Visualizing Wikileaks mirrors

For the past few weeks, Wikileaks has drawn a lot of attention from the media. Mostly because of the Cablegate.

Whether Julian Assange should be considered as a Hero (by publishing information) or Terrorist is an open question. Because of threats from governments, companies in the USA started to ban payment, hosting and dns services to Wikileaks. Soon Wikileaks moved from servers based in the USA to Sweden/Switzerland.

For now Wikileaks seem to be safe, however, they also started a call for mirrors.

Interested to see which people in the world are supporting Wikileaks, I had the idea to visualize the Wikileaks mirrors on Google Earth.

Visualizing Wikileaks mirrors

* update 09-12-2010 8pm CET *
– Added Google Earth web plugin links

* update 10-12-2010 10am CET *
– Got featured on ReadWriteWebNY Times, thanks guys!
– Stay tuned for more updates!

* update 23-12-2010 10pm CET *
– Embedded Google Earth web plugin in demo section

Data mining

In order to get the data, I went to the official Wikileaks website which had all mirrors listed on this page: mirrors. I wrote a small PHP script that would open up the mirror page and scanned the document for URLs. If a mirror was found, it would be stored in a file. At this moment there are about 1334 mirrors on the website.

Data manipulation

At this point I only have the URLs of the mirrors, but how do I know where these servers are located?

In order to know where the server is located, I used GeoLite City which is a service from MaxMind. GeoLite City allows you to resolve most IPs to a geospatial location. Of course it doesn’t gives the exact location, but usually it is able to show in which City the server is located, which is good enough for my purpose.

After obtaining the GeoLite City database (there is a free version!) I used PHP to write a script that would first resolve the URL to an IP address (PHP function: gethostbyname() ) and then use this IP address to look up the longtitude and latitude.

The last step was converting the data into the KML format (and adding some artificial altitude information) for use with Google Earth.

Data visualization

Below are some of the early results.

Currently the main server (http://46.59.1.2) seem to be located in Sweden, when we view the data in Google Earth we can see that a lot of mirrors are actually located in Europe.
Visualizing Wikileaks mirrors

Europe
Red pin: Wikileaks server
Yellow pins: Wikileaks mirrors
Greenlines: Connections from the Wikileaks server to a Wikileaks mirror

Mirrors in Europe

USA
Wikileaks mirrors in the USA
Mirrors in the USA

Sweden
Since some of the servers are at the same location (probably sharing the same data center), we can click on a pin and it will expand to show all mirrors located at this data center.

Mirrors in Sweden

Screencast / Video

Short screencast (Watch it in HD 720p, in fullscreen mode)

Online Demo

To view this demo you will need to install the Google Earth Browser Plug-in

 

 

KML source

Want to try it out locally on your computer?

No problem! Here is how:

35 Comment

    What song’s that on the video?

    Cheers, Dave.

    09 Dec 2010 | Reply

  1. Himpel

    Hi! Nice work! Can you please publish the scripts, too?

    11 Dec 2010 | Reply

  2. m

    There’s another visualization, also showing the growing number of mirrors across time: http://labs.vis4.net/wikileaks/mirrors/

    11 Dec 2010 | Reply

  3. Sycobubble

    Thanks for the fine work. For the app loaded and running in a few minutes.

    Question: how can I display the green mirror-to-central links?

    12 Dec 2010 | Reply

  1. Wikileaks-Mirrors, jetzt als Google Earth Visualisierung | KKND.org
  2. Resuming operations ! « drk||Raziel's blog
  3. Visualizing Wikileaks Mirrors in Google Earth | Fuzzy Tolerance
  4. Where In the World Is WikiLeaks Mirrored? [Google Earth] | TECHNOLOGY NEWS
  5. Visualisation : les miroirs de Wikileaks | ReadWriteWeb France
  6. Visualisierung: WikiLeaks-Mirrors « vasistas?
  7. Distributed power in the 21st century « Continental Drift
  8. Distributed power in the 21st century - machine quotidienne
  9. Dal web al mondo reale, Wikileaks è virale! Tra social activism e partecipazione [Wikileaks]
  10. Los Espejos de Wikileaks Vistos en Google Earth.[Vídeo] | GeeksRoom
  11. Visualizing Wikileaks Mirrors | Operation Protest
  12. ¿Donde estan los Mirrors de Wikileaks? | Ludics.com.ar [New]
  13. Visualizing Wikileaks mirrors « dokumentationsarchiv
  14. Redondance des données numériques - Internet Collaboratif
  15. Todos los espejos de WikiLeaks en Google Earth – Un mundo complejo
  16. WikiLeaks around the world | Mapsys.info
  17. Internet, un danger ? | Balises Info
  18. WikiLeaks-Mirrors visualisiert | Sven Büchler
  19. Google Earth: Volg Wikileaks mirrors | Clicko.nl
  20. Opendata Beispiele « Dotcom-Blog
  21. 维基解密镜像站点分布在全球哪些地方? – 读写网 ReadWriteWeb
  22. Deux clips de rappeurs pour soutenir Wikileaks
  23. WikiLeaks, aínda hai esperanza (II) | ..:: Xabier Rolán ::..
  24. Visualizing Wikileaks Mirrors « - Whisper
  25. Tot el que no sé de Wikileaks… (però ho aprenc seguint enllaços) | janquim (fent proves)
  26. WikiLeaks Appeals To Maritime Law?
  27. WikiLeaks, aínda hai esperanza (II) - Xabier Rolán

Leave a reply