The first text is excerpted from an extensive analysis by James Cowie.

The second gives political commentary on the meaning of the internet’s Long War.

James Cowie:

“Taking away WikiLeaks’ hosting, their DNS service, even their primary domain name, has had the net effect of increasing WikiLeaks’ effective use of Internet diversity to stay connected. And it just keeps going. As long as you can still reach any one copy of WikiLeaks, you can read their mirror page, which lists over 1,000 additional volunteer sites (including several dozen on the alternative IPv6 Internet). None of those is going to be as hardened as wikileaks.ch against DNS takedown or local court order — but they don’t need to be.

Within a couple days’ time, the WikiLeaks web content has been spread across enough independent parts of the Internet’s DNS and routing space that they are, for all intents and purposes, now immune to takedown by any single legal authority. If pressure were applied, one imagines that the geographic diversity would simply double, and double again.

And we’re only considering the website itself, not the torrented data files, which ensure that cryptographically signed copies of the website and its backing data are dispersed beyond all attempts to recall or suppress the information they contain. That’s an Internet infrastructure subject for another day.

If you think for a moment, you’ll realize that this rapid growth does create some potential problems with trust — when you click through to one of the myriad wikileak-look-alike sites out there, which ones are “real?” They all look pretty familiar, and share the same content at first glance. But there’s no mechanism in place to allow you to know that you’re looking at an unaltered, reasonably real-time mirroring of the official wikileaks.org website (which is, of course, no longer available for comparison). Is that incredible cable about the existence of alien bodies in New Mexico real, or is it a joke?

The torrents don’t suffer from this problem, because they are signed, and the WikiLeaks public key was distributed long ago. But when I visit, to pick a random example from the WikiLeaks mirror page, http://nepaliwikileaks.org/, am I really reading the Real Deal? For that matter, which of the dozens of official WikiLeaks sites are the Real Deal? …

…

This is a volatile conflict, with people who feel strongly about freedom on both sides, and who aren’t hesitant to talk about this as a cyberwar. I’m not going to go there. From a more dispassionate infrastructure standpoint, though, we can make a few observations.

First, even without considering the possibility of alternatives to the current DNS infrastructure, it’s evident that the country-level distribution of authority inherent in the ccTLD system has provided enough political cover to keep an extremely controversial site running. Everyone has laws that make certain kinds of content illegal, but there is no global agreement across jurisdictions about the definition of illegal content.

Second, it’s apparent that search and social infrastructure (Google and Twitter) now play a key role in re-spawning content that gets blocked in any one place, and drawing even more attention to the surviving copies. If suppressed content automatically goes viral, the Internet’s construction basically guarantees that that content will have a home for the rest of time. If you attack DNS support, people will tweet raw IP addresses. If you take down the BGP routes to web content, people will put up more mirrors, or switch to overlay networks to distribute the data. You can’t burn down the Library of Alexandria any more— it will respawn in someone’s basement in Stockholm, or Denver, or Beijing.

Finally, we can predict that in the future, enforcement of local laws will take place almost exclusively at the consumer edge of the Internet. Providers of content can change jurisdictions, but consumers generally cannot — and this asymmetry drives the creation of national domain blacklists and monitoring of access to illegal content within access networks. The day isn’t far off, if it isn’t here already, when your ISP will be set to work making lists of the naughty and nice. Get your proxies ready!”

2. The Long War, by Tim Hwang:

“The latest fighters on one side are Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, and the media-dubbed “hacker army” that has risen in his defense in the past week, staging coordinated attacks on government and corporate institutions that have stood in his way. They come from a long tradition of Internet expansionists, who hold that the Web should remake the rest of the world in its own image. They believe that decentralized, transparent and radically open networks should be the organizing principle for all things in society, big and small.

On the other side are those who believe fundamentally that the world should remake the Web in its own image. This side believes that the Internet at its heart is simply a tool, something that should be shaped to serve the demands of existing institutions. Each side seeks to mold the technology and standards of the Web to suit its particular vision.

In this current conflict, the loose confederation of “hacktivists” who rallied in support of Assange in what they called Operation Payback, targeted MasterCard, PayPal, Visa and other companies with a denial-of-service attack, effectively preventing Web sites from operating. It’s a global effort of often surprising scope; Dutch police said they arrested a 16-year-old last week suspected to be involved.

Their cause, from which Assange has publicly distanced himself, follows the simple logic of independence. One self-declared spokesperson for the “Anonymous” group doing battle for WikiLeaks explained its philosophy to the Guardian newspaper. “We’re against corporations and government interfering on the Internet,” said the 22-year-old, identified only as Coldblood. “We believe it should be open and free for everyone.”

The battle between “Anonymous” and the establishment isn’t the first in the Long War between media-dubbed “hackers” and institutions, and considering the conflict’s progression is key to understanding where it will lead. “