Monday, January 15, 2007

Wikileaks: The Great Equalizer

This would become really useful one day when doing my investigative reports, if they get this project off the ground.
You're a government worker in China, and you've just gotten a memo showing the true face of the regime. Without any independent media around, how do you share what you have without landing in jail or worse?

Wikileaks.org is a Web-based way for people with damning, potentially helpful or just plain embarrassing government documents to make them public without leaving fingerprints. Modeled on the participatory, online encyclopedia Wikipedia, the site is expected to go live within the next two months.
Great thing about it, it can be vertified by its own community.
Wikileaks organizers say the site is self-policing. "Wikileaks will provide a forum for the entire global community to examine any document relentlessly for credibility, plausibility, veracity and falsifiability," they wrote in response to e-mailed questions. "If a document is leaked from the Chinese government, the entire Chinese dissident community can freely scrutinize and discuss it; if a document is leaked from Somalia, the entire Somali refugee community can analyze it and put it in context. And so on."
The project has been officially launched, but we'll be in wait and see mode.

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