Wikirecap: because News is still happening

It is New Year's Eve tomorrow, which makes it ripe-for-scandal-o'clock on the wikifront.
As this blog is totally not about me (unless I'm somehow involved with important news), I won't explain why I'm so sluggish with updates. I WILL apologize, and warn thus: until the third week of January, this blog will be fairly quiet. And after the third of January, it will likely get very loud again.

Quick-and-dirty catch-up recap:

HUGE, huge fallout: Glenn Greenwald vs WIRED magazine over the Bradley Manning/Lamo chat logs. Apparently WIRED's editor Kevin Poulsen's been pals with Lamo for a long time, and a few opaque and important claims made by Lamo can't be confirmed with the sections of the chat logs they've already released. But Poulsen's pulling the (fairly legitimate in most cases, I think) journalistic card that says because the remainder of the chat logs don't have anything to do with wikileaks, it's in the interest of source privacy that they don't release them.
I'm fairly at odds about this myself, but I don't have much of a chance to sort it out on my head, because the whole thing fairly swiftly exploded into an all-out-internet-journalism-shit-slinging-bonanza, mostly over at WIRED. Thankfully, Rob Beschizza at boingboing begins to make sense of it all in a way that I love, and asks really excellent questions that manage to recalibrate it from a blood-and-pixels-feud back into a really important issue. Plus, some guy broke it down in one sentence. That deserves credit.


Aforementioned awesome-boingboing-Rob also notes that NPR loudly corrected the flurry of reporters still clinging to the "documents dump" myth:

"In recent weeks, NPR hosts, reporters and guests have incorrectly said or implied that WikiLeaks recently has disclosed or released roughly 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables. Although the website has vowed to publish "251,287 leaked United States embassy cables," as of Dec. 28, 2010, only 1,942 of the cables had been released."

Meanwhile, the press is suspiciously forgetting this whole wikileaks thing ever happened. The Guardian, formerly a bastion of awesomeness, is not reporting on them any more. The New York Times had been quiet on this front for a long time. Basically, it's internet-based journalism still following cablegate and its attendant nuttiness. Personally, this makes my brain go like crazy--if I was a pro journalist in a large publication, I'd be looking at the mounting legal proceedings against Assange for doing the same that that I pay bills by doing, and I'd put as much distance between my actions and him as possible.
Unless, y'know, I believed in the unavoidable responsibility of the 4th estate in a democratic society that makes something like the first amendment necessary. But whatevs.

Unsurprisingly, and on urging from Paypal, the FBI decided it was pertinent to look into Operation Payback, Anonymous and DDoS attacks in general. It confirms that they knocked down Paypal for at least a while. It also refers to 4chan as an "internet activist group", which made me spit coffee out of my nose. Apart from that, the affidavit linked up there makes good recap of the whole Operation Payback development. Interesting tidbits: Paypal gave the feds ISP addresses from people suspected of hosting IRC channels related to the Anonymous Ops, and one was in British Columbia. And by BC I mean California, as the RCMP figured out the ISP was only virtually based. And by California, I mean Dallas, Texas, where the FBI actually searched and seized server materials. Oh cyber"crime". You're so crazy.


Speaking of crazy, Assange told Al-Jazeera that the CIA have Arab officials that are basically American spies, and therefore BFFs. Then he allegedly showed them the documents he had to prove it. Which is interesting.


And probably the most overwhelming tick in the "crazy" box (that also earned a "wtf America" tag from this girl): The lawyer that won the Pentagon Papers case says Wikileaks is totally different.
And me, and hundreds of other, better-educated, more-familiar-with-the-case-and-US-law-in-general journalists and theorist wheeze "Whaaaaaaaaaaa???" and start looking into the possibility that the man's been body-snatched and replaced with a cyborg version designed to sell that tripe to the Washington Post. His argument makes that much sense.