Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by 82_28 » Wed Dec 08, 2010 6:27 pm
by vanlose kid » Wed Dec 08, 2010 6:27 pm
by vanlose kid » Wed Dec 08, 2010 6:28 pm
82_28 wrote:What?
by vanlose kid » Wed Dec 08, 2010 6:34 pm
by wintler2 » Wed Dec 08, 2010 6:47 pm
by Montag » Wed Dec 08, 2010 6:58 pm
82_28 wrote:What?
by JackRiddler » Wed Dec 08, 2010 8:36 pm
2010-12-08: Cablegate: News from the infowar front, part 3
Submitted by admin on Wed, 12/08/2010 - 10:51
http://wlcentral.org /
The Bolivian government is now hosting WikiLeaks Cablegate documents on its official servers: http://wikileaks.vicepresidencia.gob.bo/, under the banner of the Vice President's office and the office of the President of the Legislative Assembly. The statement reads:
"The Vice President of the State of Bolivia and the President of the Plurinational Legislative Assembly, seeking to democratize access to information available to the public, are making available the documents of the Department of State of the United States, published by Wikileaks, which refer to Bolivia. All of them are available in their original language (English) and those that contain information relevant to the country, beyond simple references are translated into Castilian or being in the process of being translated, a situation in which we ask for your patience.
The search engine offers search alternatives according to the relevance of the document, its creation date, language of the source institution, etc. We firmly believe that this site will expand access to this vital information and facilitate the work of many citizens."
In a reversal from the Australian government's previous pronouncements on Julian Assange, Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd said today in a declaration to Reuters that "Mr Assange is not himself responsible for the unauthorised release of 250,000 documents from the US diplomatic communications network. The Americans are responsible for that." He added that the leaks raised questions about the "adequacy" of US data security, and that "Maybe 2 million or so people having access to this stuff is a bit of a problem," referring to the number of personnel who had access to the SIPRNET network.
The Independent reports that "Informal discussions have already taken place between US and Swedish officials over the possibility of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange being delivered into American custody, according to diplomatic sources." Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt has denied the report to AFP.
In the United States, Senator Joe Lieberman raised the prospect of prosecuting media organizations such as The New York Times for publishing WikiLeaks information, in a interview with Fox News. The New York Times reports: “I certainly believe that WikiLeaks has violated the Espionage Act, but then what about the news organizations — including The Times — that accepted it and distributed it?” Mr. Lieberman said, adding: “To me, The New York Times has committed at least an act of bad citizenship, and whether they have committed a crime, I think that bears a very intensive inquiry by the Justice Department.”
Much of the media reported with ironic amusement on the State Department's announcement of World Press Freedom Day: "Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder, in jail; World Press Freedom Day announced," is the title of a Washington Post report. Marissa Bell writes: "The same day that Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) said the New York Times and WikiLeaks may be investigated for espionage, the State Department announced it would be hosting the World Press Freedom Day in 2011."
In the meantime, various media outlets are reporting on the Swedish case allegations against Julian Assange and the background on the case, including a special report from Reuters, The Guardian and The Daily Mail. Their conclusions are the same ones that we came to months ago: "The more one learns about the case, the more one feels that, unlike the bell in Enkoping, the allegations simply don’t ring true," writes The Daily Mail.
Anonymous group's Operation Payback has in the meantime taken down the websites of PostFinance, Senator Joe Lieberman's office, the Swedish prosecution office, and Mastercard. The group has vowed to "fire at anyone or anything that tries to censor WikiLeaks, including multi-billion dollar companies." Panda Labs has a good running update of the attacks so far.
In TIME's Person of the Year poll, Julian Assange is in first place, with a 92% rating and 315,403 votes as of the time of this writing, eleven percentage points and nearly 100,000 votes above the second-place holder, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
TIME also carries an article by Massimo Calabresi, titled Why WikiLeaks Is Winning Its Info War: "There was a time when WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's voluntary surrender to the British authorities might have put an end to the crisis created by the Internet provocateur's dissemination of tens of thousands of state secrets. But in the upside-down world of transnational crowdsourcing unleashed by WikiLeaks, in which thousands of activists around the globe can be rallied to defend and extend its work, Assange's arrest is a win, not a loss, for his organization."
"The asymmetrical info war initiated by the WikiLeaks dump of diplomatic cables is all about spectacle — the more Assange is set up by world powers, the more powerful his own movement becomes. "The field of battle is WikiLeaks," wrote John Perry Barlow, a former Grateful Dead lyricist and founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the First Amendment advocacy group, in a message to his followers. "You are the troops." WikiLeaks admiringly forwarded the post to 300,000 of its own followers. As the U.S. and other governments attempted to close down WikiLeaks over the past week, those "troops" have fought back. And so far, it doesn't look like much of a contest."
Bolivian Government wrote:La Vicepresidencia del Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia, Presidencia de la Asamblea Legislativa Plurinacional, en busca de democratizar el acceso a la información, pone a disposición del público los documentos del Departamento de Estado de los Estados Unidos, publicados por Wikileaks, que hacen referencia a Bolivia. Todos ellos se encuentra disponibles en su idioma original (inglés) y aquellos que contengan información relevante respecto al país, más allá de simples referencias, están traducidos al castellano o en su defecto en proceso, situación frente a la cual les pedimos paciencia.
El buscador ofrece distintas alternativas de búsqueda acorde a la relevancia del documento, su fecha de creación, el idioma en que se encuentran, la institución de origen, etc. Creemos firmemente que esta página ampliará el acceso a esta importantísima información y facilitará el trabajo de muchos ciudadanos.
Wikileaks: Australia FM (Kevin Rudd) says US to blame, not Assange
Source: BBC
Australia's foreign minister has said the US is to blame for the release of thousands of diplomatic cables on Wikileaks, not its Australian founder, Julian Assange.
Kevin Rudd said the release raised questions about US security.
Mr Rudd said he did not "give a damn" about criticism of him in the cables.
=snip=
In an interview with Reuters news agency, Mr Rudd said: "Mr Assange is not himself responsible for the unauthorised release of 250,000 documents from the US diplomatic communications network. The Americans are responsible for that."
Mr Rudd, the former prime minister who was replaced by Julia Gillard in June, added: "I think there are real questions to be asked about the adequacy of security systems and the level of access that people have had to that material. The core responsibility, and therefore legal liability, goes to those individuals responsible for that initial unauthorised release."
Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-11945558
WikiLeaks outs Mark Arbib as US informant
Source: The Australian
FEDERAL Labor powerbroker Mark Arbib has been outed as a key source of intelligence on government and internal party machinations to the US embassy.
New embassy cables, released by WikiLeaks to Fairfax newspapers today, reveal the influential right-wing Labor MP has been one of the embassy's best ALP informants, along with former frontbencher Bob McMullan and current MP Michael Danby.
The documents say the Minister for Sport had been secretly offering details of Labor's inner workings even before his election to the Senate in 2007, dating back to his time as general secretary of the party's NSW branch from 2004.
Senator Arbib was one of the "faceless men" who was instrumental in the decision to oust Kevin Rudd and install Julia Gillard as Prime Minister in June.
The documents also identify Senator Arbib as a strong backer of the Australia-US alliance.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/in-dept ... 5967923486
PayPal admits US pressure over WikiLeaks account freeze
Source: The Guardian
Esther Addley
Wednesday December 08 2010 14.13 GMT
PayPal today admitted it suspended payments to WikiLeaks after an intervention from the US State Department.
The site's vice-president of platform, Osama Bedier, told an internet conference the site had decided to freeze WikiLeaks's account on 4 December after government representatives said it was engaged in illegal activity. "State Dept told us these were illegal activities. It was straightforward," he told the LeWeb conference in Paris, adding: "We ... comply with regulations around the world, making sure that we protect our brand."
PayPal is the first major corporation to admit that its decision to suspend dealings with WikiLeaks was a result of US government pressure.
It will intensify criticism from supporters of WikiLeaks that the site is being targeted for political reasons. Visa, Amazon, the Swiss bank PostFinance and others have also announced in recent days that they will cease trading with the whistleblowing site.
Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/de ... mastercard
WikiLeaks cables: US 'lobbied Russia on behalf of Visa and MasterCard'
Source: The Guardian
US diplomats intervened to try to amend draft law so that it would not 'disadvantage' US credit card firms, cable says
Wednesday December 08 2010 14.30 GMT
The US lobbied Russia this year on behalf of Visa and MasterCard in an attempt to ensure the payment companies were not "adversely affected" by new legislation, according to American diplomats in Moscow.
A state department cable released this afternoon by WikiLeaks reveals that US diplomats intervened to try to amend a draft law going through Russia's Duma. Their explicit aim was to ensure the new law did not "disadvantage" the two US firms, the cable states.
The revelation comes a day after Visa – apparently acting under intense pressure from Washington – announced it was suspending all payments to WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowing website. Visa was following MasterCard, PayPal and Amazon, all of which have severed ties with the site and its founder Julian Assange in the last few days. The companies have justified their decision to stop donations on the grounds that WikiLeaks is acting "illegally". Each has quickly become the target of sustained online revenge attacks by disgruntled hackers, with mastercard.com paralysed today.
The cable, dated 1 February 2010, states that the Obama administration took up the companies' plight with senior Russian government officials. Earlier this year Moscow unveiled plans to create a new National Payment Card System (NPCS) that would collect all credit card fees on domestic transactions – depriving Visa and MasterCard of a major chunk of revenue.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/de ... mastercard
U.S. Prosecutors Study WikiLeaks Prosecution
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
December 7, 2010
The Justice Department, in considering whether and how it might indict Julian Assange, is looking beyond the Espionage Act of 1917 to other possible offenses, including conspiracy or trafficking in stolen property, according to officials familiar with the investigation.
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. acknowledged this week that there were problems with the Espionage Act, a World War I-era law that says the unauthorized possession and dissemination of information related to national defense is illegal. But he also hinted that prosecutors were looking at other statutes with regard to Mr. Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.
“I don’t want to get into specifics here, but people would have a misimpression if the only statute you think that we are looking at is the Espionage Act,” Mr. Holder said Monday at a news conference. “That is certainly something that might play a role, but there are other statutes, other tools that we have at our disposal.”
A government official familiar with the investigation said that treating WikiLeaks different from newspapers might be facilitated if investigators found any evidence that Mr. Assange aided the leaker, who is believed to be a low-level Army intelligence analyst — for example, by directing him to look for certain things and providing technological assistance.
Meanwhile, according to another government official familiar with the investigation, Justice Department officials have also examined whether Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks could be charged with trafficking in stolen government property.
Read the full article at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/08/world ... &ref=world
Lawyers Win Battle To See Assange In Prison
Source: Sky News
Sarah Gordon, Sky News Online
Sky sources have confirmed that Julian Assange's legal team are due to meet him in Wandsworth Prison on Thursday, ahead of a court appearance on December 14.
The information comes after the lawyers for the WikiLeaks founder had complained they did not have access to their client.
The Australian spent Tuesday night in Wandsworth Prison after turning himself into police over sexual assault allegations made against him in Sweden.
=snip=
Mr Assange's legal team had voiced their frustration they were not able to speak to him over the phone and would not have access to him for another five days. "We've been told we can't get to see our client in Wandsworth Prison until the 13th as they say they don't have the capacity to facilitate a legal visit until then," his solicitor Mark Stephens told Sky News.
http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/UK-New ... aks:_Julia
Kremlin Suggests WikiLeaks Founder For Nobel Prize
Source: RIA Novosti
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be nominated for a Nobel prize, a source in the Kremlin told RIA Novosti on Wednesday.
"Non-governmental and governmental organizations should think of ways to help him. Perhaps he could be awarded a Nobel prize," the source said.
The founder of the controversial whistleblowing website was arrested in London on Tuesday. He was wanted by Sweden on sex assault charges.
An arrest warrant for Assange was issued by Swedish prosecutors last week just days after his website published the first batch of over 250,000 confidential U.S. diplomatic cables.
World leaders and diplomats have downplayed the impact of the information leak on international relations but many have questioned the benefit of the project, alleging that some of the leaks could "threaten lives."
Read more: http://en.rian.ru/russia/20101208/161685835.html
by Belligerent Savant » Wed Dec 08, 2010 8:42 pm
stefano wrote:Yeah, that's the feeling I get sometimes on here when I read posts by people going 'Don't you get it? There is literally not one thing happening, from the corridors of power to your local DVD shop, that is not part of the control system!' If it's like that, what do you hope for? The next step is to think every poster on the board but you is an agent and all your friends report to Langley.
by JackRiddler » Wed Dec 08, 2010 8:50 pm
stefano wrote:I don't see how Paul is making the opposite case: I fully agree that "the WikiLeaks controversy serves as a diversion from the real issue of what our foreign policy should be". Purposely so. That's part of the damage limitation on the part of the US government, trying to turn the debate into one about WikiLeaks instead of about the content of the cables. (Thanks for the bit about the US drone in Yemen.)JackRiddler wrote:Blair seems to have taken that single line from a speech today in which Paul made the opposite of Blair's case
by JackRiddler » Wed Dec 08, 2010 8:58 pm
Tuesday, Dec 7, 2010 08:08 ET
Anti-WikiLeaks lies and propaganda - from TNR, Lauer, Feinstein and more
By Glenn Greenwald
AP
WikiLeak's Julian Assange.
(1) In The New Republic today, Todd Gitlin writes an entire anti-WikiLeaks column that is based on an absolute factual falsehood. Anyone listening to most media accounts would believe that WikiLeaks has indiscriminately published all 250,000 of the diplomatic cables it possesses, and Gitlin -- in the course of denouncing Julian Assange -- bolsters this falsehood: "Wikileaks’s huge data dump, including the names of agents and recent diplomatic cables, is indiscriminate" and Assange is "fighting for a world of total transparency."
The reality is the exact opposite -- literally -- of what Gitlin told TNR readers. WikiLeaks has posted to its website only 960 of the 251,297 diplomatic cables it has. Almost every one of these cables was first published by one of its newspaper partners which are disclosing them (The Guardian, the NYT, El Pais, Le Monde, Der Speigel, etc.). Moreover, the cables posted by WikiLeaks were not only first published by these newspapers, but contain the redactions applied by those papers to protect innocent people and otherwise minimize harm. Here is an AP article from yesterday detailing this process:[T]he group is releasing only a trickle of documents at a time from a trove of a quarter-million, and only after considering advice from five news organizations with which it chose to share all of the material.
"They are releasing the documents we selected," Le Monde's managing editor, Sylvie Kauffmann, said in an interview at the newspaper's Paris headquarters. . . .
"The cables we have release correspond to stories released by our main stream media partners and ourselves. They have been redacted by the journalists working on the stories, as these people must know the material well in order to write about it," WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said in a question-and-answer session on The Guardian's website Friday.
Just as they did prior to releasing the Afghanistan war documents, WikiLeaks -- according to AP -- "appealed to the U.S. ambassador in London, asking the U.S. government to confidentially help him determine what needed to be redacted from the cables before they were publicly released." Although the U.S. -- again -- refused to give such guidance, WikiLeaks worked closely with these media outlets to ensure that any material which has no valid public interest value and could harm innocent people was withheld. And Assange's frequent commitments to engage in "harm minimization" when releasing documents gives the lie to Gitlin's assertion that he is "fighting for a world of total transparency."
I understand that the media has repeated over and over the false claim that WikiLeaks "dumped" all 250,000 diplomatic cables on the Internet -- which is presumably how this falsehood made its way into Gitlin's brain and then into his column -- but that's no excuse for him and TNR editors failing to undertake the most minimal due diligence (such as, say, checking WikiLeaks' website) before publishing this claim. I've emailed Gitlin and TNR Editor-in-Chief Franklin Foer early this morning and advised them of the need for a correction, but have heard nothing. I will post any reply I get. They're entitled to condemn WikiLeaks all they want, but not to propagate this factual falsehood.
(2) According to The New York Times' Brian Stelter, Matt Lauer -- when announcing Assange's arrest in London this morning -- proclaimed: "The international manhunt for Julian Assange is over" -- as though Assange is Osama bin Laden or something. I don't know if it's sheer empty-headedness or excessive servile-to-power syndrome -- probably both, as is usually the case -- but that claim is both painfully dumb and misleading. There was no valid arrest warrant in England for Assange until yesterday; he then immediately turned himself into British law enforcement. There was no "international manhunt." How long before Matt Lauer and his friends start featuring playing cards with all the WikiLeaks Villains on the them ("and here we have Julian Assange, the Terrorist Mastermind, who is the Ace of Spades!")? Answer: as soon as the Government produces them and hands them to the media with instructions to use them.
(3) Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein ran today to The Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page to call for the prosecution of Assange under the Espionage Act of 1917. Legal experts overwhelmingly believe that any such prosecution under that law would be extremely difficult and "extremely dangerous," but that's of no concern to the Surveillance-State-protecting, Iraq-War-supporting, defense-contractor-plutocrat: the "liberal" Democratic Senator from California. To argue this, she invokes the most tired and simple-minded platitude beloved by all those who want to curtail basic press and speech freedoms: "Just as the First Amendment is not a license to yell 'Fire!' in a crowded theater, it is also not a license to jeopardize national security."
Every line of pro-prosecution rationale cited by Feinstein applies equally to journalists -- including especially the newspapers from around the world which are publishing all of the same diplomatic cables as WikiLeaks is, and which are publishing them before WikiLeaks even does. How can it possibly be that WikiLeaks should be prosecuted for espionage, but not The New York Times, or The Guardian, or any other newspaper that publishes these cables?
In 2006, Alberto Gonzales threatened to prosecute The New York Times for revealing Bush's illegal NSA program, and The Weekly Standard ran numerous articles calling for the prosecution of NYT journalists and editors under the Espionage Act for having done so. Bill Bennett demanded the prosecution of The Washington Post's Dana Priest for revealing the CIA black sites. How can all the Good Democrats who condemned that mentality possibly not condemn Dianne Feinstein and those who think like her? What's the difference?
(4) Here is the American justice system under Obama in a nutshell:
The New York Times, January 11, 2009:
The New York Times, June 11, 2010:
Salon, yesterday:
To recap "Obama justice": if you create an illegal worldwide torture regime, illegally spy on Americans without warrants, abduct people with no legal authority, or invade and destroy another country based on false claims, then you are fully protected. But if you expose any of the evils secretly perpetrated as part of those lawless actions -- by publishing the truth about what was done -- then you are an Evil Criminal who deserves the harshest possible prosecution.
(SNIP -- MORE in original, including video of Greenwald on Democracy Now & Al Jazeera)
by JackRiddler » Wed Dec 08, 2010 9:11 pm
vanlose kid wrote:Wikileaks and the Worldwide Information War
Power, Propaganda, and the Global Political Awakening
by Andrew Gavin Marshall
Global Research, December 6, 2010
SNIP
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? ... &aid=22278
*
by nathan28 » Wed Dec 08, 2010 9:13 pm
Anonymous' 'Operation Payback' Twitter Account SUSPENDED
UPDATE: Anonymous' Operation Payback seems to be back on Twitter with several new Twitter accounts, including @Anon_Operationn and @AnonOperation.
--
First its Facebook page was banned. Now, hacker group Anonymous' 'Operation Payback' Twitter account appears to have been suspended.
The pro-WikiLeaks Anonymous has been leading the charge against those have crossed WikiLeaks--including MasterCard and Visa, which stopped processing WikiLeaks payments.
Anonymous' account, @Anon_Operation, was suspended only a matter of minutes after it tweeted a link to leaked MasterCard credit card numbers (see tweet below).
Attempts to access the Twitter account now return an error message from Twitter that reads, "Sorry, the profile you are trying to view has been suspended." The account had over 20,000 followers.
Twitter has been the subject of controversy since WikiLeaks' data dump. First, Twitter was accused of censoring "WikiLeaks" from its list of Trending Topics (Twitter has denied these allegations, noting that it "absolutely [did] not" censor the term). Later, when asked whether Twitter might suspend or block WikiLeaks' Twitter account, the microblogging service replied only that it had no comment on the matter.
A Twitter spokesperson told The Huffington Post that it had "no on-the-record comment on the actions we take on specific user accounts."
by nathan28 » Wed Dec 08, 2010 9:19 pm
by Plutonia » Wed Dec 08, 2010 9:36 pm
Leaked State Department Cable Shows 'Behind The Scenes' US Embassy Involvement In Swedish Copyright Issues
from the no-surprise-there dept
It's long been common knowledge that US diplomats have had a heavy hand in other country's copyright laws but, with the Wikileaks release of State Department cables, we're finally seeing some actually confirmation of that. We've already covered the US's involvement in Spain's proposed copyright changes and now a Swedish television station claims to have a cable (not yet released by Wikileaks) that shows heavy "behind the scenes" involvement by the US Embassy in Swedish copyright law.
The key points are that the US diplomat admits that public perception is (quite accurately) that the raid and subsequent trial of The Pirate Bay was due to pressure from the US government and that public perception was in favor of The Pirate Bay and against the US government's position on copyright law. Thus, "this delicate situation made it difficult, if not counter-productive, for the Embassy to play a public role on IPR issues. Behind the scenes, the Embassy has worked well with all stakeholders."
Why do I get the feeling that "all stakeholders" seemed to leave out the public and actual content consumers who were (as stated) very much against the US government's position on copyright laws. However, the cable also lays out six specific items that the US Embassy hoped the Swedish government would follow through on with regards to copyright law... and apparently five of the six have since been implemented. So despite the public being very much against these ideas, the US government (at the urging of the US entertainment industry) directly meddled in Swedish copyright policy.
by wintler2 » Wed Dec 08, 2010 11:31 pm
JackRiddler wrote:Hi everybody, how are you today?
JackRiddler wrote:So much shit happening at once!
For those who view Wikileaks as a conspiracy or plot, as a psy-op of some kind, while indeed these things have taken place in the past, there is simply no evidence for it thus far. Every examination of this concept is based upon speculation. Many nations around the world, particularly in the Middle East and South Asia, are pointing to the Western nations as engaging in a covert propaganda campaign aimed at creating disunity between states and allies. Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and Afghanistan have made such claims. It is no surprise that most of these are nations, particularly Iran, are targets of U.S. imperial policy.
Since, however, the Wikileaks releases speak heavily and negatively about Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Russia, China, Venezuela, etc., one must remember that these are ‘diplomatic cables’, and represent the ‘opinions and beliefs’ of the diplomatic establishment, a social group which is historically and presently deeply enmeshed and submissive to elite ideology and methodology. In short, these are the foreign imperial envoys, and as such, they are ideological imperialists and represent imperial interests.
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 157 guests
