The Wikileaks Question

[Nordic]

Might explain the recent "terrorist attacks" in Sweden.

It's the Rovian Way.

[Plutonia]

WikiLeaks' Most Terrifying Revelation: Just How Much Our Government Lies to Us

Wikileaks has shown that our government and military form a 'vast lying machine' that perpetrates mass murder in our name.
January 3, 2011 |

"Try as I may I can not escape the sound of suffering. Perhaps as an old man I will accept suffering with insouciance. But not now; men in their prime, if they have convictions are tasked to act on them."

-- Julian Assange, 2007 blog entry

Do you believe that it is in Americans' interest to allow a small group of U.S. leaders to unilaterally murder, maim, imprison and/or torture anyone they choose anywhere in the world, without the knowledge let alone oversight of their citizens or the international community? And, despite their proven record of failure to protect America -- from Indochina to Iran to Iraq -- do you believe they should be permitted to clandestinely expand their war-making without informed public debate? If so, you are betraying the principles upon which America was founded, endangering your nation, and displaying a distinctly "unamerican" subservience to unaccountable authority. But if you oppose autocratic power, you are called to support Wikileaks and others trying to limit U.S. Executive Branch mass murder abroad and failure to protect Americans at home.

These two issues became officially linked for the first time when former U.S. Afghan commander General Stanley McChrystal explicitly stated that the murder of civilians increases rather than decreases the numbers of those committed to killing Americans, and actually implemented policies -- since reversed by General Petraeus -- to reduce U.S. murder of civilians. McChrystal said that “for every innocent person you kill, you create 10 new enemies." By so doing he made it clear that killing civilians is not only a moral and war crimes issue, but -- in today's interdependent world -- also threatens U.S. national security.

Wait! The US torturing and killing in swathes in order to create the very opposition that justifies their military adventures and ceaseless war profiteering? Sounds about right, doesn't it?

cont...

As important as is the issue of free speech, it is the question of whether the U.S. Executive is in fact protecting the American people through its mass murder abroad that really lies at the heart of the Wikileaks controversy. Executive Branch officials justify persecuting and threatening to murder Assange on the grounds that he has damaged U.S. "national security." If McChrystal is right, however, it is the past decade of U.S. Executive mass murder in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, now revealed beyond any doubt by Wikileaks, that is the real threat to U.S. national security.

The chilling fact is this: whether you believe that September 11, 2001 was due to incomprehensible fanaticism or genuine grievances, it seems likely that U.S. leaders’ murder of countless Muslims since 2001 will cause the next 9/11 should, God forbid, it occur, The recent suicide-bomber in Sweden who came perilously close to succeeding taped a message saying "so will your children, daughters, brothers, and sisters die, like our brothers, sisters, and children die." Similar sentiments were voiced by the Times Square bomber, and it is likely that those responsible for future American deaths will also be motivated by revenge for the hundreds of thousands of Muslims for whose deaths U.S. leaders are responsible since 2001.

This is not, of course, to justify such attacks. Any attacks on civilians, whether by the Taliban or General Petraeus, are totally unjustified and crimes of war. But if the issue is how best to enhance U.S. national security, it is critical to rationally discuss the most prudent and sensible means of preventing further attacks -- which in this case is to stop creating huge numbers of people who want to kill Americans. If General McChrystal is correct, every American should tremble at the long-term danger to America caused by the last decade of U.S. war-making in the Muslim world. If only 1/100th of 1% of the world's 1.6 billion Muslims are moved to want to attack America because of America's post-9/11 killing of Muslim civilians, for example, the U.S. Executive will have created a pool of 160,000 Muslims devoted to murdering Americans.

Nothing is more emblematic of the service Assange is doing Americans than the July 25 N.Y. Times headline announcing its publication of the Wikileaks "Afghan War Logs": "View Is Bleaker Than Official Portrayal Of War In Afghanistan."

The N.Y. Times thus not only acknowledged that Wikileaks had supplied Americans with vital information about the war that its own government was denying them, but that this information had not been provided by the U.S. mass media. If it had been doing its job, after all, America’s “newspaper of record” not Wikileaks would have long ago revealed that the Afghan war was "bleaker than official portrayal of the war." The Guardian newspaper's headline on the same day drove the point home: "Massive Leak Of Secret Files Exposes Truth Of Occupation," i.e. the truth as opposed to U.S. Executive lies.

These "Afghan War Logs", like the Iraqi war logs after them, and much material in Wikileaks' recent release of diplomatic cables, reveal above all that U.S. Executive war-making is marked by massive deception of the American people -- particularly lying about (1) the enormous civilian casualties the U.S. is causing and (2) its claim to be pursuing a "counter-insurgency strategy" designed to install a democratic Afghan government. The Times and Guardian stories describe how these official U.S. documents reveal constant U.S. Executive Branch lying to the American people.

-- U.S. MURDER OF CIVILIANS: "A huge cache of secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents," (Guardian) "Incident by incident, the reports resemble a police blotter of the myriad ways Afghan civilians were killed -- not just in airstrikes but in ones and twos -- in shootings on the roads or in the villages, in misunderstandings or in a cross-fire, or in chaotic moments when Afghan drivers ventured too close to convoys and checkpoints". (N.Y. Times) "The Nato coalition in Afghanistan has been using an undisclosed "black" unit of special forces, Task Force 373, to hunt down targets for death or detention without trial ... The logs reveal that TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path." (Guardian)

-- REGULAR COVERUPS OF U.S. CIVILIAN MURDER: "The dead, the reports repeatedly indicate, were not suicide bombers or insurgents, and many of the cases were not reported to the public at the time." (N.Y. Times) "War logs show how marines gave cleaned up accounts of an incident in which they killed 19 civilians ... There would be no punishment." (Guardian) "The logs detail how US special forces dropped six 2,000 lb bombs on a compound where they believed a `high-value individual' was hiding, after `ensuring there were no innocent Afghans in the surrounding area'. A senior US commander reported that 150 Taliban had been killed. Locals, however, reported that up to 300 civilians had died." (Guardian)

-- U.S. AND A CORRUPT AFGHAN GOVERNMENT ARE ALIENATING AFGHAN CIVILIANS AND LOSING THE WAR: "The documents illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001 ... The reports paint a disheartening picture of the Afghan police (who) are often described as distrusted, even loathed, by Afghan civilians. The reports recount episodes of police brutality, corruption petty and large, extortion and kidnapping ... The toll of the war -- reflected in mounting civilian casualties -- left the Americans seeking cooperation and support from an Afghan population that grew steadily more exhausted, resentful, fearful and alienated ... The expanding (U.S.) special operations have stoked particular resentment among Afghans -- for their lack of coordination with local forces, the civilian casualties they frequently inflicted and the lack of the accountability." (N.Y. Times)

When the Iraqi war logs were published 3 months later, they revealed even more shocking information -- particularly that U.S. soldiers had handed over Iraqi civilians to Iraqi police, knowing they would be hideously tortured employing electric drills, acid and other devices before being savagely murdered. Ellen Knickmeyer, the Washington Post Bureau chief in Baghdad in 2006, wrote that these revelations meant that U.S. officials had been lying daily to the U.S. media -- and American people -- by saying they were not aware of this mass murder. U. S. leaders also lied constantly in claiming they were not tracking civilian casualties, when in fact they were. Since international law made U.S. leaders responsible for providing law and order in occupied Iraq, these Wiklileaks cables thus also revealed that U.S. leaders bear a major responsibility for these warcrimes, among the worst since the end of WWII.

Both the Wikileaks Iraqi and Afghan War Logs, in short, have revealed that the entire U.S. Executive is a "vast lying machine", as journalist David Halberstam described the U.S. military in his affadavit for the CBS vs. Westmoreland trial. It must be understood that “truth” vs. “lies” is not even an operational category within the Executive Branch or military. The purpose of communicating with the public is not to provide them with truthful information but rather to advance “the mission”. People who communicate with the public obtain their jobs and are promoted on the basis of their ability to mislead, deceive, “spin” and lie. There is no recorded case where Executive Branch officials have been rewarded for telling the truth to the American people, and many where they have been punished or lost their jobs for doing so. And nothing so epitomizes the degradation of democracy in America that the fact the public expects Executive Branch officials to lie to them, and that mass media journalists even betray their profession by defending Executive secrecy and excoriating those who reveal their lies like Julian Assange.

It is thus impossible to overstate the importance of the Wikileaks documentation of these lies to the American people. When a journalist reports a U.S. government misdeed, government officials automatically deny it and many Americans are unsure whom to believe. But Wikileaks has revealed official government documents that prove U.S. leaders’ lying and commission of crimes of war. The fact that the U.S. has covered up its mass murder of civilians, and that this is contributing to its losing the war, is thus no longer open to serious question. The callous and careerist politicians and journalists who daily ignore U.S. mass murder, while calling for Assange's arrest or execution, shame themselves, their children, and their profession by their indifference to non-American human suffering and obsequious toadying to illegitimate Executive power.

And the Wikileaks documents reveal something even more important: the entirely bogus nature of U.S. claims that Assange has damaged U.S. "national security", e.g. by revealing information that could help the “enemy.” It is obvious that the "enemy" knows whether those murdered by the U.S. are civilians. The U.S. Executive clearly claims it is only killing “insurgents” to keep its murder of civilians a secret from the American people, fearing it would face protests that could tie its hands if it became known.

The Wikileaks documents, though they date from 2009 and before, also shed important light on what is occurring today under General David Petraeus.

It is important to remember, after all, that the Wikileaks controversy is not primarily about the past or abstract legal issues, but what is happening to actual human beings today. As you read these words countless Afghan and Pakistani villagers are huddling in their homes, terrorized by U.S. war-making, as General Petraeus's brutal offensive into southern Afghanistan, met by an increase in the Taliban's resort to roadside bombs and assassination, has caused the Red Cross to issue an unusual alarm saying that conditions are at their worst for Afghan civilians in 30 years, i.e. as bad as during the Russian invasion. A Canadian press report indicates that Kandahar's main hospital is overflowing with civilian casualties, and that "on some days, the floor is red with blood".

Petraeus has tripled air strikes, brought in 9,000 U.S. assassins who are conducting round-the-clock murder, and introduced an unprecedented number of night-time raids recalling Nazi movies from the 1940s -- as screaming U.S. soldiers break into people's homes, terrorize women and children, and kill, wound, torture or imprison men indefinitely without a trial or any chance to prove their innocence. Even the U.S.-installed Afghan President Hamid Karzai is so appalled that he has begged the U.S. to curtail its airstrikes and night raids, saying, “the raiding homes at night. Terrible. Terrible. A serious cause of the Afghan people's disenchantment with NATO and with the Afghan government … How can you measure the consequences of it in terms of the loss of life of children and women because you have captured Talib A. And who is this Talib A? Is he so important to have 10 more people killed, civilians? Who determines that?”

Petraeus has firmly refused to end what this Afghan leader describes as the General’s responsibility for civilian murder, making a further mockery of his claim to be bringing “democracy” to Afghanistan.

Particularly significant are the many first-person reports in the Wikileaks "Afghan War Logs" of U.S. murder of innocent civilians at U.S. checkpoints -- which flesh out McChrystal's March 2010 admission that "we have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat."

For this raises a basic question about Petraeus's vast escalation of U.S. airstrikes. If U.S. forces have murdered countless innocent civilians at checkpoints, where they can at least see those they are killing face-to-face, how many more innocent civilians is Petraeus killing from from the air, in bombing raids where those below can barely be seen?

And these Wikileaks documents also shed important light on how Petraeus's massive escalation into both southern Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he has dramatically escalated both U.S. drone and ground assassination, is weakening rather than strengthening long-term U.S. national security. Just as the Taliban is far stronger today after the U.S. has wasted $300 billion and thousands of American lives over the last 10 years, Petraeus's tactics are strengthening not weakening America's enemies over the long run. If he murders enough people in southern Afghanistan, the General may be able to claim some short-term successes there. But there is no serious question that his tactics are sowing a long-term whirlwind which not only threatens the stability of the Afghan and Pakistani governments, but pose a long-term threat to Americans at home.

A U.N. map just published by the Wall Street Journal has revealed that the Taliban, using classic guerrilla tactics, has moved into northern and western Afghanistan as Petraeus has moved south, giving them control of more territory than ever. “Internal United Nations maps show a marked deterioration of the security situation in Afghanistan during this year's fighting season, countering the Obama administration's optimistic assessments of military progress since the surge of additional American forces began a year ago”, the Journal reported.

The N.Y. Times has reported how various insurgent groups in Pakistan have responded to Petraeus's tactics by coordinating and cooperating for the first time, vastly increasing the threat they pose to the Pakistani state. It is also obvious that Petraeus cannot possible]y kill more "insurgents" than he is creating if he continues to provoke the 41 million Pashtuns on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to want to fight America. The population of North and South Vietnam combined during the Vietnam war was only 31 million, after all, and provided a manpower pool large enough to outlast 500,000 Americans.

In the end, however, the most profound questions for Americans raised by the Wikileaks documents go far beyond the Muslim world. If we can free our minds of a lifetime of official propaganda identifying the U.S. Executive with the American people, the evidence is overwhelming that in foreign and military policy the U.S. Executive Branch is an undemocratic institution that does not represent its own citizens. It operates largely independent of Congress, the Judiciary or a mass media which has largely become an arm of Executive power, broadcasting its lies far more often than it exposes them.

A few months before President Obama's December 2009 decision to send 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, for example, only 24% of Americans wanted to send more and 43% wanted to decrease the number. Their wishes were ignored, as are the opinions of Americans today who, by a margin of 63 to 32, oppose U.S. war-making in Afghanistan. And, Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars revealed, even the President is largely a figurehead when it comes to Executive war-making. Woodward documents how the military thwarted Obama’s clear desire to begin a major pullout from Afghanistan in the summer of 2011. Last month, Obama was humiliated by being forced to endorse a hypothetical 2014 pullout date.

Most Americans would agree with the statement in the Declaration of Independence that governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed." But the governed can only give their consent if they are informed as to what they are agreeing to. This is obvious in our daily life. I cannot be said to have "consented" to buy your laptop if you deceived me by not telling me it was broken. One of our most basic legal principles is that a contract is null and void if it was obtained under false pretenses. By revealing massive U.S. Executive deceit Wikileaks has thus revealed that it does not legitimately represent the American people.

These Wikileaks documents thus raise the most fundamental question citizens can ask themselves: to what extent to citizens of a democracy owe their allegiance to autocratic leaders who obtain the consent of their citizens through massive duplicity? And to what extent can they trust either their judgement or their decency?

Americans may find themselves increasingly pondering such questions in coming years, as economic decline and future terrorist attacks cause U.S. elites to bring home the authoritarian mindset that has caused so much damage abroad. It seems certain that American democracy will face greater challenges than at any time since the country's founding.

But that is a long-term question. The key question now is whether Americans can hear the sound of suffering their leaders are causing abroad, as at this very moment innocent men, women and children are being murdered and maimed in what the Red Cross describes as the greatest civilian carnage since the Russians invaded 30 years ago.

Julian Assange should be applauded not persecuted for hearing the sound of their suffering.

Do we?


Fred Branfman exposed the U.S. Executive's Secret Air War in Laos, which illegally and savagely murdered tens of thousands of innocent Laotian peasants. He has written frequently on Executive war-making for Alternet in recent years. See http://www.trulyalive.org for more information on his activities.

[freemason9]

What? The government lies?

Are you sure of this?

[Plutonia]

Hey, it's news to Alternet.

[The Consul]

Rove is doing what Goebbels would have done had Hitler prevailed.

[Plutonia]

This is interesting.... Assange has spoken more than once about the wall Wikileaks has repeatedly encountered in it's attempts to get people to engage with the material they publish (like this here.) From what I understand, the original idea was to facilitate citizen journalism at a wike-type site, feeding leaks into a but that disappointingly flat-lined.
Then it was expected that bloggers and independent media would pick-up the leaked stories and carry the ball, but nope, de nada. Ironic that it has been through partnering with MSM icons that WL has finally been able to get people talking about their shit. There's a subtle psychology at work here- as in in here- in all of us. This piece from last August takes a crack at the puzzle:

Wikileaks and the Toothless Politics of Exposure
By Feature Writer Mary-Beth Snow | Published: August 2, 2010

What we didn’t know that we knew about Afghanistan

In his book Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, philosopher Slajov Zizek laid out an ad-hoc taxonomy for various kinds of knowledge, via a reference to then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumseld. Zizek says:

In March 2003, Rumsfeld engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown: “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.” What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the “unknown knowns,” the things we don’t know that we know–which is precisely, the Freudian unconscious, the “knowledge which doesn’t know itself,” as Lacan used to say.

Zizek suggests that we know very well on some level what is going on, and that this latent knowledge is tacitly approved of so long as it remains at the level of the unknown known. One of the key differences between Abu Ghraib and previous torture was that the Bush administration had already admitted to the possibility of torture via its arguments about its political effectiveness in preventing further terrorist attacks. Conservative thought-games about “ticking time bomb” scenarios implicitly allowed and normalized the torture of terror suspects and the concurrent suspension of human rights.

It is hard not to see the ghost of Abu Ghraib and the continuing presence of the Bush administration policies of the early War on Terror in last week’s WikiLeaks release of an “an extraordinary compendium of over 91,000 reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010 [. . .] mainly describing lethal military actions involving the United States military, also include intelligence information, reports of meetings with political figures, and related details.”

Whilst this release has naturally caused a stir in the media, it is arguable that this will be largely politically consequenceless. By July 28th, the Washington Post could report that

“one day, the WikiLeaks uproar was sparking a once-in-a-generation debate about the disclosure of classified information, the audacious role of a stateless organization beyond the reach of sovereign nations, and the old media’s complicity in packaging the 91,000 pages of Afghanistan war documents.

The next day, the media establishment seemed to yawn: Old news.”

Despite the sensational nature of the documents, the politics of exposure that Wikileaks pursues is strangely politically toothless. NYU professor Jay Rosen tweeted that “we tend to think: big revelations mean big reactions. But if the story is too big and crashes too many illusions, the exact opposite occurs.” Yet perhaps it is that the story is simultaneously too big and it crashes too few illusions. After Abu Ghraib, what crimes can be shocking when committed by the United States military?

The nature of media coverage and its focus on spectacular footage may be similarly at work in the response. When the Abu Ghraib photos surfaced, Donald Rumsfeld rightly told the US Senate inquiry that “the photos give these incidents a vividness, indeed a horror, in the eyes of the world.” 91,000 pages of documents, however, is the journalistic equivalent of War and Peace, an impossible read-through to find the sexy or gory bits that make for good copy and better news ledes. Once the new media vs old media line was exhausted, there was little for the media to cover.

The release of the documents to The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel was thus a canny move, but one that factored in its own obsolescence. Last year, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said that “you’d think the bigger and more important the document is, the more likely it will be reported on but that’s absolutely not true. It’s about supply and demand. Zero supply equals high demand, it has value. As soon as we release the material, the supply goes to infinity, so the perceived value goes to zero.”

Indeed this prophecy was correct: once the information was available on the web, interest in the story subsided. The same overwhelming amount of information that produced the story contributed to its rapid demise.

In that interview, Assange suggested that he sees the role of Wikileaks as both archival and politically charged, stating that “we want to get as much substantive information as possible into the historical record, keep it accessible and provide incentives for people to turn it into something that will achieve political reform,” said Assange. Yet achieving both of these aims at the same time may be near-on impossible. Sadly, creating a historical record appears to be much easier than mobilizing outrage into political reform.

There was a piece published recently in the Boston Globe recently that found that people remember what they already ideologically believe, not the facts. As the piece stated:

“In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.”

Facts, it is clear, are not enough to persuade the American public (or indeed its politicians or media) of a position. We discard inconvenient facts, pushing them into the realm of the known unknown. Arguably, as with the torture at Abu Ghraib, the WikiLeaks exposure falls into the category of information we already know but pretend not to. The murder of civilians, the inadvertent funding of terrorism through aid to Pakistani supporters of Afghan jihadi, these are not really surprises. The Obama administration’s response was thus absolutely correct in a certain sense: downplaying the documents, suggesting that the information is outdated, a product of the Bush era. It certainly is—but it is a legacy that the current administration is bent on extending.

The other line offered by the Obama administration was that the WikiLeaks info-dump would “harm national security”–an obvious contradiction to its first defense, mocked easily by the likes of Jon Stewart. Yet perhaps it’s more worthwhile reflecting on the recent incident with General McChrystal’s notorious interview with Rolling Stone. In the present climate, what a general does get fired for is insubordination—but not war crimes.

Human life, especially that of the populations of Afghanistan and Iraq (but given the death toll on the US army, even its own citizens), is considerably less important politically than someone not toeing the PR line. Everyone—from WikiLeaks to the old media to the Obama administration—considered the WikiLeaks logs a much more damaging PR disaster than they turned out to be, a remnant of an earlier time where killing civilians was scandalous.

In this new stage of the War on Terror, it is not simply the control of information which is important to sovereign states. Rather, unless information is also photogenic and politically sensitive, not to mention genuinely shocking in providing a truly unknown unknown, both old and new media themselves will remain entirely toothless in pursuing a politics of exposure.

It's not how pretty or palatably presented the information is, it's that we are all in the habit of behaving as if it weren't true. That's a trick that marketers (and grifters) use all the time, only in reverse - they invite you to alter your behavior in some small way, just signing up for loyalty card for instance, because they know that your thinking will automatically adjust so that your actions, whatever they are, will make sense to you. It's the consensus trance, everyone reinforcing each other to behave "normally."

Video: Psychology of Conformity, Groupthink, & Wikileaks

Groupthink is one of the most troublesome downfalls of organized society. Today, it manifests itself on a sliding scale of severity, ranging from genocide to bullying to superstition to fashion fads to the “Digg mentality” of news reporting. Still, most of us refuse to believe that our opinions, perception and worldview are being in any way shaped by those of others. And yet they are. Even subcultures, the very essence of which is to stand out, are founded on group conformity — or, as James Thurber famously puts it, “why do you have to be a nonconformist like everyone else?”

[Plutonia]

Best analysis I've seen yet:

WikiLeaks, the New Information Cultures and Digital Parrhesia
By: Pramod K Nayar

Vol XLV No.52 December 25, 2010

How does one understand WikiLeaks, which has not only redefined media ethics but has also redefined what we understand as media cultures?

WikiLeaks (currently at http:// 213.251.145.96/) has redefined not only media ethics, it has r­edefined what we understand as infor­mation cultures itself. This commentary on perhaps one of the most significant ­developments since the arrival of internet cultures outlines certain ways of understanding WikiLeaks (WL, for short).1 I shall do this through a series of propositions, given that we have no idea yet how WL will shape up and so the present commentary also has to be partial, fragmentary and unfinished.

WL as a Cultural Phenomenon

WL cannot be identified just with an individual Julian Assange, even though he pops up as soon as one opens the website. Assange is a messenger, he is neither messiah nor the message. But, fortunately or unfortunately, he has become identified as the “face” of WL. However, to do this is to personalise-individualise what is really a cultural phenomenon.2 It draws breath from the subcultural hacker movement which arose primarily out of the belief (now the hacker credo): “information wants to be free”. Years ago the Cult of the Dead Cow (CDC) delivered its Hacktivist Declaration:

We view access to information as a basic human right. We are also interested in keeping the Internet free of state-sponsored censorship and corporate chicanery so all opinions can be heard (http://www.cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/Ha ... moFAQ.html).

This declaration itself drew upon the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), quoting its Article 19:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Like CDC, WL also sees itself as deriving its moral and ethical stance from the UDHR (citing Article 19 on its website), and thus locates itself in a global cultural apparatus: the universal movement for human and related rights. What WL represents is a new culture of information that dovetails into two other cultural practices: whistle-blowing and parrhesia (truth-telling). At the end of this essay I shall return to the second one for a more extensive d­iscussion.

Despite this emphasis on the culture of dissidence, resistance and truth-telling embodied by WL, it cannot be denied that individual whistle-blowers have put their careers and their lives on the line. For ­protest to effect any political change, cyborg theorist Chris Hables Gray, the creator of the Cyborg Bill of Rights, points out, it r­equires embodiment: “you testify to the truth with your body” (2001: 44). The persecution of Assange – his dramatic arrest, the rape charges, the threats of extradition and possible assassination – makes for a very strange mix where the virtual meets the flesh-and-blood: online activity whose validity and value are sworn to by the very real threat to the person of Julian Assange. Conversely, does eliminating the “body” of Assange alter the virtual threat that the new culture of information represents? The answer is “no”, for we are in the age of an electronic civil society and information culture unlimited to bodies, geographies or national boundaries.

WL as Public Witnessing

WL shapes a new textualisation and visualisation of how international relations and global geopolitics work. That is, something as abstract as geopolitics or international relations that very often manifest only as finalised treaties or speeches or policy documents gets broken down into its dirty, messy constituent parts. We therefore must see WL’s collection of documents as the processes that make up the world’s functioning. In a sense, WL directs us, for the first time, to the making of the world order (or disorder).

WL emerges out of digital and networked technologies that enable “public witnessing” (Reading 2009). Here the production of information about human rights violations, war, oppression, atro­city, disaster and suffering have been the work not solely of CNN and the state but amateurs wielding mobile phone cameras and camcorders. Traceable back to the epoch-making Rodney King beating in Los Angeles in 1989, public witnessing is the user-­generated content of the horrors of war or disaster. In such a context WL feeds an a­lready ravenous ­appetite for such content. In an era where extreme cultures constitute the screen in the form of e­xtreme sports, extreme deprivation and extreme violence, WL is one more component of such cultures. Thus to see WL as completely unique would be to deny significance to the visual cultures of Abu G­hraib-Guantanamo Bay, Katrina, the 2004 tsunami or the 2010 ­Haitian earthquake.

Public witnessing ensures that the invisible becomes visible as well. For example, WL’s first major exposes were of the Iraq war, many visuals being uploaded (and later acquired by WL) by soldiers from the front. As Noel Whitty suggests in his study of soldier photography (2010), a whole new “visualisation of war” is now possible with such visuals. Those scenes we were not meant to see – which is what Nicholas Mirzoeff terms “invisible” – such as Saddam Hussein’s execution, the tortures in Abu Ghraib or the massacre of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan can now be seen. We are now in the era of the h­yper-visible, by which I mean the excessive and repeated circulation of such images we were not intended to ever see.

In the age of human rights campaigns, a great deal of value is attached to the visual evidence of atrocity (Girling 2004). That is, there is a visual culture of human rights today, a cultural apparatus through which human rights are refracted for public consumption. The Iraq War Logs and the “Collateral Murder” video which first brought WL global attention are instances of this visual culture of human rights and international humanitarian law. Scenes of war, classified documents that legitimised torture, secret parleys behind policy constitute what we might term a counter-­archive. An archive has traditionally been a space where documents are stored and the rights of interpretation of these documents rest with a chosen few (known in classical times as “archons”). Here, in WL’s archives we have a database from which we, as readers, need to build narratives. I am drawing attention to two specific details here. The collection of documents might have an “internal” narrative but we need to see them as a database. A database in cyberspace leaves us many o­ptions of traversals (reading, following links). As we traverse we build a narrative through the database. I have elsewhere argued that this construction of narrative from a “raw” database is fundamentally a matter of choice: what paths we choose to take through the database (Nayar 2010). Therefore, the archive of documents WL leaks must be, and can be, made to tell a story – about injustice, corruption, ­deprivation, suffering in any part of the world – depending on our choice of frames of i­nterpretation and wanderings through the corpus. WL-facilitated public witnessing could therefore become the means of producing a globalisation of conscience.

WL, Knowledge-Making anda Virtual Public Space

WL constitutes a rupture in dominant and dominating patterns of knowledge-­making and interpretive schemes. Previously knowledge that was hierarchic, centralised and graded, is now random, non-hierarchic and user-generated, resulting in distributed knowledge (or “infotopia”, Sunstein 2006; Lévy 2001, Chapter 10).

WL’s leakage of thousands of documents offers contestatory narratives of the “war on terror”, to take just one instance. These contestatory narratives provide the necessary corrective to centralised and controlled state discourses about Iraq and Afghanistan. With WL, a gap in knowledge about the same event has occurred, between the rhetoric of the US government regarding the “war on terror” and the stories told in the leaked cables. This gap in knowledge cannot be really filled because of the contestatory nature of the counter-archive. If knowledge proceeds by debates, in the true Socratic function, WL offers us an opportunity to situate two discourses and sets of narratives in dialogue.

What WL does is not to pinpoint blames for wrongdoing on X or Y. Rather, it gives us a glimpse of the institutional, state, o­rganisational cultures that made X or Y’s acts possible. Records on/at WL must be seen not as individual instances but as e­mbodiments of institutional politics and power games. In other words, we need to treat the documents in the archive not as illuminating the perversions of one soldier in Iraq or Abu Ghraib: they must be evaluated as synecdochic of a culture where such acts of atrocity were made possible, and even legitimised. It is therefore interesting to note how former soldiers who fought in Iraq support WL’s efforts.

We did unto you what we would not want done unto us… Our heavy hearts still hold hope that we can restore in our country the acknowledgement of your humanity, that we were taught to deny (qtd in Lazare and Harvey 2010: 27).

What WL does is to locate a Lynndie England (the infamous prison warden at Abu Ghraib) within a US culture of war and a war effort that empowered such individuals. The individual soldiers only denote individual wrong-­doing, but what we need to see is the connotation – which is the cultural apparatus of atrocity.

Individuals like Bradley Manning (the military intelligence analyst who allegedly leaked the documents to WL, and is now in prison, and likely to remain there for a long time), see their acts as a public ser­vice. Thus, to bring the argument full c­ircle, to see Assange or Manning as individual heroes is to miss the point. If the public space has to possess a certain m­orality – of giving visibility to human rights violations, deprivation, suffering and cruelty (i e, whistle-blowing) and o­ffering the chance for people to voice their dissent and discontent – then it is the rise and dissemination of counter-­narratives such as those archived at WL that r­emake the space. If the public space is the space for different people to tell their stories, WL marks the arrival of such a space. This is the main reason why it is fascinating to see how the US, the so-called defender of free speech and therefore multiple stories, has suddenly decided that WL is not about free speech at all because it hurts “global” interests (US commentators have even called for the death penalty to Bradley Manning). In January 2009 US Secretary of State, H­illary Clinton, claimed a new nervous system for the globe: the internet. Sharply critical just last year of China’s efforts at limiting Google (known among hactivists as “the great firewall of China”), this same Clinton is now up in arms against WL.

WL and the Archive of the Future

Hactivism such as WL’s is always open to charges of being unethical, especially when their disclosures affect powerful state and corporate interests. However, we need to see their ethics as “deriving from the future”, as Tim Jordan argues about hactivists (2002: 138). WL cannot really predict what its disclosures will result in. In this sense, WL is not embedded either in the past or the present: it draws its courage from a promise of a future when things could be different. But it can also be read as a moral/ethical position on free speech – a position and policy endorsed by various governments in the past – being taken to its logical end and directed at the future.

The entire WL project must be seen as an archive whose uses would only be in the future, it is therefore a responsibility and response directed at the future of knowledge-production, international relations and authority. Currently, as it stands, the 2,50,000 + documents WL plans to r­elease slowly is in fact “virtual”: for the word virtual means “something with the potential to become real”. This archive has the potential – the future – to remake the world through the rise of a global c­onsciousness.

WL and the Culture of Parrhesia

To return to the point with which I began, the cultures of information, WL can be read as marking the arrival of a digital parrhesia, or truth-telling. Derived from “para” meaning “beyond” and “resis”, meaning “speech”, parrhesia is truth-telling performed at risk to the truth-teller.3 In Athenian democracy, parrhesia was an important component, but it was also a feature that distinguished the good citizen, Michel Foucault notes (1983). It involves citizens acting as individuals, but also acting as an assembly in the open space:

Parrhesia, which is a requisite for public speech, takes place between c­itizens as individuals, and also between citizens construed as an assembly. More­over, the agora [the open space] is the place where parrhesia appears (Foucault, online, unpaginated).

Two preliminary points. First, it is not possible, given the nature of global communications and the globalisation of free speech, to think of a single truth-teller, unless one were to, mistakenly, in my opinion, assign this status to Assange. But, as noted earlier, we must be careful in converting the messenger into a messiah or even the message itself. The most one can say about Assange is that he functions as a cipher in the free flow of information that is digital parrhesia. While accusations about his autocratic and anti-US bias do the rounds, it remains indisputable that the documents speak for themselves, in the medium which is cyberspace and WL. A second point to be noted is that parrhesia is performed at the risk to the truth-teller. Here, if we assume the speech-act as a manifestation of the structures enabling transmission of truth, then Assange and Bradley Manning are indeed the structures at risk.

These seem to be two apparently contradictory points – about digital parrhesia being performed at risk to the truth-teller and contemporary condition where we cannot pinpoint a single truth-teller. I propose a slightly different parrhesia, one that is less interested in the truth-teller than in the culture of truth-telling. Digital cultures create a new communications culture, which generates a new community, the global civil society (we have seen this in the case of online supports, campaigns, humanitarian efforts in the wake of the tsunami, Katrina, the Haiti earthquake, protests against the WTO, etc), and the globalisation of conscience. WL is an embodiment of this new form of communications-leading-to-community, a digital parrhesia. At risk is digital space as parrhesiastic space. At risk is a new media cultural practice (Napster, Bit Torrent, Rapid­share, Creative Commons, Open Source Movement, Wikipedia, WikiLeaks), not the individual voice. At risk is the entire culture of information sharing, the agora of information.

Parrhesia has a close link with self-­examination (Foucault). Foucault of course makes much of the fact that a truth-teller’s telling and his life must be in what he calls “harmonic relation”. Thus, it calls upon the speaker to examine what s/he believes and therefore for a closer scrutiny of her/him-self. Hence the attacks on Assange’s personal life are aimed at discrediting his role as truth-teller, but miss the crucial point of the contexts of parrhesia. By targeting him, the governments are hoping to change the cultural form itself. His m­orality in fact has nothing to do with the culture of communications. What the contemporary version of parrhesia achieves is not only the demand for self-examination (American policies, for example, as revealed in the cables) but a context in which this examination can occur. This brings us to the next point.

Foucault notes that the “agora is the place where parrhesia appears”. The agora, central to ancient democracies, is the public space where multiple stories are told, at considerable risk to the teller (and heard). For some time now cyberspace has been treated as an agora (Rheingold 2000). It is in the continuous, often random movement of data packets that parrhesia makes its appearance in the agora of virtual worlds, the information commons. Digital parrhesia is the process of building a g­lobal civil space, an electronic agora through the social act of sharing information and producing collaborative/distributed knowledge – and this is what is at stake in the WL battle. If information and rational debate are central to the democratisation of the world (democracy is often “deliberative democracy”, with an inherent emphasis on information-driven “d­eli­berations”), then the digital parrhesia is the space of deliberation where demo­cracy might emerge.

Truth-telling might of course result in the severance of relations between the truth-teller and his audience (try telling your friend you do not like her/his partner!), but that still means he must speak the truth. Foucault makes it clear that his intention “was not to deal with the problem of truth, but with the problem of the truth-teller or truth-telling as an activity”. The questions he raises about truth-telling as activity are what concern us most today in the case of WL: “what is the relation bet­ween the activity of truth-telling and the exercise of power, or should these a­ctivities be completely independent and kept separate?” We should be concerned, says Foucault, “with the question of the importance of telling the truth, knowing who is able to tell the truth, and knowing why we should tell the truth”. The task at hand is to create the agora where parrhesia can take place. It is not necessarily the validity of this or that statement, cable or memo, but the space in which these can be displayed and kept for scrutiny as part of a trust-building exercise. It is therefore important that space be made for parrhesia to take place. This means, simply, keeping the agora, the space of the virtual and WL domains open for parrhesiatic “business” (something that has been directly affected through the withdrawal of support by Amazon.com. PayPal, and ­Visa-Mastercard).4

Michael Peters has, I think correctly, proposed that parrhesia is connected not only to knowledge but to education and thence to democracy (2003). While Foucault’s interest lay in the education of the self and the institution of monarchy with which parrhesia was most situated it is possible to extend this ideas to contemporary times. Parrhesia is “fearless speech” and is a crucial component of the civic processes of any society. It is usually performed by an individual who is in a p­osition of lesser power. Parrhesia also aligns truth with duty and the necessity to improve conditions through the truth-telling act (Sementelli 2009: 360). Put together what we can argue is that WL constitutes a parrhesiastic act that (i) must be allowed to run free, (ii) must be facilitated by the construction and reinforcement of conditions in which it can happen, and (iii) enables the making of a global civil society. As of now, admittedly, the US has been the major target of the leaks. But if WL’s own statements are true, then it a­ppears as though several countries and governments around the world will have their hidden stories “outed”. If there is any chance of a global civil society, an agora, to form, then WL’s digital parrhesia might just be the route to that place where criticism of governments from the US to Ulan Bator can occur. Digital parrhesia is very possibly the domain where democracy i­tself is at stake.

Notes

1 In terms of US interests in other parts of the world, WL released an internal memo, 09STATE15113 clearly labelled NONFORN (not to be shared with any foreigners, not even US allies). The cable/memo lists sites around the world. These were categorised as “critical foreign dependencies (critical infrastructure and key resources located abroad)”, dated 18 February 2009 by the office of the Secretary of State. Three locations in India find mention on this list: chromite mines in Orissa and Karnataka and Generamedix Gujurat [sic], India, a pharma company described in the cable as “Chemotherapy agents, including florouracil and methotrexate” (http://wikileaks.ch/cable/ 2009/02/09STATE15113.html).

2 Peter Ludlow in fact draws attention to the ­hactivist roots of WL (2010). For a sustained discussion of hacker subculture see Thomas 2002 thus categorising WL as a manifestation of a movement that has been around for quite a while.

3 It is here that parrhesia differs from whistle-blowing: where whistle-blowing is often protected by law, parrhesia is not, and the truth-teller is unprotected.

4 Shyam, Ranganathan correctly points out that what is disturbing is the “extent to which many parts of the democratic system seem to have acquiesced in the process of manufacturing consent that has been undertaken by the political system” (2010: 12).

References

Foucault, Michel (1983): “Discourse and Truth: The Problematisation of Parrhesia” (six lectures given by Foucault at the University of California, Berkeley in 1983). Compiled as tap-recordings (http://foucault.info/documents/parrhesia), viewed on 10 December 2010.

Girling, Evi (2004): “‘Looking Death in the Face’: The Benetton Death Penalty Campaign”, Punishment and Society 6.

Gray, Chris Hables (2001): Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age (New York and London: Routledge).

Jordan, Tim (2002): Activism! Direct Action, Hactivism and the Future of Society (London: Reaktion).

Lazare, S and Ryan Harvey (2010): “WikiLeaks in Baghdad”, The Nation, 16/23, August, 24-27.

Lévy, Pierre (2001): Cyberculture, Tr Robert Bononno (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press).

Ludlow, Peter (2010): “WikiLeaks and Hacktivist Culture”, The Nation, 4 October, 25-26.

Nayar, Pramod K (2010): “Information Spaces, Digital Culture and Utopia”, Journal of Contemporary Thought, 31: 113-32.

Peters, Michael (2003): “Truth-telling as an Educational Practice of the Self: Foucault, Parrhesia, and the Ethics of Subjectivity”, Oxford Review of Education, 29(2): 207-23.

Pilger, John (2010): “WikiLeaks Must Be Protected”, New Statesman, 23 August, 18.

Ranganathan, Shyam (2010): “The Message and the Messenger”, The Hindu, 11 December, 12.

Reading, Anne (2009): “Mobile Witnessing: Ethics and the Camera Phone in the ‘War on Terror’”, Globalisations, 6 (1): 61-76.

Rheingold, Howard (2000): The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, 1993 (Cambridge: MIT Press).

Sementelli, Arthur J (2009): “Antiessentialism, Parrhesia, and Citizenship”, Administrative Theory and Praxis, 31(3): 360-76.

Sunstein, Cass R (2006): Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Thomas, Douglas (2002): Hacker Culture (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press).

Whitty, Noel (2010): “Soldier Photography of Detainee Abuse in Iraq: Digital Technology, Human Rights and the Death of Baha Mousa”, Human Rights Law Review, 10(4): 689-714.

Pramod K Nayar (pramodknayar@gmail.com) is at the department of English, University of Hyderabad.

[vanlose kid]

a bit of future memory from then to go with the now...



LIFE DURING WARTIME


Heard of a van that is loaded with weapons
packed up and ready to go
Heard of some gravesites, out by the highway
a place where nobody knows
The sound of gunfire, off in the distance
I'm getting used to it now
Lived in a brownstone, lived in the ghetto
I've lived all over this town

This ain't no party, this ain't no disco
this ain't no fooling around
No time for dancing, or lovey dovey
I ain't got time for that now

Transmit the message, to the receiver
hope for an answer some day
I got three passports, couple of visas
don't even know my real name
High on a hillside, trucks are loading
everything's ready to roll
I sleep in the daytime, I work in the nightime
I might not ever get home

This ain't no party, this ain't no disco
this ain't no fooling around
This ain't no mudd club, or C. B. G. B.
I ain't got time for that now

Heard about Houston? Heard about Detroit?
Heard about Pittsburgh, PA?
You oughta know not to stand by the window
somebody might see you up there
I got some groceries, some peanut butter
to last a couple of days
But I ain't got no speakers
ain't got no headphones
ain't got no records to play

Why stay in college? Why go to night school?
Gonna be different this time?
Can't write a letter, can't send a postcard
I can't write nothing at all
This ain't no party, this ain't no disco
this ain't no fooling around
I'd love you hold you, I'd like to kiss you
I ain't got no time for that now

Trouble in transit, got through the roadblock
we blended in with the crowd
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines
I know that that ain't allowed
We dress like students, we dress like housewives
or in a suit and a tie
I changed my hairstyle so many times now
don't know what I look like!
You make me shiver, I feel so tender
we make a pretty good team
Don't get exhausted, I'll do some driving
you ought to get you some sleep
Get you instructions, follow directions
then you should change your address
Maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day
whatever you think is best
Burned all my notebooks, what good are notebooks?
They won't help me survive
My chest is aching, burns like a furnace
the burning keeps me alive
Try to stay healthy, physical fitness
don't want to catch no disease
Try to be careful, don't take no chances
you better watch what you say

*

[JackRiddler]

.

Life During Wartime, a favorite song from a favorite band (and movie). Learned it by heart, back then.

On the prosecution front. (Oh look, John Burns still on the Assange trail.)

January 8, 2011
U.S. Subpoenas Twitter Over WikiLeaks Supporters

By SCOTT SHANE and JOHN F. BURNS

WASHINGTON — Prosecutors investigating the disclosure of thousands of classified government documents by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks have gone to court to demand the Twitter account activity of several people linked to the organization, including its founder, Julian Assange, according to the group and a copy of a subpoena made public late Friday.

The subpoena is the first public evidence of a criminal investigation, announced last month by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., that has been urged on by members of Congress of both parties but is fraught with legal and political difficulties for the Obama administration. It was denounced by WikiLeaks, which has so far made public only about 1 percent of the quarter-million confidential diplomatic cables in its possession but has threatened to post them all on the Web if criminal charges are brought.

Dozens of Pentagon and State Department officials have worked for months to assess the damage done to American diplomatic and military operations by the disclosures. In recent weeks, Justice Department officials have been seeking a legal rationale for charging Mr. Assange with criminal behavior, including whether he had solicited leaks.

The move to get the information from five prominent figures tied to the group was revealed late Friday, when Birgitta Jonsdottir, a former WikiLeaks activist who is also a member of Iceland’s Parliament, received an e-mail notification from Twitter.

In the message, obtained by The New York Times, the company told her it had received a legal request for details regarding her account and warned that the company would have to respond unless the matter was resolved or “a motion to quash the legal process has been filed.” The subpoena was attached.

The subpoena was issued by the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia on Dec. 14 and asks for the complete account information of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence specialist awaiting a court martial under suspicion of leaking materials to WikiLeaks, as well as Ms. Jonsdottir, Mr. Assange and two computer programmers, Rop Gonggrijp and Jacob Appelbaum. The request covers addresses, screen names, telephone numbers and credit card and bank account numbers, but does not ask for the content of private messages sent using Twitter.

Some published reports in recent weeks have suggested that the Justice Department may have secretly impaneled a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia, which often handles national security cases, to take evidence in the WikiLeaks inquiry. But the subpoena, unsealed by a Jan. 5 court order at the request of Twitter’s lawyers, was not issued by a grand jury.

In Twitter messages, WikiLeaks confirmed the subpoena and suggested that Google and Facebook might also have been issued such legal demands. Officials for Facebook declined to comment, and Google did not immediately respond to an inquiry.

WikiLeaks suggested that the United States was hypocritical for promoting an “Internet Freedom” initiative and decrying Iran’s interference with activists’ use of the Internet while pursuing a criminal investigation of the group’s activities.

A State Department spokesman, Philip J. Crowley, said that Internet freedom “has always coexisted with the rule of law” and “does not mean that the Internet can be used to harm others,” such as people who might be at risk if they were identified in diplomatic cables that were made public.

Mr. Appelbaum wrote in his Twitter feed on Saturday that Twitter’s lawyers had warned him against using or receiving private messages using the service. “Do not send me Direct Messages,” he wrote. “My Twitter account contents have apparently been invited to the (presumably-Grand Jury) in Alexandria.”

Jodi Olson, a spokeswoman for Twitter, said the company would not comment. But she said that “to help users protect their rights, it’s our policy to notify users about law enforcement and governmental requests for their information, unless we are prevented by law from doing so.”

Of the five individuals named in the subpoena, only two — Mr. Manning and Mr. Appelbaum — are American citizens. The others include an Australian, Mr. Assange; Ms. Jonsdottir, of Iceland; and Mr. Gonggrijp, a Dutch citizen. This raised the possibility of a diplomatic quarrel — other nations whose citizens are involved in such subpoenas could argue that American laws were being used to stifle free communications between individuals who were not Americans and who were not in the United States at the time of the messages.

Reached by telephone in Iceland, Ms. Jonsdottir said that she would be contesting the court action. She said that she had not exchanged sensitive information using her Twitter account, “but it’s just the fact that another country would request this sort of personal information from an elected official without having any case against me.”

Iceland’s foreign minister, she said, has requested a meeting with the American ambassador to Iceland to ask, among other things, whether a grand jury inquiry prompted the subpoena.

“It is so sad,” she said. “I have so many friends in the U.S., and there are so many things that I respect about it. This is not how America wants to present itself to the world.”

Obama administration officials on Saturday indicated that the investigation was still in an early phase, with a broad net cast for evidence regarding WikiLeaks’ interactions with Private Manning, 23, who has been held for months in a military detention center at Quantico, Va., on suspicion of being WikiLeaks’ source for the classified military and diplomatic records.

The subpoena seeks Twitter account activity since Nov. 1, a few weeks before Private Manning is alleged to have started downloading documents from his military computer and giving them to WikiLeaks.

Glenn Greenwald, a lawyer and writer who posted the subpoena on his blog at Salon.com, suggested investigators may be focusing on the first of the disclosures of which Private Manning has been accused — a military video depicting two American helicopters in Iraq in 2007 firing at people on the ground who included two Reuters journalists, both of whom were killed. An edited version of the video listed Mr. Assange, Ms. Jonsdottir, and Mr. Gonggrijp as producers.

Leak prosecutions have been rare and have almost always focused on government employees who disclose classified information, not on journalists or others who publish it. In its first two years, the Obama administration has charged five current or former government employees for such leaks, a record.

But there has never been a successful prosecution of a nongovernment employee for disseminating classified information. Most legal experts believe that efforts to bring criminal charges against WikiLeaks volunteers would face numerous practical and legal obstacles, and some human rights organizations and constitutional scholars have said such a prosecution could damage press freedom.

Technology and telecommunications companies receive thousands of subpoenas and court orders every year in which the authorities demand a broad range of information about their customers, from the content of their e-mails, to the Internet Protocol addresses of their computers, to their files that are stored online and location data from their cellphones.

The volume of requests has become so large, and the rules guarding personal information so patchy, that in March a coalition of Internet companies and communications carriers teamed up with civil liberties groups in an effort to lobby Congress. The coalition, Digital Due Process, wants to strengthen the privacy protections for online information and simplify the laws governing access to those records by law enforcement authorities.

WikiLeaks faced severe criticism after it posted military documents from the war in Afghanistan in July without removing the names of Afghan citizens who had assisted the United States. Since then, WikiLeaks has become far more cautious, stripping names out of Iraq war documents posted online and moving slowly in publishing the 251,287 diplomatic cables it obtained.

But Mr. Assange has posted an encrypted “insurance” file on several Web sites containing all or most of the unpublished cables and possibly other classified documents. Thousands of supporters around the world have downloaded the file, and Mr. Assange has suggested that if legal action is taken against him or the organization, he would release the encryption key and make the documents public.

“If something happens to us, the key parts will be released automatically,” Mr. Assange said in an online interview with readers of The Guardian last month.


Scott Shane reported from Washington, and John F. Burns from London. Reporting was contributed by Ravi Somaiya from London, Claire Cain Miller and Miguel Helft from San Francisco, Eric Lipton from Washington, and J. David Goodman from New York.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/world ... nted=print

I wonder if they're planning on indicting a sitting Icelandic parliamentarian over this?

09.01.11
Updated 02.10

Icelandic MP fights US demand for her Twitter account details
Birgitta Jonsdottir brands efforts by US justice department to access her private information 'completely unacceptable'

Birgitta Jonsdottir, the Icelandic MP and former WikiLeaks volunteer, who is now fighting a US justice department attempt to get hold of her private messages on Twitter Photograph: Halldor Kolbeins/AFP/Getty Images
Dominic Rushe in New York

The Guardian, Sat 8 Jan 2011 00.32 GMT


A member of parliament in Iceland who is also a former WikiLeaks volunteer says the US justice department has ordered Twitter to hand over her private messages.
Birgitta Jonsdottir, an MP for the Movement in Iceland, said last night on Twitter that the "USA government wants to know about all my tweets and more since november 1st 2009. Do they realize I am a member of parliament in Iceland?"
She said she was starting a legal fight to stop the US getting hold of her messages, after being told by Twitter that a subpoena had been issued. She wrote: "department of justice are requesting twitter to provide the info – I got 10 days to stop it via legal process before twitter hands it over."
She said the justice department was "just sending a message and of course they are asking for a lot more than just my tweets."
Jonsdottir said she was demanding a meeting with the US ambassador to Iceland. "The justice department has gone completely over the top." She added that the US authorities had requested personal information from Twitter as well as her private messages and that she was now assessing her legal position.
"It's not just about my information. It's a warning for anyone who had anything to do with WikiLeaks. It is completely unacceptable for the US justice department to flex its muscles like this. I am lucky, I'm a representative in parliament. But what of other people? It's my duty to do whatever I can to stop this abuse."
Twitter would not comment on the case. In a statement, the company said: "We're not going to comment on specific requests, but, to help users protect their rights, it's our policy to notify users about law enforcement and governmental requests for their information, unless we are prevented by law from doing so."
Most of Twitter's messages are public, but users can also send private messages on the service.
Marc Rotenberg, president of the online watchdog the Electronic Privacy Information Centre (EPIC) in Washington, said it appeared the US justice department was looking at building a case against WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, over its publication of secret US documents.
EPIC has already requested that the US authorities hand over information about their investigations into people who have donated to WikiLeaks via Mastercard, Visa or PayPal.
"The government has the right to get information, but that has to be done in a lawful way. Is there a lawful prosecution that could be brought against WikiLeaks? It seems unlikely to me. But it's a huge question here in the US," said Rotenberg.
Jonsdottir was involved in WikiLeaks' release last year of a video which showed a US military helicopter shooting two Reuters reporters in Iraq. US authorities believe the video was leaked by Private Bradley Manning.
Adrian Lamo, the hacker who reported Manning to the authorities, indicated that Manning first contacted WikiLeaks in late November 2009 – a period covered by the request for Jonsdottir's tweet history.
In 2009 Jonsdottir invited Assange to a party at the US embassy in Reykjavik where he chatted with the ambassador to Iceland. WikiLeaks had recently published a secret report on the collapse of the country's banks.
"I said it would be a bit of a prank to take him and see if they knew who he was. I don't think they had any idea," Jonsdottir said last year.
The MP has distanced herself from Assange and WikiLeaks, saying he should take a step back to deal with an investigation in Sweden. The 39-year-old is fighting extradition to the country, where two women have accused him of sexual misconduct. He denies the allegations.
In Iceland she has championed the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative which is aimed at creating legislation to make Iceland a legal haven for journalists and media outlets.
She is not the first WikiLeaks associate to be targeted by US officials. Last July Jacob Appelbaum, one of Assange's closest colleagues, was interrogated for three hours and had his phones confiscated upon entering the country at Newark airport. Customs officials photocopied receipts and searched his laptop.
The justice department did not returns calls seeking comment last night.

http://m.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan/ ... pe=article

[JackRiddler]

.

More Wikileaks-inspired institutional dementia. Better not look bored, government people! Put a smile on!

U.S. tells agencies: Watch 'insiders' to prevent new WikiLeaks

Measure 'happiness,' look for 'despondence and grumpiness,' memo from administration official urges

By Michael Isikoff
National investigative correspondent
NBC News
updated 1/5/2011 9:03:36 AM ET


The Obama administration is telling federal agencies to take aggressive new steps to prevent more WikiLeaks embarrassments, including instituting “insider threat” programs to ferret out disgruntled employees who might be inclined to leak classified documents, NBC News has learned.

As part of these programs, agency officials are being asked to figure out ways to “detect behavioral changes” among employees who might have access to classified documents.

A highly detailed 11-page memo
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/secti ... i_memo.pdf

prepared by U.S. intelligence officials and distributed by Jacob J. Lew, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, suggests that agencies use psychiatrists and sociologists to measure the “relative happiness” of workers or their “despondence and grumpiness” as a way to assess their trustworthiness. The memo was sent this week to senior officials at all agencies that use classified material.

The memo also suggests that agencies take new steps to identify any contacts between federal workers and members of the news media. “Are all employees required to report their contacts with the media?” the memo asks senior officials about the policies at their agencies.

The memo is the latest step in a high-priority administration initiative begun in the wake of the WikiLeaks debacle. It has taken on potentially even more significance in recent days with the disclosure this week that Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., the new chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, plans to investigate what policies the White House is implementing to prevent future leaks.

But in its efforts to root out the next Bradley Manning (the Army private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks), the administration may be misfiring, according to one national security expert.

“This is paranoia, not security,” said Steven Aftergood, a national security specialist for the Federation of American Scientists, who obtained a copy of the memo.

What the administration is doing, he added, is taking programs commonly used at the CIA and other intelligence agencies to root out potential spies and expanding them to numerous other agencies — such as the State Department, the Energy Department, NASA, Homeland Security and Justice — where they are unlikely to work.

'It's triply absurd'

For example, the idea of requiring workers to report any contacts with members of the news media, as though all such contacts are suspicious, is “absurd” at the CIA, where it has long been standard policy, said Aftergood.

“It’s triply absurd at most other agencies,” he added.

Representatives of the OMB and the Director of National Intelligence Office didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

In late November, the OMB instructed senior federal officials throughout the government to set up special “assessment teams” to review how their agencies were safeguarding classified information. Robert Bryant, the chief counterintelligence official at the Director of National Intelligence Office, and William J. Bosanko of the Director of Information Security Oversight Office, which monitors the handling of classified information for the National Archives, prepared the memo outlining questions that agency officials should answer about their practices before reporting their progress to the OMB by Jan. 28.

The memo doesn’t directly mandate the actions federal agencies should take in fulfilling their requirement to safeguard classified information. But it appears designed to prod them to take strong measures.

“Strong counterintelligence and safeguarding postures are necessary to protect classified national security information,” the memo states. Citing the OMB directive, it then spells out “questions your department or agency assessment team should utilize, as an initial step to assess the current state of your information systems security.”

“Do you have an insider threat program or the foundation for such a program?’ the memo asks. It also seeks information about whether the agencies are using polygraphs and have instituted efforts to identify “unusually high occurrences of foreign travel, contacts or foreign preference” by employees.

What's wrong with American cheese, French-face?!

Monitoring of former employees?

Perhaps the most impractical question, according to Aftergood, relates to what steps the agencies are taking to monitor whether federal workers have visited the WikiLeaks website before they started their jobs or after they retired.

“Do you capture evidence of pre-employment and/or post-employment activities or participation in online media data mining sites like WikiLeaks or Open Leaks?” the memo asks.

Aftergood said he was baffled as to how the administration expects to monitor what websites employees visit from their home computers after they have retired.

“It may be that this is what the administration needs to do to deflect congressional anger” over WikiLeaks, he said. “But some of it doesn’t make any sense.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40916433/ns ... n_security

From the memo:

Do you have a foreign travel/contacts reporting process or system that identifies unusually high occurrences of foreign travel, contacts, or foreign preference in the investigative subject pool?

Stop eyeballing those Icelandic girls!!!

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[JackRiddler]

(Thanks to plutonia on other thread.)

DOJ subpoeans Twitter records of several WikiLeaks volunteers

By Glenn Greenwald

*

(updated below)

Last night, Birgitta Jónsdóttir -- a former WikiLeaks volunteer and current member of the Icelandic Parliament -- announced (on Twitter) that she had been notified by Twitter that the DOJ had served a Subpoena demanding information "about all my tweets and more since November 1st 2009." Several news outlets, including The Guardian, wrote about Jónsdóttir's announcement.

What hasn't been reported is that the Subpoena served on Twitter -- which was ordered by a federal court -- seeks the same information for numerous other individuals currently or formerly associated with WikiLeaks, including Jacob Appelbaum, Rop Gongrijp, and Julian Assange. It also seeks the same information for Bradley Manning and for WikiLeaks' Twitter account.

* Continue reading

The information demanded by the DOJ is sweeping in scope. It includes all mailing addresses and billing information known for the user, all connection records and session times, all IP addresses used to access Twitter, all known email accounts, as well as the "means and source of payment," including banking records and credit cards. It seeks all of that information for the period beginning November 1, 2009 through the present. A copy of the court-ordered Subpoena served on Twitter is here.

The Subpoena was court ordered, signed by a federal Magistrate Judge in the Eastern District of Virginia, Theresa Buchanan. It states that there is "reasonable ground to believe that the records or other information sought are relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation." It was issued on December 14 and ordered sealed -- i.e., kept secret from the targets of the Order. On January 5, the same judge ordered the subpoena unsealed at Twitter's request in order to inform the users of the Subpoena and give them 10 days to object; had Twitter not so requested, it could have turned over this information without the knowledge of its users. A copy of the unsealing order is here.

Jónsdóttir told me that as "a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee [of Iceland's Parliament] and the NATO parliamentary assembly," she intends to "call for a meeting at the Committee early next week and ask for the ambassador to meet" her to protest the DOJ's subpoena for her records. The other individuals named in the subpoena were unwilling to publicly comment until speaking with their lawyer.

I'll have much more on the implications of this tomorrow. Suffice to say, this is a serious escalation of the DOJ's efforts to probe, harass and intimidate anyone having to do with WikiLeaks. Previously, Appelbaum as well as Bradley Manning supporter David House -- both American citizens -- had their laptops and other electronic equipment seized at the border by Homeland Security agents when attempting to re-enter the U.S.



UPDATE: Three other points: first, the three named producers of the "Collateral Murder" video -- depicting and commenting on the U.S. Apache helicopter attack on journalists and civilians in Baghdad -- were Assange, Jónsdóttir, and Gongrijp. Since Gongrijp has had no connection to WikiLeaks for several months and Jónsdóttir's association has diminished substantially over time, it seems clear that they were selected due to their involvement in the release of that film. Second, the unsealing order does not name either Assange or Manning, which means either that Twitter did not request permission to notify them of the Subpoena or that they did request it by the court denied it. Finally, WikiLeaks and Assange intend to contest the Subpoena served.

Oh the irony.

State Dept. Launching 'Democracy Is' Twitter Contest

January 7, 2010

Winston Churchill already did it — Define democracy, that is, in less than 140 characters:

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.

But Twitter wasn't around when the great man was alive.

Today, the State Department says, it's launching a Twitter contest to "tweet what you think democracy is in 140 characters or less." The person who gets the most "unique re-tweets" will receive a Flip Video HD Camcorder. The counting starts at 5:30 p.m. ET and ends on Jan. 21 at 11:59 p.m. ET.

Here's what to do:

— Go to Twitter.
— Become a follower of @demvidchallenge.
— Mark your tweets with #democracyis.

Good luck.

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WikiLeaks demands Google and Facebook unseal US subpoenas

Call comes after revelation that US has tried to force Twitter to release WikiLeaks members' private details


*snip*

The emergence of the Twitter subpoena – which was unsealed after a legal challenge by the company – was revealed after WikiLeaks announced it believed other US Internet companies had also been ordered to hand over information about its members' activities.

WikiLeaks condemned the court order, saying it amounted to harassment.

"If the Iranian government was to attempt to coercively obtain this information from journalists and activists of foreign nations, human rights groups around the world would speak out," Assange said in a statement.

Jonsdottir said in a Twitter message: "I think I am being given a message, almost like someone breathing in a phone."

Twitter has declined to comment, saying only that its policy is to notify its users where possible of government requests for information.

The specific clause of the Patriot act used to acquire the subpoena is one that the FBI has described as necessary for "obtaining such records [that] will make the process of identifying computer criminals and tracing their internet communications faster and easier".

The subpoena itself is an unusual one known as a 2703(d). Recently a federal appeals court ruled this kind of order was insufficient to order the disclosure of the contents of communication. Significantly, however, that ruling is binding in neither Virginia – where the Twitter subpoena was issued – nor San Francisco where Twitter is based.

Assange has promised to fight the order, as has Jonsdottir, who said in a Twitter message that she had "no intention to hand my information over willingly".

Appelbaum, whose Twitter feed suggested he was travelling in Iceland, said he was apprehensive about returning to the US. "Time to try to enjoy the last of my vacation, I suppose," he tweeted.

Gonggrijp praised Twitter for notifying him and others that the US had subpoenaed his details. "It appears that Twitter, as a matter of policy, does the right thing in wanting to inform their users when one of these comes in," Gonggrijp said. "Heaven knows how many places have received similar subpoenas and just quietly submitted all they had on me."

[JackRiddler]

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Talk of a Wikileaks users' class action lawsuit against DoJ:

Twitter channel, of course:
http://twitter.com/search?q=%23classactionWL

Article:
http://wlcentral.org/node/863

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This is such obvious harrassment. They can see what's on Twitter without need of a subpoena. Nothing on there is likely to be useful to their withhunt. The purpose is to let hundreds of thousands of people know they are being watched and considered suspect.

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[matrixdutch]

So the subpoenas really mean that they can get access to the users information who subscribed to Assange's twitter account?

[JackRiddler]

So the subpoenas really mean that they can get access to the users information who subscribed to Assange's twitter account?

I think all such questions are up to Twitter and a judge.

[Plutonia]

So the subpoenas really mean that they can get access to the users information who subscribed to Assange's twitter account?

I've been following the Wikileaks Twitter feed. I'll let you know what happens. If I get the chance.

WikiLeaks: WARNING all 637,000 @wikileaks followers are a target of US gov subpoena against Twitter, under section 2. B http://is.gd/koZIA