Will WikiLeaks unravel the American 'secret government'?

[David Guyatt]

In the past few days the more notorious of the dumbshits that sit in the US Congress have denounced Assange as a “traitor to america.” What total ignorance. Assange is an Australian, not an american citizen. To be a traitor to america, one has to be of the nationality. An Australilian cannot be a traitor to america any more than an american can be a traitor to Australia. But don’t expect the morons who represent the lobbyists to know this much.

The problem being that America thinks the rest of the world are its apple-polishers - to be treated and mistreated accordingly.

Forget "banana republics", the US is now a lawless State that is completely out of control.

I wonder if someone will be sitting fiddling as it burns and crumbles?

[David Guyatt]

Home Secretary, Theresa May, has ordered a "security review" as the Conservative Grovelment denounce Wikileaks latest revelations. The European arrest warrant for Assenge has been received by Scotland Yard.
And the US Attorney General is seeking laws to use against Assange:

5.20pm: Here we go: the US attorney-general says he has unspecified "significant" actions in the works against WikiLeaks regarding a criminal investigation, although won't say what they are exactly they may be:

Attorney General Eric Holder said Monday that he has authorized "significant" actions related to the criminal investigation of WikiLeaks as the website faces increasing pressure worldwide for publishing sensitive US diplomatic cables.

"National security of the United States has been put at risk," Holder said. "The lives of people who work for the American people have been put at risk. The American people themselves have been put at risk by these actions that I believe are arrogant, misguided and ultimately not helpful in any way. We are doing everything that we can."

Holder, speaking at a news conference on financial fraud, declined to answer questions about the possibility of the US government shutting WikiLeaks down, saying he does not want to talk about capabilities and techniques at the government's disposal.

And earlier this:

The Swiss Bank Post Finance today issues a press release stating that it had frozen Julian Assange's defense fund and personal assets (€31,000) after reviewing him as a "high profile" individual.

The technicality used to seize the defense fund was that Mr Assange, as a homeless refugee attempting to gain residency in Switzerland, had used his lawyers address in Geneva for the bank's correspondence.

Late last week, the internet payment giant PayPal, froze €60,000 of donations to the German charity the Wau Holland Foundation, which were targeted to promote the sharing of knowledge via WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks and Julian have lost €100,000 in assets this week.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the Cablegate exposure is how it is throwing into relief the power dynamics between supposedly independent states like Switzerland, Sweden and Australia.

WikiLeaks also has public bank accounts in Iceland (preferred) and Germany.

Please help cover our expenditures while we fight to get our assets back.

Compare these actions on behalf of the western grovelments to this:

4.31am: Time magazine is running its annual poll of readers for its Person of the Year award – and Julian Assange is currently number one in the ratings, with more than 200,000 votes.

This is shaping up as a people versus elite/entrenched power battle.

Sit back and watch laws being broken, ignored and retrospectively changed to nail Assenge. If he has any sense he'd bugger off from Blighty where the ConLib grovelment will bend over forwards and grin in oder to appease American demands.

[Peter Lemkin]

Home Secretary, Theresa May, has ordered a "security review" as the Conservative Grovelment denounce Wikileaks latest revelations. The European arrest warrant for Assenge has been received by Scotland Yard.
And the US Attorney General is seeking laws to use against Assange:

5.20pm: Here we go: the US attorney-general says he has unspecified "significant" actions in the works against WikiLeaks regarding a criminal investigation, although won't say what they are exactly they may be:

Attorney General Eric Holder said Monday that he has authorized "significant" actions related to the criminal investigation of WikiLeaks as the website faces increasing pressure worldwide for publishing sensitive US diplomatic cables.

"National security of the United States has been put at risk," Holder said. "The lives of people who work for the American people have been put at risk. The American people themselves have been put at risk by these actions that I believe are arrogant, misguided and ultimately not helpful in any way. We are doing everything that we can."

Holder, speaking at a news conference on financial fraud, declined to answer questions about the possibility of the US government shutting WikiLeaks down, saying he does not want to talk about capabilities and techniques at the government's disposal.

And earlier this:

The Swiss Bank Post Finance today issues a press release stating that it had frozen Julian Assange's defense fund and personal assets (€31,000) after reviewing him as a "high profile" individual.

The technicality used to seize the defense fund was that Mr Assange, as a homeless refugee attempting to gain residency in Switzerland, had used his lawyers address in Geneva for the bank's correspondence.

Late last week, the internet payment giant PayPal, froze €60,000 of donations to the German charity the Wau Holland Foundation, which were targeted to promote the sharing of knowledge via WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks and Julian have lost €100,000 in assets this week.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the Cablegate exposure is how it is throwing into relief the power dynamics between supposedly independent states like Switzerland, Sweden and Australia.

WikiLeaks also has public bank accounts in Iceland (preferred) and Germany.

Please help cover our expenditures while we fight to get our assets back.

Compare these actions on behalf of the western grovelments to this:

4.31am: Time magazine is running its annual poll of readers for its Person of the Year award – and Julian Assange is currently number one in the ratings, with more than 200,000 votes.

This is shaping up as a people versus elite/entrenched power battle.

Sit back and watch laws being broken, ignored and retrospectively changed to nail Assenge. If he has any sense he'd bugger off from Blighty where the ConLib grovelment will bend over forwards and grin in oder to appease American demands.

Amazing, given the middle of the road nature of most Time Readers!!!! And who do 'they' think will get the 100,000 Euro confiscated. Assange is in deep shit if he can't pay lawyers for his defense. Even the better lawyers [minus a handful worldwide] won't work for promises or free! It is as though the whole Western and part of the non-Western World were controlled by one puppet master and that evil master is now out after Assange and Wikileaks - even making clear threats to kill his children!

[Peter Lemkin]

The Shameful Attacks on Julian Assange
December 6th, 2010 Atlantic

Julian Assange and Pfc Bradley Manning have done a huge public service by making hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. government documents available on Wikileaks — and, predictably, no one is grateful. Manning, a former army intelligence analyst in Iraq, faces up to 52 years in prison. He is currently being held in solitary confinement at a military base in Quantico, Virginia, where he is not allowed to see his parents or other outside visitors.
Assange, the organizing brain of Wikileaks, enjoys a higher degree of freedom living as a hunted man in England under the close surveillance of domestic and foreign intelligence agencies — but probably not for long. Not since President Richard Nixon directed his minions to go after Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg and New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan – “a vicious antiwar type,” an enraged Nixon called him on the Watergate tapes — has a working journalist and his source been subjected to the kind of official intimidation and threats that have been directed at Assange and Manning by high-ranking members of the Obama Administration.
Published reports suggest that a joint Justice Department-Pentagon team of investigators is exploring the possibility of charging Assange under the Espionage Act, which could lead to decades in jail. “This is not saber-rattling,” said Attorney General Eric Holder, commenting on the possibility that Assange will be prosecuted by the government. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the Wikileaks disclosures “an attack on the international community” that endangered innocent people. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs suggested in somewhat Orwellian fashion that “such disclosures put at risk our diplomats, intelligence professionals, and people around the world who come to the United States for assistance in promoting democracy and open government.”

It is dispiriting and upsetting for anyone who cares about the American tradition of a free press to see Eric Holder, Hillary Clinton and Robert Gibbs turn into H.R. Haldeman, John Erlichman and John Dean. We can only pray that we won’t soon be hit with secret White House tapes of Obama drinking scotch and slurring his words while calling Assange bad names.
Unwilling to let the Democrats adopt Nixon’s anti-democratic, press-hating legacy as their own, Republican Congressman Peter King asserted that the publication of classified diplomatic cables is “worse even than a physical attack on Americans” and that Wikileaks should be officially designed as a terrorist organization. Mike Huckabee followed such blather to its logical conclusion by suggesting that Bradley Manning should be executed.
But the truly scandalous and shocking response to the Wikileaks documents has been that of other journalists, who make the Obama Administration sound like the ACLU. In a recent article in The New Yorker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Steve Coll sniffed that “the archives that WikiLeaks has published are much less significant than the Pentagon Papers were in their day” while depicting Assange as a “self-aggrandizing control-freak” whose website “lacks an ethical culture that is consonant with the ideals of free media.” Channeling Richard Nixon, Coll labeled Wikileaks’ activities – formerly known as journalism – by his newly preferred terms of “vandalism” and “First Amendment-inspired subversion.”
Coll’s invective is hardly unique, In fact, it was only a pale echo of the language used earlier this year by a columnist at his former employer, The Washington Post. In a column titled “WikiLeaks Must Be Stopped,” Mark Thiessen wrote that “WikiLeaks is not a news organization; it is a criminal enterprise,” and urged that the site should be shut down “and its leadership brought to justice.” The dean of American foreign correspondents, John Burns of The New York Times, with two Pulitzer Prizes to his credit, contributed a profile of Assange which used terms like “nearly delusional grandeur” to describe Wikileaks’ founder. The Times‘ normally mild-mannered David Brooks asserted in his column this week that “Assange seems to be an old-fashioned anarchist” and worried that Wikileaks will “damage the global conversation.”
For his part, Assange has not been shy about expressing his contempt for the failure of traditional reporting to inform the public, and his belief in the utility of his own methods. “How is it that a team of five people has managed to release to the public more suppressed information, at that level, than the rest of the world press combined?” he told The Sydney Morning Herald. “It’s disgraceful.”
Assange may or may not be grandiose, paranoid and delusional – terms that might be fairly applied at one time or another to most prominent investigative reporters of my acquaintance. But the fact that so many prominent old school journalists are attacking him with such unbridled force is a symptom of the failure of traditional reporting methods to penetrate a culture of official secrecy that has grown by leaps and bounds since 9/11, and threatens the functioning of a free press as a cornerstone of democracy.
The true importance of Wikileaks — and the key to understanding the motivations and behavior of its founder — lies not in the contents of the latest document dump but in the technology that made it possible, which has already shown itself to be a potent weapon to undermine official lies and defend human rights. Since 1997, Assange has devoted a great deal of his time to inventing encryption systems that make it possible for human rights workers and others to protect and upload sensitive data. The importance of Assange’s efforts to human rights workers in the field were recognized last year by Amnesty International, which gave him its Media Award for the Wikileaks investigation The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances, which documented the killing and disappearance of 500 young men in Kenya by the police, with the apparent connivance of the country’s political leadership.
Yet the difficulties of documenting official murder in Kenya pale next to the task of penetrating the secret world that threatens to swallow up informed public discourse in this country about America’s wars. The 250,000 cables that Wikileaks published this month represent only a drop in the bucket that holds the estimated 16 million documents that are classified top secret by the federal government every year. According to a three-part investigative series by Dana Priest and William Arkin published earlier this year in The Washington Post, an estimated 854,000 people now hold top secret clearance – more than 1.5 times the population of Washington, D.C. “The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive,” the Post concluded, “that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.”
The result of this classification mania is the division of the public into two distinct groups: those who are privy to the actual conduct of American policy, but are forbidden to write or talk about it, and the uninformed public, which becomes easy prey for the official lies exposed in the Wikileaks documents: The failure of American counterinsurgency programs in Afghanistan, the involvement of China and North Korea in the Iranian nuclear program, the likely failure of attempts to separate Syria from Iran, the involvement of Iran in destabilizing Iraq, the anti-Western orientation of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and other tenets of American foreign policy under both Bush and Obama.
It is a fact of the current media landscape that the chilling effect of threatened legal action routinely stops reporters and editors from pursuing stories that might serve the public interest – and anyone who says otherwise is either ignorant or lying. Every honest reporter and editor in America knows that the fact that most news organizations are broke, combined with the increasing threat of aggressive legal action by deep-pocketed entities, private and public, has made it much harder for good reporters to do their jobs, and ripped a hole in the delicate fabric that holds our democracy together.
The idea that Wikileaks is a threat to the traditional practice of reporting misses the point of what Assange and his co-workers have put together – a powerful tool that can help reporters circumvent the legal barriers that are making it hard for them to do their job. Even as he criticizes the evident failures of the mainstream press, Assange insists that Wikileaks should facilitate traditional reporting and analysis. “We’re the step before the first person (investigates),” he explained, when accepting Amnesty International’s award for exposing police killings in Kenya. “Then someone who is familiar with that material needs to step forward to investigate it and put it in political context. Once that is done, then it becomes of public interest.”
Wikileaks is a powerful new way for reporters and human rights advocates to leverage global information technology systems to break the heavy veil of government and corporate secrecy that is slowly suffocating the American press. The likely arrest of Assange in Britain on dubious Swedish sex crimes charges has nothing to do with the importance of the system he has built, and which the US government seems intent on destroying with tactics more appropriate to the Communist Party of China — pressuring Amazon to throw the site off their servers, and, one imagines by launching the powerful DDOS attacks that threatened to stop visitors from reading the pilfered cables.
In a memorandum entitled “Transparency and Open Government” addressed to the heads of Federal departments and agencies and posted on WhiteHouse.gov, President Obama instructed that “Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing.” The Administration would be wise to heed his words — and to remember how badly the vindictive prosecution of Daniel Ellsberg ended for the Nixon Administration. And American reporters, Pulitzer Prizes and all, should be ashamed for joining in the outraged chorus that defends a burgeoning secret world whose existence is a threat to democracy.

[David Guyatt]

Imagine a worse case:

- Assange is arrested and shipped to Sweden. Sweden ships him to the US and thence into prison for the rest of his life (however long that might amount to in view of the angst against him?)

- the insurance file is classed by all western governments as secret in their own domestic classification, and anyone, any individual or entity, downloading, reading and circulating it would be charged with treason. The media is immediately out of the game. So are almost everyone else.

The fear would be palpable.

Fiddles polished and ready anyone?

[Peter Lemkin]

Imagine a worse case:

- Assange is arrested and shipped to Sweden. Sweden ships him to the US and thence into prison for the rest of his life (however long that might amount to in view of the angst against him?)

- the insurance file is classed by all western governments as secret in their own domestic classification, and anyone, any individual or entity, downloading, reading and circulating it would be charged with treason. The media is immediately out of the game. So are almost everyone else.

The fear would be palpable.

Fiddles polished and ready anyone?

Won't be long now...they are trying to avoid the Bank Leaks, at all costs.....!!!! The REAL Puppet-Masters of the World! I'll bet that insurance file is breaking all records for downloads. I have mine and not on my computer....on DVD's [100 of 'em] and each with a different person or place outside my flat!....:dancing2: I urge all here brave enough to download the insurance file, move it to a DVD or DVD's and spread around your friends.....they ain't gonna stop this. It is nothing short of class/Truth warfare...and who'd have thought it would break out so suddenly!...but it has!...so grab a mouse and a DVD-Recorder and get to it.....!

[Bernice Moore]

SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2010, Issue No. 96
December 6, 2010

Secrecy News Blog: http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/


** BLOCKING ACCESS TO WIKILEAKS MAY HARM CRS, ANALYSTS SAY
** NATIONAL SECURITY SECRECY: HOW THE LIMITS CHANGE


BLOCKING ACCESS TO WIKILEAKS MAY HARM CRS, ANALYSTS SAY

The Library of Congress confirmed on Friday that it had blocked access from all Library computers to the Wikileaks web site in order to prevent unauthorized downloading of classified records such as those in the large cache of diplomatic cables that Wikileaks began to publish on November 28.

Since the Congressional Research Service is a component of the Library, this means that CRS researchers will be unable to access or to cite the leaked materials in their research reports to Congress. Several current and former CRS analysts expressed perplexity and dismay about the move, and they said it could undermine the institution's research activities.

"It's a difficult situation," said one CRS analyst. "The information was released illegally, and it's not right for government agencies to be aiding and abetting this illegal dissemination. But the information is out there. Presumably, any Library of Congress researcher who wants to access the information that Wikileaks illegally released will simply use their home computers or cellphones to do so. Will they be able to refer directly to the information in their writings for the Library? Apparently not, unless a secondary source, like a newspaper, happens to have already cited it."

"I can understand LOC blocking the public's access to Wikileaks," a former CRS analyst said. "It would have no control over someone from the public using classified information for impermissible or improper purposes. [But] the connection between LOC and CRS has always been somewhat fuzzy because Congress intended CRS to have a certain amount of autonomy. There should be room for CRS to adopt a different policy, particularly for specialists who have security clearances, know how to protect classified information, and can be entrusted to use Wikileaks appropriately. To me, it is a wrong course to simply close the door tightly without searching for a compromise needed to continue providing Congress with high-level professional analysis."

In fact, if CRS is "Congress's brain," then the new access restrictions could mean a partial lobotomy.

"I don’t know that you can make a credible argument that CRS reports are the gold standard of analytical reporting, as is often claimed, when its analysts are denied access to information that historians and public policy types call a treasure trove of data," another former CRS employee said.

"I understand the rationale behind the policy decision to preclude government agencies from making the information available via their sites as a matter of pure principle. On the other hand (as CRS is famous for saying), in some cases it would clearly diminish the weight of some of the analysis CRS does on policy issues, particularly on foreign affairs and military strategy where it is widely known that key information that would help inform thoughtful and comprehensive analysis was released on Wikileaks."

"As an example, when [CRS Middle East analyst] Ken Katzman writes on U.S. policy towards Iran I don’t know how he could meet the high professional standards for completeness and accuracy he routinely meets if he can’t refer to the information in the [leaked] diplomatic notes that express the thoughts of key leaders in the region on the need to strike Iran’s nuclear program. The same with North Korea; how do you provide Congress complete and accurate analysis to inform their decision making that ignores the [leaked] information on China’s increasing frustration with Pyongyang? The examples could go on and on."

"I’m sure public policy analysts from other organizations are going to use the [Wikileaks] information and their reports may prove more valuable to decision makers than CRS reports," the former CRS employee said.

Another former analyst questioned the legal basis for the Library of Congress's action.

"In its press release, LOC seems to be saying that it is following OMB advice regarding the obligation of federal agencies and federal employees to protect classified information and to otherwise protect the integrity of government information technology systems. But LOC is statutorily chartered as the library of the House and the Senate. It is a legislative branch agency. I don't recall either chamber directing the blocking of access to Wikileaks for/or by its committees, offices, agencies, or Members."

Interestingly, the OMB guidance did not require federal agencies to block access to Wikileaks, only to warn employees against downloading classified information. So by imposing such blocks, the Library of Congress has actually exceeded the instructions of OMB.

The Library did not reply to an inquiry from Secrecy News over the weekend concerning the impact of its restricted access policy on CRS. If a reply is forthcoming, it will be posted on the Secrecy News blog.


NATIONAL SECURITY SECRECY: HOW THE LIMITS CHANGE

On December 3, I participated in an interesting, somewhat testy discussion about Wikileaks on the show Democracy Now along with Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com, who is a passionate defender of the project. The ultimate victory of Wikileaks (or something like it) is guaranteed, Mr. Greenwald suggested, so any criticism of it is basically irrelevant.

"We can debate WikiLeaks all we want," he said, "but at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter, because the technology that exists is inevitably going to subvert these institutions' secrecy regimes. It's too easy to take massive amounts of secret [material] and dump it on the internet.... And I think that what we're talking about is inevitable, whether people like Steven Aftergood or Joe Lieberman or others like it or not."

This seems like wishful thinking. It is true that Wikileaks offers the most direct public access to the diplomatic cables and other records that it has published, most of which could not be obtained any time soon through normal channels. But instead of subverting secrecy regimes, Wikileaks appears to be strengthening them, as new restrictions on information sharing are added and security measures are tightened. (Technology can be used to bolster secrecy as well as subvert it.)

In fact, Wikileaks may deliberately be attempting, in a quasi-Marxist way, to subvert secrecy by provoking governments to strengthen it. But please try this in your own country first.

It was ordinary political advocacy, not leaks, that produced reversals of longstanding U.S. government secrecy policies this year on nuclear stockpile secrecy and intelligence budget secrecy. It was also political advocacy, not leaks, that led to the declassification of more than a billion pages of classified records since 1995. Obviously, much more remains to be done, and the tools available to transparency advocates are not as powerful as one would wish. Leaks that serve the public interest have their honored place; more would be welcome. Advocacy may fail, and often does. Nothing is inevitable, as far as I know. But so far it is still politics, not the subversion or repudiation of politics, that has produced the greater impact on U.S. secrecy policy. (The calculation may well be different in other countries.)

The susceptibility of secrecy policy to political action was discussed in a paper I wrote on "National Security Secrecy: How the Limits Change" (pdf). It will appear in the forthcoming Fall 2010 issue of the journal Social Research that is devoted to the topic of "Limiting Knowledge in a Democracy."


_______________________________________________
Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation of American Scientists.

below julian assange.....

[Ed Jewett]

List of Facilities Vital to U.S. Security Leaked

December 6th, 2010 If you look at the State Department document, notice how many times the phrase, “undersea cable landing,” appears? I stopped counting after 50. This goes all the way back to one of my core assumptions on here: If “The Terrorists” were real, this show would have been down long ago. It would take no special equipment or skills. It could be done with publicly available information. It would be sudden. It would be devastating.
But it didn’t go that way. Instead, we got a three ring circus, with crashing planes, fireballs and collapsing sky scrapers.
And, for the most part, people have tolerated everything that has followed.
I have mostly doubted that my fiber optic doom’s day scenario would ever be on the table, in terms of a false flag, UNLESS, the financial system just couldn’t be doubled down again. Then… Maybe.
And, what do you know. An obscure issue that hardly anybody has heard of, outside of the industry, the military and the wonks who study it, is getting top billing across a wide swath of the mainstream press. I looked around this morning and saw stories about undersea fiber optic cables all over the place.
This Wikileaks release actually provides the perfect backstory for the cut fiber takedown scenario.
You can hear it now:
Terrorists, armed with information from WikiLeaks, and sawz-alls, delivered a strategic financial blow to the United States and its main trading partners……..
Hardly anyone will note that all of this information, and much more specific information, is and has always been publicly available. I came to the conclusion (in 1996) that infrastructure protection was just another waste of time—because THERE IS NO DEFENSE AGAINST A STRATEGIC PHYSICAL ATTACK ON COMMUNICATIONS INFRASTRUCTURE. The whole show relies on security through obscurity, which is a total joke. These things may be safe from most ten-year-olds, but that’s about it.
So, the value of this document to any attacker is nil, and anyone who has looked into infrastructure vulnerabilities knows that.
Much more interesting than the contents of this document is the real story of why Joe and Jane Six Pack are hearing about undersea cables this morning.
Via: MSNBC:
A list drawn up by U.S. officials of companies and installations around the world regarded as “critical” to the security of the United States has been published online by controversial website WikiLeaks.
The list includesfactories, ports, fuel companies, drug manufacturers, undersea cables, pipelines, communication hubs and a host of other “key resources.”

[Peter Lemkin]

Twitter: We Are Not Keeping WikiLeaks Out of Trending Topics [UPDATED] :aetsch:
December 6th, 2010

Speculation surfaced this weekend that Twitter has been censoring the discussion of WikiLeaks by keeping it out of trending topics.

According to Twitter, the list of trending topics is determined by the words, phrases or hashtags appearing in the greatest number of tweets at any given time. Given the flurry of news about WikiLeaks since it released thousands of secret U.S. embassy cables last weekend, it’s a little surprising that #WikiLeaks has been entirely left out of Twitter’s Trending Topics list.

It’s especially surprising when you look at the data compiled by a blogger known as Bubbloy, who pulled data from trendistic.com that shows that as of last night, #WikiLeaks was outperforming the top five Trending Topics on Twitter, yet it did not make the list (see graph, below).
In fact, according to his data, #WikiLeaks hasn’t been a trending topic since August 21, although #cablegate was trending last weekend.

Over at the blog Student Activism, which has also noted #WikiLeaks’s conspicuous absence from the Trending Topics, a commenter who claims to be Twitter Product Manager Josh Elman (Update (1:37 p.m. ET): Confirmed: It’s him) offered this explanation for #WikiLeaks’s absence:

“Twitter hasn’t modified trends in any way to help or prevent wikileaks from trending. #cablegate was trending last weekend and various terms around this issue have trended in different regions over the past week. Trends isn’t just about volume of a term but also the diversity of people and tweets about a term and looking for organic volume increases above the norm. I hope this helps.”

It is therefore possible that #WikiLeaks is failing to trend because the tweets simply aren’t diverse enough in content, although looking at the current list of tweets with the hashtag #WikiLeaks, this seems a little hard to believe.

Twitter Director of Communications Matt Graves likewise denied the allegations that #WikiLeaks is being censored: “Twitter is absolutely not keeping Wikileaks out of Trending Topics,” he wrote to Mashable.

This is not the first time Twitter has been accused of keeping certain hashtags out of Trending Topics. Last week, student protestors at University College London (UCL) complained that the microblogging service was keeping the hashtag #demo2010 off the list, and that Twitter even went so far as to make their accounts unavailable. Twitter likewise denied the allegations.

As a side note, Twitter’s communications team has repeatedly dodged questions about whether it will continue to allow the @WikiLeaks account to run on the service after EveryDNS.net, Amazon and PayPal terminated their service contracts with the organization, citing illegal activity.

Update (1:20 p.m. ET): Twitter has just released the following statement:

“Twitter is not censoring #wikileaks, #cablegate or other related terms from the Trends list of trending topics.

Our Trends list is designed to help people discover the ‘most breaking’ breaking news from across the world, in real-time. The list is generated by an algorithm that identifies topics that are being talked about more right now than they were previously.

There’s a number of factors that may come into play when seemingly popular terms don’t make the Trends list. Sometimes topics that are popular don’t break into the Trends list because the current velocity of conversation (volume of Tweets at a given moment) isn’t greater than in previous hours and days. Sometimes topics that are genuinely popular simply aren’t widespread enough to make the list of top Trends. And, on occasion, topics just aren’t as popular as people believe.”

source: http://mashable.com/

[Ed Jewett]

Lebanese Newspaper Publishes U.S. Cables Not Found on WikiLeaks 03 Dec 2010 Nearly 200 previously unreported U.S. diplomatic cables were posted on Thursday to the website of Lebanese newspaper Al Akhbar. The cables, from eight U.S. embassies across the Middle East and North Africa, have not appeared on Wikileaks' official website or in the Western media outlets working with Wikileaks... A series from Beirut in 2008 shows Lebanese Defense Minister Elias al-Murr telling U.S. diplomats, in a message he implied they should pass on to Israeli officials, that the Lebanese military would not resist an Israeli invasion so long as the Israeli forces abided by certain conditions. Murr, apparently hoping that an Israeli invasion would destroy much of the Hezbollah insurgency and the communities in Lebanon's south that support it, promised an Israeli invasion would go unchallenged as long as it did not pass certain physical boundaries and did not bomb Christian communities.