Wikileaks Payback - Offensive and Defensive

[Peter Lemkin]

A Symposium on Wikileaks and Internet Freedom

Saturday, December 11, from 10:00 AM - 2:00 PM (ET), New York City
In the digital age, should all information be free?
Does good government require secrecy, or more openness?
Can we trust private internet service providers to defend free speech?
Is Wikileaks a terrorist organization, or the beginning of a new kind of transnational investigative journalism?

Join us to explore these questions with:

Emily Bell, Director of Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School
Esther Dyson, EDventure
Allison Fine, Co-author, The Networked Nonprofit
Charles Ferguson, Director, Inside Job and No End in Sight
Arianna Huffington, Co-founder and editor-in-chief, The Huffington Post
Jeff Jarvis, Professor, CUNY Graduate School of Journalism
Andrew Keen, Author of the forthcoming book, Digital Vertigo: An Anti-Social Manifesto
Gideon Lichfield, Deputy digital editor, The Economist
Rebecca MacKinnon, Senior fellow, New America Foundation and author of the forthcoming book, Consent of the Networked
Mark Pesce, Author and futurist
Andrew Rasiej, Co-founder, Personal Democracy Forum
Jay Rosen, NYU Journalism School and PressThink.org
Jack Rosenthal, Senior fellow, Atlantic Philanthropies
Carne Ross, Director, Independent Diplomat and former UK Diplomat
Douglas Rushkoff, Author, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age
Micah L. Sifry, Co-founder, Personal Democracy Forum
Katrin Verclas, Principal, New Rights Group
Tom Watson, Author, CauseWired: Plugging In, Getting Involved, Changing the World
Dave Winer, Editor, Scripting News and Visiting Scholar, NYU
and more...

Space is limited. Tickets will not be available at the door.
Event hashtag: #pdfleaks
Press inquiries only: Contact Justin Kazmark (justin@threadwell.org, 646-483-3700)

Saturday, December 11, 10am-2pm*
Riverpark: A Tom Colicchio Restaurant
450 East 29th Street (east of 1st Ave just before the FDR & East River)
New York, NY 10016

Event tickets: Eventbrite
---------------------------------------------------------
We would like to remind you that a few events are taking place Melbourne: A meeting to discuss Wikileaks' Julian Assange's legal and political position
Speakers: Julian Burnside AO QC, Peter Gordon, John Faine and Professor Spencer Zifcak
Date: Thursday 9 December 2010
Time: 5:30pm
Venue: the Law Institute of Victoria, 470 Bourke St, Melbourne
Details: http://www.law.monash.edu.au/castancentr...index.html

AUSTRALIA: National rallies to defend Julian Assange and WikiLeaks

Media release: http://wlcentral.org/node/556

Website: http://rally4wikileaks.com/

Sydney: Friday, December 10, 1pm
Location: Sydney Town Hall
Media contacts: Antony Loewenstein 0402 893 690; Simon Butler 0421 231 011. Rally information: Kylie Gilbert 0451 827 693
Event page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=161656067211736

Melbourne: Friday, December 10, 4:30pm
Location: State Library Lawns, Melbourne
Contact: Vashti Jane 0423 407 910.
Event page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=182297491780623

Brisbane: Thursday, December 9, 5.30pm
Location: Brisbane Square CBD
Event page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=153885131325141

Brisbane: Friday, December 10, 12:00 noon
Location: Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade, 295 Anne Street, Brisbane CBD
Rally information: Liam Hanlon 0435 266 613. Media contact: Jim McIlroy 0423 741 734
Event page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=155161634529449

Hobart: Saturday, December 11, 12:00 noon
Location: Hobart Parliament Lawns
Event page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=171620612868329

Adelaide: Sunday, December 12, 1:00pm
Location: Parliament House
Event page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=182236928453862

Perth: Friday, December 10, 6:00pm
Location: Wesley Church, corner of William & Hay Streets, Perth City

Canberra: Thursday, December 16, 5:30pm
Location: Garema Place, Civic
Event page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=109503732454066

UNITED KINGDOM

London: Saturday, December 11: 11:00am - 6:00pm Location "Cumberland Gate" at Marble Arch Hyde Park. Nearest tube station - Marble Arch
Event page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=175481195812657

London: Tuesday, December 14, 11:00am - 6:00pm
Location: City of Westminster Magistrates' Court, 70 Horseferry Rd, Westminster, London SW1P
Directions: Google maps
Nearby stations: St. James Park, Victoria and Pimlico

UNITED STATES

Washington, DC: Thursday, December 16, 10:00am
Location: In front of the White House
Event details: http://www.zcommunications.org/with-wiki...e-communit...

New York City, NY: Thursday, December 9, 6:30pm - 0:30am
Location: New York Times Bldg, New York, NY 10018
Event page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=155203287858724

New York City, NY: Thursday, December 9, 5:00pm
Location: Federal Building, Broadway between Worth and Duane St, NY, NY
(A, C, E, R, 4, 5, 6 Trains to Chamber and/or Brooklyn Bridge stops)
Event page: http://www.iacenter.org/nyc_actions/
Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=182681678414096
Organized by: International Action Center, 212-633-6646

Olympia, WA: Saturday, December 18, 1:00pm - 4:00pm
Location: Heritage Park (5th Ave and Water St)
Event page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Wikileaks-...WA/1747382...

New York City, NY: Saturday, December 11 at 12:00 noon
Location: British Consulate-General at 845 Third Ave.

Minneapolis, MN: Monday, December 13, 4:30pm - 5:30pm
Location: Senator Klobuchar's Minneapolis Office, 1200 Washington Ave S., Minneapolis, MN
Event page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=109641875774406

GERMANY

Hamburg: Saturday, December 11, 11:00am - 6:00pm
Location: To be announced
Event page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=112899808778406

CANADA

Montreal: Sunday, December 12th, 1:00pm
Location: 1155 St-Alexandre Street (US consulate)
Event page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=166504226718137

AUSTRIA

Vienna: Wednesday, December 22th, 8:00pm – 10:00pm
Location: In front of the Parliament
Event page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=134852293237996

PORTUGAL

Lisbon: Saturday, December 11, 3:00pm - 6:00pm
Location: To be announced
Event page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=109098922496334

THE NETHERLANDS

Amsterdam: Saturday, December 11, 1:30pm
Location: Dam Square
New York, NY: Thursday, December 9, 6:30pm - 0:30am
Location: New York Times Bldg, New York, NY 10018
Event page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=155203287858724

New York, NY: Thursday, December 9, 5:00pm
Location: Federal Building, Broadway between Worth and Duane St, NY, NY
(A, C, E, R, 4, 5, 6 Trains to Chamber and/or Brooklyn Bridge stops)
Event page: http://www.iacenter.org/nyc_actions/
Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=182681678414096
Organized by: International Action Center, 212-633-6646
Please join us for an emergency action in response to the unlawful censoring and aggressive attacks on WikiLeaks and the threats on Julian Assange's life and right to due process.


Stop Amazon, Paypal and the US government from censoring WikiLeaks and the Internet!
Stop the threats on Assange's life and release him. End the detainment of Bradley Manning!

People around the world have a right to know the consequences of endless wars waged by the US government. WikiLeaks and its sources have done a service to humanity.

Stop ALL the attacks on the many courageous WikiLeaks activists around the world.
WikiLeaks has no blood on its hands — the US government does!

Charge the REAL War Criminals!
Stop the wars!
Stop the cover-ups!
Free Bradley Manning!
Called by the International Action Center, http://www.IACenter.org 212-633-6646

[Peter Lemkin]

10.05am: Amazon may have ditched WikiLeaks but you can still buy Kindle versions of the leaked cables documents from the site.

My colleague Charles Arthur also points to other WikiLeaks books and booty available through Amazon, including a WikiLeaks Freedom T-shirt.

Corporate Capitalism has only one god :adore:$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$:bandit:

[Peter Lemkin]

Julian Assange cast as common enemy as US left and right unite

Growing clamour sees Republicans and Democrats demanding action against WikiLeaks founder

Ed Pilkington
The Guardian, Thursday 9 December 2010

Julian Assange: Republicans have labelled him a terrorist and even liberal Democrats have called for him to be prosecuted. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

The outcry against Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is intensifying in the US, drawing a rare degree of consensus from politicians and pundits who have collectively cast him in the role of a common enemy.

In the past few days the calls for action against Assange have grown steadily louder and more shrill, with leading Republicans labelling him a terrorist, and top liberal Democratic politicians, albeit in more moderate language, also calling for his prosecution.

The highly unusual bipartisan hounding of Assange has led some free speech campaigning groups to warn of a "chilling effect," in which the threats of legal action are already having an impact on the open spirit of the internet.

The most extreme attacks have come from prominent Republicans including Sarah Palin, who has likened Assange to an al-Qaida operative; Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, who called him a "hi-tech terrorist"; and Newt Gingrich, who called him an information terrorist and said he should be arrested as an "enemy combatant" .

Assange was also attacked by leading Democrats such as Dianne Feinstein, who said he should be charged under the US espionage act, and John Kerry, who has called for the law to be changed to allow a prosecution of the WikiLeaks website.

Gabriel Schoenfeld, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington and author of Necessary Secrets, said the cross-party baying put the Obama administration in a difficult place. "There is a huge amount of pressure on them to do something about WikiLeaks."

This week Joe Lieberman, the independent senator who has long been an opponent of WikiLeaks, widened the net when he accused the New York Times of an "act of bad citizenship" by publishing versions of the US embassy cables and called on the justice department to hold a "very intensive inquiry" into whether the paper had committed a crime.

Schoenfeld and other experts on the US first amendment think it highly unlikely that a prosecution will be brought against the New York Times – no news outlet has ever been charged under the espionage act and the supreme court ruled out such an action against the same newspaper over the leak of the Pentagon Papers in 1971.

The Times is keeping its head down for the moment, saying only that "We believe that our decision to publish was responsible journalism, legal, and important to a democratic society". It has also published a long explanation of why it went ahead with the embassy leaks.

So far key Obama administration figures have adopted a more temperate tone than much of the swirling debate around them. Robert Gates, the defence secretary, has called the embassy cables "moderate" in their seriousness and said arguments that they had damaged national security were "fairly significantly overwrought".

The secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, has played a double game, threatening to take "aggressive steps" against disseminators of the cables while emphasising the positive worth of an open internet.

Eric Holder, the US attorney general, who will have the final decision on whether to prosecute, has said he will do everything he can to hold WikiLeaks accountable, but has not specified what that would mean.

"Whether or not new laws are passed to further curb freedom of speech, there is already a chilling effect," said Steve Rendall of the media watchdog Fair.

There is already evidence that some people who were willing to donate to WikiLeaks in support of the site's freedom of information work have now stopped doing so for fear of being arrested as terrorist funders .

Bloggers pointed out that if Feinstein's desire to wield the espionage act against WikiLeaks were followed through, it would have a powerful deadening effect on mainstream media outlets' efforts to report on national security matters.

However, some at the coal face of internet publishing say that they are unfazed by the current furore. John Young, whose website cryptome.org has published about 60,000 classified and non-classified documents over the past 14 years, believes the storm will pass.

"This is just typical arm-waving and yelling. If anything, this will just further wind people up to oppose authority and send in more documents."

[Magda Hassan]

10.05am: Amazon may have ditched WikiLeaks but you can still buy Kindle versions of the leaked cables documents from the site.

My colleague Charles Arthur also points to other WikiLeaks books and booty available through Amazon, including a WikiLeaks Freedom T-shirt.

Corporate Capitalism has only one god :adore:$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$:bandit:

:hahaha::eviltongue::reddy::banghead::argh:
It's kind of funny and sad all at once.
Wasn't it Lenin said something about capitalists will sell you the rope with which they will later be hung.

[David Guyatt]

Gabriel Schoenfeld, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington and author of Necessary Secrets, said the cross-party baying put the Obama administration in a difficult place. "There is a huge amount of pressure on them to do something about WikiLeaks."

What a piece of outright sham and bollocks. Obama being forced into doing something. My arse. Obama is "their" boy. He'll do whatever they tell him. And pols whether on the left or the right are "their" boys, and they'll do whatever they're told to do.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Gabriel Schoenfeld, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington and author of Necessary Secrets, said the cross-party baying put the Obama administration in a difficult place. "There is a huge amount of pressure on them to do something about WikiLeaks."

What a piece of outright sham and bollocks. Obama being forced into doing something. My arse. Obama is "their" boy. He'll do whatever they tell him. And pols whether on the left or the right are "their" boys, and they'll do whatever they're told to do.

Bollox indeed.

As is this from the MSM article in post #33 above:

Julian Assange cast as common enemy as US left and right unite

I just lurve the explicit MSM assumption that Democrats and Republicans represent the US left and right.

Here's a response more articulate than mine:

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul

And I hope that you die
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand o'er your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead

[Magda Hassan]

FBI Raids Texas Server Farm for Clues to Anonymous Group, Operation Payback


Share
By: Fahmida Y. Rashid
2010-12-30



Federal agents seized two hard drives from a server in a Texas company believed to have been used to launch the DDoS attack against PayPal as part of a pro-WikiLeaks protest.

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The FBI raided a Dallas-based server farm and seized servers used in the distributed denial-of-service attack against PayPal earlier this month, according to an affidavit obtained by the Smoking Gun Web site.
Federal agents are looking for clues as to the identity of the hackers who orchestrated the DDOS attack on PayPal, according to the affidavit. It is unclear whether the raids were successful in that regard.
The FBI began their investigation shortly after the Anonymous group of Internet activists launched DDoS attacks against PayPal and other financial and technical service companies for cutting off support to the WikiLeaks site after it published thousands of secret U.S. state department cables.
The PayPal blog was offline for a few hours as part of the DDoS campaign the Anonymous group called "Operation Payback." Volunteers were encouraged to download a point-and-click DDoS tool to attack PayPal and other targets, including Visa, MasterCard, Bank of America (earlier this week), and a Swiss bank who froze WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's accounts.
FBI investigators believe that some volunteers used botnets of compromised machines to launch a more potent assault, according to the affidavit.
"Vigilante DDoS, a bunch of kids getting together and running a software," is not a particularly powerful attack because there is not enough volume, Jason Hoffman, of Joyent, told eWEEK. Attackers would have needed five to fifteen million people all on high broadband connections to "be effective," he said.
PayPal provided FBI agents with eight IP addresses of servers that were used to run IRC chat servers associated with planning the Operation Payback attacks, according to the affidavit. Investigators believed the same systems were used as command and control hubs for botnets used during the DDOS attacks.
According to the affidavit, "multiple, severe DDos attacks" had been launched against PayPal, which amount to felony violations of a federal law covering the "unauthorized and knowing transmission of code or commands resulting in intentional damage to a protected computer system."
One IP address was traced to Host Europe, a Germany-based Internet service provider. The server in question turned out to belong to a man from Herrlisheim, France, but that the root-level access to the machine appeared to be from a remote user with administrator access, said the affidavit. The log files indicate the commands to execute the attack came from this remote address, which led investigators to hosting firm Tailor Made Services in Dallas, Texas.
Investigators believe the command to launch the attack was made on Tailor Made Services systems and relayed to this server in Germany to hide its origin.
A pair of log entries on the compromised Host Europe machine contained the same message: "Good_night,_paypal_Sweet_dreams_from_AnonOPs." according to a sworn statement from FBI agent Allyn Lynd.
Agents raided Tailor Made Services on Dec. 16 after getting a search warrant based on the affidavit. Agents copied two hard drives from the targeted server during this raid, according to Smoking Gun. There is currently no information available about what was found on the drives.
Another IP address associated with the attacks was traced to a Canadian ISP in British Columbia, which was actually a virtual server physically hosted at California-based "co-location" firm, Hurricane Electric. There is no information as to whether the company had been raided by agents at this time.

[Peter Lemkin]

Incipient Fascist State: America Has Gone Away

by Paul Craig Roberts


Anyone who doesn't believe that the US is an incipient fascist state needs only to consult the latest assault on civil liberty by Fox News (sic). Instead of informing citizens, Fox News (sic) informs on citizens. Jason Ditz reports (antiwar.com Dec. 28) that Fox News (sic) "no longer content to simply shill for a growing police state," turned in a grandmother to the Department of Homeland Security for making "anti-American comments."

The media have segued into the police attitude, which regards insistence on civil liberties and references to the Constitution as signs of extremism, especially when the Constitution is invoked in defense of dissent or privacy or placarded on a bumper sticker. President George W. Bush set the scene when he declared: "you are with us or against us."

Bush's words demonstrate a frightening decline in our government's respect for dissent since the presidency of John F. Kennedy. In a speech to the Newspaper Publishers Association in 1961, President Kennedy said:

"No president should fear public scrutiny of his program, for from that scrutiny comes understanding, and from that understanding comes support or opposition; and both are necessary. . . . Without debate, without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed, and no republic can survive. That is why the Athenian law makers once decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment."

The press is not protected, Kennedy told the newspaper publishers, in order that it can amuse and entertain, emphasize the trivial, or simply tell the public what it wants to hear. The press is protected so that it can find and report facts and, thus, inform, arouse "and sometimes even anger public opinion."

In a statement unlikely to be repeated by an American president, Kennedy told the newspaper publishers: "I'm not asking your newspapers to support an administration, but I am asking your help in the tremendous task of informing and alerting the American people, for I have complete confidence in the response and dedication of our citizens whenever they are fully informed."

The America of Kennedy's day and the America of today are two different worlds. In America today the media are expected to lie for the government in order to prevent the people from finding out what the government is up to. If polls can be believed, Americans brainwashed and programmed by O'Reilly, Hannity, Beck, and Limbaugh want Bradley Manning and Julian Assange torn limb from limb for informing Americans of the criminal acts of their government. Politicians and journalists are screeching for their execution.

President Kennedy told the Newspaper Publishers Association that "it is to the printing press, the recorder of man's deeds, the keeper of his conscience, the courier of his news, that we look for strength and assistance, confident that with your help man will be what he was born to be: Free and Independent." Who can imagine a Bill Clinton, a George W. Bush, or a Barack Obama saying such a thing today?

Today the press is a propaganda ministry for the government. Any member who departs from his duty to lie and spin the news is expelled from the fraternity. A public increasingly unemployed, broke and homeless is told that they have vast enemies plotting to destroy them in the absence of annual trillion dollar expenditures for the military/security complex, wars lasting decades, no-fly lists, unlimited spying and collecting of dossiers on citizens supplemented by neighbors reporting on neighbors, full body scanners at airports, shopping centers, metro and train stations, traffic checks, and the equivalence of treason with the uttering of a truth.

Two years ago when he came into office President Obama admitted that no one knew what the military mission was in Afghanistan, including the president himself, but that he would find a mission and define it. On his recent trip to Afghanistan, Obama came up with the mission: to make the families of the troops safe in America, his version of Bush's "we have to kill them over there before they kill us over here."

No one snorted with derision or even mildly giggled. Neither the New York Times nor Fox News (sic) dared to wonder if perhaps, maybe, murdering and displacing large numbers of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen and US support for Israel's similar treatment of Lebanese and Palestinians might be creating a hostile environment that could breed terrorists. If there still is such a thing as the Newspaper Publishers Association, its members are incapable of such an unpatriotic thought.

Today no one believes that our country's success depends on an informed public and a free press. America's success depends on its financial and military hegemony over the world. Any information inconsistent with the indispensable people's god-given right to dominate the world must be suppressed and the messenger discredited and destroyed.

Now that the press has voluntarily shed its First Amendment rights, the government is working to redefine free speech as a privilege limited to the media, not a right of citizens. Thus, the insistence that WikiLeaks is not a media organization and Fox News (sic) turning in a citizen for exercising free speech. Washington's assault on Assange and WikiLeaks is an assault on what remains of the US Constitution. When we cheer for WikiLeaks' demise, we are cheering for our own.

[Peter Lemkin]

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to another story. One of the top stories of the year, of course, has been WikiLeaks. Juan?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, when WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was released from a British jail this month, he downplayed the prospect of an extradition to Sweden, where he's wanted for questioning on allegations of sex crimes. Speaking outside the courthouse, Assange said he is most concerned about extradition to the United States.

JULIAN ASSANGE: I don't have too many fears about being extradited to Sweden. There are much bigger concerns about being extradited to the United States. We have a rumor today from my lawyers in the United States. We have not confirmed yet that there has been an indictment made against me in the United States.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Although Assange hasn't been charged, there are reports the Justice Department has convened a grand jury in Virginia to indict him for WikiLeaks' release of tens of thousands of secret government documents.

Earlier this month, Vice President Joe Biden confirmed the U.S. is looking at ways to pursue Assange while he remains under house arrest in Britain. In an interview on Meet the Press, Biden said he thinks Assange could be a, quote, "high-tech terrorist."

VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I would argue that it's closer to being a high-tech terrorist than the Pentagon Papers. But look, this guy has done things that have damaged and put in jeopardy the lives and occupations of people in other parts of the world. He has made it more difficult for us to conduct our business with our allies and our friends.

AMY GOODMAN: U.S. officials have said Julian Assange could be charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 and suggested laws could be amended to overcome any legal obstacles to his prosecution.

Well, the potential use of the Espionage Act has special significance for our next guest. In a moment we'll speak with Robert Meeropol. He's the younger son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. They're the only U.S. citizens to be executed for conspiracy to commit espionage, described as the most controversial death sentence in U.S. history.

The government alleged the couple, along with Morton Sobell, helped the Soviet Union acquire the secret of the atomic bomb. But supporters say there's no evidence Ethel Rosenberg took part in espionage. And the Rosenbergs' family has admitted that while Julius Rosenberg did pass on information to the Soviet Union, none of it aided development of the atomic bomb.

This is a clip of a newscast after the Rosenbergs' execution.

NEWSREEL: Dateline: Sing Sing, June 19th, 1953. Someone had passed America's atomic bomb secrets to Russia. This was an undisputed fact that the whole world knew. The federal government had laid the crime at the doorstep of two native New Yorkers, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. But to the end, they both protested their innocence of the theft. In April of 1951, the federal court of Judge Irving R. Kaufman found the pair guilty as charged and sentenced them to death in the electric chair to pay for their crime of treason.

AMY GOODMAN: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were killed on June 19, 1953, after being sent to the electric chair at New York's Sing Sing Prison. The Rosenbergs' younger son, Robert Meeropol, was six years old at the time. He's author of the autobiography An Execution in the Family: One Son's Journey. He's the founder and executive director of the Rosenberg Fund for Children. This week, he released a widely read statement in support of WikiLeaks called "My Parents Were Executed Under the Unconstitutional Espionage ActHere's Why We Must Fight to Protect Julian Assange." Robert Meeropol joins us now from Chicopee, Massachusetts.

Welcome to Democracy Now! Why do feel people must fight to support Julian Assange?

ROBERT MEEROPOL: Well, thank you for having me.

Well, there's several layers that we should get into here. Perhaps the start is to understand what he may be indicted forthat is, conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act of 1917. A lot of people in the United States have been saying, since post-9/11 Americain post-9/11 America, that we feel we have echoes of the McCarthy period. But in the McCarthy period itself, we really had the echoes of the aftermath of our entry into World War I, that period between 1917 and the early 1920s. And World War I was very unpopular in the United States, and there was an effort to convince the public about this war, and that was a two-pronged effort. One was propaganda was put in place to drum up support for the war, but the other was the Espionage Act of 1917 was passed, basically to criminalize dissent. And this criminalization of criticism of government policy landed hundreds of people in jail, perhaps most famously Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party candidate for president who ran from a jail cell and got almost a million votes in 1920. That whole panoply of repressive activity, that quieted down after a while. But in the McCarthy period, it was reinstituted.

And the act, the Espionage Act, has been criticized as an attempt to do an end run around the constitutional definition of "treason." You see, the founders of our nation were very anxious to make sure that the term "treason" wasn't thrown around to attack people who were dissenters. So they put, within the Constitution, a very narrow definitiongiving aid and comfort to the enemyin as the only way you could be convicted of treason. But as you saw in that television clip of the 1950s, my parents charged under the Espionage Act of 1917, here's the press reporting "executed for their crime of treason." So this was an effort to do an end run around the treason clause of the Constitution and turn dissent into treason.

Well, now we fast-forward to today, and we have the possibility that Julian Assange will be charged under that act. That act, by the way, isit's pages and pages and pages of things that you can't do, and if you do it, if you disseminate, publicize, information that the government today declares secret, then you could be subject to massive prison sentences. And again, we have to place this in a broad context. A functioning democracy needs a free flow of information. But what we have in post-9/11 America is a vast expansion of the secrecy complex. So, vast amounts of material can be declared secret. And then, if you reveal those secrets, you could be sent to jail. And, of course, thiswell, this undermines the basis for democracy. And that's what's going on here. And that doesn't even get into the question of conspiracy.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Robert Meeropol, younger son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. And he'll stay with us after break. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: "Strange Fruit," written by Abel Meeropol, the adoptive father of the young sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Robert and Michael Meeropol. Robert Meeropol joins us now from Massachusetts, who put out a piece in call of support for Julian Assange, because his parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the most famous case, the only people to be executed under the Espionage Act, that possibly the U.S. government is looking to charge Julian Assange with. Juan?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Robert, I'd like to ask youthis whole issue, as you were saying, about the government possibly trying to look at being able to charge Julian Assange under the Espionage Act, even if you get pastor those who believe that the Espionage Act is constitutionalthe mere idea of charging someone who is not a U.S. citizen, who wasn't even in the country, with a violation of the U.S. Espionage Act really begins to take the American legal system to whole new realms of arrogance, I wouldit seems to me, in terms of its power around the world.

ROBERT MEEROPOL: Well, yes, that's true, but we shouldn't forget the case of Manuel Noriega. The United Statesand, of course, we have Guantánamo and black site prisons all over the world. Our government rejects the universal jurisdiction of other nations or of the World Court. But as far as we're concerned, we are free to indict, and if we can get our hands on anyone anywhere all over the world. And that is, I would say, a prerogative of empire. It's a reality we face. It's not one that I approve of, but I think it's the reality of today.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to some more news footage from June 1953. These reports are right before the Rosenbergs were executed, after their final appeals were rejected. One newscaster here lampoons the protesters who demonstrated in support of the Rosenbergs.

NEWSCASTER: Inside the stone walls of Sing Sing Prison, the Rosenbergs wait all day for word of their fate. It's now more than two years since they were first sentenced to die for organizing atomic espionage for Russia. Rabbi Irving Koslowe, a prison chaplain, goes in. He will not leave until after the execution, which is being held before sundown, because the setting of the sun this Friday marks the beginning of the Holy Sabbath in the Jewish calendar. A matron, Mamie Crayton, comes out after seeing Ethel Rosenberg. She says the woman refuses to believe she's going to die, insists she is innocent. State troopers surround the prison to prevent demonstrations. Again, there are none. The hours pass slowly. Julius Rosenberg, now 35, his wife Ethel, now 37, married 14 years and one day, parents of two boys, tonight dined on hard-boiled eggs, macaroni salad and tea. There was no time for the usual last meal. Their fate is decided in Washington. And here is that story from David Brinkley.

DAVID BRINKLEY: In these last minutes before the Rosenbergs are electrocuted at Sing Sing Prison, here's how in Washington today their attorneys went through the last possible legal maneuvers to save them. It began at noon at the Supreme Court, normally quiet, but today surrounded by groups of the curious. The Court met at noon. At 12:06, it announced the decision to end the Rosenbergs' stay of execution. That was a stay granted two days ago by Justice Douglas. That seemed to be the end, but it wasn't. Their attorneys promptly asked for another stay while they appeal to President Eisenhower again for clemency. The Court said it would consider it.

Meanwhile, a lobbyist who came to Washington to work for the Rosenbergs kept up their parade in front of the White House. People riding by in automobiles shouted and asked why they didn't go to Russia. But there was no other disorder, so the police left them alone. They even sang a little song somebody wrote especially for this occasion. But the picketing and singing did them no good, because at the Supreme Court, by this time, the government's lawyers, having won their case, were leaving. The Court had refused again to delay the execution. A few minutes later, Emanuel Bloch, chief counsel, came out, read us a telegram he had sent to the President.

EMANUEL BLOCH: For sake of American tradition, prestige and influence, urge redress for Rosenbergs, demand you be afforded sufficient time to consider this serious matter.

DAVID BRINKLEY: The President's answer came quickly. Here it is, read by a White House press officer.

WHITE HOUSE PRESS OFFICER: The following is part of a statement just issued by the President of the United States. "I am convinced that the only conclusion to be drawn from the history of this case is that the Rosenbergs have received the benefit of every safeguard which American justice can provide. There is no question in my mind that their original trial and the long series of appeals constitute the fullest measure of justice and due process of law. Throughout the innumerable complications and technicalities of this case no judge has ever expressed any doubt that they committed most serious acts of espionage. Accordingly, only most extraordinary circumstances could warrant executive intervention in the case.

"When democracy's enemies have been judged guilty of a crime as horrible as that of which the Rosenbergs were convicted, when the legal processes of democracy have been marshaled to their maximum strength to protect the lives of convicted spies, when in their most solemn judgment the tribunals of the United States has adjudged them guilty and the sentence just, I will not intervene in this matter."

DAVID BRINKLEY: The President and the Attorney General were standing by to the last, in case the Rosenbergs decided at the last minute they wanted to talk.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, in this news clip from the Sing Sing Prison, a reporter who witnessed the executions describes Ethel Rosenberg's death in the electric chair. Like many in the news media at the time, the reporter, Bob Considine of the International News Service, indicates that he supports the executions.

BOB CONSIDINE: She died a lot harder. When it appeared that she had received enough electricity to kill an ordinary person and had received the exact amount that had killed her husband, the doctors went over and pulled down the cheap prison dress, a little dark green printed job, and placed the stethoscopeI can't say itplaced the stethoscopes to her and then looked around and looked at each other, rather dumbfounded, and seemed surprised that she was not dead. Believing she was dead, the attendants had taken off the ghastly strappings and electrodes and the black belts and so forth. These had to be readjusted again, and she was given more electricity, which started again a kind of a ghastly plume of smoke that rose from her head and went up against the skylight overhead. After two more of those jolts, Ethel Rosenberg had met a maker she'll have a lot of explaining to do to.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Bob Considine of the International News Service describing the execution of Ethel Rosenberg. Our guest is Robert Meeropol in Massachusetts, her younger son. Juan?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Robert Meeropol, you were just a young boy at the time of this ghastly description. I'm wondering, your response? And also, as new evidence has emerged ofindicating that your parents were not involved incertainly in espionage towardof sending atomic secrets to the Russians, and that your mother was completely innocent. Your sense?

ROBERT MEEROPOL: Well, first of all, you know, I'm sure it'sit's always hard for me to hear Bob Considine's description, to relive the last day of my parents' lives. And people may wonder, you know, how I can react in such a cool and calm manner. I mean, part of it is, is I've dedicated my life, through the Rosenberg Fund for Children, to providing for the educational and emotional needs of the children of targeted activists in the United States, my people who I consider kindred spirits, people suffering what I've suffered. And that, finding that positive outlet for my grief and rage and anger, has really enabled me, again, to respond in a positive manner.

That said, I think it's very fitting that you focused on my mother, particularly in the context of the charges that Julian Assange may face, and that is conspiracy. My mother was involved in this case because she was deemed or dubbed a conspirator. She was convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage. All that means is thatall that "conspiracy" means is that two for more people got together and planned to commit an illegal act and took one step in furtherance of that plancould be a phone call, could be a conversation. Well, that was used in my parents' case. My parents' chief accusers, David and Ruth Greenglass, testified that my mother was present during the critical espionage meeting, and she typed up David Greenglass's handwritten notes, descriptions of a sketch, that supposedly gave away the secret of the atomic bomb. Well, it's come out since that this testimony was false and that David Greenglass himself has even admitted that. But even if it were true, that would mean that the United States government executed someone for typing.

Now, but it's not surprising that the government would use conspiracy, whether it's against my parents or whether it's against the WikiLeaks people, because if you're anybody who engages in conversation or discussion, and the government can get one person to testify that that discussion was to leak classified material, or to transmit information to the Soviet Union, in my parents case, they could be swept up in the dragnet. And you could get people to rat out their friends in order to get more lenient sentences. It sows distrust among the community of support. It scares other people into silence.

And so, what we see here is, if there is a criminal indictment for conspiracy, not an attack on just Julian Assange himself, but on the entire community of support that is seeking to promote the very revolutionary idea that the people have the right to know what their government is doing, that's what this ultimately is all about. And every left-wing, every progressive organizer, every organizer, in generalhow can you engage in organizing, in getting groups of people to protest and coordinating activities, without engaging in what the government would term a conspiracy? And so, it is a threat to all of us. And that is really why I issued my call for us to recognize this. This Espionage Act of 1917 has been the sword of Damocles, sitting quietly, mostly unused, ready to spring out and attack dissenters. And when you have it in the context of the growing secrecy that we face today

AMY GOODMAN: We have five seconds.

ROBERT MEEROPOL:and an authoritarian-oriented Supreme Court, it is a danger to us all.

AMY GOODMAN: Robert Meeropol, we want to thank you very much for being with us, younger son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, founder and executive director of the Rosenberg Fund for Children.

[Peter Lemkin]

2010-12-31: Updates on the Investigations into "4chan" and "Anonymous" DDoS Attacks
Submitted by knowledgeempire on Fri, 12/31/2010 - 21:53

Allegations and Investigation
On Dec. 16, the FBI raided a Texas server-hosting company in hopes of finding evidence to advance an investigation into the hactivist groups engaged in various attacks against Wikileaks-unfriendly institutions and individuals.

The investigation seems to have been set in motion as a direct result of PayPal's actions; PayPal is said to have supplied the FBI with various IP addresses hosting an IRC chat for current and prospective hacktivists. At least one hard drive was seized.

The Smoking Gun obtained the PayPal affidavit according to which

On December 2, 2010, Paypal Incorporated … contacted the FBI and reported that an Internet activist group using the names "4chan" and "Anonymous," appeared to be organizing a [DDoS] attack against the company. The attack appeared to be organized in response to Paypal's decision to suspend Wikileaks' Paypal account, which Wikileaks was using to collect donations. The attackers, "Anonymous," described themselves as being "average Internet Citizens" and stated their "motivation is a collective sense of being fed up with all the minor and major injustices we witness every day." Later that same morning, at approximately 11:44am, Paypal advised the FBI that a DDoS attack against the company's website … had begun. Since that time, there have been multiple, severe DDoS attacks against the Paypal website.

Attack Method
According to the affidavit, it is thought that some individuals were unknowingly involved in the DDoS attacks because their machines may have been compromised with botnets. In order for the attacks to have been effective, "[a]ttackers would have needed five to fifteen million people all on high speed broadband connections", Jason Hoffman of Joyent.com said in an interview with EWeekEurope.

Could there have been so high a number of willing volunteers, thus overriding the need for unknowing attackers whose machines were secretly infected with botnets? This remains an open question that cannot be rigorously addressed without empirical investigation, which is under way.

Sean-Paul Correll of Panda Security believes that botnets were, in fact, used: "Today we observed over 3,000 computers in the voluntary botnet, but we also have knowledge of a 30k node botnet."

This botnet infects computers via peer to peer filesharing systems, but it can spread via Microsoft Messenger and USB sticks as well, he said. Panda is trying to get a sample of the botnet code to analyze (source).

Progress
Thus far, it has been reported that 2 or more IP addresses were identified as being associated with the sources of the attacks, either in virtue of having hosted Anonymous chat services or in virtue of having been at the root of botnet distribution.

Search warrants were issued according to which the FBI was authorized to seize "records and material relating to the DDoS attacks or other illegal activities pertaining to the organization Anonymous or 4chan" (Source). Another search warrant was apparently executed by the German Federal Criminal Police. They found that

the "server at issue" belonged to a man from Herrlisheim, France. However, an analysis of the server showed that "root-level access" to the machine "appeared to come from an administrator logging in from" another IP address.

"Log files showed that the commands to execute the DDoS on PayPal actually came from" this IP, Agent Lynd reported. Two log entries cited in the affidavit include an identical message: "Good_night,_paypal_Sweet_dreams_from_AnonOPs" (Source).

Another IP address was traced to Tailor Made Services in Dallas (a dedicated server hosting company), and yet another was traced to an Internet service provider in British Columbia, Canada:

Investigators with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police determined that the Canadian firm's "virtual" server was actually housed at Hurricane Electric, a California firm offering "colocation, web hosting, dedicated servers, and Internet connections," according to its web site.

FBI Agent Christopher Calderon, an expert on malicious botnets who works from the bureau's San Jose office, is leading the probe of the second IP (and presumably has seized a server from Hurricane Electric). Hurricane's president, Mike Leber, did not respond to a message left for him at the firm's office in Fremont, which is about 20 miles from PayPal's San Jose headquarters (ibid.).