Will WikiLeaks destroy the internet as we know it?

We’ve seen Wikileaks lose its DNS provider, so it had to change its domain name from wikileaks.org to wikileaks.ch.

We’ve seen Wikileaks lose access to income sources when PayPal, MasterCard, and others stopped accepting payments on its behalf.

We’ve seen Wikileaks lose hosting services from Amazon, when Amazon rightly determined that Wikileaks had violated its terms of service (the part where you need to own your own content was a clear violation).

We’ve also seen Wikileaks’ ringmaster, Julian Assange, finally tracked down and arrested. Weirdly, though, he wasn’t arrested for trafficking in stolen government documents, but for some conveniently strange sexual deviance charge.

I honestly can’t tell how to parse that one. We don’t really know Assange, so we don’t know if he is a sexual offender, but isn’t it curious how those charges suddenly showed up? I’m obviously not a fan of the guy, but the timing is…interesting.

But even though Wikileaks continues to take a licking, it still keeps on ticking.

How is it possible that a simple Web site can so infuriate governments the world over, but still remain active?

We may start to see in-depth packet analysis for all traffic, so that torrents containing classified information can be disrupted. We may see ISPs required to block any encrypted or binary communication, so anything that’s unreadable by governments can’t travel across the network. We may see citizens permanently cut off from the Internet (and, by extension, cut off from their friends, jobs, and society) because they’re hosting files that only just might be similar to files of interest.

Full Story.

Click here to go to most recent posts.