Hi everyone, I agree that the Internet is what makes these leaked cables unprecedented, surpassing in reach the well-known Pentagon Papers (leaked by Daniel Ellsberg) during the Vietnam War. What is anachronistic is that in this information age, the US government has ordered its employees not to read the leaked cables (as Thomas Jones usefully clarified in an earlier post). See the NYT's article reporting on the US government's ban: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/world/05restrict.html?_r=1&hp Also, Glenn Greenwald has a very good take on the recent government reaction to the leaked cables: http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/01/lieberman/index...
From Amazon to PayPal, the Internet has become a battleground for this information war.
Cheers, Aziz On Sun, Dec 5, 2010 at 11:34 AM, Monica Murero <murero.monica@gmail.com>wrote:
In our community of Internet Researchers it makes sense that academics and scholars are interested in WikiLeaks from an interdisciplinary perspective. Regardless our personal view about the controversial phenomenon of publishing secret documents, and its implications, the event raises a question: would this have been possible without the internet?
WikiLeaks gathers, verifies, releases information to the general public via the internet. The "cables" released to the public come from the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, or SIPRNet, the worldwide US military internet system. Millions of people as we speak read the cables on the web, share them via social media all over the world, read blogs, twitt about it, upload vlogs on uTube, join WikiLeaks groups on Facebook at an unprecedented rapid diffusion rate , and without any possibility of control or arrest. Even the next super-secret tranche of documents is ready to be released from a popular online file sharing service:
http://www.torrentz.com/76a36f1d11c72eb5663eeb4cf31e351321efa3a3
I think this case is already internet history and it will be studied in future textbooks.
Anyone interested in collaborating on a WikiLeaks interdisciplinary panel submission to the Seattle conference?
Monica
-------------------------- Monica Murero , Ph.D. AoIR Exec, 2003-2009; AoIR Treasurer, 2005-2009 AoIR Lifetime Member
Director E-Life International Institute Associate Professor in Politics of e-Government and in Sociology of New Technology University Federico II, Italy Consultant, World Health Organization LinkedIN: http://it.linkedin.com/pub/monica-murero-ph-d/16/52/606 Twitter: monica_murero Facebook: murero monica
_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Aziz Douai, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Faculty of Social Science and Humanities University of Ontario Institute of Technology 55 Bond Street East Oshawa, ON L1G 0A5 Tel: 905.721.8668, ext. 3790 Fax: 905.721.3372 E-mail: aziz.douai@uoit.ca -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both." James Madison, 1822 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------