Around 8pmest every night
The Agenda tv show interviews Birgitta Jonsdottir (sorry, I can't find a transcript so I will work on one for Informationthread 36. Anyone want to help? Like I'll take the first 10mins of video and you can take the last 6?)
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Please check out Informationthread 34 and Informationthread 33 and Informationthread 32 and Informationthread 31 for more info on Twittergate.
The Globe and Mail asks some stupid questions of Birgitta Jonsdottir
Q: Can you impose structure on anarchy?
A: That’s not my agenda. My agenda is to make it possible for sources to be sources and for whistle blowers to be encouraged and for info to be made accessible that is already online, and to limit prior restraints and efforts to stop media from publishing stories. I am troubled by the fact that in the U.K. when you publish online it has an infinite lifetime. That is messing with our historical records and falsifying the history we are living. I am not seeking for everything to go online. I don’t care about your personal life. These lines have blurred so much. Those who have had success with libel cases are very powerful. As a legislator and individual I want to have access to information about corruption.
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Q: But Wikileaks disgorged a vast amount of government information, so is that the same as whistle blowing?
A: I don’t agree. Bradley Manning...[the U.S. soldier and suspected leaker] does this because he sees so much wrong and all this wrong isn’t being exposed The material uncovered from Iraq war logs, all these unreported civilian deaths, U.S. military establishment turned a blind eye to the torture. Why isn’t that being investigated further? Most media analyzes Julian Assange, instead of the content of the leaks..... The cables are going out very slowly and being redacted to ensure nobody will get into serious trouble.
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Q: Who gets to decide what is secret?
A: The public should be able to ask why. Should be a process where they can get an answer to why. There is nothing wrong with transparency. We haven’t suffered because of lack of transparency or too much freedom of information. We have suffered more because of secrets.
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Q: How did you even meet him and Bradley Manning?
Now, I may be a bit slow but......can someone tell me why this interviewer thinks that last question belongs in an adult conversation or interview? Disgusting. Yes, many stupid questions in the interview but that last one really takes the cake. Does anyone in the media do any fact checking anymore?!
the leaked cable on Tunisia that has proved a nice way for the media to lie about Wikileaks. Politico and The Guardian have offered "corrections" to their lies but, Chris Albon of The Atlantic is staying strong with the lies, for now. Now Chris Albon has "corrected" the story.
Glenn Greenwald discusses this Read the whole thing. Here are bits:
Last week, on January 3, The Guardian published a scathing Op-Ed by James Richardson blaming WikiLeaks for endangering the life of Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the democratic opposition in Zimbabwe. Richardson -- a GOP operative, contributor to RedState.com, and a for-hire corporate spokesman -- pointed to a cable published by WikiLeaks in which American diplomats revealed that Tsvangirai, while publicly opposing American sanctions on his country, had privately urged their continuation as a means of weakening the Mugabe regime: an act likely to be deemed to be treasonous in that country, for obvious reasons. By publishing this cable, "WikiLeaks may have committed its own collateral murder," Richardson wrote. He added: "WikiLeaks ought to leave international relations to those who understand it – at least to those who understand the value of a life."
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This accusation against WikiLeaks was repeated far and wide. In The Wall Street Journal, Jamie Kirchick -- the long-time assistant of The New Republic's Marty Peretz -- wrote under this headline: "Julian Assange's reckless behavior could cost Zimbabwe's leading democrat his life." Kirchick explained that "the crusading 'anti-secrecy' website released a diplomatic cable from the U.S. Embassy in Harare" which exposed Tsvangirai's support for sanctions. As "a result of the WikiLeaks revelations," Kirchick wrote, the reform leader would likely be charged with treason, and "Mr. Tsvangirai will have someone additional to blame: Julian Assange of WikiLeaks." The Atlantic's Chris Albon, in his piece entitled "How WikiLeaks Just Set Back Democracy in Zimbabwe," echoed the same accusation, claiming "WikiLeaks released [this cable] to the world" and that Assange has thus "provided a tyrant with the ammunition to wound, and perhaps kill, any chance for multiparty democracy." Numerous other outlets predictably mimicked these claims.
There was just one small problem with all of this: it was totally false. It wasn't WikiLeaks which chose that cable to be placed into the public domain, nor was it WikiLeaks which first published it. It was The Guardian that did that. In early December, that newspaper -- not WikiLeaks -- selected and then published the cable in question. This fact led The Guardian -- more than a full week after they published Richardson's accusatory column -- to sheepishly add this obscured though extremely embarrassing "clarification" at the end of his column:
• This article was amended on 11 January 2011 to clarify the fact that the 2009 cable referred to in this article was placed in the public domain by the Guardian, and not as originally implied by WikiLeaks. The photo caption was also amended to reflect this fact.
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UPDATE: Beyond the falsehood documented here, Aaron Bady of Berkeley's PhD program describes how Albon, Richardson and others are completely simplifying -- distorting -- the situation in Zimbabwe in order to demonize WikiLeaks over this cable.
And Politico's Keach Hagey -- who wrote one of the above-referenced pieces repeating this falsehood -- has emailed me to say that she's now working to directly address these matters. So credit where it's due. We'll see if The Atlantic's Albon and The Wall Street Journal are similarly willing to acknowledge their serious errors.
UPDATE II: Both Politico and The Atlantic have now issued a "correction" and an "update," respectively, by tacking on a paragraph to the end of their old article. I'll leave it to readers to assess for themselves if that's adequate in light of the magnitude of the error made. The Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page and Kirchick have still said nothing, reflecting what they do and what they are. About all of this, this person asks the key question: "Would [these media outlets] have written the exact same article, substituting Guardian for WL? I doubt it." I doubt it, too -- highly -- and that's the point: the political and media class is obsessed with demonizing WikiLeaks and painting them as fundamentally different than "respectable" media outlets, even if -- as happened here -- that's accomplished by blaming them for things they manifestly did not do. That, of course, is the same strategy as the government is pursuing to justify the prosecution of WikiLeaks, so whether intended or not, attacks like these serve a vital enabling role.
Aaron Bady of Berkeley's PhD program
The problem here isn’t that Albon and Richardson are wrong, though I certainly do disagree with them. The problem is that they don’t seem to be anywhere nearly as interested in being right about Zimbabwe as they are in moralizing about Wikileaks. These articles polemically oversimplify a situation that is actually quite complicated and ambiguous, and they do it by adopting the same kind of Manichaean framework as the Anonymous hackers that have been targeting Zimbabwe for its "anti-Wikileaks stance." Things are either good or they are bad. You are either pro-democracy or you are pro-Mugabe. Black or white.
This is, on so many levels, a terrible attitude to take with respect to Zimbabwe. And while Albon or Richardson may or may not be knowledgable about their subjects, the way their articles address Zimbabwe only to the extent that it can show us something about Wikileaks causes them to overlook important facts on the ground that would either substantially complicate the case they’re making or absolutely destroy it. Albon wrote in a tweet (which I’ve lost track of) that he’s simply calling for a more nuanced sense of Wikileaks, both the good and the bad. I agree. But when it comes to Zimbabwe itself, he and Richardson suddenly adopt maddeningly rigid and simplistic categories: good for democracy or bad for democracy. What is good for Mugabe is bad for Zimbabwe; what is bad for Tsvangerai is bad for democracy. We need to do better than this.
Jacob Appelbaum's Twitter He is one of the people involved in Twittergate. Here are a few choice tweets:
It's interesting to note that some media initially reported that I had no trouble because I said nothing at all. Irony abounds.
• It's very frustrating that I have to put so much consideration into talking about the kind of harassment that I am subjected to in airports.
• I was detained, searched, and CPB did attempt to question me about the nature of my vacation upon landing in Seattle.
• The CPB specifically wanted laptops and cell phones and were visibly unhappy when they discovered nothing of the sort.
• I did however have a few USB thumb drives with a copy of the Bill of Rights encoded into the block device. They were unable to copy it.
• The forensic specialist (who was friendly) explained that EnCase and FTK, with a write-blocker inline were unable to see the Bill of Rights.
• I requested access my lawyer and was again denied. They stated I was I wasn't under arrest and so I was not able to contact my lawyer.
• The CBP (U.S. Customs and Border Protection) agent was waiting for me at the exit gate. Remember when it was our family and loved ones?
Forum at London's Frontline with video :
The Frontline Club’s first ‘On The Media’ event of 2011 was a fascinating discussion focusing on the changing and sometimes wrought relationship between the worlds media and WikiLeaks. The controversial whistle-blowing website has attracted intense worldwide interest following the massive releases of leaked US military and diplomatic files and the controversy surrounding its enigmatic founder, Julian Assange. In this event, chaired by presenter of The Listening Post on Al Jazeera English, Richard Gizbert, this thoroughly modern relationship was dissected and argued over passionately by an expert panel.
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Logan Symposium: The New Initiatives at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism Includes Julian Assange and Birgitta Jonsdottir.
Just remember this diary when someone links to that Guardian or that Politico or that Atlantic story without mentioning that they all had to retract only after moaning about it.