“I thought it would take two years instead of four to be recognised by others as having this important role, so we are still a little behind schedule and have much more work to do.”

Julian Assange, in a Q&A session with readers of the Guardian, December 3rd.

Nobody has really picked up on this yet, but apparently there is a schedule. And where there is a schedule there is a plan. And looking at where things are going, the plan is for radical change, and it relies on an open source model.

First step, apparently, was getting the ammo. As John Robb pointed out, WikiLeaks started building its insurgency by making a “plausable promise” to participants:

Julian created a very simple plausible promise around which this diverse community assembled. The promise can be seen on the “Wikileaks:Submissions” page:

Submitting confidential material to WikiLeaks is safe, easy and protected by law.

The recent wins against the US government is a clear demonstration that this promise — the idea that it possible to safely leak anything, regardless the power of target — is plausible. The promise above is followed by an advertisement of its plausibility:

Over 100,000 articles catalyzed world-wide. Every source protected. No documents censored. All legal attacks defeated.

And indeed the community grew and responded, with WikiLeaks now sitting on enough material to keep us glued to our monitors for probably years.

The Afghanistan and Iraq diaries were early releases, proof of what they could do and to reach a critical mass of followers. Now, with the diplomatic cables, all hell has broken loose and not even 1% of it has been released. The effects are already visible everywhere and in ways we would not have held possible even a year ago.

Obama went to visit Karzai, and supposedly got stuck at an Air Force base without the mightiest country in the world being able to even set up a video link with his Afghan counterpart, because of “bad weather” as the official version had it. But WikiLeaks has again confirmed – with the force of a sledgehammer – that we should never believe official versions ever again. I think Obama got dissed by Karzai, who is understandably pissed about how he’s being portrayed by his American “friends”.

Imagine that. The US president left waiting in the cold on some Afghan airfield because of documents leaked by a website.

The next step in the WikiLeaks plan would then be to create a swarm. The website almost immediately came under a DOS attack, and then another one, and then Amazon pulled the plug on hosting, followed by EveryDNS.

Assange, in the same Q&A quoted above, said that they actually expected this to happen with for example Amazon.com. On top of that, an expectation of the wikileaks.org domain getting in some sort of trouble would not be unreasonable, especially since the US government seized domain names just days ago to “combat piracy” on the web.

On the Wired.com Threat Level blog, Kevin Poulsen wondered why WikiLeaks had not done more to keep its DNS service up and running:

It’s unclear why WikiLeaks went with a free provider, instead of paying for bulletproof DNS that could withstand attack. But according to EveryDNS, the distributed denial-of-service attacks that have been dogging WikiLeaks were threatening to overrun EveryDNS’s servers, which serve some 500,000 sites.

(…)

WikiLeaks had the four regional domains working on Friday, resolving to hosts in Sweden and France. Domain-registration records show that WikiLeaks still has control of the WikiLeaks.org, but for whatever reason, the organization still has EveryDNS set as its name server for that domain.

Poulsen insinuates that the struggles with domain names, hosting and DNS servers shows bungling on the part of the wikileakers, but I don’t really believe that; I think it has been deliberate.

After all, what has been the net result of the affair? A swarm. Not only did WikiLeaks itself set up numerous other domains to host cablegate, but people all over the globe have been busy setting up mirror sites, pointing their domains towards WikiLeaks and so on, a reported 100,000 people have downloaded the “insurance file” which contains all the un-redacted cables plus some more goodies, the released cables have also been made available as a package for easy download – in other words: it is now 200% sure that this cache of secret documents will never ever go away again and for those who seek to stop the leak the only possible outcome is that things will get much worse.

There is even, as we speak, set up a page (don’t know by whom) to allow anyone who owns a website to allow for a mirror to be set up under that domain by just filling a form and adding a subdomain to your domain (not sure how safe that procedure actually is).

All this points to grand strategic thinking. With WikiLeaks now being hosted by a swarm of people around the globe, these volunteers are now part of WikiLeaks themselves – the emerging WikiLeaks tribe – plus releasing new cables becomes a simple matter of syncing all the mirrors, and the distribution of the material is now invulnerable to any kind of attack or regulatory oversight, no matter how much they whine about it in France or the US.

With the infrastructure now firmly in place and bullet-proof and the hype-hungry mainstream media waiting to be fed, the stage is set for further releases of classified cables, probably even more damaging than the ones we’ve already seen. And then the Bank of America files. And then who knows what.

By that time the “conspiracy” will be crumbling under the relentless attacks of this open source insurgency – our insurgency, really. So that we can build something new, from the bottom up, to replace it.