UPDATE: This post began as a conspiracy theory and lesson for how decentralized information warfare is upon us, but now it seems to be true. See below.
Participating in a Wikipedia article (Bronze Soldier) that is a breaking event where you understand some of the historical context and can gain access to needed language skills is a greater participatory experience than anything I've participated in by blogging. Except when I'm generating first-hand reports. But the interesting thing is the potential modern propoganda at play. I wanted to share this with the obvious caveat that you can get a more conservative story from mainstream sources, it might help Wikipedia literacy for a breaking event and that it might be a form of modern propoganda. If I was truly conspiratorial would think stems from political institutions, and I do need to disclaim that the following may just be a conspiracy theory.
As of edit 04:07, 1 May 2007 the page took two interesting turns around a disinformation angle:
A number of video clips, usually taken via cellphone camera, have appeared on Youtube under the keyword 'eSStonia', ostensibly to corroborate the police brutality claims.[68] Interestingly, most of them are mislabelled, apparently in an attempt to frame the incidents recorded in the clips in a pro-rioter way. For example, the clip labelled "eSStonia - Police car crushes pedestrians crowd" features no pedestrian-menacing cars.[69]
I noticed these clips at the top of YouTube's most viewed the day after and thought the same. If you want to deceive in time-based media, a cheap tactic while things are breaking is to send the quick and dirty message to people who won't really spend time. This is similar to the episodic framing that mainstream media is prone to, and I hoped blogging could counter. But this disinformation, potentially from one random idiot, is otherwise of great effect at low cost.
Since the riots took place in the centre of the city, after hours of tense situation, many thousands of frames of photographic and video material of the events are available, both from journalists and security cameras and from witnesses among general public (who usually used cellphone cameras). The police have gathered a number of such photographs depicting unidentified suspects on a website at [2] (not available from outside Estonia while a foreign DDoS attack on Estonian government servers is underway[79]) and asked the public to identify such unidentified people.
The President's website (which I started a long time ago) and others are indeed inaccessible, but the above footnote is DDoS inaccessible, which may be a clever disinformation edit in-and-of-itself. this claim can be verified through other means than an Estonian TV broadcast found in the discussion page (time-based and language barriered comprehension).
But really, I share this because many people don't know how Wikipedia works, or have that bullshit detector that starts to blink in the corner of their eye when things don't make sense. Because I would expect such tactics not only out of individuals for no good reason, but institutions for good reason, and you should assume it is the case. If you can follow the evolution of a page, and understand that something breaking could be broken, you will otherwise find this Wikipedia article to be one of the very best sources for understanding the event. But it is one source and you have to give it, and yourself, time.
These things happen every minute on Wikipedia. Meanwhile my edits have survived because they were factual and well sourced. And I'll be happy to find them and other good ones there in the future. It was interesting to read how Clinton opined that "History may be kind to my friend Yeltsin." I hope history is kind to how I wrote it when everyone is my editor.
UPDATE: The Estonian government says Russia is behind the cyber-attacks, according to the BBC. For more see Robin Gurney, David Phillips and F-secure's weblog (a Finnish security company, source of the chart to the right). For perspective, just consider how 50 years of occupation and being lied to in the news and history books would sensitize you to the Russian government's accusations and this kind of cyber-warfare. As I've covered, Estonia has leap-frogged in its adoption of the internet, especially as a source for news. Zone-H reports of widespread email outages, as well as the web:
Considering that in Estonia technology and the Internet is covering a role more and more relevant in ordinary life , we cannot be surprised that the Net has become the public screen of this conflict. Several governmental web sites have been DoS attacked from abroad. Ddos attacks has been led from simple pings with large packets . Other attacks were carried out from botnets with syn and udp floods. Finally, some prominent Estonian websites - such as Foreign Ministry site, that is very useful for foreigners - have been completely inaccessible from abroad for some hours.
However, the most creative successful attack was carried out against www.reform.ee, the website of Prime Minister Ansip political party. A fake statement that pretended to come from the Prime Minister himself was placed on the home page, telling that "party apologises and promises to bring monument back to its location".
This may just be modern life with individuals behind the cyber-attacks. An un-sourced claim on the Wikipedia discussion page says attacks came from a range of Russian government IP addresses. But if you wanted to change perception of such a fast moving event in a coordinated fashion, wouldn't such tactics be employed? I'm sure large governments are prepared to counter such moves. But small countries, even if they are members of, say, the EU, should prepare against dis-information and to have their own communications with their peoples and the world not denied.
