Chris Page

The CIA, murder, physical violence, intimidation, hacking — security agencies and unknown persons are trying to close down WikiLeaks. Read about it here.

Meanwhile, WikiLeaks has raised just $360,000 of the $600,000 they need to fund themselves this year but they have re-started limited publishing.

Despite the huge publicity generated by this site for their money raising campaign, WikiLeaks has not yet resumed normal service. However, they are still accepting leaks and they are regularly posting on Twitter (follow them here).

Being an assiduous reader of this site, you will already know that WikiLeaks allows corporate or government whistleblowers to place information with minimal risk to themselves where journalists, NGOs, you and I can get it.

“We have received hundreds of thousands of pages from corrupt banks, the US detainee system, the Iraq war, China, the UN and many others that we do not currently have the resources to release,” says their web page.

The site goes on to say, “Even $10 will pay to put one of these reports into another ten thousand hands and $1000, a million.”

I didn’t send enough money for WikiLeaks to distribute information to millions. I sent precisely something between that amount and the suggested minimum, and I found that very easy to do through the WikiLeaks main page.

Incidentally, on WikiLeaks’ main page there is a froody little YouTube video culled from Britain’s the Culture Show that tells you more about the organization (in that strenuously interesting style that only TV victims can find interesting).

So there you go. If you want to bring an abrupt end to corruption and injustice in the world, you still have time to set the wheels of data revolution in motion with your credit card.

News stories illustrating the imbecility and unfairness of humanity are so commonplace as to be almost banal yet on a regular basis you come across stories that make you go ‘Bah! Horrid world! I want to get off this planet.’

This week two stories came around within about 24 hours of each other, which on their own might have been depressing enough, but coming together gave me a really big bah! moment.

The first was that a poll in the US suggested that the most trusted news source in the US was Fox (read). The second, the very next day, was that Wikileaks has gone offline for lack of funds (read).

Fox News is either a paradigm of right thinking, or if you don’t actually live under a rock, it is the paradigm of the thinking of the right — anthrax to the intellect, purveyors of fine propaganda on behalf of the radioactively plutocratic. It is also by any objective standard a behemoth of the media, owned by News International, the second biggest media conglomerate in the world, prop. one Rupert Murdoch.

The non-behemothian Wikileaks is, in its own words, “a non-profit organization funded by human rights campaigners, investigative journalists, technologists and the general public,” and which publishes leaked documents from governments, corporations and religious organizations, documents the authors would prefer kept from public sight.

In other words, it is probably the bane of many of the people R. Murdoch has tiffin with.

But why am I explaining who Wikileaks are when you might already know, or when you could read a more coherent account here on Wikipedia?

The point is, while Fox, the fountain of untruth, goes from strength to strength, Wikileaks, exploder of porkie pies, is in danger of going offline for lack of money.

Just another tale of humdrum iniquity — well, what do you expect? Wikileaks should carry advertising and give up its independence from outside interests, let the free market control the flow of information.

Well, I’ve put my credit card where my blog post is and contributed to Wikileaks fundraising drive and I mention this story because there may be more people out there who would like to exclaim ‘Bah, horrid world!’ with me and then try to make a small difference.