Questioning WikiLeaks Thread

[nathan28]

It’s unfortunate what is going to happen. We all know it. We all see it.** At some point that 256 character encryption code is going to be released and all of those wanna-be hackers will busily work to decode the 1.6 gig file they downloaded from all those bit torrent sites. Of course the files are unredacted, as has already been made clear by Mr. Assange himself, and the end result will obviously be that some U.S. agent in Pakistan or Somalia or even Yemen will be disclosed and killed. At that point, the Obama administration will have no choice but to shut down thousands of websites (they just ran a BETA test for that last month shutting down 70 all at once) for “national security” reasons. Once that happens, they will of course have to pass a net neutrality bill that allows for licensing requirements for hosting websites which will mean only government approved sites will be allowed and they will be constantly monitored, for the public good of course. And thus, all those troubling “conspiracy theory” sites will be gone and Cass Sunstein can sleep better at night.

Right. The government is going to shut down the most effective surveillance tool in the history of the surveillance tools on planet earth. Okay. Sure.

You might keep in mind that the web is a government project monitoring your every keystroke in a permanent database. Just for starters. And they're gonna toss that away - why again? 'Cause some hypothetical schmuck in Yemen got killed by the WikiLeaks "poison pill" insurance file? I doubt it. Color me doubtful. Refer to me as Uncle McDoubt.

Alice, is there any scenario for which you don't already have a narrative ready to fire off?

thousands of websites (they just ran a BETA test for that last month shutting down 70 all at once)

If it was a BETA test it failed. The "ATTACK ON TEH INTERNETZ ONOZ" was an attack from your asshole friends at Dickstein Dickstein & Dickstein LLP ("Somebody shared one of your songs from iTunes? Dial 1-900-IPSolutions!") subcontracting for the DHS.

U.S. Gets In on Censorship Action
Posted on December 2nd, 2010 by Derek Bambauer
The United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of the Department of Homeland Security, has seized 82 domain names that it contends are responsible for facilitating IP infringement (and perhaps infringing themselves). The seizures have prompted some outrage, and some head-scratching. The head-scratching has been by lawyers (and normal people) trying to figure out the legal basis for the seizure. If I’m reading the U.S. Code right, seizures are authorized under 18 U.S.C. 2323(a), and 18 U.S.C. 981(a)(1)(A) and (C), which authorizes civil seizures of property that is used in a violation, or attempted violation, of 18 U.S.C. 1956(c)(7). If you’re bored enough to trace to 1956(c)(7)(D), you’ll see that it does in fact mention criminal copyright infringement: 18 U.S.C. 2319. Now, we’ve got civil seizure of items used in crime, so that’s weird enough. What is even more strange is that the government doesn’t have to provide notice to the domain name owners if it files a civil complaint against the property – that is, against the domain names (an in rem proceeding for you Civ Pro nerds). (This assumes I’m reading 18 U.S.C. 983(a)(1)(A)(ii) properly – no sure thing.) While the government still bears the burden of showing that the seizure is proper – 983(c)(1) – it also gets to lock up the domain name until the matter is resolved.
OK. That was some painful statutory lifting. The larger – and to me more interesting – question is about censorship. The U.S. government is grabbing domain names to prevent users from reaching content it views as illegal. Not content that has been adjudicated illegal, as far as we know – content that is alleged to be illegal. To content owners, and probably to ICE, it looks only natural that we’d prevent people from reaching information they view as stolen, or counterfeit. But it’s natural to China to censor human rights sites. Or Wikileaks, for that matter. Legitimacy in information control on-line rests, I’ve argued, on being open, transparent, narrow, and accountable. The problem here is twofold: narrowness, and accountability. First, the accountability analysis looks to the procedures by which censorship is carried out. Given that the government can seize sites without notice, and with a showing only in an ex parte hearing (to obtain a warrant), this is problematic in this case. Moreover, the government gets the benefit of the doubt: if they make a mistake, well, too bad for the domain name owner, whose URL is out of commission until there’s a hearing. Second, these seizures aren’t narrow. They’re both overbroad and underbroad. The domain name seizures are underbroad because, surprise surprise, there are more than 82 sites out there offering copyrighted content. They’re overbroad because seizing a domain name blocks licit along with illicit content. It fails to distinguish between content used in an infringing way, and content in a lawful way (such as fair use). It’s true that many of these Torrent sites traffic primarily in infringing materials, but the Supreme Court let the VCR off the hook for secondary copyright liability when less than 10% of taping was lawful...

Every country in the world believes that some material on the Net qualifies inherently for censorship. It’s obvious! In this respect, we’re no different from China. So, we should give up pretensions of American exceptionalism for information controls – for us, it’s IP; for Saudi Arabia, it’s porn; for France, it’s hate speech. Only the quality of the legal process differentiates censors. And with these seizures, I think there’s much to worry us in the (lack of) process…

You may not agree with that last bit--I don't, because I see a difference between browsing porn and reading ZOG pamphlets and between those and listening to a friend's CD, but the bit about quality of law matters.

Because DHS didn't just swoop in and say "you this domain name, it's ours". I(Edit: see, told you I was with The Jewish Hegelian Reptilian Chemtrail Huffing party) They went about getting a judge to sign off on paperwork--a judge who doesn't know wtf he's doing (and most don't. come on, wearing diapers at the bench?)

[Sounder]

No need to deal with the substance of Alice’s post and link. I suppose pointing out the historical links between wikileaks and major media has no meaning in a world where folk are just peachy keen happy to be living on gossip and breadcrumbs.

cuda wrote with misplaced distain...

Right. The government is going to shut down the most effective surveillance tool in the history of the surveillance tools on planet earth. Okay.

Poor logic here; Painting the assumption of ‘shut down’ on to Alice’s words which are more like ‘shunting of internet freedom’ makes for a velly weak argument.

You might keep in mind that the web is a government project monitoring your every keystroke in a permanent database. Just for starters. And they're gonna toss that away - why again? 'Cause some hypothetical schmuck in Yemen got killed by the WikiLeaks "poison pill" insurance file? I doubt it. Color me doubtful.

OK, here’s the deal homie. It’s more difficult to ‘kettle’ the rabble-rousers if they are all over the freaking place. The game for the system is to herd the crowd into kettle situations. This here is an information war where ‘the movement’ may infect enough of the common people with coherent ideas that create something larger than a ‘crowd’, and/or where social control officers in turn shape a mass into a crowd that is then more easily co-opted and controlled.

So no, they’re not going to ‘toss that away’, but you can bet your bottom dollar that some folk would like to better monetize and control the content of this internet thingy.

[AlicetheKurious]

Right. The government is going to shut down the most effective surveillance tool in the history of the surveillance tools on planet earth. Okay.

You might keep in mind that the web is a government project monitoring your every keystroke in a permanent database. Just for starters. And they're gonna toss that away - why again? 'Cause some hypothetical schmuck in Yemen got killed by the WikiLeaks "poison pill" insurance file? I doubt it. Color me doubtful.

Nobody's talking about shutting down the whole internet, especially not anything that limits the governments' ability to monitor people through surveillance of what they say and do on the net, still less the government's ability to control what and how much information can be made available. It's not about eliminating the internet, but bringing it under control. What's so hard to understand about that?

It reminds me of the vibrant democracy we have in Egypt, with opposition parties and independent newspapers and elections and everything. Except that according to the laws under the State of Emergency we've been living in for 30 years or so, no more than 5 people can gather together without special permission from the security services, let alone start a political party or organize meetings even for licensed political parties (you need another license to meet). You can't even distribute a printed piece of paper without a special license from the Special Committee for Journalism, let alone publish anything resembling a newspaper. Any broadcast media can have its license revoked for an infinite number of specific or vague or even "classified" reasons. As a journalist or blogger, you can be arrested and imprisoned for making any verbal or written statement that violates the vaguely worded law that proscribes speech inimical to "national unity", "national security", or "peace and stability". The government has access to every detail of your life but doesn't even publish an annual budget showing where your taxes go, and maintains code of secrecy about all sorts of government business that would be the envy of any mafia don. These laws are very selectively enforced, at the government's discretion, so that the illusion of daily freedom and political diversity and debate is preserved and under normal circumstances most people aren't even aware that these laws exist.

All, all of this is justified on the grounds of "national security". It's all for our own good and amazingly even when they learn about these laws, many people here agree that it's very necessary, especially that back in the 1990s there were some horrific terrorist attacks that convinced all but the most skeptical that a tight police state is exactly what we need to be safe. Moreover, as long as you keep your head low and choose from the wide variety of entertainments available to you and shut up about things that don't concern you, you might live your entire life believing that you live in a reasonably free country. A country that is visibly deteriorating in every way while a small minority living in super-luxurious enclaves just keeps getting richer and richer, but as long as you have football and religion and teevee dramas and sex, and failing that, drugs, and failing that, some kind of a medical or health crisis to keep you preoccupied, "politics" are not such a high priority.

I'm using the model of Egypt's "Security State" because I think in a lot of ways the repression is more obvious than in the US but in some ways it's not as bad and despite Egypt's head-start, the US is rapidly catching up and with the help of its super-advanced technology will soon overtake and surpass Egypt as a system of totalitarian control. Meanwhile, there's no reason why illusion of freedom can't be preserved as much as possible on the internet during the new era that will follow the US government's "reaction" to the Wikileaks. Cass Sunstein and his fellow strategists don't have a problem with you exchanging tips on how to cook a perfect turkey or shopping around for the best prices for appliances or even reading online mainstream newspapers or listening to streaming music and sending emails. Why would they shut down the internet when it is so useful to them? They'll just tinker with it a bit to make sure it can no longer be used in the way it's been used by, say, 9/11 researchers and BDS advocates and alternative media investigative journalists and other 'subversives'.

I don't think they could have predicted how powerful a tool the internet would become, allowing people around the globe to communicate and exchange important information and even organize actions that endanger the global elite's ability to impose its will whenever and wherever it wants. I believe that after years of deliberation they've finally come up with a plan, and with the Wikileaks psyop there are a number of clear warning signs that this plan is finally being put into action, to neutralize the internet once and for all.

Enjoy this board and others like it while you still can. Maybe, given the consolidation of so much of the media in so few hands, it was inevitable that the internet would be targeted next. What I find most sickening of all, is how they've managed to convince so many self-deluded and self-described skeptics to disregard all the red flags and all the cognitive dissonance and remain so adamantly convinced that Assange is a hero and Wikileaks is all about democratization and People Power.

[JackRiddler]

Right. The government is going to shut down the most effective surveillance tool in the history of the surveillance tools on planet earth. Okay.

You might keep in mind that the web is a government project monitoring your every keystroke in a permanent database. Just for starters. And they're gonna toss that away - why again? 'Cause some hypothetical schmuck in Yemen got killed by the WikiLeaks "poison pill" insurance file? I doubt it. Color me doubtful.

Nobody's talking about shutting down the whole internet, especially not anything that limits the governments' ability to monitor people through surveillance of what they say and do on the net, still less the government's ability to control what and how much information can be made available. It's not about eliminating the internet, but bringing it under control. What's so hard to understand about that?

It's easy to understand and I think those whom you imply are not understanding it, do understand it. (barracuda will get it I'm sure.) I certainly agree that this is where the "Cyber Security" and selective war on the Internet wish to arrive, and that there must be a fight back. But how is an important question.

It reminds me of the vibrant democracy we have in Egypt, with opposition parties and independent newspapers and elections and everything. Except that according to the laws under the State of Emergency we've been living in for 30 years or so, no more than 5 people can gather together without special permission from the security services, let alone start a political party or organize meetings even for licensed political parties (you need another license to meet). You can't even distribute a printed piece of paper without a special license from the Special Committee for Journalism, let alone publish anything resembling a newspaper. Any broadcast media can have its license revoked for an infinite number of specific or vague or even "classified" reasons. As a journalist or blogger, you can be arrested and imprisoned for making any verbal or written statement that violates the vaguely worded law that proscribes speech inimical to "national unity", "national security", or "peace and stability". The government has access to every detail of your life but doesn't even publish an annual budget showing where your taxes go, and maintains code of secrecy about all sorts of government business that would be the envy of any mafia don. These laws are very selectively enforced, at the government's discretion, so that the illusion of daily freedom and political diversity and debate is preserved and under normal circumstances most people aren't even aware that these laws exist.

All, all of this is justified on the grounds of "national security". It's all for our own good and amazingly even when they learn about these laws, many people here agree that it's very necessary, especially that back in the 1990s there were some horrific terrorist attacks that convinced all but the most skeptical that a tight police state is exactly what we need to be safe. Moreover, as long as you keep your head low and choose from the wide variety of entertainments available to you and shut up about things that don't concern you, you might live your entire life believing that you live in a reasonably free country. A country that is visibly deteriorating in every way while a small minority living in super-luxurious enclaves just keeps getting richer and richer, but as long as you have football and religion and teevee dramas and sex, and failing that, drugs, and failing that, some kind of a medical or health crisis to keep you preoccupied, "politics" are not such a high priority.

I'm using the model of Egypt's "Security State" because I think in a lot of ways the repression is more obvious than in the US but in some ways it's not as bad and despite Egypt's head-start, the US is rapidly catching up and with the help of its super-advanced technology will soon overtake and surpass Egypt as a system of totalitarian control.

Leaving aside "soon overtake" as an unknown, yes. (Thank you for these insights into the Egyptian situation.)

Meanwhile, there's no reason why illusion of freedom can't be preserved as much as possible on the internet during the new era that will follow the US government's "reaction" to the Wikileaks.

Here's the deal. I understand your argument as

(A) that states want to shunt and sanitize and kettle and control the Internet -- including and most dangerously the big powerful state that started the Internet and sits on the central trunk and claims universal jurisdiction and sovereignty not just for its laws but for its policy and will in all contexts, without need of rationale.

Also that

(B) Wikileaks now serves as a pretext for endeavoring a big step toward this repressive goal.

I don't disagree with either statement. (Although to B, I'd say: "among other things.")

Most of what seems to cause the contentiousness around here is your insistence on completely filling in the unknown area around Wikileaks and declaring that because of A and B, it must follow that

(C) Wikileaks is a government operation from the go and must be condemned (which implies that condemnation of Wikileaks will be an effective tool in fighting back against A and B)

and, in practice once the argument gets going, that

(D) anyone disagreeing with C and your evidentiary grounds for C is a fool and a tool and maybe a Them. Also, a worshipper of Assange who has fallen blindly without any reservations for every aspect of the Wikileaks psyop, etc. *engage rhetorical overkill* etc. etc.

Cass Sunstein and his fellow strategists don't have a problem with you exchanging tips on how to cook a perfect turkey or shopping around for the best prices for appliances or even reading online mainstream newspapers or listening to streaming music and sending emails. Why would they shut down the internet when it is so useful to them? They'll just tinker with it a bit to make sure it can no longer be used in the way it's been used by, say, 9/11 researchers and BDS advocates and alternative media investigative journalists and other 'subversives'.

Yes. And antiwar and social justice and anti-secrecy and anti-government and anti-corporate movements of all kinds. Especially insofar as they involve international solidarity and information from one country affecting public opinion about foreign policy in another.

I don't think they could have predicted how powerful a tool the internet would become, allowing people around the globe to communicate and exchange important information and even organize actions that endanger the global elite's ability to impose its will whenever and wherever it wants.

Yes. Also, depends. They the most authoritarian in the state did not predict. Capital did, and saw business. But anyway, hair-splitting. Yes.

I believe that after years of deliberation they've finally come up with a plan, and with the Wikileaks psyop there are a number of clear warning signs that this plan is finally being put into action, to neutralize the internet once and for all.

So you believe: that Wikileaks is this psyop.

And for some reason, even as the Wikileaks affair indeed develops into a pretext that may successfully be used to achieve greater state control of Internet content, your emphasis is to corral all evidence for this psyop thesis, whether or not it remotely fits, and insist on acceptance. The premise you most insist on defending in how we view the unfolding situation is not that the Internet must remain free or that this freedom is under threat, but that Wikileaks is psyop.

And the practical upshot of that is what? Should we all join in the condemnation of Assange? You see, even if the unknowns are as you wish to have them, the big leap forward toward suppressing the Internet that you posit is going to be conducted by the means of taking away Assange's rights to disseminate information, and generalizing that to take away the rights of the rest of us to do so.

Very clever if they've set it up that way, but what's your slogan for action? "JAIL JULIAN ASSANGE"?

Enjoy this board and others like it while you still can. Maybe, given the consolidation of so much of the media in so few hands, it was inevitable that the internet would be targeted next. What I find most sickening of all, is how they've managed to convince so many self-deluded and self-described skeptics to disregard all the red flags and all the cognitive dissonance and remain so adamantly convinced that Assange is a hero and Wikileaks is all about democratization and People Power.

As I said above:

(D) anyone disagreeing with C and your evidentiary grounds for C is a fool and a tool and maybe a Them. Also, a worshipper of Assange who has fallen blindly without any reservations for every aspect of the Wikileaks psyop etc. *engage rhetorical overkill* etc. etc.

Meanwhile, what's a big part of the statist propaganda saying?

Exterminate Assange! Drop a drone!

.

[82_28]

I don't think "C" and "D" are the case at all. Personally, I think you're misunderstanding a member's position and are underestimating the power of what we do not know. If we knew it, then we wouldn't all be fretting about this and that as of now. It's precisely the power that we do not know or understand that is at issue here. We do not know what the next "step" is and I think Alice is right on and I think you, Jack, are a great archiver, thinker and all of the above. But in my approximations, Alice is exactly right. She may be presenting worst case scenario shit, but I believe she believes, from years of reading her and just what I feel in my bones, is that it's worse than that. In a game of poker sometimes an opponent will show one of his cards to fuck with you. Don't look at this as Texas Hold 'Em. Look at it as 7 card stud. All seven of the cards dealt per player are per player. No community cards.

Assange is not the issue here, but is being made to be. Why, because logically it is so much larger than one man. This shit don't scale in the logic department. You have all kinds of motherfuckers sharing millions upon millions, if not billions of links of detritus daily on safely ensconced web "portals" -- how to cook the perfect turkey type shit -- whoa bro, nice Mexico pics!!!. But as a political tool, we all know that one man cannot or will not save any of us. It takes all of us. Now apply the need for a critical mass of fear or hate or in the case of Obama a couple of years ago, "hope". They're using logic against the logical, by understanding that the human mind, no matter how brilliant, still on a moment by moment basis cannot grok the sheer size of the equation.

It's like a squirrel who does not see an oncoming car -- or does see it but darts around anyhow not knowing what to do. You may think the squirrel to be adept at seeing oncoming objects, and it is and it is perfectly good at doing so. But it has no defense for moving objects at such speed and size as an automobile. It sees part of it, not the whole thing. It cannot understand what its momentary situation is. We're, as humans, in one of those darting squirrel moments. Except, it is not happening by happenstance. It is being fully engineered.

But one man, the figure of one man, can take this all down with the right amount of occluded knowledge, hype and fear. Now place the whole net neutrality bullshit in there, the tangible (for the public) story of Comcast bringing down the hammer on a fellow corporation, mix it all up with everything else that makes no sense on a case by case basis. Throw in some TV shows that only appeal to the hard-core thinkers. Toss in some economic turmoil. And you get your critical mass you need to not have everybody saying, Jesus Christ, they expect me to believe this shit? It's subliminal.

And far be it for me to admit to something in which I have already taken an ill-deserved Internet beating for, but Assange was perfect for the task. I AM NOT saying he was "in on it" for cryin' out loud and never once did I. What I have always maintained is that he is a perfect figure for the mainstream to glom onto and use to put the fact that the Internet needs to change on the front burner. The next couple of weeks will doubtless see some announced measures put forth so that this does not happen again. Even though nothing even happened, but business as usual. They're merely twisting the ongoing and existing propaganda to fit immediate needs in order to implement results.

And oh, I've got more examples of things to keep our eyes out for. I need to go back to sleep though.

[norton ash]

82-28:

But it has no defense for moving objects at such speed and size as an automobile. It sees part of it, not the whole thing. It cannot understand what its momentary situation is.

The four legs of the lion-tamer's chair, the tamer, and the whip hand is what confounds the big cat. It will try to track all six-- four in the foreground, two in background/periphery-- before making a move.

So my ass stays back against the bars on Wikileaks for now, and kudos and admiration to ALL our RI researchers and writers.

Love to see the Vatican getting its criminal cover blown, though. 'Just for Today' as the 12-steppers say, I am very cool with that.

[Montag]

Wikileaks and Media Disinformation
by Gearóid Ó Colmáin

December 8, 2010
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? ... &aid=22321

excerpt:

Much is being written in the mainstream press about the internet whistle-blowing website Wikileaks.

But the interpretation and significance of those Wikileaks stories disseminated throughout the corporate media must be subjected to careful and critical analysis.

As readers of Global Research and other alternative media outlets know, there is little that is particularly shocking about the recent Wikileaks. What is striking about many of the latest leaks is their conformity to the lies and disinformation regularly diffused by the mainstream media.

The upshot of this is that, while exposés of American war crimes should damage America’s imperial ambitions, other ‘leaks’ could actually serve the opposite purpose, especially when they are uncritically reported as ‘revelations’. In this article we are going to look at two examples of how Wikileaks stories could be used to further a US imperialist agenda.

Wikileaks on Belarus

The first example concerns the Republic of Belarus. In a Wikileaks document released on December 1 and reported in The Messenger Georgia’s English language newspaper. The Wikileak reports the statement of the Spanish prosecutor José Gonzalez who accuses Russia, Belarus and Chechnya of being ‘mafioso’ states. According to The Messenger ‘The statement was made by Gonzalez on January 13 this year during a session of the Spanish-American working group on combating terrorism and organised crime.

Wikileaks reports that the information was sent by the US embassy in Madrid to the US government with the comment that the remarks were deep and valuable since the author had knowledge of the Euro-Asian mafia.’ (1)

What is interesting here is the suggestion that the remarks are deep and valuable due to the author’s so-called ‘knowledge’ of the Euro-Asian mafia. The inclusion of Belarus in this ‘leak’ is particularly puzzling. Belarus has one of the lowest crime rates in Europe. The President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko has been continuously re-elected since 1994, due to his progressive social policies and no one denies his obvious popularity.

Yet he is consistently slandered as a ‘dictator’. While Belarus does have close connections with Russia, relations between the two countries have soured recently over energy disputes, geopolitical differences and Belarus’s refusal to pursue free-market policies.

Belarus and Alexander Lukashenko in particular, has been indefatigably demonised in the international press for his refusal to privatise the Belarusian economy, opening up publicly owned industries to international, finance capital mafia.

President Lukashenko’s refusal to indebt his country through IMF loans together with the robust performance of the Belarusian economy since the outbreak of the global economic crisis, have won the Belarusian leader the praise and close friendship of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, who has described Belarus as model socialist economy.

Yet Wikileaks considers a flippant and mendacious comment by a Spanish prosecutor to be ‘deep and valuable’? Here we can see ideology masquerading as objective truth. A flippant opinion by a Spanish prosecutor is considered ‘deep and valuable’ because he should know such things.

The Wikileak is in reality not a revelation at all. It is simply the publication of a highly dubious statement with an ideological assumption appended. Here the Wikileak serves to bolster the negative view of the country engineered by the acolytes of the corporate media to demonise a respectable socialist democracy. Far from undermining US imperialism, this Wikileaks ‘revelation’ slanders a law-abiding country by associating it with criminality and terrorism.

Since the election of Alexander Lukashenko in 1994 the demonization of Belarus has taken the familiar route of ‘human rights’ violations and lack of ‘liberal democracy’, this in spite of the fact that Belarus has held more referenda in the last decade than any other country in Europe, and the so called Human rights violations are minimal in comparison to countries praised by the ‘international community’ such as Latvia, Lithuania, The Czech Republic, Romania, Britain, Poland and other countries praised by the EU and the US, that is to say ‘the international community’.

Belarus has been called an ‘authoritarian’ regime by left liberals with a less than realistic understanding of socialism, and an outright ‘dictatorship’ by the corporate press, who view any regime that controls the excesses of individual greed a ‘violator of human rights’. The problem with Belarus for the ‘international community’ is that it has not embraced capitalism and has some of the highest levels of social equality of any country in the world.

Belarus sets a bad example and that is why one never reads any articles in the bourgeois press that tell the truth about this country.

In a hostile policy paper the Polish academic Antoni Kaminski bluntly states international finance capital’s principal problem with Belarus.

‘The liberal-democratic transition in the post-communist world has, however, proven to be difficult because it embodies a social revolution: it is a move from one type of social order to its logical contradiction. The more successful a country had been in building its communist regime, the more difficult it is for it to carry out the liberal-democratic transformation.’

[Montag]

No need to deal with the substance of Alice’s post and link. I suppose pointing out the historical links between wikileaks and major media has no meaning in a world where folk are just peachy keen happy to be living on gossip and breadcrumbs.

I'm sure William Engdahl would be fascinated to know that he lives on gossip and bread crumbs.

The whole MSM is a Berlin Wall it stands to reason to know something you may have look to unusual places.

I see the blind support of Wiki/Assange as living on ignorance. We know what the U.S. government has done and is capable of (from the past)... We don't know a thing about Assange, and what we do is a highly unusual profile (possibly ritually abused). It walks like a duck, talks like a duck, a duck it is!

p.s. People not even reading things yet wholly dismissing them I find to be fascinating. It shows someone who is going to be paper mache in a debate.

[barracuda]

Painting the assumption of ‘shut down’ on to Alice’s words which are more like ‘shunting of internet freedom’ makes for a velly weak argument.

I do indeed disdain such an argument, partly because it doesn't exist in a vaccum here. The underlying premises of Alice's (and, to an extent, Scott Creighton's) polemic are that:

- Israel controls the US government completely, and
- WikiLeaks is a Mossad plot, as has been made clear by the lack of cables which reflect poorly on Israel.

She has made this about as clear as is it is possible to do here. So naturally, I get a bit confused when the next piece of the syllogism turns out to be:

- WikiLeaks is a plot to destroy internet freedoms.

...because I'm stuck trying to figure out how Israel profits from shutting down internet freedoms. What it sounds like to me is a migration of the construction: [WL=Jew plot] to a more managable argument which retains the same essential underpinnings in a less obvious form, now that the arrest and detainment without counsel, and probable torture and extradition of Assange has basically blown that particular pipe dream away.

But okay. Here, again, is Creighton's paragraph that I disagree with:

It’s unfortunate what is going to happen. We all know it. We all see it. At some point that 256 character encryption code is going to be released and all of those wanna-be hackers will busily work to decode the 1.6 gig file they downloaded from all those bit torrent sites. Of course the files are unredacted, as has already been made clear by Mr. assange himself, and the end result will obviously be that some U.S. agent in Pakistan or Somalia or even Yemen will be disclosed and killed. At that point, the Obama administration will have no choice but to shut down thousands of websites (they just ran a BETA test for that last month shutting down 70 all at once) for “national security” reasons. Once that happens, they will of course have to pass a net neutrality bill that allows for licensing requirements for hosting websites which will mean only government approved sites will be allowed and they will be constantly monitored, for the public good of course. And thus, all those troubling “conspiracy theory” sites will be gone and Cass Sunstein can sleep better at night.

So, the 'Bama administration is going to shut down all those troubling "conspiracy theory" websites. You mean, the government is going to force service providers to block 4chan? And then, presumably somehow they will shut down any alternative meeting site which might be arranged via email? None of this has been thought through at all here. It's putting toothpaste back in the tube, or, even more fundamentally, as if your freedom is somehow predicated upon access to a DSL line.

OK, here’s the deal homie. It’s more difficult to ‘kettle’ the rabble-rousers if they are all over the freaking place. The game for the system is to herd the crowd into kettle situations. This here is an information war where ‘the movement’ may infect enough of the common people with coherent ideas that create something larger than a ‘crowd’, and/or where social control officers in turn shape a mass into a crowd that is then more easily co-opted and controlled.

I presume, holmes, you are saying this because you feel that at the moment the internet is somehow promoting freedom, rather than funneling energy and dissent into an easily monitored backwater. The situation is already coopted and controlled. It's when people leave their keyboards and walk the streets that things get dicey. The NSA wants MORE people on the internet, buying MORE computers and software, sharing MORE of their intimate thoughts, feelings and politics - not less. The NSA doesn't want to limit political speech on the internet - they want real-time actionable intelligence, and anything that limits their access to that won't be tolerated.

Remember back in the olden days, when there was no internet? There were still political dissidents and street protests, but the NSA had no effective way to track your every conversation, or to database social trends up to the second. Do you think for a moment they would like to return to that era? Because if "only government approved sites will be allowed", that is effectively shutting down the internet. At least with regards to the monitoring of those individuals whose use of the 'net is problematic for the government, the individuals they most want to keep an eye on. They will have effectively shut themselves out of their best surveillance tool. They might as well just toss all that expensive software and hardware they've spent decades developing.

Look, one day, like all things, the internet wil disappear. I have no doubt of that. Our very presence on this forum is pretty much at the whim of a single individual. And the prospect makes for an interesting conversation. But Creighton's argument, even if you accept it, doesn't lead one inexorably to the conclusion that Assange or WikiLeaks are bad-faith actors. Precisely the opposite.

[JackRiddler]

82_28, after reading that (and much else from you besides), I don't see why you should ever fear being thought stupid, or be bothered by rhetoric you think implies that on a board (including from me). Seriously. I've never thought that, only occasionally that (as with anyone else) something you said... but anyway. Not in this case.

Thing is, conceptually it can still be the reverse of what you're saying. Just thinking here, if I may: "They" have desired and prepared for greater repressive control of Internet content for many years... and so far haven't got very far with that beyond a rhetorical level of bitching about bloggers and adopting the corporate copyright crusade. Wikileaks provides the pretext for a new try at a content control system -- let's register journalists! -- but that doesn't mean it's going to happen and actually work (any more than the full Rex84 plan has been put into effect, or open martial law followed 9/11 and the official activation under emergency orders of the "shadow government" that had always been present).

The Wikileaks affair (as distinct from WL, the org) is inspiring not only calls for new authoritarian measures but a lot of opposition to them, and in a lot of countries. How does it fit in that presidents of countries that aren't official enemies or antagonists, like Lula, are supporting Wikileaks? Meanwhile there are close to 2000 WL mirrors. Is the US going to build a wall against the rest of the Internet world? Will they invite other nations to join a Cyber Coalition? The Wikileaks affair may, in fact, appear to confirm that shunting and content control can't be done without shutting down large sections of the Web (possibly then inspiring resistance even from the turkey-recipe traders and the ISP corps). It's one thing to show a weakness in the content control and propaganda system that can be addressed, and use that as a pretext for draconian measures (which would argue for the psyop thesis). But what if WL is showing a weakness that cannot be overcome without gumming up the machinery of control? (See State Department and military busy with an internal panic over security and telling their own people not to read stuff in the public domain!) As norton points out, plenty of criminality is being exposed by the leaks (even if it's not the full deep state in view), undermining the credibility of some of the same entities who desire total content control. For these reasons I don't think the WL affair is going to turn into some kind of final Internet putsch, but also that we can't allow any moves in that direction to be kept quietly. (I certainly hope the Dec. 16th House hearings are going to be followed closely and turn those bozos into circus clowns.)

But I reserve the right to not be certain of anything at this stage -- and also not to be accused therefore of falling for an unknown game.

Heroes are dangerous. You never know what's really in their heads, and you don't know what they'll do next. It's a regrettable existential reality that the only hero you can trust not to disappoint or betray you is a dead one. Assange is not my hero. Based only on what I can see now and have seen so far, Wikileaks has engaged in heroic if also questionable acts that, however, won't matter unless they are a spark -- if WL finally becomes a small part of the story because enough others start doing the same.

norton and 82: Which are we really? Tigers or squirrels? I prefer to think a large herd of drowsy elephants.

.

[nathan28]

Yet Wikileaks considers a flippant and mendacious comment by a Spanish prosecutor to be ‘deep and valuable’? Here we can see ideology masquerading as objective truth. A flippant opinion by a Spanish prosecutor is considered ‘deep and valuable’ because he should know such things.

The Wikileak is in reality not a revelation at all. It is simply the publication of a highly dubious statement with an ideological assumption appended. Here the Wikileak serves to bolster the negative view of the country engineered by the acolytes of the corporate media to demonise a respectable socialist democracy. Far from undermining US imperialism, this Wikileaks ‘revelation’ slanders a law-abiding country by associating it with criminality and terrorism.

The argument posed here seems to be analogous to saying that because the Nixon tapes were full of his absurdly racist rants, the release of the tapes was an effort to undermine the civil rights movement.

There is a simple fact associated with this that Global Research can't wrap it's LaRouchite brains around. The leaked cables document the ideological arrogance of the State Dep't and official US policy. If you (the impersonal you) can't see that than I'm not sure what else to say. Sorry, there's no no receipt for fifty kg of nanothermite, ATTN: Kroll Int'l Sec. Desk, Liberty & Church 10006.

That, and the omissions here are almost as important as the facts. So far, we've been told that Eastern European, Russian and African gov'ts are woefully corrupt. We've even seen some documents that show that the Knesset is corrupt and infiltrated by organized crime, but Alice seems to have me and Wikileaks itself on ignore. But we've seen next to not even the slightest hint of corruption in the Euro-American west--despite the fact that documents tell us that those same corrupt Slavs and Jews and Arabs are, in fact, moving into and out of the United States and Europe with relative ease. Apparently, their cunning Orientals have an ability to deceive, being able to engage in massive criminal conspiracy without having any allies in the morally pure and virginal West. In fact, check out the admission by the DEA that they do not intercept much dope coming out of SE Asia. True, it was the #1 source for heroin when the Taliban held control of Afghanistan prior to the 2k1-present campaigns, but that's really not a big deal, right? Nothing to see here...

Which simply is not true and cannot be true. Palms have to get greased, and when like Mogilevich you have more money than god, that's probably not a problem. See Gary Webb's investigation, which was largely initiated by the gov't calling in some favors to get one of the LA suppliers in Iran-Contra off the hook in County Ct. IIRC. "You have one new message. 'Hey, Rickie, it's Ollie...'" etc.

The damn Israeli organized crime memo mentions this as a specific problem, pointing out that the privileged status of Israeli citizens makes it far more difficult to arrest or otherwise interfere with them even when they are known and documented int'l traffickers.


So there is, in fact, value to these. First, they show how thoroughly ideological US policy is and how propagandized the little Eichmanns of empire are; diplomacy is thoroughly in the hands of some jingos, to be sure. Reading some of the things these State Dep't Real American Heros have written makes Henry Kissinger and Zbig look like beacons of antiamerican cosmopolitanism. Second, it shows that this confused-ass worldview manifests in actual policy while disguising it: We're not trying to extract resources from Nigeria. We're not colluding with business to exploit these countries. We're spreading "democracy", or whatever. Lastly, the present omissions are telling, and underscore the problems inherent with the first two issues.


Now, it may be the case than any one of the things I conclude here is inaccurate--less than 1% of the docs are available to most of us. It may be that what I am doing is deconstructing the press's filtering of the docs--but in that case I'm working with what I can see, which has to go through the NY Times for approval. It may be the case that there are "seeded" docs; it may be the case that some are forgeries and hoaxes, though considering the way that Assange and Manning have been treated, I doubt it.

[JackRiddler]

nathan28, nice. Just one thing:

There is a simple fact associated with this that Global Research can't wrap it's LaRouchite brains around.

Global Research publishes a lot of views, including the excellent article by Andrew Gavin Marshall back on page 22 of the other thread...
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=30362&start=315#p370129

[Sounder]

Montag wrote...

I'm sure William Engdahl would be fascinated to know that he lives on gossip and bread crumbs.

I was referring to us, the public not Engdahl, maybe it should have been in green.

[nathan28]

@82:

They're using logic against the logical, by understanding that the human mind, no matter how brilliant, still on a moment by moment basis cannot grok the sheer size of the equation... Except, it is not happening by happenstance. It is being fully engineered.

This is an assumption, and a paranoid one at that, one that attributes a god-like power ("human mind... cannot") to some institution, force or power. If you want to make this out to be a gnostic anthroposophic confession, that's your perogative, but don't expect us to join you. By your own terms, it is fully impossible for any of us to even engage with the big picture.


Which leads me to ask: how did you gain access to this picture? What is it about you that is different from us and the rest of humanity, which you categorically excluded (and you did) from understanding?



That's beside the point, but it is not.

But one man, the figure of one man, can take this all down with the right amount of occluded knowledge, hype and fear. Now place the whole net neutrality bullshit in there, the tangible (for the public) story of Comcast bringing down the hammer on a fellow corporation, mix it all up with everything else that makes no sense on a case by case basis. Throw in some TV shows that only appeal to the hard-core thinkers. Toss in some economic turmoil. And you get your critical mass you need to not have everybody saying, Jesus Christ, they expect me to believe this shit? It's subliminal... I AM NOT saying he was "in on it" for cryin' out loud and never once did I. What I have always maintained is that he is a perfect figure for the mainstream to glom onto and use to put the fact that the Internet needs to change on the front burner. The next couple of weeks will doubtless see some announced measures put forth so that this does not happen again. Even though nothing even happened, but business as usual.

Why you shift gears from gnostic paranoia to this makes little sense to me. That's called "rhetorical slippage," btw, because you argue as though they are related.

What you are saying is:

1. Net neutrality is an issue in the press ATM
2. Nothing "makes [] sense on a case by case basis"
3. There are "TV shows that only appeal to the hard-core thinkers"
4. Because of 2 & 3, ATM most people have no capacity for the thought or attention needed to recognize what is 'really' happening
5. Assange is being scapegoated
6. Scapegoating Assange will bring the issue of internet control up
7. They are going to clamp down on the internet


First, you suggest that Comcast smacking another corporation for fees is somehow surprsing and "doesn't make sense". This isn't accurate. Net neutrality has been under discussion for years now. Besides that, corporations are not all one big unified front. Telecoms stand to benefit from ending net neutrality and telecom is a powerful lobby. ISPs and end-users, i.e, people, stand to lose. Likewise, Comcast offers its own streaming video content service, making it a competitor of Netflix--that is classic capitalist accumulation tending towards oligarchy and monopoly. So, sadly, this one *does* make sense taken as a discrete case.

I don't understand WTF you mean about TV shows. I'm ignoring 4.




IOW, what you're saying is that the internet is gong to get smacked. Alice also says this, but Alice says in no uncertain terms that WikiLeaks was a plot to make Iran look bad, which you do not but you say she's exactly right.

So it's about internet control, then. Okay, well, let me see if I can figure that out.

[Montag]

nathan28, nice. Just one thing:

There is a simple fact associated with this that Global Research can't wrap it's LaRouchite brains around.

Global Research publishes a lot of views, including the excellent article by Andrew Gavin Marshall back on page 22 of the other thread...
http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/view ... 15#p370129

Yes I know isn't it good they don't just fall in line like much of the rest of the media.

Chossodovsky the editor supports Wikileaks (from what I could make out in this interview bad audio, haha), but he obviously doesn't think the people that question it are nuts.