Around 8pmest every night
Video below of what the Digby smackdown of Jeffrey Toobin was about that I linked in Informationthread 16 :
Video Transcript:
SPITZER: And back to Woodward, where does Woodward fit in to this?
SHIRKY: So I think that Woodward is not a criminal for publishing leaked documents but I also think that Assange is not a criminal for publishing leaked documents. However, I also, also think that if I'm wrong about that, that the way in which I would be wrong is going through the court system. Not through an extra legal running of WikiLeaks off the network.
The damage to me -- Jeffrey to your earlier point about the slippery slope, the non-slippery slope argument is the State Department has currently committed itself to making it very difficult for autocratic governments to force information off the Internet. And we're suddenly providing not just a recipe but a rationale that's making everyone from Lubchenko (ph) to Kim Jong-il laugh.
TOOBIN: But see, you know, again, this is a slippery slope argument.
SHIRKY: No.
TOOBIN: It is, it is. Because the fact that someone takes United States government documents, secret, no foreign distribution, and says that shouldn't be on the Internet. To say that North Korea shouldn't have a free press, to say that Russia shouldn't allow journalists to -- I mean, I think it is easy to draw a distinction between the two.
WOLF: Jeff, can I talk about the Espionage Act because that's really what's at stake now that they've invoked it. I predicted in my book "The End of America" that sooner or later, journalists would be targeted with the Espionage Act in an effort to close down free speech and free criticism of government. And we have a precedent for that. In 1917, the Espionage Act was invoked to go after people like us who are criticizing the first World War. Publishers, educators, editors. Wait, and people were put in prison. They were beaten. One guy got a 10-year sentence for reading the First Amendment. And that intimidation effectively closed down dissent for a decade in the United States of America.
The Espionage Act has a very dark and dirty history. And when you start to use the Espionage Act, to criminalize what I'm sure you've handled classified documents in your time as a serious journalist, you know perfectly well that every serious journalist has seen or heard about classified information and repeated it. When you start to use the Espionage Act to say reporting is treachery, reporting is spying, it's espionage, you criminalize journalism. And that's the history that our country has shown.
TOOBIN: I recognize there is that history. And I'm familiar with the red scare, too. America is different now.
WOLF: Oh, it's worse in some ways.
TOOBIN: Well, I would disagree.
SPITZER: I want to ask Jeff a question though, because I want to come back to this Woodward distinction. You would agree with Clay and Naomi, I think, that Julian Assange would be precisely Bob Woodward if he had been the recipient of these documents, is that correct?
TOOBIN: I'd have to know a lot more.
SPITZER: But it might be the case.
TOOBIN: It well might be the case.
SPITZER: OK. So you're sort of clear articulation of the beginning that he clearly violated something maybe not so much.
TOOBIN: I'm not sure. Certainly the attorney general of the United States seems to think criminal -- criminal activity was involved here. But I think the wholesale taking of enormous quantities of classified information and putting it on the Internet, even if you don't put all 250,000 documents on, I think that is a meaningful distinction from what Bob Woodward does.
SPITZER: It seems to me that Bob Woodward arguably did something much more egregious. He took real-time decisions about why we were going to war in Afghanistan, the discussions are rationale, where we would go spoke to the most senior political and military officials in the nation and blasted that out in the book. A clear distinction.
TOOBIN: Well, again, there is a distinction in part because the president of the United States and the vice president are allowed to declassify anything they want at any time for any reason. So if the president declassified -- SPITZER: A lot of people who didn't have that power were sourced in that book. Seemed to be speaking in clear violation. They, in fact, should be subject to criminal investigations.
TOOBIN: I always wondered why -- why Woodward gets away with it. It's an interesting question.
(CROSSTALK)
PARKER: It's a fascinating conversation. I have mostly listened as a non-lawyer to these arguments. And I never want to make a case against due process because that seems always the right thing to do.
WOLF: Thank you.
PARKER: And yet I also want to say the government should be able to shut down people who are giving away secrets that are going to cause people to lose their lives and put in, you know, and cause our own people abroad not to be able to do their work in safety.
All right then. Naomi Wolf, Clay Shirky and Jeffrey Toobin, fabulous conversation. Thank you.
SHIRKY: Thanks so much.
PARKER: And you, too, Eliot Spitzer. We'll be right back.
Greg Mitchell at his amazing Wikileaks blog at The Nation reports:
4:30 Is El Pais the only one of the original news outlets still reporting on new cables?
10:00 Once again yesterday, for third day, not a single report on new cables at The Guardian, which had been feverish on the subject for so long. One wonders.
This link from WLCentral shows that El Pais is the only paper still doing cables
Editorial at The New York Times :
Our concern is not specifically about payments to WikiLeaks. This isn’t the first time a bank shunned a business on similar risk-management grounds. Banks in Colorado, for instance, have refused to open bank accounts for legal dispensaries of medical marijuana.
Still, there are troubling questions. The decisions to bar the organization came after its founder, Julian Assange, said that next year it will release data revealing corruption in the financial industry. In 2009, Mr. Assange said that WikiLeaks had the hard drive of a Bank of America executive.
What would happen if a clutch of big banks decided that a particularly irksome blogger or other organization was "too risky"? What if they decided — one by one — to shut down financial access to a newspaper that was about to reveal irksome truths about their operations? This decision should not be left solely up to business-as-usual among the banks.
Le Monde names Julian Assange Person of the Year (translated by google)
Wikileaks: challenges and limits of transparency
Julian Assange Man of the Year? Time Magazine hesitated, then he chose Mark Zuckerberg , Facebook's father. The man of Wikileaks, or man of Facebook? The World hesitated too, putting more into balance an exemplary woman, who has not created or site for leaks or social networking giant, but that inspires an entire nation by his ideals and his courage, Aung San Suu Kyi . Then we chose Julian Assange - a choice confirmed by the readers of Monde.fr.
In contrast, more than 2000 of Wikileaks mirror sites have been created: a decision to ban Wikileaks Hosting by OVH is not only legally vulnerable because it is really justice, but it would be useless practical.
As to the political position of Mr. Besson, two simple sentences Christine Lagarde have shattered, December 17, on the set of "Grand Journal" Canal +: Julian Assange and Mark Zuckerberg, said the Minister of Economy, "are really interesting characters, one and the other determined to support freedom of expression, which I think is a fundamental freedom" .
Assange, the receiver of stolen documents? "I'm not trying to congratulate me for everything he has done, she said, but I think at the heart of the action is freedom expression, with its substitutes, its disadvantages. " That's fine, too, the problem of the White House.
Peter Kemp from WLCentral writes post 3 about extradition
Question 1: If objectively, the extradition is not for a prosecution per se, by the stated reason of Sweden’s prosecutor it is an "investigation": is that a process of "punishment" of Assange based on his political opinions (and actions)? It is legally, as we would say, arguable.
Now a really interesting part is this:
The European arrest warrant is a judicial decision issued by a Member State with a view to the arrest and surrender by another Member State of a requested person, for the purposes of conducting a criminal prosecution or executing a custodial sentence or detention order.
Note it says criminal prosecution, not criminal investigation. Criminal investigations, after arrest, it must be strongly noted are subjected to legislated limits on time. A person cannot and should not be arrested and held in custody for days, weeks on end purely for the purposes of investigation. That way abuse lies as we have seen in our historical common law UK heritage—Star Chambers and the like-- and lately in despotic regimes such as Suharto’s Indonesia.
On arrest, police or prosecutors as a general principle should have a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing with sufficient or enough evidence that the suspect can be charged with statutory (and/or common law offences). If after the legislated time for investigation has passed with the accused in custody (NSW Australia four hours plus timeouts)and there is insufficient evidence to justify a charge, then the suspect must be released.
Any lawyers or anyone smarter than me should read the entire post.
Bradley Manning holiday statement:
23 December 2010
"I greatly appreciate everyone's support and well wishes during this time. I am also thankful for everything that has been done to aid in my defense. I ask that everyone takes the time to remember those who are separated from their loved ones at this time due to deployment and important missions. Specifically, I am thinking of those that I deployed with and have not seen for the last seven months, and of the staff here at the Quantico Confinement Facility who will be spending their Christmas without their family."
Again from Mitchell:
10:30 Report from Google: WikiLeaks tops gambling for web search hits, and Obama only beats out Assange, 70 million to 68 million.
Since I know most of you are already bored with your gifts, feel free to catch up on the past Wikileaks Informationthread diaries and especially go and read Glenn Greenwald's amazing visual post about just what Wikileaks has released in 2010.
KateCrashes gives us links to an Australian Assange Doc that most still have not seen.
From Reuters Canada - Panama president wanted to wiretap rivals: WikiLeaks
Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli tried to bully the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to turn its wiretapping program on political rivals, a State Department cable released by WikiLeaks said.
Martinelli, a supermarket tycoon elected last year, sent a "cryptic" message to the U.S. ambassador in Panama which said, "I need help with tapping phones," according to the cable from August 2009 published by Spanish newspaper El Pais.
"He made reference to various groups and individuals whom he believes should be wiretapped, and he clearly made no distinction between legitimate security targets and political enemies," the cable written by then Ambassador Barbara Stephenson said.
And that leads us to This New York Times piece Cables Portray Expanded Reach of Drug Agency :
WASHINGTON — The Drug Enforcement Administration has been transformed into a global intelligence organization with a reach that extends far beyond narcotics, and an eavesdropping operation so expansive it has to fend off foreign politicians who want to use it against their political enemies, according to secret diplomatic cables.
...
¶In Panama, an urgent BlackBerry message from the president to the American ambassador demanded that the D.E.A. go after his political enemies: "I need help with tapping phones."
¶In Sierra Leone, a major cocaine-trafficking prosecution was almost upended by the attorney general’s attempt to solicit $2.5 million in bribes.
¶In Guinea, the country’s biggest narcotics kingpin turned out to be the president’s son, and diplomats discovered that before the police destroyed a huge narcotics seizure, the drugs had been replaced by flour.
¶Leaders of Mexico’s beleaguered military issued private pleas for closer collaboration with the drug agency, confessing that they had little faith in their own country’s police forces.
¶Cables from Myanmar, the target of strict United States sanctions, describe the drug agency informants’ reporting both on how the military junta enriches itself with drug money and on the political activities of the junta’s opponents.
Also from the New York Times Jailed Soldier Has Support of Resisters :
Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, is also a supporter. "What I read from his motives seems very familiar to me based on my own experience," Mr. Ellsberg said.
Courage to Resist has raised more than $100,000 to support Private Manning’s legal fund, Mr. Paterson said. An activist with the group visits Private Manning in prison every two weeks.
"He has supporters all over the world," said Adam Seibert-Szyper, 39, a staff member who deserted the Marine Corps in 1996. He leafed through envelopes mailed from Brazil, South Africa and Thailand. One envelope, from British Columbia, included a stick of incense and a piece of crystal.
...
Robert Meola, an activist who drafted the resolution as chairman of Berkeley’s Peace and Justice Commission, said he would fight for Private Manning.
"If he didn’t do it, then he’s in pretrial confinement in isolation for several months, and he should be freed," Mr. Meola said.
"If he did do it, I definitely feel that he’s a hero," Mr. Meola added, arguing that revelations contained in the leaked documents "could potentially stop the immoral and illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan."
Once again, if you have not, listen to Brad Friedman filling in for Mike Malloy from last week where he interviews Coleen Rowley and Daniel Ellsberg. A must listen.
In non-Wikileaks news, TorrentFreak interviews Benn Jordan aka The Flashbulb , a musician who used Bittorent to market his music after finding that itunes put his music for sale even though he was not paid for it. A bit:
TF: What are your thoughts on the big labels. Are they good or bad for the majority of artists?
Jordan: I have to be honest. Big labels that aren’t being innovative are little more than delusional laughing stocks at this point. Their numbers get worse and worse, and they push the artists to do dumber and dumber stunts to try and stay on top of things.
The shows and festivals they book are sponsored by 8 different alcoholic beverages and 10 different energy drinks, and they just punish their customers while validating their own demise. I’m not worried about them and neither should you. Its a dozen senior citizens trying to stop a stampede of fresh culture. Good luck boys.
TF: And what about Apple?
Jordan: Apple, love or hate their products, is fucking scary. On one hand, hats off. They’re business and marketing geniuses. On the other hand, they might single handedly be the worst thing that has happened to entertainment media in the last 3 years. The major record industry collapsing should also mean that artists are more free to do what they want.
For example, iTunes completely screwed up the track listing of my last album Arboreal. Their network is so influential that over half of the people who have bought the CD from my label now have botched track titles on their mp3 players. Apple doesn’t have ANY accessible artist support to deal with things like this.
They reject my cover art if I don’t have my name and the title in bold. If I want to sell a 30 minute long track (Louisiana Mourning, for example), they require me to split it up into a bunch of separate tracks. Their distribution system is so unorganized that artists have to pay business like Tunecore upwards of $40 per album (and annual fees) to do Apple’s job for them.
Again, its genius on the business side. But they’ve wedged themselves in so well that now, if I don’t have an album on iTunes (under their insane rules and lack of support), a large portion of my listeners simply won’t know how to put my music on their iPods/iPhones.
Ok, be safe and enjoy.
shenderson with the daily 24hr Wikileaks diary update!!