WikiLeaks Con Job?

About a week or so ago, I started thinking about WikiLeaks from a different perspective. What if WikiLeaks was a well-crafted pys-ops project?

The more I thought about some of oddities of WikiLeaks (primarily their partnership with mainstream media outlets, a few of whom were known CIA-assets), the more that pys-ops scenario could be a possibility. Let's face it, nothing that was released in the latest batch from WikiLeaks was earth-shattering information. Were there any really incendiary pieces? I couldn't find anything leaked that was more damaging as the Pentagon Papers or the investigate journalism conducted by Woodward and Bernstein to crack the Watergate case.

I'm a writer who uses the web as a pulpit and as someone who runs small business that operates in e-commerce, so obviously my biggest concern is internet censorship. When all of the powers-to-be in DC freaked out about WikiLeaks, I couldn't help but think that this was the beginning of the end of freedom on the internet. There are groups of politicians who have been trying to use the 9/11 attacks as their primary motivation to shut down dark corners of the internet, and the WikiLeaks incidents just adds more fuel to their fire.

Regardless of WikiLeaks intentions, more politicians in the US are going to use the security concerns posed by WikiLeaks as the perfect reason why they need to control the information flow on the internet.

I read something on Zero Hedge today titled Is the End Game of Wikileaks Internet Censorship?, which was a guest post from F. William Engdahl.

Here's the original article that Engdahl wrote titled Wikileaks: a Big Dangerous US Government Con Job. They come to the conclusion that... "Wikileaks is a US government-run propaganda and disinformation operation with an end goal of restricting freedoms on the internet."

This is the section from Engdahl's article that really bothered me:

What is emerging from all the sound and Wikileaks fury in Washington is that the entire scandal is serving to advance a long-standing Obama and Bush agenda of policing the until-now free Internet. Already the US Government has shut the Wikileaks server in the United States though no identifiable US law has been broken.

The process of policing the Web was well underway before the current leaks scandal. In 2009 Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller and Republican Olympia Snowe introduced the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (S.773). It would give the President unlimited power to disconnect private-sector computers from the internet. The bill "would allow the president to ’declare a cyber-security emergency’ relating to ’non-governmental’ computer networks and do what’s necessary to respond to the threat." We can expect that now this controversial piece of legislation will get top priority when a new Republican House and the Senate convene in January.

The US Department of Homeland Security, an agency created in the political hysteria following 9/11 2001 that has been compared to the Gestapo, has already begun policing the Internet. They are quietly seizing and shutting down internet websites (web domains) without due process or a proper trial. DHS simply seizes web domains that it wants to and posts an ominous "Department of Justice" logo on the web site. See an example at http://torrent-finder.com. Over 75 websites were seized and shut in a recent week. Right now, their focus is websites that they claim "violate copyrights," yet the torrent-finder.com website that was seized by DHS contained no copyrighted content whatsoever. It was merely a search engine website that linked to destinations where people could access copyrighted content. Step by careful step freedom of speech can be taken away. Then what?

For more articles on WikiLeaks, I suggest you take a look at WikiLeaks: The Banality of Evil and Imperial Over-Reach by Charles Hugh Smith.