Information Will Be Free ... on Wikileaks

by Steve Dondley and Jason Pramas

Quite the brouhaha this week between the AFL-CIO and arch-union buster Richard Berman.

It seems the AFL posted a blog entry in the "anti-union network" section of their American Rights at Work site that included newly-public documents from an ongoing lawsuit by Smithfield Foods against the United Food and Commercial workers. The documents detailed Berman's relationship to Smithfield.

Berman threatened legal action, and the AFL pulled the post - now comically referring to it the-blog-that-must-not-be-named."

Poor AFL ... if only someone had told them about Wikileaks, then perhaps someone could have posted the relevant info about Berman there. Then any inquiring mind wanting to know something about Berman's dastardly deeds could have simply gone there to check the info out. And there's not a gosh-darned thing he or anyone else could do about it.

You see Wikileaks is a site based in Sweden that publishes leaks of sensitive documents from anywhere in the world in an untraceable and anonymous way. Kind of like the "No More Secrets" chip in the movie Sneakers.

In the first year of its existence, Wikileaks has survived concerted attacks on it by governments, cults, banks and corporations - including a near-miss when a Swiss bank got an initial ruling against it that would have resulted in Wikileaks losing its domain. The bank but the brakes on the suit when American public interest lawyers got the judge to dissolve his original ruling and indicated that they would be able to sue to the bank for attorney's fees under California public interest law if it continued its campaign against the feisty web service.

Of course, the-blog-that-must-not-be-named can still be seen on Google Cache. And even the PDFs will likely appear on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine in 6 months. More on those services in future posts.

So like the old hacker saying goes "information will be free." Anything released on the internet, generally exists forever somewhere on the internet. A good thing for everyone to remember.

If you've never checked Wikileaks out, it's worth a gander. Clearly a site that was developed in part by Chinese dissidents might be useful for union folks as well. [MWAH HA HAAAAH ... end transmission ... oh wait, was this thing still on? D'oh!]