This week’s activity asks for a compilation of individuals and groups involved in and association with Wikileaks and to chart out their relationship using Gliffy, which is a piece of online software that allows you to create various diagrams and flowcharts. Below is my list of key individuals and groups associated with Wikileaks.
Wikileaks
Non-profit organization that publishes secret and classified documents.
Jacob Appelbaum
Volunteer for Wikileaks and represented the organization at the 2010 Hope Conference. His Twitter account was subpoenaed by the U.S. government.
Rop Gonggrijp
A dutch hacker that volunteers for Wikileaks and founder of Internet Service Provider XS4ALL. His Twitter account was subpoenaed by the U.S. government.
Birgitta Jonsdottir
A former volunteer who had her Twitter account subpoenaed by the U.S. government.
Twitter
A social networking website that allows users to post short status updates. Twitter decided to not give the U.S. government the information that was subpoenaed.
Julian Assange
States he is the Editor in Chief of Wikileaks, yet his actual role in the organization is largely unknown.
Bradley Manning
A U.S. Army soldier who alledgly leaked classified information including the U.S. Diplomatic Cables to Wikileaks. Manning is currently being held in a U.S. high-security prison.
Barack Obama
Current President of the United States, opposed to Wikileaks and all of its operations.
Daniel Ellsberg
A former U.S. military analyst who released secret government documents known as the Pentagon Papers. Has referred to Julian Assange and Bradley Manning as ‘heros’.
Daniel Domscheit-Berg
Former spokesperson for Wikileaks. Deflected the organization and started OpenLeaks. He as previously involved with the Chaos Computer Club, a German hacker group.
Rudolf Elmer
A former Swiss banker who passed on confidential documents to Wikileaks that detail activities of bank Julius Bar and their involvement in an alleged tax evasion scheme.
TIME Magazine
A popular news magazine which saw its readers vote Julian Assange as TIME’s Person of the Year for 2010. TIME decided to select Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg as the Person of the Year instead.
Facebook
A social networking website that allows individuals to create personal profiles and share information. Wikileaks cablegate documents where/are shared by individuals using the website.
Joe Liberman
A U.S. Senator who put pressure on Amazon.com to stop providing infrastructure and web services to Wikileaks.
The U.S. Government
Strongly opposed to Wikileaks and Julian Assange.
Gliffy was actually pretty intuitive and easy to use. Some of the tools can get a little cumbersome and the site seems to bog down when you have a lot of objects on your flowchart. Normally when online tools are free to use, you expect there to be limited functionality or advertisements popping up all over the place. However, this wasn’t the case with Gliffy, although I found the zoom and move tools to be a bit clunky and not as precise as something like Photoshop, for example. Exporting the org chart was very easy, although I feel Gliffy lacked exporting options, and I had to do some cropping with Apple’s Preview to get rid of the white space that Gliffy didn’t remove. Overall I thought Gliffy was great for a free tool, and I can see it being useful for large organizations or for project planning. My org chart is embedded below.
