(0)

Thanks to some dogged nudging by the good folks at MuckRock.com, we now have a letter from Colonel Craig A. Smith (USAF) with an authoritative list of the websites blocked by the U.S. Air Force because of the WikiLeaks disclosures. The list of 45 sites primarily covers various WikiLeaks mirror sites, as well as several of the main media outlets that partnered with the whistleblowing platform last year, including The New York Times, The Guardian, el Pais, Der Spiegel, and OWNI.fr.

Leaving aside the wisdom of preventing American service-members from accessing information available to the rest of the world through mainstream media, and putting aside the idiotic controversy that erupted briefly when the Air Force initially said that even family members of soldiers could be prosecuted for reading the leaked material on their home computers, there was one other odd choice on the Air Force's do-not-read list: olpc.com, a website that is devoted to the One Laptop Per Child project, though not officially affiliated with it. There's no mention whatsoever to WikiLeaks on the olpc.com site, however.

Shall we file this under the Pentagon's "Random Acts of Blindness" program?

Credit: Micah L. Sifry for techpresident.com

The illustration is part of a pro-active series of works designed by Metahaven, an Amsterdam-based studio for design and research, who have been studying an alternative visual identity for WikiLeaks since June 2010. In this case: Proposal to self-censor one of WikiLeaks' key slogans, “We Open Governments.” And, “Leaks,” rather than “Wiki-,”  is a more appropriate proposed brand name for the future. In this proposal “Wiki-” would be censored away from the name by means of a black bar, so the result is "Leaks.” 

Censorship | Civil Liberties | Department of Defense | information | Wikileaks