All the Citizens' Men
I'm editing an anthology of critical responses -- both written and artistic -- to the United States diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks in November and December of this year.
Details at the link above, and under the cut. Please feel free to spread this far and wide! I'm happy to answer any questions in the comments.
tl;dr:
Inertial Fallacy Productions is putting together a Creative Commons-licensed anthology of short (no more than 2600 words) critical responses to the diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks in November/December 2010. You're invited. The resulting volume will be printed in several volumes (as well as digitally published) and used as part of a legal experiment.
This is a "for the love" anthology: no advance, no royalties. The editor isn't taking a cut either. Any revenue from sales will be donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
All the Citizens' Men will be published under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
How:
Visit the Cablegate archive, or explore the archive via fulltext search. Find a cable that interests you. Read it. Get to know it. Read up on the people, places, cultures, governments, events and other details mentioned. Then, craft a thought-provoking response that will engage the reader beyond the text itself.
Your response could take one of many forms. We expect that many responses will be political, historical or philosophical analyses of the cables they address - but don't limit yourself! Memoirs, satire, creative nonfiction, fiction (of any genre), close reading or other forms of literary criticism, poetry, illustration, sequential art - all of these, and more, are lenses through which we as writers and artists can illuminate one of the most polarizing moments of the 21st century.
Please indicate, somewhere in your submission (in the email is fine), the reference ID of the cable to which you are responding, e.g. 10STATE4108, 75TEHRAN2069, &c. Also, please note that we are looking for reactions to / works inspired by individual cables, not to Wikileaks itself; works which focus on Wikileaks the organization, Julian Assange, &c, whether to praise or to condemn, will not be considered. We welcome submissions from across the political spectrum, regardless of whether the author is a supporter or detractor of Wikileaks; indeed, since our goal is to capture a snapshot of the zeitgeist of 2010, we need contributors from all points of view. So please focus on the cables themselves, but by all means, tell us what you really think.
If you would prefer to send your submission encrypted, please use our GPG public key (3F23C1AC).
pub 1024D/3F23C1AC 2010-12-06 [expires: 2011-12-06]
Key fingerprint = 5739 F650 D2BE 810C D196 AE08 9234 0279 3F23 C1AC
If you would prefer to send your submission anonymously, we strongly recommend using the Mixmaster anonymous remailer network.
When:
Deadline is 11:59pm GMT on January 15, 2011.
Where:
Send written submissions to submissions@allthecitizensmen.com. For written material, send plain text only, 2600 words maximum (for poetry, 10 pages max). Word documents, PDFs, and anything that isn't plain text will be deleted unread. If there's an attachment to your email, you're doing it wrong.
Art also goes to submissions@allthecitizensmen.com, but again, no attachments - links to images only. If you must compress, please use a lossless format like PNG. Sequential art must be no more than 10 pages.
Why:
We're doing this for two reasons: one artistic, the other political. Isn't it always like that?
The phenomenon of Wikileaks is a transformative one. What has been seen can never be unseen, and what has been said can never be unsaid; global politics is changing, and will continue to change in response to the existence of secure havens for whistleblowing. However, the news media have focused mainly on the conflict between Wikileaks the organization and the United States government, relegating the material in the cables themselves to third- and fourth-page news. These documents deserve thoughtful analysis, and we want to collect high-quality examples to appreciate. Think of it as a time capsule to be understood now and reinterpreted in ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred years.
At the same time, the Wikileaks issue has raised troubling questions about free speech on an Internet that is growing toward cloud computing. The First Amendment limits the federal government's ability to control speech, but the corporations which provide access to speech also wield a startling degree of control over its propagation. On December 1st, 2010, Amazon Web Services ceased hosting the Wikileaks website, citing violation of its terms of service - though only after pressure from Senator Joe Lieberman. Amazon claims that since Wikileaks does not "own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content," Wikileaks was not holding up its end of the AWS service agreement. Their statement is, as you might imagine, hotly disputed.
Fortunately, there is a lesson from history that we can use to illuminate this situation further. In 1995, computer science professor D.J. Bernstein sued the Department of Justice to challenge export control regulations on cryptography. The federal government established a choke-hold on cryptographic software, source code, and algorithms under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations; printed materials, however, are an exception. Bernstein designed and implemented a cipher called Snuffle, wrote an academic paper about it, then wrote an English-language set of instructions explaining how to implement Snuffle. Since he wanted to publish it in the scientific community, he asked the State Department which of these works would require an export license. The State Department replied, "All of them." Bernstein challenged this under the First Amendment, and as a result, the Ninth Circuit ruled that source code is protected speech.
Bernstein's approach - throwing diverse inputs at a function to test how it will respond - is generally known in the computer security community as "fuzzing." Fuzzing the State Department helped us to discover a bug in our legal code, and the Ninth Circuit fixed it - its decision is now binding case law.
Instead of fuzzing the federal government, however, we're going to fuzz Amazon. All the Citizens' Men will be published in at least three volumes - maybe more, if we think of good ones. Volume One will consist of all accepted submissions alongside their corresponding cables. Volume Two will consist of the responses by themselves, and Volume Three will consist of the corresponding cables by themselves. This way, we intend to test Amazon's compatibility with United States copyright and fair use law. Criticism, comment, news reporting and research are all "purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered fair" according to the U.S. Copyright Office; we expect that all three volumes will constitute fair use and protected speech, but then, that's why this is an experiment, isn't it?
Who:
This collection is curated by Meredith L. Patterson, an American writer and computer security researcher living in Belgium.
Details at the link above, and under the cut. Please feel free to spread this far and wide! I'm happy to answer any questions in the comments.
tl;dr:
- Choose a leaked diplomatic cable. (fulltext search)
- Craft a critical or artistic response to it.
- Submit it for inclusion in this anthology.
Inertial Fallacy Productions is putting together a Creative Commons-licensed anthology of short (no more than 2600 words) critical responses to the diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks in November/December 2010. You're invited. The resulting volume will be printed in several volumes (as well as digitally published) and used as part of a legal experiment.
This is a "for the love" anthology: no advance, no royalties. The editor isn't taking a cut either. Any revenue from sales will be donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
All the Citizens' Men will be published under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
How:
Visit the Cablegate archive, or explore the archive via fulltext search. Find a cable that interests you. Read it. Get to know it. Read up on the people, places, cultures, governments, events and other details mentioned. Then, craft a thought-provoking response that will engage the reader beyond the text itself.
Your response could take one of many forms. We expect that many responses will be political, historical or philosophical analyses of the cables they address - but don't limit yourself! Memoirs, satire, creative nonfiction, fiction (of any genre), close reading or other forms of literary criticism, poetry, illustration, sequential art - all of these, and more, are lenses through which we as writers and artists can illuminate one of the most polarizing moments of the 21st century.
Please indicate, somewhere in your submission (in the email is fine), the reference ID of the cable to which you are responding, e.g. 10STATE4108, 75TEHRAN2069, &c. Also, please note that we are looking for reactions to / works inspired by individual cables, not to Wikileaks itself; works which focus on Wikileaks the organization, Julian Assange, &c, whether to praise or to condemn, will not be considered. We welcome submissions from across the political spectrum, regardless of whether the author is a supporter or detractor of Wikileaks; indeed, since our goal is to capture a snapshot of the zeitgeist of 2010, we need contributors from all points of view. So please focus on the cables themselves, but by all means, tell us what you really think.
If you would prefer to send your submission encrypted, please use our GPG public key (3F23C1AC).
pub 1024D/3F23C1AC 2010-12-06 [expires: 2011-12-06]
Key fingerprint = 5739 F650 D2BE 810C D196 AE08 9234 0279 3F23 C1AC
If you would prefer to send your submission anonymously, we strongly recommend using the Mixmaster anonymous remailer network.
When:
Deadline is 11:59pm GMT on January 15, 2011.
Where:
Send written submissions to submissions@allthecitizensmen.com. For written material, send plain text only, 2600 words maximum (for poetry, 10 pages max). Word documents, PDFs, and anything that isn't plain text will be deleted unread. If there's an attachment to your email, you're doing it wrong.
Art also goes to submissions@allthecitizensmen.com, but again, no attachments - links to images only. If you must compress, please use a lossless format like PNG. Sequential art must be no more than 10 pages.
Why:
We're doing this for two reasons: one artistic, the other political. Isn't it always like that?
The phenomenon of Wikileaks is a transformative one. What has been seen can never be unseen, and what has been said can never be unsaid; global politics is changing, and will continue to change in response to the existence of secure havens for whistleblowing. However, the news media have focused mainly on the conflict between Wikileaks the organization and the United States government, relegating the material in the cables themselves to third- and fourth-page news. These documents deserve thoughtful analysis, and we want to collect high-quality examples to appreciate. Think of it as a time capsule to be understood now and reinterpreted in ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred years.
At the same time, the Wikileaks issue has raised troubling questions about free speech on an Internet that is growing toward cloud computing. The First Amendment limits the federal government's ability to control speech, but the corporations which provide access to speech also wield a startling degree of control over its propagation. On December 1st, 2010, Amazon Web Services ceased hosting the Wikileaks website, citing violation of its terms of service - though only after pressure from Senator Joe Lieberman. Amazon claims that since Wikileaks does not "own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content," Wikileaks was not holding up its end of the AWS service agreement. Their statement is, as you might imagine, hotly disputed.
Fortunately, there is a lesson from history that we can use to illuminate this situation further. In 1995, computer science professor D.J. Bernstein sued the Department of Justice to challenge export control regulations on cryptography. The federal government established a choke-hold on cryptographic software, source code, and algorithms under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations; printed materials, however, are an exception. Bernstein designed and implemented a cipher called Snuffle, wrote an academic paper about it, then wrote an English-language set of instructions explaining how to implement Snuffle. Since he wanted to publish it in the scientific community, he asked the State Department which of these works would require an export license. The State Department replied, "All of them." Bernstein challenged this under the First Amendment, and as a result, the Ninth Circuit ruled that source code is protected speech.
Bernstein's approach - throwing diverse inputs at a function to test how it will respond - is generally known in the computer security community as "fuzzing." Fuzzing the State Department helped us to discover a bug in our legal code, and the Ninth Circuit fixed it - its decision is now binding case law.
Instead of fuzzing the federal government, however, we're going to fuzz Amazon. All the Citizens' Men will be published in at least three volumes - maybe more, if we think of good ones. Volume One will consist of all accepted submissions alongside their corresponding cables. Volume Two will consist of the responses by themselves, and Volume Three will consist of the corresponding cables by themselves. This way, we intend to test Amazon's compatibility with United States copyright and fair use law. Criticism, comment, news reporting and research are all "purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered fair" according to the U.S. Copyright Office; we expect that all three volumes will constitute fair use and protected speech, but then, that's why this is an experiment, isn't it?
Who:
This collection is curated by Meredith L. Patterson, an American writer and computer security researcher living in Belgium.