The US government has called on the organization Wikileaks to “return” all the classified documents it received and has begun to publish and “destroy” all the documents in its databases. For at least the fraction of the documents that have been released to the public, it’s far too late for that.
How far and wide have the Wikileaks Cablegate documents spread around the web – and how fast have they been traveling? After reading Danny Sulivan’s post Why Wikileaks Will Never Be Closed or Blocked today, I visited the torent search engine The Pirate Bay, pulled down some numbers and did some math. Here’s what I found.
WikiLeaks Coverage From ReadWriteWeb:
- Wikileaks Lets Loose “Global Intelligence Files” from Stratfor Emails
- WikiLeaks May Move Servers to International Waters to Avoid Shutdown
- One Year After Cablegate Began, WikiLeaks’ Operations Still Handicapped
- Twitter, WikiLeaks and the Troubling New Implications For Online Privacy
- Having Ended the Iraq War, Wikileaks Runs Out of Money
- Did Google Hand a Wikileaks Volunteer’s Gmail Data to the U.S. Government? [Updated]
- Weekly Wrap-up: Wikileaks, Google Plus, Facebook and More…
- Wikileaks Takes Down the Head of Al Jazeera
- There are 113 different torrents with the words Wikileaks Cablegate in the title listed on the Pirate Bay right now.
- At the moment I write this, there are 109 people leeching a Wikileaks Cablegate file from those torrents and 5801 total seeds for those files living on computers all around the world. For context, that’s roughly the same number of seeds you’ll find for the latest Katy Perry album.
- The most popularly seeded file is 10 Mebibytes (Megabytes) in size; it’s the seed for the first day’s released cables and was released that evening.
- That first full archive file was seeded two and a half hours after @wikileaks first Tweeted about the documents’ availability.
- The first upload, a mirror of the Cablegate site, was seeded as a torrent 20 minutes after its availability was published about on Twitter.
- 721 people are currently helping seed the first day’s archive file and 14 people are currently downloading it as leechers. It is both the single most seeded and leeched file of the group right now.
- It can be downloaded in full and unzipped, in HTML, in about 5 minutes. (It’s just as readable as the website that way, too, but you know it’s not going to disappear when it’s on your own computer.)
- 26 different Wikileaks Cablegate torrents were uploaded yesterday.
- As of 7 PM PST on December 8th, no one has yet uploaded today’s leaked cables.
- According to the Wikileaks.ch site, just 1193 out of the 251,287 total documents included in Cablegate have been released so far. That’s less than 0.5% of what’s on its way.
If you’d like to join the thousands of people who have pulled down a torrented copy of these documents, to pass along to the grandkids later, and you haven’t downloaded a torrent before, the Miro media player is a particularly attractive and easy to use torrent downloading application, among many other things.
