A Special Holiday to-do list from Anne!
12/27/10
Stay home, eat some veggies, drink some water to compensate for all that butter and wine and bourbon.
12/28/10
Go see A Fire In My Belly, at the Henry or online on youtube.
While you are there, also see the Harry Shearer show
http://www.henryart.org/exhibitions/current/1139
http://www.henryart.org/exhibitions
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM_80zif-5w&has_verified=1
Ponder these things, Wikileaks, and the recent painting-over of Blu’s work at MOCA.
12/29/10
Do [...]
Le Frenchword – Fancy Mud
Satirical performance, that’s actually funny
Monday is the last night: Rendezvous. 7 and 8:30
http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=148988491814553
Spend a chill night at home with friends drinking festive spicy drinks (bärenjäger toddy with cloves recommended) and baking. Seriously. It’s good for your soul, and then you get to hand out cookies or rugelah or brownies [...]
In thinking about the Wikileaks phenomenon this week, I continually come back to the fact that so much information was leaked so easily. Apparently one individual was responsible for leaking the massive trove of State Department material and the previous haul of Department of Defense documents–more than 250,000 diplomatic cables from State Department diplomatic corps and 90,000 DOD documents about the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The information was released to the Wikileaks site in two installments by an army private named Bradley Manning. Manning had access to the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNET) run by the DOD and the State Department. According to Manning the data dump he had access to was not that difficult to transfer to his own media and then transfer to Wikileaks via a personal computer:
“lets just say *someone* i know intimately well, has been penetrating US classified networks, mining data like the ones described … and been transferring that data from the classified networks over the “air gap” onto a commercial network computer … sorting the data, compressing it, encrypting it, and uploading it to a crazy white haired aussie who can’t seem to stay in one country very long”. (http://www.boingboing.net/2010/06/19/wikileaks-a-somewhat.html)
Compared to the famous “Pentagon Papers” leaks, PFC Manning’s actions seem almost effortless. In 1969, Daniel Ellsberg and a friend at the Rand Corporation had to surreptitiously photocopy 47 volumes of a secret DOD history about Vietnam over off hours and weekends and sneak the documents out in small batches that would fit in his briefcase. According to Ellsberg, this took several months and he was convinced that he would be caught on several occasions. http://www.mostdangerousman.org/
The Wikileaks information is another example where technology has reduced the difficulty of connecting information with people over distance and in small packages. It is now extremely easy to share information—top secret information to the world. My concern about the Wikileaks leaks is not so much about the reveling of classified government information. It has more to do with what it says about protecting any information that is stored on a computer network.
Continue reading Your Data or Mine? “Dataveillence” and Privacy in America.
