Egyptian protesters who infiltrated the offices of Egypt's State Security apparatus on Saturday found exactly what they were looking for: surveillance files on millions of Egyptian citizens and caches of information on hundreds of sensitive subjects.
They also found secret torture chambers, evidence of vote rigging, possible complicity in terrorism, state surveillance of the Christian minority and extensive lists of passwords to Skype and Facebook accounts used by ordinary Egyptians.
According to the Meta-Activism Project--and the Twitter/Facebook accounts of Egyptians involved in the State Security raid--the use of WikiLeaks was the primary inspiration for the Facebook page and Yfrog Postings. According to Al Jazeera, the action involved hundreds of protesters and a search for documents detailing the hacking, targeting of human rights groups, plus torture devices and secret detention rooms. The protestors left with plenty of those documents, although Egypt's armed forces called them to return them, as they were part of "a larger investigation into corruption and rights violations."
Then, following the discovery, the Egyptian protesters did a very 21st century thing with their new, liberated information cache: They posted it to Facebook and other social networking sites.
A new Facebook group called Amn Dawla Leaks (State Security Leaks), which is posting scans of secret Egyptian security files, already has more than 12,000 fans. Use of it is accompanied by Egyptian protesters who have taken it upon themselves to upload scans of controversial state security files to Twitpic, Yfrog and similar services.
Monday, March 7, 2011
Egyptian Protesters Raid State Security, Post Government Secrets to Facebook | Fast Company
Friday, December 3, 2010
Scripting News: WikiLeaks on the run
See the problem isn't that WikiLeaks is lying, the problem is that they're telling the truth. This is not business as usual.
While the politicians and reporters are getting a fumbling on-the-job education of the architecture of the Internet (an NPR reporter said, hesitatingly, that it appears as if the server is now in Switzerland), the next question is where does the running stop? When does the situation reach equilibrium? What's the best outcome for the people of the planet?
It seems to me that at the end of this chain is BitTorrent. That when WikiLeaks wants to publish the next archive, they can get their best practice from eztv.it, and have 20 people scattered around the globe at the ends of various big pipes ready to seed it. Once the distribution is underway the only way to shut it down will be to shut down the Internet itself. Politicians should be aware that these are the stakes. They either get used operating in the open, where the people they're governing are in on everything they do, or they go totalitarian, around the globe, now.
That must be what they're discussing behind the scenes in government. And don't miss that this is equally threatening to media. They won't be able to engage in spin rooms and situation rooms, appearances and such -- when we can see the real communiques, that kind of mush won't do.
