If you teach civics, if you teach government, if you tech ethics, if you teach civil rights, if you teach children at all, watch this video. This is how we need to think about marriage equality, and how many more of our lawmakers need to start speaking. Thank you, Cory Booker.
Switched covered a Wired story about how the military has the capability to put drones or planes into the air to restore Internet communication on the ground. This could be a way to keep dictatorial governments from repressing Internet-based communication. One major caveat, military futurist John Arquilla says it would be an act of war.
The scarier part of the story is that the United States most certainly has the capability to turn off communications as easily as it can turn it on. It's too much power, something the United States has had for a long time if you include nuclear weapons, and the like.
What is Wikileaks?
Wikileaks is a self-described “not-for-profit media organization,” launched in 2006 for the purposes of disseminating original documents from anonymous sources and leakers. Its website says: “Wikileaks will accept restricted or censored material of political, ethical, diplomatic or historical significance. We do not accept rumor, opinion, other kinds of first hand accounts or material that is publicly available elsewhere.”
More detailed information about the history of the organization can be found on Wikipedia (with all the caveats that apply to a rapidly-changing Wiki topic). Wikipedia incidentally has nothing to do with Wikileaks — both share the word “Wiki” in the title, but they’re not affiliated.
An excellent Wikileaks FAQ resource on Jonathan Zittrain's blog
via @abowllan