Will WikiLeaks unravel the American 'secret government'?

[Albert Doyle]

Why don't they just stick WMD in his back pocket like they did Saddam? That seemed to work.

[Peter Lemkin]

As previously announced, the Personal Democracy Forum will be hosting an event titled "A Symposium on WikiLeaks and Internet Freedom" today from 10am - 2pm ET, in New York City.
You can tune in live to the event via http://personaldemocracy.com/pdfleakslive :marchmellow:

10:00-11:00am: Remarks by Mark Pesce, Esther Dyson, Jeff Jarvis, Rebecca MacKinnon, Jay Rosen, Carne Ross, Douglas Rushkoff, Katrin Verclas and Gideon Lichfield (moderated by Micah Sifry)
11:00-11:45am: Open forum, moderated by Jeff "Oprah" Jarvis
11:45-12:00pm: Break
12:00pm-1:00pm: Remarks by Arianna Huffington, Charles Ferguson, Andrew Keen, Zeynep Tufekci, Tom Watson, Dave Winer, and Emily Bell (moderated by Andrew Rasiej)
1:00-2:00pm: Open forum, moderated by Jeff "Donahue" Jarvis

Each of our speakers will have seven to eight minutes for their remarks, and we will do our best to allow for plenty of audience give-and-take.

Some background notes: It is not our intention to try to hammer out a common position on Wikileaks or internet freedom over the course of this symposium, but to explore some common questions together, with respect for each other's intelligence and sincerity. PdF is a crosspartisan forum devoted to examining the impact of technology on politics, government and society. This is obviously a hinge moment in that unfolding process.

In addition, this is not an attempt at a "balanced" debate, but rather an effort to give people from the fields of new and old media, technology, academia, politics, and policy, a place where we could start to think together about the meaning of current events. The presence or absence of particular speakers or points of view should not be taken as meaning anything more than the fact that some smart, engaged people were available on extremely short notice, and other smart, engaged people weren't.

The hashtag for the event is #pdfleaks. There will be coffee and light refreshments available.

To watch or listen to the symposium live, go to personaldemocracy.com/pdfleakslive starting Saturday morning at 10:00am Eastern.

It is live now...and very good!!.....

Its very very good, I think...on live now!!! [And COPA and others - this is the kind of technology you need. It is working flawlessly, clearly and even can take online questions with video!!]

The conference was surprisingly good. It is now online at the same url. Ms. Huffington came up with the only funny one-liner {that Assange's broken condom gave new meaning to a 'wiki leak'}; but the conference was very much a serious one on assuring internet freedom and will be followed-up in multiple cities and countries with similar ones. Again, whatever one thinks of Assange and/or Wikileaks they are no longer the issue - they have brought up THE ISSUE - which is who will control the internet and its content - or if it will be a democratic and free place for the exchange of ideas and information.

[Ed Jewett]

I look forward to sending a check to PO Box ___.

Given the sense that some have that all of the Wikileaks matter is lending itself incrementally toward a shutdown of the 'net, or the establishment of some pre-registration, security and payment mechanism in order to be able to be able to read certain sites, and

given the earlier indications (continuing and ongoing) about the establishment of lists of dissidents [see the content on Main Core etc. elsewhere here at DPF],

the establishment of thousands of mirrors and the ability to track everyone who accesses them adds volume to the lists.

Maybe if we get everyone on the list, the list-managers will get the point.

[Ed Jewett]

Reddit
Dec 11, 2010

I was going thru WikiLeaks mirrors list, and noticed a small oddity; http://wikileaks.psytek.net was on netblock which belonged Central Intelligence Agency. It has now changed, but 010-12-08 12:27:34 (EEST) was still registered for CIA.


http://www.prisonplanet.com/cia-running-wi...irror-site.html

[Peter Lemkin]

WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange was in a segregation unit of a London jail Saturday for his safety, as new secret US diplomatic cables were made public, increasing the embarrassment to Washington.

The 39-year-old Australian has been transferred from the main section of Wandsworth prison to an isolation unit, Jennifer Robinson, one of his legal team, said Friday.

“The prison authorities are doing it for his own safety, presumably,” she told AFP.

Assange is due to appear in a London court for a second time Tuesday after being arrested on a warrant issued by Sweden, where prosecutors want to question him about allegations of rape and sexual molestation made by two women.

WikiLeaks insists the allegations are politically motivated because the whistleblowing website has enraged Washington and governments around the world by releasing thousands of classified US diplomatic cables.

Robinson complained that Assange “does not get any recreation” in the prison and “has difficulties getting phone calls out… he is on his own.”

The former computer hacker is not allowed to have a laptop in his cell, but his lawyers have requested one.

“We are trying to prepare a legal appeal and he has difficulties hand writing, so it would be much easier in order to assist us in the preparation if he had a laptop,” Robinson said, without explaining why he had difficulty writing.

Assange is in “very good” spirits but “frustrated” that he cannot answer the allegations that WikiLeaks was behind cyber attacks launched on credit card firms which have refused to do business with the website.

“He told me he is absolutely not involved and this is a deliberate attempt to conflate WikiLeaks, which is a publishing organisation, with hacking organisations which are not,” she said.

The websites of the Dutch prosecutor’s office and police became the latest target of cyber attacks Friday, “probably” linked to the arrest of a 16-year-old WikiLeaks supporter, officials said.

Assange’s lawyer however denied reports that his legal team believe a US indictment over WikiLeaks is imminent.

But she added: “Our position is that any prosecution under the espionage act would be unconstitutional and call into question First Amendment protections for all media organisations.”

Assange’s mother said she was worried for her son because “massive forces” were ranged against him.

Christine Assange dismissed the rape accusations, but told Australia’s Seven Network she was concerned about what will happen to him.

“Julian, rape? Straight out of my guts — no way. Julian would not rape,” she said, adding: “It’s a worry, of course. I am no different from any other mother.

“These massive forces have decided they are going to stop him and they are not going to play by the rules.”

US cables released by WikiLeaks Saturday showed the Vatican refused to cooperate with an Irish probe into child sex abuse by Catholic priests in Dublin because the requests were not made through official channels.

Requests for information by the 2009 Murphy commission “offended many in the Vatican… because they saw them as an affront to Vatican sovereignty”, according to a cable from the US embassy in Rome, leaked by WikiLeaks.

The Murphy commission’s findings, published in November 2009, caused shock across Ireland and the worldwide Catholic community by detailing how Church authorities covered up for paedophile priests in Dublin for three decades.

Another cable leaked earlier showed London’s envoy to the Vatican feared the pope’s invitation for disgruntled Anglicans to switch to Catholicism might spark anti-Catholic violence in Britain.

http://www.france24.com/

[Ed Jewett]

Wikileaks Founder: Bigger Bombshells On The Way

Cryptome.org’s John Young, “the original Wikileaker,” warns that Assange is being set up to be the fall guy for a massive lurch towards Internet censorship

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Friday, December 10, 2010
One of the original members of Wikileaks warns that a series of bigger bombshell revelations are in the pipeline and that the growing crisis being contrived around the group and its figurehead Julian Assange is greasing the skids for the cybersecurity agenda to regulate and censor the world wide web.
Cryptome.org founder John Young, who the New York Observer recently characterized as “the original Wikileaker,” told the Alex Jones Show how he volunteered to register Wikileaks.org in December 2007 under his name for Wikileaks members who wanted to remain anonymous, with the understanding that the site was merely for the public benefit. Young became suspicious when he was subsequently told that the aim was to raise $5 million dollars within the first six months.
“I said wait a minute, that doesn’t sound like public benefit to me, that sounds like a high value funded program,” said Young, likening the scenario to a George Soros-style outfit.
“This was a business operation not a public benefit operation and it’s turned out to be that,” said Young, concurring with the fact that Wikileaks was introduced into the public arena by Cass Sunstein in a Washington Post editorial. This is important because in a 2008 white paper, Sunstein, who is now Obama’s White House information czar, argued that government entities should pose as “conspiracy theorists” as part of a clandestine plot to discredit independent media voices and ultimately demolish free speech on the Internet.
Young said that Wikileaks provided the perfect pretext for government to raise funds for a cybersecurity infrastructure that would eventually be used to silence free speech and regulate the Internet.
“Some of the enthusiasts for Wikileaks seem to be operating in concert with some of its opponents, it looks like they’re in lock step to me,” said Young, noting that the whole fiasco was a display of theatre designed to test whether the cybersecurity agenda is ready to get traction. Given the fact that establishment Republicans are already introducing legislation aimed at criminalizing Wikileaks, circumstances clearly indicate that the crisis is being exploited to push Internet censorship.
Although George Soros’ Open Society Institute denies having any connection to Wikileaks, Young personally had conversations with Wikileaks founders who told him of their efforts to secure funding from the organization, at which point Young resigned from Wikileaks. Young said that Wikileaks were all but bankrupt when they were operating on their own but have now “raised millions by being on the inside.”
As to who is actually behind Wikileaks aside from Assange himself, Young pointed to a Wikipedia list of “Cypherpunks,” Internet gurus, some of whom now hold prominent positions in major technology companies, who were responsible for a mailing list that started in 1992 for people interested in privacy and cryptography.

three long YouTubes of Alex Jones show with interviews with John Young at this link:


http://www.prisonplanet.com/wikileaks-fo...e-way.html

[Ed Jewett]

8 December 2010

Wikileaks Reneges Bradley Manning Promise

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Bradley Manning Support Network accepts responsibility for all expenses to defend accused Wikileaks whistle-blower
MEDIA
Jeff Paterson, Steering Committee, Bradley Manning Support Network
jeff[at]bradleymanning.org
+1-510-488-3559
Oakland, CA, December 8, 2010 - Since July 2010, the Bradley Manning Support Network, in collaboration with Oakland, CA based Courage to Resist, has solicited and distributed funds in support of accused Wikileaks whistle-blower Bradley Manning. Over 1,200 individuals and organizations have responded with contributions totaling over $90,000, either to the defense fund or to Bradley's legal trust account. Thus far $50,000 has been transferred to Bradley's lead civilian attorney, David Coombs, half of the total expected legal expense of $100,000.
The Support Network has also made expenditures for printing and international distribution of leaflets, posters and information cards; staging public forums, events and demonstrations; production of banners, t-shirts, stickers and whistles for organizers; travel expenses for Bradley's visitors at the Quantico brig; communication expenses, including phone and Internet hosting; processing the "Stand with Brad" public declaration and petition (www.standwithbrad.org); accounting; fiscal fees and credit card company fees.
Immediately following Bradley's arrest in late June 2010, the whistle-blower website Wikileaks publicly solicited donations specifically for Bradley's legal defense expenses. In July 2010, Wikileaks pledged to contribute a "substantial amount" towards Bradley's legal defense costs. Since Bradley's selection of David Coombs as his civilian defense attorney in August 2010, the Bradley Manning Support Network has unsuccessfully attempted to facilitate the pledged Wikileaks contribution.
"We understand the difficult situation Wikileaks currently faces as the world's governments conspire to extinguish the whistle-blower website," explained Jeff Paterson, Bradley Manning Support Network steering committee member and project director of Courage to Resist (couragetoresist.org). "However, in order to meet Bradley Manning's legal defense needs, we're forced to clarify that Wikileaks has not yet made a contribution towards this effort. We certainly welcome any contribution from Wikileaks, but we need to inform our supporters that it may not be forthcoming and that their continued contributions and support are crucial."
Donations towards Bradley's defense can be made at bradleymanning.org -- to either the Support Network for both public education efforts and legal defense, or directly to Bradley's legal trust account.
# # #



http://cryptome.org/0003/wikileaks-renege.htm

[Ed Jewett]

Wikileaks Founder: Bigger Bombshells On The Way

Cryptome.org’s John Young, “the original Wikileaker,” warns that Assange is being set up to be the fall guy for a massive lurch towards Internet censorship

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Friday, December 10, 2010
One of the original members of Wikileaks warns that a series of bigger bombshell revelations are in the pipeline and that the growing crisis being contrived around the group and its figurehead Julian Assange is greasing the skids for the cybersecurity agenda to regulate and censor the world wide web.

<snip>

“This was a business operation not a public benefit operation and it’s turned out to be that,” said Young, concurring with the fact that Wikileaks was introduced into the public arena by Cass Sunstein in a Washington Post editorial. This is important because in a 2008 white paper, Sunstein, who is now Obama’s White House information czar, argued that government entities should pose as “conspiracy theorists” as part of a clandestine plot to discredit independent media voices and ultimately demolish free speech on the Internet.
Young said that Wikileaks provided the perfect pretext for government to raise funds for a cybersecurity infrastructure that would eventually be used to silence free speech and regulate the Internet.
“Some of the enthusiasts for Wikileaks seem to be operating in concert with some of its opponents, it looks like they’re in lock step to me,” said Young, noting that the whole fiasco was a display of theatre designed to test whether the cybersecurity agenda is ready to get traction. Given the fact that establishment Republicans are already introducing legislation aimed at criminalizing Wikileaks, circumstances clearly indicate that the crisis is being exploited to push Internet censorship.
Although George Soros’ Open Society Institute denies having any connection to Wikileaks, Young personally had conversations with Wikileaks founders who told him of their efforts to secure funding from the organization, at which point Young resigned from Wikileaks. Young said that Wikileaks were all but bankrupt when they were operating on their own but have now “raised millions by being on the inside.”
As to who is actually behind Wikileaks aside from Assange himself, Young pointed to a Wikipedia list of “Cypherpunks,” Internet gurus, some of whom now hold prominent positions in major technology companies, who were responsible for a mailing list that started in 1992 for people interested in privacy and cryptography.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/wikileaks-fo...e-way.html

In case you missed it scrolling on by...

[Ed Jewett]

11 December 2010

[B]Six Anti-Theses on WikiLeaks [/B]

Date: Fri, 10 Dec 2010 23:41:07 -0500
From: Faculty of the College of Ontopoetic Machines <faculty[at]ontopoeticmachines.org>
To: nettime-l[at]kein.org
Subject: <nettime> Six Anti-Theses on WikiLeaks
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Six Anti-Theses on WikiLeaks
Following "Twelve theses on WikiLeaks" by Geert Lovink & Patrice Riemens
1. Wikileaks exposes the slippery moralism of global capital.
The corporate abdication of non-discrimination prefigures more scrutiny of online activity. Visa, Amazon, Mastercard, Tableau, PayPal, PostFinance, and EveryDNS: each severed their relationship with one or more aspects of the WikiLeaks organization due to technicalities. None were served with legal documents requiring that they stop supporting "illegal" activity; rather, some caved due to vague public and private requests by functionaries within US government offices. Yet, these business have no moral qualms as to provide similar services to the Ku Klux clan, homophobic sites and just about anything else. As to the decision to cut Wikileaks off they justified their actions via the legalese of their Terms of Service (ToS) or Acceptable Use Policy (AUP), contracts that we all accept as the necessary evil of using free services online. AUPs, once the interest of legal scholars or small actors who fell afoul of them, now become the prime means for ending of services to the undesirable. (Recall, for example, Facebooks' threat of legal action against the seppukoo project. This is a refrain that continues to haunt the online space; however it was never seen with such vehemence as with WikiLeaks.) Yet in a truism, this does not only eliminate the possibility of online activity, for the actions of Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal prevent the flow of electronic currency to WikiLeaks, requiring the organization to ask for either bank transfers (that are prohibitively expensive for people in the US) or paper money orders sent to a physical address. These actions by financial institutions foreground the linkage between online activities and their real reliance on forms of money that are still tied to large corporations. As well, the use of contractual language to engage in corporate censorship enables what is prohibited by US Constitutional guarantees, among other legal safeguards elsewhere in the world. Given the tiered nature of the internet---in that a hosting provider purchases bandwidth from a separate company, that probably purchases DNS service from a separate company---means that any activity can be forced offline by any intermediary if found to be in violation of the ToS. While you may have legal recourse via a civil suit, such an undertaking is oftentimes impossible due to the legal costs involved and the vastly unequal power differential.
2. Wikileaks draws on the tense affair between the antiauthoritarian ethos of hacker culture and the authoritarian logic of capital, also known as neoliberalism.
WikiLeaks found a characteristically computational way around their hosting problems, drawing on an unorganized group of volunteers to provide mirrors of the site (http://wikileaks.ch/mirrors.html). This strategy of providing mirrors for content hearkens back to 1990s internet culture, where the practice of setting up FTP mirrors was commonplace (hacker culture itself is situated in the 1940s, see Steven Levy). Mirroring mitigates the impact of corporate censorship somewhat, but is likely to be impractical on a large scale in the long-term, especially for all of the worthwhile projects that can be removed by intermediaries. Nevertheless, this example of mirroring is an interesting case of hackers relaxing their security mindset for what they perceive as a greater good. Setting up a WikiLeaks mirror requires the administrator to allow a member of WikiLeaks remote access to their server in order to upload new files as needed; this is made possible using public-key encryption techniques, the focus of much hacker attention in the 1990s. Usually system administrators would never open their servers for unknown people to upload files. But there seems to be a belief here that the sysadmins of WikiLeaks, whomever they are, will not abuse their power and will only upload what they say they will upload. There is something here that deserves greater scrutiny, especially in light of what Mathieu O'Neil calls "hacker charismatic authority". Most studies consider this as a form of authority over people; in this case, however, the authority is exercised amongst sysadmins, enabling them to open their machines to the unknown WikiLeaks administrators.
3. Wikileaks shows that any system is vulnerable to infiltration.
WikiLeaks is highly collaborative, and not only as a result of the recent mirroring activity. Indeed, the project is only possible due to their collaboration with the individuals and groups providing the content to be leaked. Throughout the recent consternation over "Cablegate", the hundreds, if not thousands, of other people who have put their lives on the line to pass documents to WikiLeaks have unfortunately been forgotten, Bradley Manning excluded. To ignore these people is to make a grave analytical error. Be thankful that we do not know their names, for if we did, they would be in immediate danger.
4. Wikileaks demonstrates that the human 'factor' is the weak spot of networks.
The "Cablegate" release also shows the importance of having collaborators within governmental and military institutions. If we assume that Manning is the source of the diplomatic and military cables---and this has not been proven yet---then we can see how individuals within these organizations are disgusted with the conduct of the war. This is of a piece with other projects such as Iraq Veterans Against the War and the War Veteran's Book Project that aim to present the personal side of the present conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan as a way of organizing public outrage. Do not discount the power of solidarity with disgruntled soldiers. We only have to recall the Abril Revolution in 1974 in Portugal, where the military supported the peaceful transition from the Salazar dictatorship, to understand how important it is to have military forces on one's side. Recall as well that the main technical tool used to anonymize submissions to WikiLeaks, Tor (The Onion Router), came out of a US Naval Research Laboratory project to protect clandestine activities overseas. In fact, members of the military are some of the most vocal opponents of current attempts in the US to require person-level attribution of data packets online.
5. WikiLeaks is a classic example of using media as a tool for de-dehumanizing.
The actions of Anonymous on the websites of Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, PostFinance, and others are in a lineage with the FloodNet by the Electronic Disturbance Theater. While many mainstream media sources see these as "attacks", others, such as the editors of The Guardian, realize them to be "non-violent action or civil disobedience". We do not want to discount how easy it is for the media and authorities to misconstrue these actions as illegal denial of service attacks, as a 16-year old Dutch teenager is finding out right now, or as the EDT and b.a.n.g. lab found out earlier this year. Nevertheless, we are seeing a certain maturation of this technique as acceptable to others outside of the net.art community.
Furthermore, the deliberation process of Anonymous prefigures future forms of activist collaboration online, subject to the caveats mentioned above. Discussions happened across a diversity of networked media, both old and new (IRC, Twitter, Blogspot, PiratePad, etc.). Orderly discussion under the control of a leader was not the norm, as individuals simultaneously put forth their own suggestions to have them edited into or out of existence. As Gabriella Coleman wrote in her analysis of their planning, they appeared to be "seasoned political activists", not simply "script-kiddies" as they are described by both the mainstream media and other hacker organizations such as 2600. Maybe there is something those of us interested in new forms of organization can learn from these predominantly 16-24-year olds.
6. Wikileaks suggests an understanding of a notion of networks as media assemblages.
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the recent Wikileaks phenomenon has to do with what it portends for future networked tendencies. Given what we stated in anti-thesis 1, we ought to pay more attention to the movement of information outside of Internet-based networks. There is a tendency to conflate network sharing of data with the Internet proper, but this is not a necessary condition. Indeed, there are multitudinous methods of arranging networks of humans and things that do not rely on corporate or government controlled conduits for the passage of bits. Consider, for example, the host of artistic projects in this space just from the past couple of years: netless, Feral Trade, deadswap, Dead Drops, Fluid Nexus, Autonet, etc. These projects rely on assemblages of humans and infrastructure in motion. And, they rely in part on a prior agreement among participants with respect to protocols to follow. This is already at work in the Wikileaks project with respect to their main members. Only they know who they are; we are in the dark, and rightly so. This is an application of Hakim Bey's concept of Immediatism, updated to take into account a certain mongrel of immediate contact and networked activities.
Additionally, the projects just mentioned foreground a certain notion of slowness that works to counteract the notions of "information overload". If data transport relies on the motion of humans from one location to another, this will require a particular patience, producing a form of slowness. Nevertheless, this should not be understood as a pastoral call as voiced by certain proponents of, for example, the Slow Food Movement. Rather it is a way to reinvigorate thought and practice regarding human-scale machinic assemblages. What remains is the difficult and challenging work of producing long-term, permanent ad-hoc networks.
Members of the Faculty of the College of Ontopoetic Machines
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http://cryptome.org/0003/wikileaks-six.htm

[David Guyatt]

Julian Assange's Lawyers Warn of Imminent US Charges
Legal team for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says Washington plans to invoke Espionage Act to indict their client

by Steven Morris

The US may be about to press charges against Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, one of his lawyers said today.

Jennifer Robinson said an indictment of her client under the US's Espionage Act was imminent. She said her team had heard from "several different US lawyers rumours that an indictment was on its way or had happened already, but we don't know".

According to some reports, Washington is seeking to prosecute Assange under the 1917 act, which was used unsuccessfully to try to gag the New York Times when it published the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s.

The only clause I could see in the Act when I checked it a couple of days ago, was the Sedition Act of 1917 (absorbed into the Espionage Act) which, was originally an Act of King George used against Americans in the War of independence.

How noble and telling it would be of the Obama Administration to bring it back to prominence now.

Do I trust the British 'Bullingdon 'pro-American'" government to fight the ball-less extradition agreement that allows the US to demand extradition without providing evidence of the claimed offense?

No.

Do I think the trumped up Swedish "wape" charges may have been used to get Assange into custody so that a "greater" charge of "espionage" takes precedence over the fallacious "wape" accusations?

The possibility has entered my mind.

Do I think a deal might have been hammered out between the Bullingdon grovelment and the Obama mirage-ment... possibly weeks ago?

Well, yes...

Signed,

Worried