Category Archives: WikiLeaks

Case against Assange begins to unravel

As much as the mainstream media has willingly promoted the narrative of Julian Assange as a bad-boy rock-star type figure who has innocent groupies throwing themselves at his feet, the fact is, a rebellious enterprise such as WikiLeaks naturally attracts individuals who themselves have a rebellious independent spirit. It would seem likely that this would apply as much the women who accused Assange of sexual impropriety as it would to anyone else involved in WikiLeaks.

Given the way events have unfolded in recent days, one might doubt that these women — however justifiable might be their personal grievances — would now want to serve the interests of WikiLeaks’ enemies. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why one of them — Anna Ardin — has taken up residence here, in the tiny village of Yanoun in the West Bank, where only one of the 1990 Palestinian inhabitants speaks English.

Australia’s Crikey.com reports (h/t Raw Story):

Anna Ardin, one of the two complainants in the rape and sexual assault case against WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange, has left Sweden, and may have ceased actively co-operating with the Swedish prosecution service and her own lawyer, sources in Sweden told Crikey today.

The move comes amid a growing campaign by leading Western feminists to question the investigation, and renewed confusion as to whether Sweden has actually issued charges against Assange. Naomi Klein, Naomi Wolf, and the European group Women Against Rape, have all made statements questioning the nature and purpose of the prosecution.

Ardin, who also goes by the name Bernardin, has moved to the West Bank in the Palestinian Territories, as part of a Christian outreach group, aimed at bringing reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis. She has moved to the small town of Yanoun, which sits close to Israel’s security/sequestration wall. Yanoun is constantly besieged by fundamentalist Jewish settlers, and international groups have frequently stationed themselves there.

Ardin recently mocked her detractors and the press by tweeting: “CIA agent, rabid feminist / Muslim lover, a Christian fundamentalist, frigid & fatally in love with a man, can you be all that at the same time …”

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A cyber shot heard round the world

When the stalwart pillar of the establishment, the New York Times, publishes a serious report on Anonymous, it’s fitting to conclude — as does John Perry Barlow from the Electronic Frontier Foundation– that the group has indeed fired a “shot heard round the world.”

They got their start years ago as cyberpranksters, an online community of tech-savvy kids more interested in making mischief than political statements.

But the coordinated attacks on major corporate and government Web sites in defense of WikiLeaks, which began on Wednesday and continued on Thursday, suggested that the loosely organized group called Anonymous might have come of age, evolving into one focused on more serious matters: in this case, the definition of Internet freedom.

While the attacks on such behemoths as MasterCard, Visa and PayPal were not nearly as sophisticated as some less publicized assaults, they were a step forward in the group’s larger battle against what it sees as increasing control of the Internet by corporations and governments. This week they found a cause and an icon: Julian Assange, the former hacker who founded WikiLeaks and is now in a London jail at the request of the Swedish authorities investigating him on accusations of rape.

“This is kind of the shot heard round the world — this is Lexington,” said John Perry Barlow, a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties organization that advocates for a freer Internet.

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From Judith Miller to Julian Assange

Jay Rozen says: “Our press has never come to terms with the ways in which it got itself on the wrong side of secrecy as the national security state swelled in size after September 11th.”

Noting that the New York Times did eventually look back at its own role in the build-up to the war in Iraq, Rozen says:

[T]he Times did not look at the problem of journalists giving powerful officials a free pass by stripping names from fear-mongering words and just reporting the words, or of newspapers sworn to inform the public keeping secrets from that same (misinformed) public, of reporters getting played and yet refusing to ID the people who played them because they needed to signal some future player that the confidential source game would go on.

In its look back the Times declared itself insufficiently skeptical, especially about Iraqi defectors. True enough. But the look back was itself insufficiently skeptical. Radical doubt, which is basic to understanding what drives Julian Assange, was impermissible then. One of the consequences of that is the appeal of radical transparency today.

Simon Jenkins got at some of this in a Guardian column on Wikileaks: “Accountability can only default to disclosure. As Jefferson remarked, the press is the last best hope when democratic oversight fails.” But at the nadir the last best hope failed, too. When that happens accountability defaults to extreme disclosure, which is where we are today. The institutional press isn’t driving it; the wilds of the Internet are. To understand Julian Assange and the weird reactions to him in the American press we need to tell a story that starts with Judy Miller and ends with Wikileaks.

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Putin and Lula express support for Assange

Agence France Presse reports:

Vladimir Putin on Thursday led a growing band of international leaders voicing support for WikiLeaks’ boss Julian Assange, describing his detention in Britain as “undemocratic”.

The Russian prime minister’s broadside came as hackers escalated their cyber war on opponents of the whistleblower website, setting their sights on Amazon.com.

“Why was Mr. Assange hidden in jail? Is that democracy? As we say in the village: the pot is calling the kettle black,” Putin said in response to a question on Russia’s undemocratic image in US embassy cables leaked by the website.

His comments echoed Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who expressed “solidarity” with Assange, blasting the Australian activist’s arrest as a blow against “freedom of expression.”

Assange has “exposed a diplomacy that had appeared unreachable,” said Lula, who criticized the failure of other governments to challenge Assange’s detention.

“They have arrested him and I don’t hear so much as a single protest for freedom of expression,” he said.

The Guardian adds:

Russia has suggested that Julian Assange should be awarded the Nobel peace prize, in an unexpected show of support from Moscow for the jailed WikiLeaks founder.

In what appears to be a calculated dig at the US, the Kremlin urged non-governmental organisations to think seriously about “nominating Assange as a Nobel Prize laureate”.

“Public and non-governmental organisations should think of how to help him,” the source from inside president Dmitry Medvedev’s office told Russian news agencies. Speaking in Brussels, where Medvedev was attending a Russia-EU summit yesterday , the source went on: “Maybe, nominate him as a Nobel Prize laureate.”

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WikiLeaks reveals Shell’s grip on Nigerian state

The Guardian reports:

The oil giant Shell claimed it had inserted staff into all the main ministries of the Nigerian government, giving it access to politicians’ every move in the oil-rich Niger Delta, according to a leaked US diplomatic cable.

The company’s top executive in Nigeria told US diplomats that Shell had seconded employees to every relevant department and so knew “everything that was being done in those ministries”. She boasted that the Nigerian government had “forgotten” about the extent of Shell’s infiltration and was unaware of how much the company knew about its deliberations.

The cache of secret dispatches from Washington’s embassies in Africa also revealed that the Anglo-Dutch oil firm swapped intelligence with the US, in one case providing US diplomats with the names of Nigerian politicians it suspected of supporting militant activity, and requesting information from the US on whether the militants had acquired anti-aircraft missiles.

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How WikiLeaks turned the First Amendment into a ‘problem’

First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams says: “WikiLeaks may just be the price we pay for freedom of the press in this country.”

Why not: “WikiLeaks demonstrates the value of the First Amendment”?

After all, what’s the good of having a free press when journalists so willingly serve the interests of the establishment? If the Fourth Estate had not turned itself into a fourth branch of government, WikiLeaks would have little reason to exist — or at least, little reason to be challenging the authority of the US government.

Freedoms not exercised will easily be taken away.

Time reports:

Thanks to nearly a century of cases dealing with the clash between national security and the freedom of the press, the Constitution provides enormous protection for publishers of state secrets. Those who leak the secrets in the first place — government officials, even soldiers, for instance — can and are prosecuted, such as Army private, Bradley Manning, now sitting in a military prison after having been charged with illegally downloading secret files amid suspicions that he gave them to WikiLeaks.

Putting someone like Assange in jail for publishing documents he did not himself steal, on the other hand, is exactly the kind of thing that First Amendment makes difficult. “From everything we’ve seen, [Manning] was merely responding to the notion that Assange might publish the cables,” former CIA inspector general Frederick P. Hitz told TIME. “There’s nothing to show that Assange played an active role in obtaining the information.” He conceded that the leaks had been tremendously damaging, but added “I don’t see any easy effort there” in pursuing charges.

Holder has said the government will explore whether Assange could be charged with a form of theft since the records had been stolen, though such a course is fraught will obstacles, given that the files are digital copies of government records. Holder said too the government will consider whether Assange might be guilty of conspiring somehow with Manning, or went beyond the traditional role of publisher by acting as a kind of broker in dissemenating the files to newspapers around the world. What worries famed First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams is that if the government stretches to get around the Constitution to charge Assange, it may end up damaging the press freedoms enjoyed by every publisher. Nobody should applaud Assange, Abrams told TIME, but trying to remedy the harm he caused could easily leave the country worse off. “WikiLeaks may just be the price we pay for freedom of the press in this country,” Abrams said.

The New York Times reports on the administration’s ongoing effort to find a legal trap in which they might snare Assange:

Justice Department officials have … examined whether Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks could be charged with trafficking in stolen government property.

But scholars say there might be legal difficulties with that approach, too, because the leaked documents are reproductions of files the government still possesses, not physical objects missing from its file cabinets. That means they are covered by intellectual property law, not ordinary property law.

“This is less about stealing than it is about copying,” said John G. Palfrey, a Harvard Law School professor who specializes in Internet issues and intellectual property.

Intellectual property law criminalizes the unauthorized reproduction of certain kinds of commercial information, like trade secrets or copyrighted music, films and software files. But those categories do not appear to cover government documents, which by law cannot be copyrighted and for which there is no ordinary commercial market.

Mr. Assange has received leaks of private-sector information as well. He has indicated, for example, that his next step might be to publish a copy of the contents of a hard drive belonging to an executive at a bank — apparently, Bank of America.

If he does so, some of the problems associated with trying to find a way to prosecute him for distributing leaked government documents could disappear. The works of a person in the private sector are automatically copyrighted, and bank documents could be deemed trade secrets.

“If you had large-scale dissemination of a private-sector company’s records, there might be some kind of argument there similar to commercial espionage,” said James Boyle, a Duke University law professor who specializes in intellectual property and public-domain issues.

There would still be obstacles. For example, Mr. Assange could claim that his distribution of the files was allowable under the “fair use” exception to copyright law and that it was not for financial gain. Still, “fair use” does not allow wholesale reproduction, and prosecutors could argue that his organization was raising money from its activities.

Even so, Mr. Boyle cautioned, intellectual property law is not well designed to prosecute what WikiLeaks is doing.

“The reason people are upset about this is not about commercial theft or misusing the fabulous original expressions of U.S. diplomats,” Mr. Boyle said. “I think it is the wrong tool. You go after Al Capone for tax evasion rather than bootlegging — fine. But this is a bridge too far.”

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Why Assange and Wikileaks have won this round

Ian Welsh writes:

The odd thing about Wikileaks is that their success has been assured, not by what they leaked, though there is some important information there, but by their enemies.

The massive and indiscriminant overreaction by both government and powerful corporate actors has ensured this, and includes but is not nearly limited to:

  • Shutting down Wikileaks servers, starting with the Amazon server
  • Stopping domain name server propagation
  • Paypal refusing to send payments
  • VISA and Mastercard refusing to process payments
  • The Swiss Bank PostFinance shutting down Assange’s account
  • Senator Lieberman pressuring firms over Wikileaks
  • The odd behavior of prosecutors in the Assange rape accusations/case

Wikileaks and Assange have now been made in to cause celebres. If corporations and governments can destroy someone’s access to the modern economy as they have Wikileaks, without even pretending due process of the law (Paypal, VISA, Mastercard, Amazon, etc… were not ordered by any court to cut Wikileaks) then we simply do not live in a free society of law, let alone a society of justice.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports:

WikiLeaks’ payment processor said Thursday that it was preparing to sue credit card companies Visa and MasterCard over their refusal to process donations to the secret-spilling website.

Andreas Fink, the CEO of Iceland’s DataCell ehf, told The Associated Press that he would seek damages from the American financial companies over their decision to block WikiLeaks funds.

“It’s difficult to believe that such a large company as Visa can make a political decision,” Fink said in a telephone interview from Switzerland. In an earlier statement, his company had defended the WikiLeaks, saying that “it is simply ridiculous to think WikiLeaks has done anything criminal.”

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The accusations against Assange

Kate Harding writes:

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to find the timing of Interpol’s warrant for the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who turned himself in to British authorities today, curious. The charges — “one count of unlawful coercion, two counts of sexual molestation and one count of rape,” according to a statement from Scotland Yard — were brought against him in Sweden last August, yet he suddenly graduated to “most wanted” status just after releasing over a thousand leaked diplomatic cables in late November? It would be irresponsible of journalists, bloggers and average citizens of countries most eager to plug the gushing WikiLeaks not to wonder if those dots connect.

Still, as the New York Times put it, “there is no public evidence to suggest a connection,” which some members of the public seem to find unbearably frustrating. With no specific target for their suspicions and no easy way to find one, folks all over the blogosphere have been settling for the next best thing: making light of the sexual assault charges and smearing one of the alleged victims.

By Sunday, when Keith Olbermann retweeted Bianca Jagger’s link to a post about the accuser’s supposed CIA ties — complete with scare quotes around the word “rape” — a narrative had clearly taken hold: Whatever Assange did, it sure wasn’t rape-rape. All he did was fail to wear a rubber! And one woman who claims he assaulted her has serious credibility issues anyway. She threw a party in his honor after the fact and tried to pull down the incriminating tweets. Isn’t that proof enough? The only reason the charges got traction is that, in the radical feminist utopia of Sweden under Queen Lisbeth Salander, if a woman doesn’t have multiple orgasms during hetero sex, the man can be charged with rape. You didn’t know?

As of today, even Naomi Wolf — Naomi Effin’ Wolf! — has taken a public swipe at Assange’s accusers, using her status as a “longtime feminist” to underscore the absurdity of “the alleged victims … using feminist-inspired rhetoric and law to assuage what appears to be personal injured feelings.”

Wow. Admittedly, I don’t have as much experience being a feminist as Wolf has, but when I see a swarm of people with exactly zero direct access to the facts of a rape case loudly insisting that the accusation has no merit, I usually start to wonder about their credibility. And their sources.

Laura Flanders: When Interpol cares about sexual assault

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How the US and China colluded to undermine Copenhagen climate summit

Der Spiegel reports:

Last year’s climate summit in Copenhagen was a political disaster. Leaked US diplomatic cables now show why the summit failed so spectacularly. The dispatches reveal that the US and China, the world’s top two polluters, joined forces to stymie every attempt by European nations to reach agreement.

In May 2009 the Chinese leaders received a very welcome guest. John Kerry, the powerful chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, met with Deputy Prime Minister Li Keqiang in Beijing. Kerry told his hosts that Washington could understand “China’s resistance to accepting mandatory targets at the United Nations Climate Conference, which will take place in Copenhagen.”

According to a cable from the US embassy in the Chinese capital, Kerry outlined “a new basis for ‘major cooperation’ between the United States and China on climate change.”
At that time, many Europeans were hoping the delegates at the Copenhagen summit would agree climate-change measures that could save the planet from the cumulative effects of global warming. But that dream died pitifully in mid-December 2009, and the world leaders went their separate ways again without any concrete achievements. Confidential US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks now show just how closely the world’s biggest polluters — the United States and China — colluded in the months leading up to the conference. And they give weight to those who have long suspected that the two countries secretly formed an alliance.

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Lying for the State Department

Is skill in the art of lying a prerequisite for the job of State Department spokesman, or is it just an ability acquired through on-the-job training?

James Rubin, State spokesman for the Clinton administration, demonstrated that he retains his fluency in an interview he did this afternoon alongside Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald and John Burns from the New York Times who were all guests on KCRW’s On The Point.

Glenn Greenwald:

I’ve written about this before, but what’s most remarkable is how — as always — leading media figures and government officials are completely indistinguishable in what they think, say and do with regard to these controversies; that’s why Burns and Rubin clung together so closely throughout the segment, because there is no real distinction between most of these establishment reporters and the government; the former serve the latter. Below is the clip itself; I’m posting the specific evidence showing that Rubin’s general claim (that these cables contain no deceit or wrongdoing) as well as his specific claims about Yemen were absolutely false:

Regarding Rubin’s claims about Yemen: here is the cable reflecting a meeting between Gen. David Petraeus and the Yemeni President in January, 2010, proving that it was the U.S., not Yemen, which perpetrated the December, 2009 air strike. Moreover, it records this:

President Obama has approved providing U.S. intelligence in support of ROYG [Republic of Yemen government] ground operations against AQAP targets, General Petraeus informed Saleh. . . . Saleh lamented the use of cruise missiles that are “not very accurate” and welcomed the use of aircraft-deployed precision-guided bombs instead. “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Saleh said, prompting Deputy Prime Minister Alimi to joke that he had just “lied” by telling Parliament that the bombs in Arhab, Abyan, and Shebwa were American-made but deployed by the ROYG.

As Salon‘s Justin Elliott noted, this cable “confirms that the Obama Administration has secretly launched missile attacks on suspected terrorists in Yemen, strikes that have reportedly killed dozens of civilians.” Despite that, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley had the following exchange on December, 15, 2009, with reporters:

QUESTION: On the conflict in Yemen, Houthis say that U.S. warplanes have launched airstrikes in northern Yemen. Is the U.S. involved in any military operations in Yemen?

MR. CROWLEY: No.

QUESTION: No?

MR. CROWLEY: But we — those kinds of reports keep cropping up. We do not have a military role in this conflict.

In response to having been caught spouting these falsehoods in the wake of the WikiLeaks release, Crowley claimed that he confined his denial to only one attack in which the U.S. was not involved (the one on the Yemeni Houthis), but the clear words from the Press Conference prove that his denial applied to “any military operations in Yemen” (Q: “Is the U.S. involved in any military operations in Yemen? MR. CROWLEY: No”). The WikiLeaks cable reveal that is false; the airstrike launched by the U.S. occurred a mere two days later, on December 17.

Among Rubin’s many dubious claims, none is more disingenuous than his assertion that the Yemeni government’s choice to lie to its own people is one over which the US has no control, and thus he implies, no interest. On the contrary, the Obama administration has just as deep an investment as does the Yemeni government in concealing from the Yemeni people the depth of America’s military involvement in their country.

Having opted for a policy which runs the risk of turning Yemen into another Somalia, the administration is holding on to the dubious idea that so long as this emerging war can avoid being officially stamped “made in America,” Yemen’s feeble government might be able to retain its grip on power.

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Leiberman suggests New York Times could be investigated

The Guardian reports:

Joe Lieberman, the chair of the Senate homeland security committee, told Fox News: “To me the New York Times has committed at least an act of, at best, bad citizenship, but whether they have committed a crime is a matter of discussion for the justice department.”

Lieberman also said that the department of justice should indict Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, under the 1917 Espionage Act and try to extradite him from the UK. Asked why this had not happened, Lieberman admitted there was probably an argument going on over how to charge Assange.

“I think this is the most serious violation of the Espionage Act in our history,” Lieberman said, adding: “It sure looks to me that Assange and WikiLeaks have violated the Espionage Act.”

At the daily state department briefing in Washington, DC, Philip Crowley, the department’s press spokesman, said: “What WikiLeaks has done is a crime under US law.”

The Guardian appears to have misquoted Crowley. According to the transcript of yesterday’s briefing, he said:

What we’re investigating is a crime under U.S. law. The provision of 250,000 classified documents from someone inside the government to someone outside the government is a crime. We are investigating it. And as we’ve said, we will hold those responsible fully accountable. That investigation is still ongoing.

From all the information currently available, the only individual who is believed to have committed a crime is Private First Class Bradley Manning. He has been has been arrested and charged with the unauthorized use and disclosure of classified information.

The New York Times reporter David Sanger told NPR:

The Times knew that this material was going to be out there anyway. We didn’t get the initial leak,” he says. “If we had done nothing — if we had ignored it — I think it would have looked strange. I think that also would have been irresponsible. It is the responsibility of American journalism, back to the founding of this country, to get out and try to grapple with the hardest issues of the day and to do it independently of the government.

Which is why the Times‘ sycophantic executive editor, Bill Keller, consulted with the administration for advice on each of the cables it has published. So much for “independence.”

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Paypal and the State Department’s legal charade

“On November 27, the State Department — the US government basically — wrote a letter saying that the WikiLeaks activities were deemed illegal in the United States and as a result our [acceptable use] policy group had to make the decision of suspending the account,” PayPal’s VP of Platform Osama Bedier said on stage at Le Web 2010 conference in Paris today, TechCrunch reported. He later clarified that this letter was not sent to Paypal but was addressed to Julian Assange and his lawyer Jennifer Robinson.

This is what the State Department letter from legal adviser Harold Hongju Koh says on the legality of WikiLeaks activities:

As you know, if any of the materials you intend to publish were provided by any government officials, or any intermediary without proper authorization, they were provided in violation of U.S. law and without regard for the grave consequences of this action. As long as WikiLeaks holds such material, the violation of the law is ongoing.

The letter then goes on to provide an assessment of the damage that publication of “documents of this nature at a minimum would” cause. It also claims that WikiLeaks is not acting in accordance with the organization’s stated principles.

The only illegal action that the State Department identified was one that could be committed by a US government official. If WikiLeaks itself was violating or about to violate any law, it’s hard to imagine that the State Department would be mealy mouthed about stating the fact. Indeed, not only would the legal infraction be spelled out but likewise the legal consequences.

For that reason — the lack of legal recourse — State was forced to fall back on moral persuasion, in the hope that it might pressure WikiLeaks to do what the US government regards as “the right thing.”

The fact that the administration is now clutching at straws in its pursuit of a legal case against WikiLeaks is evident in the suggestion that Assange might be charged with receiving stolen property. If that happens, Bill Keller at the New York Times better get ready to turn himself in — for that matter, virtually every journalist in America should volunteer to be arrested.

One can only assume that Paypal, Visa, Mastercard and other corporations that are now acting as lackeys for the Obama administration in its witch-hunt against WikiLeaks, hope that come the day they themselves run afoul of the law, they can expect leniency in return for today’s favors. Even worse, they seem happy to display a corporate-government solidarity that reflects the all too transparent fact that representative democracy now means government of corporations, for corporations, by corporations.

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Truth in chains

Chris Floyd writes:

Well, they got him at last. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the target of several of the world’s most powerful governments, turned himself into British authorities today and is now at the mercy of state authorities who have already shown their wolfish – and lawless – desire to destroy him and his organization.

It has been, by any standard, an extraordinary campaign of vilification and persecution, wholly comparable to the kind of treatment doled out to dissidents in China or Burma. Lest we forget, WikiLeaks is a journalistic outlet – just like The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel, all of whom are even now publishing the very same material – leaked classified documents — available on WikiLeaks. The website is also a journalistic outlet just like CNN, ABC, CBS, Fox and other mainstream media venues, where we have seen an endless parade of officials – and journalists! – calling for Assange to be prosecuted or killed outright. Every argument being made for shutting down WikiLeaks can – and doubtless will – be used against any journalistic enterprise that publishes material that powerful people do not like.

And the leading role in this persecution of truth-telling is being played by the administration of the great progressive agent of hope and change, the self-proclaimed heir of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Barack Obama. His attorney general, Eric Holder, is now making fierce noises about the “steps” he has already taken to bring down WikiLeaks and criminalize the leaking of embarrassing information. And listen to the ferocious reaction of that liberal lioness, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who took to the pages of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal to call for Assange to be put in prison – for 2,500,000 years:

When WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange released his latest document trove—more than 250,000 secret State Department cables—he intentionally harmed the U.S. government. The release of these documents damages our national interests and puts innocent lives at risk. He should be vigorously prosecuted for espionage.

“The law Mr. Assange continues to violate is the Espionage Act of 1917. That law makes it a felony for an unauthorized person to possess or transmit “information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” … Importantly, the courts have held that “information relating to the national defense” applies to both classified and unclassified material. Each violation is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

So there you have it. Ten years for each offense; 250,000 separate offenses; thus a prison term of 2.5 million years. Naturally, tomorrow the same newspaper will denounce Feinstein for being such a namby-pamby terrorist-coddling pinko: “Why didn’t she call for Assange to be torn from limb to limb by wild dogs, as any right-thinking red-blooded American would do!?”

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Wikileaks and the long haul

Clay Shirky writes:

Like a lot of people, I am conflicted about Wikileaks.

Citizens of a functioning democracy must be able to know what the state is saying and doing in our name, to engage in what Pierre Rosanvallon calls “counter-democracy”*, the democracy of citizens distrusting rather than legitimizing the actions of the state. Wikileaks plainly improves those abilities.

On the other hand, human systems can’t stand pure transparency. For negotiation to work, people’s stated positions have to change, but change is seen, almost universally, as weakness. People trying to come to consensus must be able to privately voice opinions they would publicly abjure, and may later abandon. Wikileaks plainly damages those abilities. (If Aaron Bady’s analysis is correct, it is the damage and not the oversight that Wikileaks is designed to create.*)

And so we have a tension between two requirements for democratic statecraft, one that can’t be resolved, but can be brought to an acceptable equilibrium. Indeed, like the virtues of equality vs. liberty, or popular will vs. fundamental rights, it has to be brought into such an equilibrium for democratic statecraft not to be wrecked either by too much secrecy or too much transparency.

As Tom Slee puts it, “Your answer to ‘what data should the government make public?’ depends not so much on what you think about data, but what you think about the government.”* My personal view is that there is too much secrecy in the current system, and that a corrective towards transparency is a good idea. I don’t, however, believe in total transparency, and even more importantly, I don’t think that independent actors who are subject to no checks or balances is a good idea in the long haul.

If the long haul were all there was, Wikileaks would be an obviously bad thing. The practical history of politics, however, suggests that the periodic appearance of such unconstrained actors in the short haul is essential to increased democratization, not just of politics but of thought.

We celebrate the printers of 16th century Amsterdam for making it impossible for the Catholic Church to constrain the output of the printing press to Church-approved books*, a challenge that helped usher in, among other things, the decentralization of scientific inquiry and the spread of politically seditious writings advocating democracy.

This intellectual and political victory didn’t, however, mean that the printing press was then free of all constraints. Over time, a set of legal limitations around printing rose up, including restrictions on libel, the publication of trade secrets, and sedition. I don’t agree with all of these laws, but they were at least produced by some legal process.

Unlike the United States’ current pursuit of Wikileaks.

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Visa and Mastercard are happy to transfer donations to the Ku Klux Klan, but not WikiLeaks

The BBC reports:

Visa Europe has begun suspending payments to whistle-blowing website Wikileaks ahead of carrying out an investigation into the organisation.

It follows a similar move by rival payments processor Mastercard on Tuesday.

Charles Arthur, the Guardian’s technology editor, points out that while MasterCard and Visa have cut WikiLeaks off you can still use those cards to donate to overtly racist organisations such as the Knights Party, which is supported by the Ku Klux Klan.

The Ku Klux Klan website directs users to a site called Christian Concepts. It takes Visa and MasterCard donations for users willing to state that they are “white and not of racially mixed descent. I am not married to a non-white. I do not date non-whites nor do I have non-white dependents. I believe in the ideals of western Christian civilisation and profess my belief in Jesus Christ as the son of God.”

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The arrest of Julian Assange

Outside the court, Assange’s lawyer Mark Stephens said:

WikiLeaks will continue. WikiLeaks is many thousands of journalists around the world. A renewed bail application will be made.

We have heard the judge today say that he wishes to see the evidence himself. He was impressed by the fact that a number of people were prepared to stand up on behalf of Mr Assange. In those circumstances I think we will see another bail application.

They [those offering surety] were but the tip of the iceberg. This is going to go viral. Many people believe Mr Assange to be innocent, myself included. Many people believe that this prosecution is politically motivated.

I’m sure that the British judicial system is robust enough not to be interfered with by politicians and that are judges are impartial and fair. I hope I can say the same about Swedish prosecutors in the future.

In an op-ed appearing today in The Australian, Assange wrote:

The US diplomatic cables reveal some startling facts:

The US asked its diplomats to steal personal human material and information from UN officials and human rights groups, including DNA, fingerprints, iris scans, credit card numbers, internet passwords and ID photos, in violation of international treaties. Presumably Australian UN diplomats may be targeted, too.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia asked the US Officials in Jordan and Bahrain want Iran ‘s nuclear program stopped by any means available.

Britain’s Iraq inquiry was fixed to protect “US interests”.

Sweden is a covert member of NATO and US intelligence sharing is kept from parliament.

The US is playing hardball to get other countries to take freed detainees from Guantanamo Bay . Barack Obama agreed to meet the Slovenian President only if Slovenia took a prisoner. Our Pacific neighbour Kiribati was offered millions of dollars to accept detainees.

In its landmark ruling in the Pentagon Papers case, the US Supreme Court said “only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government”. The swirling storm around WikiLeaks today reinforces the need to defend the right of all media to reveal the truth.

Glenn Greenwald writes:

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.

The one thing WikiLeaks did not need to leak — it spills out freely of its own accord — is the venality of American journalism.

And for those in the press corps who find it difficult to contain themselves from expressing their personal disdain for Assange, Jack Shafer appropriately commented: “sure, he’s a pompous egomaniac sporting a series of bad haircuts and grandiose tendencies. And he often acts without completely thinking through every repercussion of his actions. But if you want to dismiss him just because he’s a seething jerk, there are about 2,000 journalists I’d like you to meet.”

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The war on free speech

John Naughton writes:

‘Never waste a good crisis” used to be the catchphrase of the Obama team in the runup to the presidential election. In that spirit, let us see what we can learn from official reactions to the WikiLeaks revelations.

The most obvious lesson is that it represents the first really sustained confrontation between the established order and the culture of the internet. There have been skirmishes before, but this is the real thing.

And as the backlash unfolds – first with deniable attacks on internet service providers hosting WikiLeaks, later with companies like Amazon and eBay and PayPal suddenly “discovering” that their terms and conditions preclude them from offering services to WikiLeaks, and then with the US government attempting to intimidate Columbia students posting updates about WikiLeaks on Facebook – the intolerance of the old order is emerging from the rosy mist in which it has hitherto been obscured. The response has been vicious, co-ordinated and potentially comprehensive, and it contains hard lessons for everyone who cares about democracy and about the future of the net.

There is a delicious irony in the fact that it is now the so-called liberal democracies that are clamouring to shut WikiLeaks down.

Consider, for instance, how the views of the US administration have changed in just a year. On 21 January, secretary of state Hillary Clinton made a landmark speech about internet freedom, in Washington DC, which many people welcomed and most interpreted as a rebuke to China for its alleged cyberattack on Google. “Information has never been so free,” declared Clinton. “Even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.”

She went on to relate how, during his visit to China in November 2009, Barack Obama had “defended the right of people to freely access information, and said that the more freely information flows the stronger societies become. He spoke about how access to information helps citizens to hold their governments accountable, generates new ideas, and encourages creativity.” Given what we now know, that Clinton speech reads like a satirical masterpiece.

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The expanding Saudi file

Saudi Arabia’s Prince Turki al-Faisal demanded on Sunday that WikiLeaks be “vigorously punished” and said that it was incumbent on the US “to not just be extra vigilant but to try to restore the credibility and the legitimacy of their engagement with the rest of us, and ensure that there are no more leaks to be faced in the future,” Reuters reported.

Leaked cables claim that Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest source of financial support for terrorism; that the Iraqi government sees a greater threat to the country’s stability coming from Saudi Arabia than Iran; and that the Saudis appeared to want ‘another Musharraf‘ to take over Pakistan — no wonder the Saudis want to see WikiLeaks punished.

The Los Angeles Times now reports:

At Saudi Arabia’s urging, Morocco broke ties with Iran and began a domestic campaign against Moroccan Shiites in exchange for economic trade-offs, an Egyptian diplomat told sources at the U.S. Embassy in Rabat, according to a leaked U.S. diplomatic cable published by the Lebanese newspaper Al Akhbar.

“[The diplomat] said goading Iran, a country with which it had limited economic interests, and demonizing the Shi’a, a powerless minority group, was a small price for Morocco to pay for a strategy that could have major payoffs,” the April 2009 cable read.

In exchange for active Moroccan support, Saudi Arabia allegedly promised to ensure the flow of subsidized oil and compensate for the loss in direct foreign investment in Morocco resulting from the global financial crisis.

The diplomat, whose name had been redacted from the cable, also said that the domestic campaign against Shiites was intended to neutralize opposition groups in the municipal elections and reassert King Mohammed VI’s authority as a religious leader.

Morocco broke ties with Iran in March 2009, accusing Tehran of using its embassy in Rabat as a base for spreading Shiite Islam. The formal break in relations was followed by a crackdown on Morocco’s tiny Shiite minority, which resulted in the closure of religious schools and the arrest of hundreds of people.

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