Crowd-sourcing analysis of the Afghan War Diary

Justin Podur was blogging all day yesterday about the start of his computer-aided analysis of the War Diary. He managed to overlay maps of Afghanistan with references in the leak to locations of incidents involving various keywords or acronyms like "Canadian Forces", "Drug War", etc., then overlaying more maps to try to find underlying patterns, all with freely available data and free software. Tim Groves from the Toronto Media Co-op called for groups of people to come together to take a collaborative approach to analysing the references to Canada in the ginormous leak, which could be a really interesting new way to do analysis, especially given all of the free on-line collaboration tools like wikis now in existence. I'm excited to see where this goes!

Here's a brief update on how the whole leak has been unfolding over the past few days: the White House is now begging Wikileaks not to release any more documents. US border guards detained a Wikileaks volunteer (mostly known for his work on the fabulous on-line anonymizer Tor) and questioned him for three hours. They demanded he decode the files on his laptop, and he refused, so they just gave it back to him and let him go, though they kept his three cellphones, and FBI agents followed him around. Bradley Manning, the US sodier accused of giving the documents to Wikileaks, was transferred on Thursday from the military prison in Kuwait where he was held since May to a military prison in Virginia. It's expected he'll be kept there a long time in solitary confinement before being ever being put on trial.