Around 8pmest every night
Seems like the transitionn to DK4 has been pretty damned awesome for Anonymous and Wikileaks diaries. Awesome. Will link to them after the jump.
Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake.com on Russian tv discussing Wikileaks and scumbags:
Sam Seder interviews Glenn Greenwald today and you MUST LISTEN!:
Brad Friedman Interviews Marcy Wheeler in the first hour filling in for Mike Malloy about the whole Chamber attack on Wikileaks and on progressives including Brad and HIS FAMILY!
Julian Assange video interview:
Tunisie, Egypte : Assange explique le rôle de WikiLeaks
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Greg Mitchell interviewed on the radio
7:30 Wow, what a shock, Assange has a ghostwriter. In a tough legal fight, U.S. and corporations after him, and still sitting on 245,000 cables and others leaks, but, gee, can't seem to write a book all by himself on tight deadline.
-Greg Mitchell mocking people(journos for sure) for saying that Assange needed a ghostwriter
link for Anon release of emails
Glenn Greenwald's updates to his amazing post
UPDATE: Several new items to note: (1) Salon's Editor-in-Chief, Kerry Lauerman, has an excellent response to all of this on behalf of Salon; (2) The CEO and COO of Berico -- the third company whose name appears on the report (along with Palantir and HB Gary) -- has now issued a statement [link fixed] condemning the proposal as "reprehensible" and also severed all ties with HB Gary; and (3) Bank of America has issued a carefully worded statement to USA Today, denying that they ever saw or have any interest in the proposal and claiming they never hired HB Gary to do this work (though they don't say whether they hired Berico or Palantir, the firms that were coordinating the proposal, to do similar work, nor whether Hunton & Williams did); I'll look forward to hearing from Palantir's CEO, as promised, on those questions.
UPDATE II: The New York Times this morning has a fairly thorough account of this matter that is worth reading. While Bank of America continues to deny involvement in these proposals, its law firm, Hunton & Williams -- one of the most well-connected law firms in Washington -- refuses to comment, and that firm appears to be a key link in all of these efforts.
ProPublica on Egypt Defense Minister Tantawi
âEgyptâs government is not so much a Mubarak government as it is a military government,â Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program [5] at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Bloomberg last month, when the protests had only gone on for a week [6].
Letâs not forget, after all, that since the Egyptian military led a coup in 1952 and ended the countryâs rule under the British monarchy, all three of the countryâs presidents [7]âincluding Mubarakâhave been military men. (Hosni Mubarakâs son, Gamal Mubarak, had long been believed to be a potential successor to the presidencyâan idea that top military officials hated [8]. Gamal had no background in the military.)
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof cautioned that the new leadershipâmore or less the old leadership without Mubarakâmay want to keep a âMubarak-style government without Mubarak [9].â
The Egyptian military has internal rifts and divided loyalties.
As we noted [2] earlier this week, U.S. embassy cables describe some of the militaryâs internal divisions, particularly between the mid-level officers and the organizationâs leadership. Hereâs what we wrote:
One cable describes mid-level army officers as âdisgruntled [10]â and particularly critical of Egyptian Defense Minister Mohamed Tantawi, whom they saw as too subservient to Mubarakâs regime. ⦠Another cable, this one from 2008, describes Tantawi as opposed to âeconomic and political reforms that he perceives as eroding central government power [11].â
Anonymous claims it is in possession of Stuxnet worm
Cables released by newspapers on 2/13
Cables released by newspapers on 2/12
Cables released by newspapers on 2/11
Leading mainstream media figures will inevitably soon find themselves learning from and eventually emulating the Guardian/WikiLeaks collaboration
Following Bill Keller's catty account in the New York Times, in which Assange was judged to be "alert but disheveled, like a bag lady walking in off the street," Katz found Assange "ferociously intelligent, with a control freak's mastery of detail and an infectious enthusiasm." This despite the fact that the Guardian's "pioneering WikiLeaks collaboration," ended like that of the New York Times before it, "in distrust and legal threats," as the headline on Katz's article explained.
The most notable part of Katz's piece -- other than his admission that he had mistakenly emailed the biggest scoop in decades to the BBC -- is his actual analysis of the collaboration itself, which he describes as "a model of what traditional media and the new breed of digital subversive can achieve together." There's been an awful lot of speculation and analysis -- much of it ill-informed -- speeding through cyberspace of late on the disruptive impact social media are having on all sorts of institutions, especially political and legacy media types. Some argue that the new media are now not just supplementing but actually supplanting the old forms. What Katz experienced and reveals to us, however, is a harbinger of an exciting journalism future-in-the-making -- the coming media convergence:
Much has been written about the culture clash between what many in Wiki-world rather derisively call "mainstream media" and uncompromising information libertarians such as Assange. But if anything, I was struck by how the two cultures converged during the collaboration...
Assange brought a trove of raw data and a considerable degree of savviness about how to work with vast, complex databases -- and, not insignificantly, the ability to publish outside the reach of any individual jurisdiction. The Guardian and other media partners brought the old-fashioned journalistic skills and deep expertise required to figure out what mattered -- and the resources (some 40 Guardian reporters worked on the cables alone) and commitment to deal with highly sensitive material responsibly.
...
C'mon, Bill Keller, if playing an instrumental part in bringing those leaked war logs and embassy cables to public attention isn't journalism, what is? Keller and co. are now said to be reinventing the WikiLeaks wheel, developing their own secure whistleblower drop-off site. But like it or not, the top Times man and other leading mainstream media figures will inevitably soon find themselves learning from and eventually emulating the Guardian/WikiLeaks collaboration. Here comes the new media convergence!
Well-known columnist Ed Wasserman wonders what NYT ed Bill Keller really has against Assange
What gives? Since when is an honest source pilloried? You would have thought Assange had deceived the paper, like the trusted U.S. officials who in 2002 fed The Times garbage about an Iraqi nuclear program and helped dupe the United States into a murderous and needless war. When will a top Times editor publish an account that even names those sources, let alone belittles them for their wardrobes?"
The AMAZING and just plain BAD-ASS Bill Moyers puts his 2 cents in
Fred was right, as he so often was: independence meant the best hope for me to pursue journalism as a mission. Perhaps, we were naïve, but in those days many of us still assumed that an informed public is preferable to an uninformed one. Hadn't Thomas Jefferson proclaimed that, "Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government"? And wasn't a free press essential to that end?
Maybe not. As Joe Keohane reported last year in The Boston Globe, political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency "deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information." He was reporting on research at the University of Michigan, which found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in new stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts were not curing misinformation. "Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger."
...
But you, my colleagues, can't give up. If you do, there's no chance any public memory of everyday truths - the tangible, touchable, palpable realities so vital to democracy - will survive. We would be left to the mercy of the agitated amnesiacs who "make" their own reality, as one of them boasted at the time America invaded Iraq, in order to maintain their hold on the public mind and the levers of power. You will remember that in Orwell's novel "1984," Big Brother banishes history to the memory hole, where inconvenient facts simply disappear. Control of the present rests on obliteration of the past. The figure of O'Brien, who is the personification of Big Brother, says to the protagonist, Winston Smith: "We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves." And they do. The bureaucrats in the Ministry of Truth destroy the records of the past and publish new versions. These in turn are superseded by yet more revisions. Why? Because people without memory are at the mercy of the powers that be; there is nothing against which to measure what they are told today. History is obliterated.
Greg Mitchell:
3:30 Here's the ACLU's press release on the big court hearing tomorrow: "The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will be in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia on Tuesday, February 15 at 10:30 a.m. EST for a hearing in a legal battle over the governmentâs demands for the records of several Twitter users in connection with an investigation related to WikiLeaks.
"The ACLU and EFF represent Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic parliamentarian and one of the Twitter users whose records were sought by the government. They have asked the court to unseal the still-secret court records of the government's attempts to collect private records from Twitter, Inc., as well as other companies who may have received demands for information from the government. The groups have also asked the court to overturn the December 14 court order requiring Twitter to provide information about its users.
"The motions were joined by attorneys from the law firm Keker & Van Nest LLP and the Law Office of John D. Cline on behalf of Jacob Appelbaum and Rop Gonggrijp, respectively, as well as local counsel in Virginia. The government has also requested information concerning Appelbaum and Gonggrijp's Twitter accounts."
Wikileaks press release
WIKILEAKS PRESS RELEASE
Mon Feb 14 18:28:37 2011 GMT
Tomorrow (Tuesday morning), a federal magistrates court in Virginia's national security heartland will be the scene of the first round in the US government's legal battle against Julian Assange. The US Attorney-General has brought an action against Twitter, demanding that it disclose the names, dates and locations of all persons who have used its services to receive messages from Wikileaks or Mr Assange. It is understood that Twitter will resist the order, so as to protect the privacy of its customers.
Assange said today "This is an outrageous attack by the Obama administration on the privacy and free speech rights of Twitter's customers - many of them American citizens. More shocking, at this time, is that it amounts to an attack on the right to freedom of association, a freedom that the people of Tunisia and Egypt, for example, spurred on by the information released by Wikileaks, have found so valuable".
On December 14, 2010, the US Department of Justice obtained an Order requiring Twitter turn over records of all communications between Wikileaks and its followers. This Order was acquired through the use of the "Patriot Act", which establishes procedures whereby the Government can acquire information about users of electronic communication networks without a Search Warrant, without Probable Cause, without particularizing the records that relate to a proper investigatory objectiveâand with without any public scrutiny. The basis for the Order remains sealed and secret.
Whilst happy that Twitter plans to resist the subpoena, Wikileaks said it was confirmed that other service providers like Google and Facebook and Yahoo may also have been served with a production order back in December, at the same time as Twitter, and may already have provided information to the government by way of a deal under the secrecy provisions introduced by the Patriot Act. "We are all asking all service providers to explain whether they too have been served with a similar order, and whether, they have caved into it" said Mr Assange.
Tuesdayâs case in Virginia, involves the United States government seeking to obtain vast amounts of private information that would jeopardize and chill First Amendment rights of association, of expression, of political assembly, of speech. At its essence it seeks information that can be converted into a list of individuals, across the globe, who have followed, communicated with, and received messages from WikiLeaks â the very sort of government intrusion into basic freedoms that the Supreme Court ruled was prohibited by the First Amendment. WikiLeaks will not participate directly in that proceeding because it believes that the US lacks jurisdiction over expressive activities beyond its borders, but it strongly supports the associational rights of its followers and all who work toward a more open society.
Mr Assange will not himself be intervening in the action against Twitter because as an Australian who has committed no criminal act on US territory, he claims that the American courts have no jurisdiction over him. The head of his UK legal team, Geoffrey Robertson QC, has brought in Alan Dershowitz, the distinguished Harvard Law Professor, as part of the team to advise on the US Attorney General's actions.
END
Alan Dershowitz joins the fight for Wikileaks and Twitter
HBGary CEO Also Suggested Tracking, Intimidating WikiLeaksâ Donors
A quick search of the companyâs WikiLeaks-related conversations shows that Aaron Barr, the HBGary chief executive who first caught the attention of Anonymous by boasting that heâd penetrated the group and identified its leaders, also suggested other tactics against WikiLeaks that werenât included in that PowerPoint: namely, tracking and intimidating anyone who had given money to WikiLeaks. The security firms âneed to get people to understand that if they support the organization we will come after them,â he wrote in an email. âTransaction records are easily identifiable.â
WLCentral: How HBGary & Other Firms Could Have Falsified WikiLeaks Documents
The âmathematical theoryâ for âmitigatingâ the leaks was seriously considered. In a slide presentation prepared for law firm Hunton & Williams, HBGary (along with Berico and Palantir Technologies) planned to âfeed the fuel between the feuding groups.â Use âdisinformation.â And, âcreate messages around actions to sabotage or discredit the opposing organizationâ and âsubmit fake documents and then call out the error.â
The post is likey what led Aaron Barr to include the tactic of creating "fake documents" in the slide presentation.
Now, how might this have been done?
Click the link to find out. Dunt dun doooooone....