WikiLeaks, Censorship and the Watchdog Web

Marshall Kirkpatrick — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 14:54:59 -0800

A very interesting site for whistle blowers called WikiLeaks is facing government censorship as today a California judge reportedly ruled that the company in control of the site's domain name must shut down public access to the entire site. You can visit the site directly via its IP address. (Thanks, TechDirt) See a wide randing discussion over on Techmeme and a collection of resources we've assembled for tracking this and related issues, below.

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]]> The court action occurred because of a suit filed by a Swiss banking group over what they say was hundreds of documents uploaded by a former VP concerning the group's offshore activities. It's pretty shocking that things have gone down the way they have, but perhaps it was just a matter of time. WikiLeaks is a site with a whole lot of enemies, most of whom are in very high places. The site warrants a closer examination than I can offer here but below are some resources for tracking the case. Specifically, nobody in the whistle blowing business knows about RSS, apparently - so I scraped some feeds you can use to track these issues.

Check out this section from the site's submission page:

Wikileaks accepts classified, censored or otherwise restricted material of political, diplomatic or ethical significance. Wikileaks does not accept rumor, opinion or other kinds of first hand reporting or material that is already publicly available.

All staff who deal with sources are accredited journalists or lawyers. All submissions establish a journalist-source relationship. Online submissions are routed via Sweden and Belgium which have first rate journalist-source shield laws. Wikileaks records no source identifying information and there are a number of submission mechanisms available to deal with even the most sensitive national security information.

Well hot damn.

Feeds and Search

Interested in keeping track of the leaks and news? There's no RSS feed on Wikileaks, but you know how much we love Dapper here at RWW so here's a feed you can subscribe to: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Wikileaks. If you're interested only in leaked documents that get some press, subscribe to the most popular items on Wikileaks feed.

If you've got your taste for government documents whetted (and what better time than the present?) check out these other fine sites and the OPML file below to subscribe to feeds and best of from each of them. Can you recommend others?

Crymptome - so sketchy. It's been around for years though - maybe Wikileaks is showing it up. Still a good, if often dry, read though. Cryptome's Greatest Hits

National Security Archives at George Washington University - hot stuff. Super reputable.

Here's everybody in a bundle: http://readwriteweb.com/images/RWWGovWatchDogsFeeds.opml

Just right click to save the linked file above and you can import that bundle of feeds in OPML format into your feed reader. There you can chose which ones you want to keep or read them all. Below is a live preview using Grazr to show you what's currently in the feeds. Click around in there and make yourself at home.

Finally, here's a custom search engine for US Government Watchdog Sites. You can click on the Google cached pages for WikiLeaks there. Bookmark and enjoy!

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WikiLeaks, Censorship and the Watchdog Web

Feeds and Search