Wikileaks

The internet and government

Leaks and lawsuits

Mar 6th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Lawyers and governments battle over free speech on the internet

BEFORE they were leaked onto the internet, the activities in the Cayman Islands of Bank Julius Baer, and how far they may or may not have been approved by the tax authorities in the bank's native Switzerland, were strictly confidential. Even after a disgruntled senior executive posted some rum-sounding details to Wikileaks, a website specialising in information provided by whistle-blowers, they would have remained obscure. But the bank's attempts to have Wikileaks shut down have brought exactly the sort of scrutiny that it had shunned.

The bank now says it is considering its position. But the legal battles in California have highlighted both the legal limbo in cyberspace, and the way that the evolution of the web is widening the gap between those that want to share information (even illegally) and lawyers and governments that may want to control it.

Wikileaks appears to have been founded by an Australian living in Kenya. It boasts a distinguished advisory board, featuring both cryptographers and pro-democracy activists from such places as China. It offers “military-strength” encryption for those wanting to upload files anonymously. Material is reviewed by journalists and lawyers and then put on the web for public discussion. Big recent scoops have included an operating manual for guards at the American internment camp at Guantánamo, a document relating to the British government's expensive rescue of Northern Rock, a troubled bank, and material relating to official corruption in Kenya.

Working out where to sue it is tricky. Wikileaks has no offices or legal presence. Its servers are in Sweden and Belgium: countries, its website says, that offer strong legal protection. An initial American court ruling removed wikileaks.org from the internet domain registry, making it harder to find. But on February 29th the same judge reversed his ruling, to the delight of a bevy of free-speech advocates.

Websites that can be edited by anybody anywhere, part of what is often termed Web 2.0, are a powerful tool for political and social protest. In Colombia, protesters against FARC, a guerrilla group, used Facebook to organise a 4m-strong demonstration. Google Maps allowed a few bright Kenyan bloggers to display the incidence of post-election violence reported by text message. Russian bloggers have mobilised on LiveJournal to expose corruption at a pharmaceutical company.

But the golden age of cyberactivism may be coming to an end. China restricts access to anything with a Tibetan or pro-democracy flavour. Turkey blocked access to sites on Wordpress, a popular blogging platform, because it hosted material critical of Kemal Ataturk, the revered founder of the secular republic. Muslim countries, worried about the way in which the internet undermines conservative social mores on nudity and mingling, are twitchy too. Sites such as YouTube or even Craigslist, which offers an online dating service among a myriad of innocuous free-of-charge classified advertisements, are often banned in whole or in part.

Filtering out specific content from such sites is the subtlest but most expensive means of maintaining control. A simpler but more controversial approach is to block an entire domain. Inexpert official intervention can easily backfire. In Pakistan earlier this year the authorities (inadvertently, they claim) briefly made YouTube, a popular video-sharing site, inaccessible even for users abroad. A big fan of the site is none other than the country's president, Pervez Musharraf. According to Techcrunch, a technology blog, he was a conspicuously frequent visitor to a facility at Davos, a plutocratic Swiss shindig, where summit-goers could answer questions posed by YouTube users.

Ethan Zuckerman, a Harvard internet guru, says that authoritarian regimes find it harder to block such general sites as YouTube than to block those run by a specific group (Human Rights Watch, for example). The second lot appeals solely to dissidents, whereas the first are useful to many more internet users who are interested in apolitical subjects.

But Michael Anti, a Chinese free-speech advocate, fears that state and commercial interests are colluding to produce Web 2.0 products that are apolitical but attractive. The convenience of China's Tudou and Baidu makes them strong competitors to foreign rivals like YouTube and Google. That makes an outright ban on the foreign sites less thorny.

To counter this, Chinese activists are returning to older, decentralised, internet services such as e-mail and chat rooms. These may be safer, but they have little reach outside the dissenting elite. Maybe netizens are too busy enjoying the new social and cultural freedoms offered by the internet to care about politics.

Scientology

given the deep pockets and litigious nature of some people in the world, I will do no more than draw readers' attention to an interesting article in this week's Economist

Telex lives on

Telex

A faint ping

Jan 31st 2008
From The Economist print edition

An ancestor of e-mail lives on

LIKE slide-rules, steam engines and carbon paper, the telex machine, once ubiquitous and indispensable, has vanished from sight. But not, quite, from existence. As younger readers may need reminding, or informing, the telex was what would nowadays be called a hard-wired, low-bandwidth, point-to-point messaging system.

At speeds of around one-millionth of that of a modern broadband connection, it sent data chugging along dedicated networks to clunky terminals.

In its time, telex was a huge improvement on the international telegram system, which could charge the modern equivalent of several dollars per word. It was often better than making international phone calls, which were cumbersome, crackly and costly. It was on telex systems that today's electronic data interchange developed. Telex starred in the huge logistics effort for the airlift that supplied West Berlin during the Soviet blockade of 1948.

It would be easy to imagine that newer technology puts paid to such systems. But their death throes are oddly slow. Three countries, Japan, Kuwait and Italy, still maintain the old-fashioned international telegrams. And the internet has not yet killed off the telex. It has certainly sent traffic tumbling (see chart). In March Britain's BT will be the latest big company to cease offering telex services. “All good things come to an end,” says a spokesman. Britain will then join around 30 countries including Austria, Germany and Russia that no longer provide telex through their national telecoms operators.

But that clears the way for nimble, low-cost competitors. These have turned round the technology. As well as maintaining the old-fashioned service involving terminals and dedicated lines, they provide telex services both over phone lines and over the internet—in effect, making it a secure and ultra-reliable variant of e-mail. One, SwissTelex, is a spin-off from the Swiss national telecoms operator that offers international telex services and has taken over BT's network. Another is EasyLink, based in America, which provides a service for Dutch, Belgian and Japanese subscribers.

Many of the remaining customers are banks. Telexes, unlike ordinary e-mails, are legally valid documents (being to all intents and purposes impossible to fake). “The telex network is closed—you can't get in unless you are part of the club,” says Peter MacLaverty of SwissTelex.

Small financial institutions not hooked up to the main international money-transfer system, SWIFT, find telexes a cost-effective alternative. And with no server to go down, the telex system is robust. Big banks like that: for them back-up systems are vital, and the cost of keeping a telex is trivial.

Euroclear, the world's largest settlement system for international financial markets, maintains 184 telex accounts for 50 out of its 1,375 clients. It sends up to 800 telexes a day, mostly as confirmation for transactions. The system is overseen by Danny Bogaerts, a communications manager who was told when he joined the company in 1975 not to learn about telexes because they were soon going to be obsolete. “You can laugh about it,” he admits. “It is old-fashioned—but it works.” The second big customer group is at sea. Ocean-going ships are still legally required to have a telex on board—chiefly for SOS messages.

Even its fans do not pretend that telex is a technology with a bright future. Euroclear, for example, will start decommissioning its telex system in 2010 when it introduces new software. “I'm surprised it has lasted as long as it has,” says Mr MacLaverty. “What we aim to do is to be the last man standing,” says Eva Allen of EasyLink. “Who will send the last telex? Possibly me.”