C4SS Begins Mirroring Wikileaks
The Center for a Stateless Society is now hosting a mirror site of Wikileaks — an international whistle-blower site which reactionary elements in the US government have been attempting to suppress over the last week. The mirror site is available at this web address:
Censorship has always been wrong and irresponsible. Now it’s another thing: Impossible.
I feel Hillary Clinton’s pain. Wikileaks’ release of 250,000 diplomatic cables previously hidden behind a state secrets wall has been tremendously embarrassing to her, not to mention implicating her in an international identity theft scheme that looks a lot like Watergate and the Zimmerman Telegram rolled into one.
But embarrassment or not, state officials have no right to hide their misdeeds from the people who foot the bill, in money and blood, for government actions. Nor, now, do they have the power to do so.
We have put this mirror site together using custom software developed by C4SS web administrator Mike Gogulski. We are making that software publicy available because we want as many people who can also mirror the site to do so.
As Mike put it:“This is an opportunity for those who support freedom of information to take action. We particularly hope to see people and organizations with greater resources than we dispose of — the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for example, or US Representatative Ron Paul’s IT staff — making use of those resources, and of the tool we’re offering, to settle this issue once and for all.”
The software, a bash script, is available for download below in a compressed archive. Instructions for installation, configuration and use are in comments in the code. Technical support for civil liberties/libertarian/anarchist organizations is available from admin@c4ss.org.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Bash shell
- Perl
- A subdomain to host the files
- HTTrack (mandatory)
- lftp (optional, if copying to remote via FTP)
- Ability to create a cron job
DOWNLOAD: mirror-wikileaks.bash.tar.gz
posted by Kevin Carson | 11:23 PM
3 Comments:
That mirror site has made it as Counterpunch's Website of the Day.
People have right to know what their governments are doing, with that I can agree.
But in the same time it's very irresponsible to publish documents dealing with diplomacy and foreign politics. We all know diplomacy is not based on open trust, and sometimes, diplomats need to work on keepin some things secret from other countries - and that work was just destroyed.
Heather: The problem is that you can't trust the state to mean well, and it's a lot easier for them to get away with feathering their nests if they can hide behind "reasons of state."
There are the questions of
1) What they're trying to accomplish is even good in itself; a
2) Even if it is good, whether a given bit of secrecy protects a good-faith effort to promote that end, or hides a bit of mendacity; and
3) Whether, given the role of belief systems in justifying self-interest, the people keeping the secrets don't actually mistake their own mendacity for the "national interest."
In short, we can't trust them to decide what needs to be kept secret and what doesn't.
That sort of ties in with today's C4SS post, which I don't think they've published yet.
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