Observations on the Wikileaks affair

[puellavulnerata]

You're either with us, or you're with WikiLeaks [Marc A. Thiessen; Washington Post]

If "one guy with a laptop" can shut down WikiLeaks even temporarily, imagine what the 1,100 cyber-warriors at U.S. Cyber Command could do. While the United States sits on the sidelines, the New York Times reported Saturday that WikiLeaks had come under assault "from armies of zombie computers in Europe, Russia and Asia." This flood of attacks creates the perfect cover for the United States to deliver the coup de grace to WikiLeaks secretly, with no fingerprints, if it chose to do so.

Some say attacking WikiLeaks would be fruitless. Really? In the past year, the Iranian nuclear system has been crippled by a computer worm called "Stuxnet," which has attacked Iran's industrial systems and the personal computers of Iranian nuclear scientists. To this day, no one has traced the origin of the worm. Imagine the impact on WikiLeaks's ability to distribute additional classified information if its systems were suddenly and mysteriously infected by a worm that would fry the computer of anyone who downloaded the documents. WikiLeaks would probably have very few future visitors to its Web site.

Such abject failure of clue speaks for itself, really. It certainly confirms my previous opinion on the technical competence of anyone uttering the phrase 'cyber-warrior'. One imagines he's expecting that the Cyber-Warriors (gods, I can feel my IQ dropping just typing that) will just re-route a few encryptions, override a password or two and type something like rm -rf wikileaks, and then there'll be a flashing red countdown before their servers explode. Mr. Thiessen, of course, has a long history of saying cluelessly authoritarian things on this subject, as I've previously commented on.

This is why, in the long run, we're going to win: everyone on the other side is operating with a model of the world so grossly at odds with reality that they'll expend most of their effort shooting themselves in the foot to slay hallucinatory enemies. I'd be happier to watch it all end in fire from a safer distance, though.

Additional observation on the subject: using a random sample of 50 cables released by Wikileaks in a tarball compressed with bzip2, they seem to average around 4.1 kilobytes compressed per cable. This comes to only 998 megabytes for the complete set of 251,287 cables. The insurance.aes256 file is too large by almost half to contain just the unredacted cables. There's something more in there yet to come.