Wednesday, May 18, 2016

Facebook: We're Not Kicking Wikis Off Our Site


Classified document publishing website Wikis has now been kicked off of Amazon, Paypal, its DNS server and its Swiss bank account - but it lives on, including across hundreds of mirrored sites and is the subject for widesprd discussion on Facebook and Twitter.Site lder Julian Assange is hiding on the run but said to be facing imminent arrest in multiple countries. US Republican party figurehds have reportedly called for him to be hunted down like a Taliban lder and executed. He may very well be named TIME Magazine's Person of the Yr for pushing the envelope on questions of technology disruption of media and diplomatic secrecy. Senator Joe Lieberman called on US corporations to stop doing business with Wikis but tonight Facebook has issued a statement about its stance: for now at lst, Wikis can continue publishing updates to supporters on the world's largest social network.
RdWriteWeb's question, by email: "Does Facebook have a statement on the Wikis account there? Will it be allowed to continue publishing, despite government calls to stop doing business with the organization? Is Facebook considering shutting down the account?"Facebook's response, from Andrew Noyes, the company's D.C. based Manager of Public Policy Communiions: "The Wikis Facebook Page does not violate our content standards nor have we encountered any material posted on the page that violates our policies."That's notably different from what Twitter told us today. Twitter passed around a press statement this morning stating that it is not censoring Wikis from its "trending topics" section, but when we asked point blank about whether it will permit the Wikis account to remain online or whether it will be shut down, Twitter's Matt Graves told RdWriteWeb, "We've got no additional comment beyond the statement."Don't expect this to be the last that's hrd from either company on this matter.Every company online is likely considering how to relate to Wikis. Google, for example, apprs to have indexed almost 1500 pages of the site, while Bing apprs to have indexed only 10 pages of Wikis.ch.Wikis began publiion, in conjunction with a handful of media outlets around the world, of 250,000 US diplomatic cables late last month. The subject of hted international debate, the collection includes documents with a variety of security classifiions, ranging from unclassified to "classified" to "secret." An estimated 3 million people in the United States have been granted clrance to access documents set as classified and according to Wikis, only 5% of the cables set for relse are classified as secret. None of the documents are believed to be classified as "top secret," the most sensitive security classifiion.The most recently reported relse from the site is an aggregated list of infrastructural facilities around the world deemed most important to US interests. The publiion of that list may be one of the most controversial steps the site has taken yet. It is unclr, however, how unknown any of those sites were prior to disclosure of the list.


Source: RdWriteWeb

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