Around 8pmest every night
Accused Soldier in Brig as WikiLeaks Link Is Sought
Private Manning’s cause has been taken up by the nation’s best-known leaker of classified secrets, Daniel Ellsberg, who gave the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971. He denounces Private Manning’s seven months in custody and media coverage that has emphasized the soldier’s sexual orientation (he is gay) and personal troubles. Mr. Ellsberg, 79, calls him a courageous patriot.
"I identify with him very much," Mr. Ellsberg said. "He sees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I’d say correctly, as I saw Vietnam — as hopeless ventures that are wrong and involve a great deal of atrocities."
He is the only person charged in the WikiLeaks case so far. And despite his supporters’ suspicions that he will be pressured to testify against Mr. Assange, the Army spokeswoman, Ms. Kelly, said that to date, Private Manning had not spoken with civilian investigators or prosecutors.
Mr. Assange has often spoken highly of the soldier. On Thursday, Private Manning's legal defense fund announced a $15,100 contribution from WikiLeaks. In an article in the British magazine New Statesman on Thursday that called Private Manning "the world’s pre-eminent prisoner of conscience," Mr. Assange said he believed the Justice Department’s goal was to force the soldier to confess "that he somehow conspired with me to harm the security of the United States."
"Cracking Bradley Manning is the first step," Mr. Assange said.
Exclusive interview: Julian Assange on Murdoch, Manning and the threat from China
On Bradley Manning, the US soldier accused of leaking diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, Assange says: "I'd never heard his name before it was published in the press." He argues that the US is trying to use Manning – currently stuck in solitary confinement in the US – to build a case against the WikiLeaks founder:
"Cracking Bradley Manning is the first step," says the Australian hacker. "The aim clearly is to break him and force a confession that he somehow conspired with me to harm the national security of the United States."
Such conspiracy would be impossible, he says. "WikiLeaks technology was designed from the very beginning to make sure that we never knew the identities or names of people submitting material. We are as untraceable as we are uncensorable. That's the only way to assure sources they are protected."
First thoughts on Tunisia and the role of the Internet
The Newest WikiLeaks Problem: Unredacted Cables
Information wants to be free and that, apparently, even applies to censored portions of WikiLeaks. Unredacted versions of censored WikiLeaks cables appear to be quietly (and widely) disseminating through the torrentsphere, conventional websites, and the murky subculture of conspiracy- and cryptography-oriented websites. Meanwhile, a controversial Russian figure associated with WikiLeaks has announced his intent to release further unredacted cables to the web.
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Meanwhile, a torrent alleging to show edits and redactions made to WikiLeaks cables is being distributed by a Ukranian website and gaining wide dissemination on Torrent directories and bulletin boards frequented by both cryptography and conspiracy theory enthusiasts.
The website, which is associated with the Twitter account privet_bank and maintains a theme involving cute cats, distributes and is responsible for a ~560k .RAR file containing HTML files which claim to be before-and-after versions of edited WikiLeaks diplomatic cables, with changes keyed to dates. Due to the sensitivity of the unredacted WikiLeaks cables, Fast Company has opted not to link to the site or to the torrent. However, the torrent's current wide distribution and relatively easy availability make it newsworthy.
June 7, 2010 New Yorker article :
Iceland was a natural place to develop Project B. In the past year, Assange has collaborated with politicians and activists there to draft a free-speech law of unprecedented strength, and a number of these same people had agreed to help him work on the video in total secrecy. The video was a striking artifact—an unmediated representation of the ambiguities and cruelties of modern warfare—and he hoped that its release would touch off a worldwide debate about the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was planning to unveil the footage before a group of reporters at the National Press Club, in Washington, on April 5th, the morning after Easter, presumably a slow news day. To accomplish this, he and the other members of the WikiLeaks community would have to analyze the raw video and edit it into a short film, build a stand-alone Web site to display it, launch a media campaign, and prepare documentation for the footage—all in less than a week’s time.
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Assange typically tells would-be litigants to go to hell. In 2008, WikiLeaks posted secret Scientology manuals, and lawyers representing the church demanded that they be removed. Assange’s response was to publish more of the Scientologists’ internal material, and to announce, "WikiLeaks will not comply with legally abusive requests from Scientology any more than WikiLeaks has complied with similar demands from Swiss banks, Russian offshore stem-cell centers, former African kleptocrats, or the Pentagon."
Rop Gonggrijp, one of those at the center of DOJ move against Twitter for info on WIkiLeaks backers
So what does Twitter have on me?
Basically my tweets, which are publicly accessible, and the IP-numbers I connected from. I don’t use Twitter all that much and for convenience my tweets are generally posted through a plugin on this blog. I have never sent or received private messages on twitter. In other words: what Twitter has on me is unspectacular.
This matter does beg the question who else has gotten such court orders and whether other parties have silently complied with such orders. Hello Facebook? Google?
Why did this happen?
I don’t know. But from the list of names we can speculate this has something to do with the release of the "Collateral Murder" video in april of 2010.
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The entire process of releasing this video is ridiculously well-documented as Raffi Khatchadourian, a journalist for The New Yorker, was with us the whole time. I recommend his article for an in-depth look at what happened. For a broader look at my life over the past year or so, I recommend reading a keynote speech I delivered in Berlin a few weeks ago.
So what am I going to do now?
Being involved in a criminal investigation, and especially one which is likely to have huge political pressure behind it, is a very serious matter. So I am talking to lawyers, trying to better understand what is going on and I am weighing my options. Frequent readers of this blog will likely be the first to know if I have something new to say.
Greg Mitchell : Why WikiLeaks Matters
How all these issues and others are viewed by the public hinges significantly, however, on the perceived value of the leaked cables. US officials, even in charging foul, usually focus on the embarrassing loss of control and secrecy, not the damaging content of the cables. And as with earlier WikiLeaks bombshells—the massive Iraq and Afghanistan "war logs"—many critics in the media soon labeled the Cablegate revelations minor, old hat. Some of WikiLeaks' media partners, after a dozen days of heavy-duty reporting, severely reduced coverage of the cables. Now most of them are emerging via El País and the Norwegian daily Aftenposten.
Mitchell goes on to list just what "important stuff" has been released from these cables. I will ask you to click the link to read. Here are two other lists:
1. CBS News amazing run down
2. Glenn Greenwald : What Wikileaks revealed in 2010
Some Stuff:
Transcript at Informationthread 20
Greenwald interviews Lamo from June -Transcript also at Informationthread 20
Robert Meeropol, the son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—the only U.S. citizens to be executed under the Espionage Act, in what’s been described as the most controversial death sentence in U.S. history. This week, Meeropol released a widely read statement in support of WikiLeaks called, "My Parents Were Executed Under the Unconstitutional Espionage Act-Here's Why We Must Fight to Protect Julian Assange."
Part 1.
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part 2.
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Transcript at Informationthread 22
On Dec, 31 Democracy Now! dedicated the full hour today to Wikileaks and Julian Assange. You can find the full transcript at the Democracy Now! link and the Daniel Ellsberg transcript at Informationthread 23.
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For more info on Bradley Manning :
Informationthread 11
Informationthread 13
Informationthread 15
Informationthread 28
For more info on DOJ/Twittergat :
Informationthread 36
Informationthread 35
Informationthread 34
Informationthread 33
Informationthread 32
Informationthread 31
Had only a few hours tonight so I am sorry. 38 will be better.
UPDATE:
Please let me know what you think should be in the "basics" section going forward. Many of you know what I included before(see Informationthread 32 ). Any other info you feel needs to be made basic?