Reflections on 'Wikileaks' Issues

Two Calvin College professors say there are several concerns that are raised by the new-media Website Wikileaks.

The site has been releasing classified military, governmental and diplomatic documents.

For instance, on April 5, 2010, the nonprofit website published footage of the killing of civilians in Baghdad by two U.S.-operated Apache helicopters.

On July 25, 2010 and October 22, 2010, the site published U.S. military logs on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And on November 28, 2010, Wikileaks revealed 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables to its worldwide cyber-audience.

All of these were classified documents. The site's editor-in-chief, Julian Assange—who has been quoted as saying, "Which country is suffering from too much freedom of speech? Name it, is there one?"—was arrested on December 7 for sex crimes.

Recently, Calvin computer science professor Joel Adams and political science professor Joel Westra discussed the Wikileaks phenomenon in a question and answer format with Myrna Anderson of Calvin College communications.

Here is the first question: How does Wikileaks operate?

Adams: What technology allows you to do these days is have a distributed system of servers and spread them among many countries in the world. This mirroring technology lets you distribute information in such a way that it is not under the jurisdiction of any one country. It isn’t especially new; it's what the file-sharing people have been doing for years. Remember the original Napster? It was one site and as soon as the forces of justice shut it down, the service was shut down. To avoid that single point of vulnerability, people devised software to coordinate multiple servers distributed across different countries, each “mirroring” the other’s information, so that as long as any of the servers exists, the service is available.

So, imagine that an employee from somewhere wants to leak some documents. They copy the documents onto a flash drive and get it to someone at Wikileaks. The Wikileaks folks copy the documents onto their servers, and those servers copy the documents to one another. The same information is available on each one, so trying to take out a Wikileaks server is like playing playing “Whack-a-Mole” the Wikileaks folks can just launch a different server in another country.

To read the entire interview by Myrna Anderson, Calvin College communications, click here: Wikileaks story.