Around 8pmest every night
First, let's take a moment to think about those killed and injured by the shooter today, including a child.
Ok...................................
Copy of the DOJ request
John Cole : The Guy Just Drove Over a Body (giggle)
NSFW or children :
Those were real people, you assholes. Maybe I feel more strongly about this because I advocated for this war and carry a helluva lot more guilt than some of you. This isn’t about Assange, who may or may not be the world’s biggest asshole and a rapist. It’s about our government lying to us about their conduct, and then launching campaigns against the people who exposed those lies. It’s also about the future of journalism and whistleblowing.
John Cole posted that b/c "The records the DOJ subpoenaed today were in regards to an attempt to prosecute people for the crime of informing us that our government was overtly lying to us about the gleefully conducted murder of innocents..."
http://gawker.com/... from Informationthread 30 :
Icelandic legislator Brigitta Jonsdottir said today that she has been notified by Twitter that the Department of Justice is seeking access to her Twitter account. She tweeted: "just got this: Twitter has received legal process requesting information regarding your Twitter account in (relation to wikileaks)." Jonsdottir says the DOJ is looking for all Wikileaks-related tweets and other "personal information" dating back to November 2009. She now has 10 days to try to block the subpoena before Twitter turns over the information. (According to Twitter's terms of service, the company notifies users if it receives a subpoena for their information.)
Also from 30 :
7:55 Updates on the case of Iceland MP drawing interest from DOJ for past WikiLeaks association (see bunch of items below): Here are Birgitta Jonsdottir's latest tweets. "I have nothing to hide and have done nothing wrong - i have no intention to hand my information over willingly to DoJ." "thank you ALL for your support, means a lot to me & the next steps in our fight for freedom of information, hoping to get legal advice soon." "if twitter hands over my information - then no ones information is save with twitter."
Marcy Wheeler at FDL has some thoughts about why the DOJ is doing this :
One of the things the government may be trying to do is to pinpoint what IP was involved in the tweets revealing the surveillance, to try to tie any conversation about that surveillance to conversations with Manning, and in turn tie those conversations to their theory that the Wikileaks team conspired to leak this information.
Yesterday Glenn Greenwald broke it all down
UPDATE II: It's worth recalling -- and I hope journalists writing about this story remind themselves -- that all of this extraordinary probing and "criminal" investigating is stemming from WikiLeaks' doing nothing more than publishing classified information showing what the U.S. Government is doing: something investigative journalists, by definition, do all the time.
And the key question now is this: did other Internet and social network companies (Google, Facebook, etc.) receive similar Orders and then quietly comply? It's difficult to imagine why the DOJ would want information only from Twitter; if anything, given the limited information it has about users, Twitter would seem one of the least fruitful avenues to pursue. But if other companies did receive and quietly comply with these orders, it will be a long time before we know, if we ever do, given the prohibition in these orders on disclosing even its existence to anyone.
UPDATE III: Iceland's Interior Minister, Ögmundur Jónasson, described the DOJ's efforts to obtain the Twitter information of a member of that country's Parliament as "grave and odd." While suggesting some criticisms of WikiLeaks, he added: "if we manage to make government transparent and give all of us some insight into what is happening in countries involved in warfare it can only be for the good." The DOJ's investigation of a member of Iceland's Parliament -- as part of an effort to intimidate anyone supporting WikiLeaks and to criminalize journalism that exposes what the U.S. Government does -- is one of the most extreme acts yet in the Obama administration's always-escalating war on whistleblowers, and shows how just excessive and paranoid the administration is when it comes to transparency: all this from a President who ran on a vow to have the "most transparent administration in history" and to "Protect Whistleblowers."
WikiLeaks demands Google and Facebook unseal US subpoenas
Amid strong evidence that a US grand jury has begun a wide-ranging trawl for details of what networks and accounts WikiLeaks used to communicate with Bradley Manning, the US serviceman accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of sensitive government cables, some of those named in the subpoena said they would fight disclosure.
"Today, the existence of a secret US government grand jury espionage investigation into WikiLeaks was confirmed for the first time as a subpoena was brought into the public domain," WikiLeaks said in a statement.
The writ, approved by a court in Virginia in December, demands that the San Franscisco-based micro-blogging site hand over all details of five individuals' accounts and private messaging on Twitter – including the computers and networks used.
They include WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Manning, Icelandic MP Brigitta Jonsdottir and Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp. Three of them – Gonggrijp, Assange and Jonsdottir – were named as "producers" of the first significant leak from the US cables cache: a video of an Apache helicopter attack that killed civilians and journalists in Baghdad.
From Greg Mitchell :
8:20 No response from Google and Facebook yet on whether they got subpoenas. As Glenn Greenwald notes this morning, "the key question now is this: did other Internet and social network companies (Google, Facebook, etc.) receive similar Orders and then quietly comply? It's difficult to imagine why the DOJ would want information only from Twitter; if anything, given the limited information it has about users, Twitter would seem one of the least fruitful avenues to pursue. But if other companies did receive and quietly comply with these orders, it will be a long time before we know, if we ever do, given the prohibition in these orders on disclosing even its existence to anyone."
Bianca Jagger: "The #USGov demands the "right" to privacy, but when they want information, they obtain it by force: subpoena #WikiLeaks & its supporters."
Privacy Inc. weighs in
A wide-ranging court order
Buchanan's order isn't a traditional subpoena. Rather, it's what's known as a 2703(d) order, which allows police to obtain certain records from a Web site or Internet provider if they are "relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation."
The 2703(d) order is broad. It requests any "contact information" associated with the accounts from November 1, 2009 to the present, "connection records, or records of session times and durations," and "records of user activity for any connections made to or from the account," including Internet addresses used.
It requests "all records" and "correspondence" relating to those accounts, which appears to be broad enough to sweep in the content of messages such as direct messages sent through Twitter or tweets from a non-public account. That could allow the account holders to claim that the 2703(d) order is unconstitutional. (One federal appeals court recently ruled that under the Fourth Amendment, a 2703(d) order is insufficient for the contents of communications and search warrant is needed, although that decision is not binding in Virginia or San Francisco.)
A Twitter representative declined to comment on any specific legal requests, but told CNET: "To help users protect their rights, it's our policy to notify users about law enforcement and governmental requests for their information, unless we are prevented by law from doing so"
Wikileaks Central has some info :
Twitter could simply have provided the information requested, instead of acting, on January 5, to have the order unsealed. The unsealing of the subpoena allowed the Twitter users in question to become aware of the situation, and it allowed them an opportunity to dispute the order--an opportunity they would not otherwise have had.
The question arises as to why Twitter made this decision and the answer may lie in a recent interview, in which Twitter CEO Dick Costolo expresses his distaste for censorship and rights violations:
In general, he hates government mandates to keep things quiet. And he hates that a woman in China was punished for retweeting something. He reiterates Twitter’s desire to connect people with useful information. "We’re going to lash out at things that prevent us from doing that, as aggressively as we can." The proof is that we’re banned in China. "We’re not going to sacrifice what we’re trying to do to."
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The battle against censorship tends to go hand in hand with the constant fight to preserve individual privacy and it is clear that neither can be won without the other. If social networking sites do not take steps to ensure individual privacy, users will not have much incentive to tweet, blog or tag themselves in a public photo.
The Best of Cablegate: Instances Where Public Discourse Benefited from the Leaks
1. "Dancing Boy" Scandal Alleges Child Prostitution, Possible Drug Use among U.S. Private Contractors
The Guardian reported on a cable describing an incident in which employees of DynCorp, a U.S. military contractor, hired a "dancing boy" for a party. The term "dancing boy," also known as bacha bazi, is a euphemism for a custom in Afghanistan in which underaged boys are dressed as women, dance for gatherings of men and are then prostituted.
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2. Pfizer Allegedly Sought to Blackmail Nigerian Regulator to Stop Lawsuit Against Drug Trials on Children
A cable released by Wikileaks says that Pfizer "had hired investigators to uncover corruption links to [Nigerian] Attorney General Michael Aondoakaa to expose him and put pressure on him to drop the federal cases."
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3. U.S. Failed to Bully Spain Into Adopting Untested Anti-P2P bill
A diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks to the Spanish paper El Pais shows that the United States used bullying tactics to attempt to push Spain into adopting copyright laws even more stringent than those in the U.S.
4. U.S. to Uganda: Let Us Know If You Want to Use Our Intelligence for War Crimes
The United States has long supported the efforts of the Ugandan government to defeat the Lord's Resistance Army, as part of a conflict known for its brutality and the use of child solders. One cable released by Wikileaks indicated the United States was considering selling arms to Uganda. The Guardian reported that the U.S. ambassador accepted verbal promises from the Ugandan defense minister that they would "consult with the US in advance if the [Ugandan army] intends to use US-supplied intelligence to engage in operations not government [sic] by the law of armed conflict." That same article noted that the United States has been concerned that the Ugandan government is engaged in actions which might violate the laws of war.
5. U.S. Haggling over Guantánamo Detainees
President Obama promised to close the Guantánamo Bay detention camp since his campaign for the office, and reiterated the promise once he took office. Yet the controversial detention facility remains open. An article by the New York Times analyzed cables released by Wikileaks which indicated the United States is having difficulties in fulfilling this promise and is now considering some unique solutions.
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The debate over Wikileaks will continue for some time. But these examples make clear that Wikileaks has brought much-needed light to government operations and private actions which, while veiled in secrecy, profoundly affect the lives of people around the world and can play an important role in a democracy that chooses its leaders. As founding father James Madison explained, "a popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or tragedy or perhaps both." Regardless of whether you agree with WikiLeaks, Cablegate has served an important role in bettering public understanding on matters of public concern.
twigg diaried earlier today about twitter-gate
Last but not least, Brad Friedman mentioned yours truly last evening during the 2nd hour while he filled in for Mike Malloy right before he mentioned Twitter-gate. You can listen to the full show, hour by hour, at the link.
ok folks, stay safe............