The Wikileaks Question

[sferios]

Alex Jones parodied in Wikileaks RapNews.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hl4NlA97GeQ

[vanlose kid]

...

JP: In the information that you have revealed on WL about these so-called endless wars, what has come out of them?

JA: Looking at the enormous quantity and diversity of these military of intelligence apparatus insider documents what I see is a vast sprawling estate, what we would traditionally call the military intelligence complex or military industrial complex. And this sprawling industrial estate is growing, becoming more and more secretive, becoming more and more uncontrolled. This is not a sophisticated conspiracy controlled at the top. This is a vast movement of self-interest by thousands and thousands of players all working together and against each other to produce an end result which is Iraq and Afghanistan, Columbia, and keeping that going. You know we often deal with tax havens and people hiding assets and transferring money through offshore tax havens, so I see some really quite remarkable similarities. Guantanamo is used for laundering people to an offshore haven, which doesn’t follow the rule of law. Similarly, Iraq and Afghanistan and Columbia are used to wash money out of the US tax base and back.

JP: Arms companies?

JA: Arms companies, yes.

JP: What you’re saying is that money and money making is at the centre of modern war. And it’s almost self-perpetuating.

JA: Yes, and it’s becoming worse.

JP: What happens when WL runs into the UK, which has some of the most draconian secrecy laws in the world, such as the official secrets act?

JA: We haven’t found a problem publishing UK information. I mean, when we look at the official secrets act labelled documents we see… they state that it is an offence to retain the information, and it is an offence to destroy the information, so the only possible outcome is that we have to publish the information, which we have done on many, many occasions.

JP: I noticed one that I had a personal interest in, was one from the MoD, classified document, that equated terrorists with investigative journalists as threats…

JA: And Russian spies. As in fact in many sections of that report, investigative journalists are the number one threat to the information security of the MoD. That was a 2000 page document on how to stop leaks from the MoD, which we leaked.

JP: I don’t know whether to be offended or honored.

JA: Well, it’s nice to be having an impact.

...

*

[vanlose kid]

WikiLeaks “no threat,” top German official says
By Jeff Stein

Germany’s top security official said Monday that WikiLeaks is “irritating and annoying for Germany, but not a threat.”

Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere also he said he was opposed to financial entities cutting off payments to WikiLeaks under pressure from Washington.

“If this occurs under pressure from the U.S. government, I don't think it is acceptable,” de Maiziere, a confidant of Chancellor Angela Merkel, said in an interview with the German weekly Der Spiegel. “If a company freely decides to do so, then that is a corporate decision, but it is also politically problematic. I am a big advocate of what is known as net neutrality. This means that providers are compelled to transmit content without political or commercial pre-selection.”

PayPal and Bank of America have announced they will no longer process payments to WikiLeaks.

De Maiziere, Merkel's former chief of staff, also questioned how “intelligent” the U.S. government is for allowing so many people access to classified documents.

“From an international perspective, I see their actions as totally irresponsible,” de Maiziere said of WikiLeaks. “One might also ask, however, if a government is acting intelligently when it organizes its entire diplomatic correspondence on a network that can be accessed by 2.5 million people.”

The Government Accountability Office reported last year that over 2.4 million people have security clearances.

De Maiziere, the chancellor’s former chief of staff, cautioned that he wasn’t making a case for “total transparency” in foreign relations.

“Governments also have to be able to communicate confidentially. Confidentiality and transparency are not mutually exclusive, but rather two sides of the same coin,” he said.

But he said he was “astounded” to learn from WikiLeaks that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had ordered U.S. diplomats to “spy” on their foreign counterparts at the United Nations, by gathering such personal information as their “credit card account numbers; frequent flyer account numbers; work schedules, and other relevant biographical information,” as a cable signed by her said.

Such an order was “unprecedented,” former State Department intelligence chief Carl W. Ford told SpyTalk on Nov. 29, but other U.S. diplomats said such headquarters directives were a longtime and routine practice, one not always fully obeyed.

In any event, de Maiziere said, a better target for WikiLeaks would be truly closed governments like those of China and Russia.

“I would actually prefer it if WikiLeaks focused less on transparent and open Western democracies and more on the world's dictatorships and oppressive regimes,” he said. “Then it could at least have a genuine informative purpose.”

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/spy-ta ... erman.html

*

[justdrew]

longish piece by Bruce Sterling... comments and links at source...

The Blast Shack
22 December 2010

We asked Bruce Sterling (who spoke at Webstock ’09) for his take on Wikileaks...

The Wikileaks Cablegate scandal is the most exciting and interesting hacker scandal ever. I rather commonly write about such things, and I’m surrounded by online acquaintances who take a burning interest in every little jot and tittle of this ongoing saga. So it’s going to take me a while to explain why this highly newsworthy event fills me with such a chilly, deadening sense of Edgar Allen Poe melancholia.

But it sure does.

Part of this dull, icy feeling, I think, must be the agonizing slowness with which this has happened. At last — at long last — the homemade nitroglycerin in the old cypherpunks blast shack has gone off. Those “cypherpunks,” of all people.

Way back in 1992, a brainy American hacker called Timothy C. May made up a sci-fi tinged idea that he called “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.” This exciting screed — I read it at the time, and boy was it ever cool — was all about anonymity, and encryption, and the Internet, and all about how wacky data-obsessed subversives could get up to all kinds of globalized mischief without any fear of repercussion from the blinkered authorities. If you were of a certain technoculture bent in the early 1990s, you had to love a thing like that.

As Tim blithely remarked to his fellow encryption enthusiasts, “The State will of course try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders, and fears of societal disintegration. Many of these concerns will be valid; crypto anarchy will allow national secrets to be traded freely,” and then Tim started getting really interesting. Later, May described an institution called “BlackNet” which might conceivably carry out these aims.

Nothing much ever happened with Tim May’s imaginary BlackNet. It was the kind of out-there concept that science fiction writers like to put in novels. Because BlackNet was clever, and fun to think about, and it made impossible things seem plausible, and it was fantastic and also quite titillating. So it was the kind of farfetched but provocative issue that ought to be properly raised within a sci-fi public discourse. Because, you know, that would allow plenty of time to contemplate the approaching trainwreck and perhaps do something practical about it.

Nobody did much of anything practical. For nigh on twenty long years, nothing happened with the BlackNet notion, for good or ill. Why? Because thinking hard and eagerly about encryption involves a certain mental composition which is alien to normal public life. Crypto guys — (and the cypherpunks were all crypto guys, mostly well-educated, mathematically gifted middle-aged guys in Silicon Valley careers) — are geeks. They’re harmless geeks, they’re not radical politicians or dashing international crime figures.

Cypherpunks were visionary Californians from the WIRED magazine circle. In their personal lives, they were as meek and low-key as any average code-cracking spook who works for the National Security Agency. These American spooks from Fort Meade are shy and retiring people, by their nature. In theory, the NSA could create every kind of flaming scandalous mayhem with their giant Echelon spy system — but in practice, they would much would rather sit there gently reading other people’s email.

One minute’s thought would reveal that a vast, opaque electronic spy outfit like the National Security Agency is exceedingly dangerous to democracy. Really, it is. The NSA clearly violates all kinds of elementary principles of constitutional design. The NSA is the very antithesis of transparency, and accountability, and free elections, and free expression, and separation of powers — in other words, the NSA is a kind of giant, grown-up, anti-Wikileaks. And it always has been. And we’re used to that. We pay no mind.

The NSA, this crypto empire, is a long-lasting fact on the ground that we’ve all informally agreed not to get too concerned about. Even foreign victims of the NSA’s machinations can’t seem to get properly worked-up about its capacities and intrigues. The NSA has been around since 1947. It’s a little younger than the A-Bomb, and we don’t fuss much about that now, either.

The geeks who man the NSA don’t look much like Julian Assange, because they have college degrees, shorter haircuts, better health insurance and far fewer stamps in their passports. But the sources of their power are pretty much identical to his. They use computers and they get their mitts on info that doesn’t much wanna be free.

Every rare once in a while, the secretive and discreet NSA surfaces in public life and does something reprehensible, such as defeating American federal computer-security initiatives so that they can continue to eavesdrop at will. But the NSA never becomes any big flaming Wikileaks scandal. Why? Because, unlike their wannabe colleagues at Wikileaks, the apparatchiks of the NSA are not in the scandal business. They just placidly sit at the console, reading everybody’s diplomatic cables.

This is their function. The NSA is an eavesdropping outfit. Cracking the communications of other governments is its reason for being. The NSA are not unique entities in the shadows of our planet’s political landscape. Every organized government gives that a try. It’s a geopolitical fact, although it’s not too discreet to dwell on it.

You can walk to most any major embassy in any major city in the world, and you can see that it is festooned with wiry heaps of electronic spying equipment. Don’t take any pictures of the roofs of embassies, as they grace our public skylines. Guards will emerge to repress you.

Now, Tim May and his imaginary BlackNet were the sci-fi extrapolation version of the NSA. A sort of inside-out, hippiefied NSA. Crypto people were always keenly aware of the NSA, for the NSA were the people who harassed them for munitions violations and struggled to suppress their academic publications. Creating a BlackNet is like having a pet, desktop NSA. Except, that instead of being a vast, federally-supported nest of supercomputers under a hill in Maryland, it’s a creaky, homemade, zero-budget social-network site for disaffected geeks.

But who cared about that wild notion? Why would that amateurish effort ever matter to real-life people? It’s like comparing a mighty IBM mainframe to some cranky Apple computer made inside a California garage. Yes, it’s almost that hard to imagine.

So Wikileaks is a manifestation of something that this has been growing all around us, for decades, with volcanic inexorability. The NSA is the world’s most public unknown secret agency. And for four years now, its twisted sister Wikileaks has been the world’s most blatant, most publicly praised, encrypted underground site.

Wikileaks is “underground” in the way that the NSA is “covert”; not because it’s inherently obscure, but because it’s discreetly not spoken about.

The NSA is “discreet,” so, somehow, people tolerate it. Wikileaks is “transparent,” like a cardboard blast shack full of kitchen-sink nitroglycerine in a vacant lot.

That is how we come to the dismal saga of Wikileaks and its ongoing Cablegate affair, which is a melancholy business, all in all. The scale of it is so big that every weirdo involved immediately becomes a larger-than-life figure. But they’re not innately heroic. They’re just living, mortal human beings, the kind of geeky, quirky, cyberculture loons that I run into every day. And man, are they ever going to pay.

Now we must contemplate Bradley Manning, because he was the first to immolate himself. Private Manning was a young American, a hacker-in-uniform, bored silly while doing scarcely necessary scutwork on a military computer system in Iraq. Private Manning had dozens of reasons for becoming what computer-security professionals call the “internal threat.”

His war made no sense on its face, because it was carried out in a headlong pursuit of imaginary engines of mass destruction. The military occupation of Iraq was endless. Manning, a tender-hearted geek, was overlooked and put-upon by his superiors. Although he worked around the clock, he had nothing of any particular military consequence to do.

It did not occur to his superiors that a bored soldier in a poorly secured computer system would download hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables. Because, well, why? They’re very boring. Soldiers never read them. The malefactor has no use for them. They’re not particularly secret. They’ve got nothing much to do with his war. He knows his way around the machinery, but Bradley Manning is not any kind of blackhat programming genius.

Instead, he’s very like Jerome Kerveil, that obscure French stock trader who stole 5 billion euros without making one dime for himself. Jerome Kerveil, just like Bradley Manning, was a bored, resentful, lower-echelon guy in a dead end, who discovered some awesome capacities in his system that his bosses never knew it had. It makes so little sense to behave like Kerveil and Manning that their threat can’t be imagined. A weird hack like that is self-defeating, and it’s sure to bring terrible repercussions to the transgressor. But then the sad and sordid days grind on and on; and that blindly potent machinery is just sitting there. Sitting there, tempting the user.

Bradley Manning believes the sci-fi legendry of the underground. He thinks that he can leak a quarter of a million secret cables, protect himself with neat-o cryptography, and, magically, never be found out. So Manning does this, and at first he gets away with it, but, still possessed by the malaise that haunts his soul, he has to brag about his misdeed, and confess himself to a hacker confidante who immediately ships him to the authorities.

No hacker story is more common than this. The ingenuity poured into the machinery is meaningless. The personal connections are treacherous. Welcome to the real world.

So Private Manning, cypherpunk, is immediately toast.

No army can permit this kind of behavior and remain a functional army; so Manning is in solitary confinement and he is going to be court-martialled. With more political awareness, he might have made himself a public martyr to his conscience; but he lacks political awareness. He only has only his black-hat hacker awareness, which is all about committing awesome voyeuristic acts of computer intrusion and imagining you can get away with that when it really matters to people.

The guy preferred his hacker identity to his sworn fidelity to the uniform of a superpower. The shear-forces there are beyond his comprehension.

The reason this upsets me is that I know so many people just like Bradley Manning. Because I used to meet and write about hackers, “crackers,” “darkside hackers,” “computer underground” types. They are a subculture, but once you get used to their many eccentricities, there is nothing particularly remote or mysterious or romantic about them. They are banal. Bradley Manning is a young, mildly brainy, unworldly American guy who probably would have been pretty much okay if he’d been left alone to skateboard, read comic books and listen to techno music.

Instead, Bradley had to leak all over the third rail. Through historical circumstance, he’s become a miserable symbolic point-man for a global war on terror. He doesn’t much deserve that role. He’s got about as much to do with the political aspects of his war as Monica Lewinsky did with the lasting sexual mania that afflicts the American Republic.

That is so dispiriting and ugly. As a novelist, I never think of Monica Lewinsky, that once-everyday young woman, without a sense of dread at the freakish, occult fate that overtook her. Imagine what it must be like, to wake up being her, to face the inevitability of being That Woman. Monica, too, transgressed in apparent safety and then she had the utter foolishness to brag to a lethal enemy, a trusted confidante who ran a tape machine and who brought her a mediated circus of hells. The titillation of that massive, shattering scandal has faded now. But think of the quotidian daily horror of being Monica Lewinsky, and that should take a bite from the soul.

Bradley Manning now shares that exciting, oh my God, Monica Lewinsky, tortured media-freak condition. This mild little nobody has become super-famous, and in his lonely military brig, screenless and without a computer, he’s strictly confined and, no doubt, he’s horribly bored. I don’t want to condone or condemn the acts of Bradley Manning. Because legions of people are gonna do that for me, until we’re all good and sick of it, and then some. I don’t have the heart to make this transgressor into some hockey-puck for an ideological struggle. I sit here and I gloomily contemplate his all-too-modern situation with a sense of Sartrean nausea.

Commonly, the authorities don’t much like to crush apple-cheeked white-guy hackers like Bradley Manning. It’s hard to charge hackers with crimes, even when they gleefully commit them, because it’s hard to find prosecutors and judges willing to bone up on the drudgery of understanding what they did. But they’ve pretty much got to make a puree’ out of this guy, because of massive pressure from the gravely embarrassed authorities. Even though Bradley lacks the look and feel of any conventional criminal; wrong race, wrong zipcode, wrong set of motives.

Bradley’s gonna become a “spy” whose “espionage” consisted of making the activities of a democratic government visible to its voting population. With the New York Times publishing the fruits of his misdeeds. Some set of American prosecutorial lawyers is confronting this crooked legal hairpin right now. I feel sorry for them.

Then there is Julian Assange, who is a pure-dye underground computer hacker. Julian doesn’t break into systems at the moment, but he’s not an “ex-hacker,” he’s the silver-plated real deal, the true avant-garde. Julian is a child of the underground hacker milieu, the digital-native as twenty-first century cypherpunk. As far as I can figure, Julian has never found any other line of work that bore any interest for him.

Through dint of years of cunning effort, Assange has worked himself into a position where his “computer crimes” are mainly political. They’re probably not even crimes. They are “leaks.” Leaks are nothing special. They are tidbits from the powerful that every journalist gets on occasion, like crumbs of fishfood on the top of the media tank.

Only, this time, thanks to Manning, Assange has brought in a massive truckload of media fishfood. It’s not just some titillating, scandalous, floating crumbs. There’s a quarter of a million of them. He’s become the one-man global McDonald’s of leaks.

Ever the detail-freak, Assange in fact hasn’t shipped all the cables he received from Manning. Instead, he cunningly encrypted the cables and distributed them worldwide to thousands of fellow-travellers. This stunt sounds technically impressive, although it isn’t. It’s pretty easy to do, and nobody but a cypherpunk would think that it made any big difference to anybody. It’s part and parcel of Assange’s other characteristic activities, such as his inability to pack books inside a box while leaving any empty space.

While others stare in awe at Assange’s many otherworldly aspects — his hairstyle, his neatness, too-precise speech, his post-national life out of a laptop bag — I can recognize him as pure triple-A outsider geek. Man, I know a thousand modern weirdos like that, and every single one of them seems to be on my Twitter stream screaming support for Assange because they can recognize him as a brother and a class ally. They are in holy awe of him because, for the first time, their mostly-imaginary and lastingly resentful underclass has landed a serious blow in a public arena. Julian Assange has hacked a superpower.

He didn’t just insult the captain of the global football team; he put spycams in the locker room. He has showed the striped-pants set without their pants. This a massively embarrassing act of technical voyeurism. It’s like Monica and her stains and kneepads, only even more so.

Now, I wish I could say that I feel some human pity for Julian Assange, in the way I do for the hapless, one-shot Bradley Manning, but I can’t possibly say that. Pity is not the right response, because Assange has carefully built this role for himself. He did it with all the minute concentration of some geek assembling a Rubik’s Cube.

In that regard, one’s hat should be off to him. He’s had forty years to learn what he was doing. He’s not some miserabilist semi-captive like the uniformed Bradley Manning. He’s a darkside player out to stick it to the Man. The guy has surrounded himself with the cream of the computer underground, wily old rascals like Rop Gonggrijp and the fearsome Teutonic minions of the Chaos Computer Club.

Assange has had many long, and no doubt insanely detailed, policy discussions with all his closest allies, about every aspect of his means, motives and opportunities. And he did what he did with fierce resolve.

Furthermore, and not as any accident, Assange has managed to alienate everyone who knew him best. All his friends think he’s nuts. I’m not too thrilled to see that happen. That’s not a great sign in a consciousness-raising, power-to-the-people, radical political-leader type. Most successful dissidents have serious people skills and are way into revolutionary camaraderie and a charismatic sense of righteousness. They’re into kissing babies, waving bloody shirts, and keeping hope alive. Not this chilly, eldritch guy. He’s a bright, good-looking man who — let’s face it — can’t get next to women without provoking clumsy havoc and a bitter and lasting resentment. That’s half the human race that’s beyond his comprehension there, and I rather surmise that, from his stern point of view, it was sure to be all their fault.

Assange was in prison for a while lately, and his best friend in the prison was his Mom. That seems rather typical of him. Obviously Julian knew he was going to prison; a child would know it. He’s been putting on his Solzhenitsyn clothes and combing his forelock for that role for ages now. I’m a little surprised that he didn’t have a more organized prison-support committee, because he’s a convicted computer criminal who’s been through this wringer before. Maybe he figures he’ll reap more glory if he’s martyred all alone.

I rather doubt the authorities are any happier to have him in prison. They pretty much gotta feed him into their legal wringer somehow, but a botched Assange show-trial could do colossal damage. There’s every likelihood that the guy could get off. He could walk into an American court and come out smelling of roses. It’s the kind of show-trial judo every repressive government fears.

It’s not just about him and the burning urge to punish him; it’s about the public risks to the reputation of the USA. They superpower hypocrisy here is gonna be hard to bear. The USA loves to read other people’s diplomatic cables. They dote on doing it. If Assange had happened to out the cable-library of some outlaw pariah state, say, Paraguay or North Korea, the US State Department would be heaping lilies at his feet. They’d be a little upset about his violation of the strict proprieties, but they’d also take keen satisfaction in the hilarious comeuppance of minor powers that shouldn’t be messing with computers, unlike the grandiose, high-tech USA.

Unfortunately for the US State Department, they clearly shouldn’t have been messing with computers, either. In setting up their SIPRnet, they were trying to grab the advantages of rapid, silo-free, networked communication while preserving the hierarchical proprieties of official confidentiality. That’s the real issue, that’s the big modern problem; national governments and global computer networks don’t mix any more. It’s like trying to eat a very private birthday cake while also distributing it. That scheme is just not working. And that failure has a face now, and that’s Julian Assange.

Assange didn’t liberate the dreadful secrets of North Korea, not because the North Koreans lack computers, but because that isn’t a cheap and easy thing that half-a-dozen zealots can do. But the principle of it, the logic of doing it, is the same. Everybody wants everybody else’s national government to leak. Every state wants to see the diplomatic cables of every other state. It will bend heaven and earth to get them. It’s just, that sacred activity is not supposed to be privatized, or, worse yet, made into the no-profit, shareable, have-at-it fodder for a network society, as if global diplomacy were so many mp3s. Now the US State Department has walked down the thorny road to hell that was first paved by the music industry. Rock and roll, baby.

Now, in strict point of fact, Assange didn’t blandly pirate the massive hoard of cables from the US State Department. Instead, he was busily “redacting” and minutely obeying the proprieties of his political cover in the major surviving paper dailies. Kind of a nifty feat of social-engineering there; but he’s like a poacher who machine-gunned a herd of wise old elephants and then went to the temple to assume the robes of a kosher butcher. That is a world-class hoax.

Assange is no more a “journalist” than he is a crypto mathematician. He’s a darkside hacker who is a self-appointed, self-anointed, self-educated global dissident. He’s a one-man Polish Solidarity, waiting for the population to accrete around his stirring propaganda of the deed. And they are accreting; not all of ‘em, but, well, it doesn’t take all of them.

Julian Assange doesn’t want to be in power; he has no people skills at all, and nobody’s ever gonna make him President Vaclav Havel. He’s certainly not in for the money, because he wouldn’t know what to do with the cash; he lives out of a backpack, and his daily routine is probably sixteen hours online. He’s not gonna get better Google searches by spending more on his banned MasterCard. I don’t even think Assange is all that big on ego; I know authors and architects, so I’ve seen much worse than Julian in that regard. He’s just what he is; he’s something we donâ’t yet have words for.

He’s a different, modern type of serious troublemaker. He’s certainly not a “terrorist,” because nobody is scared and no one got injured. He’s not a “spy,” because nobody spies by revealing the doings of a government to its own civil population. He is orthogonal. He’s asymmetrical. He panics people in power and he makes them look stupid. And I feel sorry for them. But sorrier for the rest of us.

Julian Assange’s extremely weird version of dissident “living in truth” doesn’t bear much relationship to the way that public life has ever been arranged. It does, however, align very closely to what we’ve done to ourselves by inventing and spreading the Internet. If the Internet was walking around in public, it would look and act a lot like Julian Assange. The Internet is about his age, and it doesn’t have any more care for the delicacies of profit, propriety and hierarchy than he does.

So Julian is heading for a modern legal netherworld, the slammer, the electronic parole cuff, whatever; you can bet there will be surveillance of some kind wherever he goes, to go along with the FREE ASSANGE stencils and xeroxed flyers that are gonna spring up in every coffee-bar, favela and university on the planet. A guy as personally hampered and sociopathic as Julian may in fact thrive in an inhuman situation like this. Unlike a lot of keyboard-hammering geeks, he’s a serious reader and a pretty good writer, with a jailhouse-lawyer facility for pointing out weaknesses in the logic of his opponents, and boy are they ever. Weak, that is. They are pathetically weak.

Diplomats have become weak in the way that musicians are weak. Musicians naturally want people to pay real money for music, but if you press them on it, they’ll sadly admit that they don’t buy any music themselves. Because, well, they’re in the business, so why should they? And the same goes for diplomats and discreet secrets.

The one grand certainty about the consumers of Cablegate is that diplomats are gonna be reading those stolen cables. Not hackers: diplomats. Hackers bore easily, and they won’t be able to stand the discourse of intelligent trained professionals discussing real-life foreign affairs.

American diplomats are gonna read those stolen cables, though, because they were supposed to read them anyway, even though they didn’t. Now, they’ve got to read them, with great care, because they might get blindsided otherwise by some wisecrack that they typed up years ago.

And, of course, every intelligence agency and every diplomat from every non-American agency on Earth is gonna fire up computers and pore over those things. To see what American diplomacy really thought about them, or to see if they were ignored (which is worse), and to see how the grownups ran what was basically a foreign-service news agency that the rest of us were always forbidden to see.

This stark fact makes them all into hackers. Yes, just like Julian. They’re all indebted to Julian for this grim thing that he did, and as they sit there hunched over their keyboards, drooling over their stolen goodies, they’re all, without exception, implicated in his doings. Assange is never gonna become a diplomat, but he’s arranged it so that diplomats henceforth are gonna be a whole lot more like Assange. They’ll behave just like him. They receive the goods just like he did, semi-surreptitiously. They may be wearing an ascot and striped pants, but they’ve got that hacker hunch in their necks and they’re staring into the glowing screen.

And I don’t much like that situation. It doesn’t make me feel better. I feel sorry for them and what it does to their values, to their self-esteem. If there’s one single watchword, one central virtue, of the diplomatic life, it’s “discretion.” Not “transparency.” Diplomatic discretion. Discretion is why diplomats do not say transparent things to foreigners. When diplomats tell foreigners what they really think, war results.

Diplomats are people who speak from nation to nation. They personify nations, and nations are brutal, savage, feral entities. Diplomats used to have something in the way of an international community, until the Americans decided to unilaterally abandon that in pursuit of Bradley Manning’s oil war. Now nations are so badly off that they can’t even get it together to coherently tackle heroin, hydrogen bombs, global warming and financial collapse. Not to mention the Internet.

The world has lousy diplomacy now. It’s dysfunctional. The world corps diplomatique are weak, really weak, and the US diplomatic corps, which used to be the senior and best-engineered outfit there, is rattling around bottled-up in blast-proofed bunkers. It’s scary how weak and useless they are.

US diplomats used to know what to do with dissidents in other nations. If they were communists they got briskly repressed, but if they had anything like a free-market outlook, then US diplomats had a whole arsenal of gentle and supportive measures; Radio Free Europe, publication in the West, awards, foreign travel, flattery, moral support; discreet things, in a word, but exceedingly useful things. Now they’re harassing Julian by turning those tools backwards.

For a US diplomat, Assange is like some digitized nightmare-reversal of a kindly Cold War analog dissident. He read the dissident playbook and he downloaded it as a textfile; but, in fact, Julian doesn’t care about the USA. It’s just another obnoxious national entity. He happens to be more or less Australian, and he’s no great enemy of America. If he’d had the chance to leak Australian cables he would have leapt on that with the alacrity he did on Kenya. Of course, when Assange did it to that meager little Kenya, all the grown-ups thought that was groovy; he had to hack a superpower in order to touch the third rail.

But the American diplomatic corps, and all it thinks it represents, is just collateral damage between Assange and his goal. He aspires to his transparent crypto-utopia in the way George Bush aspired to imaginary weapons of mass destruction. And the American diplomatic corps are so many Iraqis in that crusade. They’re the civilian casualties.

As a novelist, you gotta like the deep and dark irony here. As somebody attempting to live on a troubled world… I dunno. It makes one want to call up the Red Cross and volunteer to fund planetary tranquilizers.

I’ve met some American diplomats; not as many as I’ve met hackers, but a few. Like hackers, diplomats are very intelligent people; unlike hackers, they are not naturally sociopathic. Instead, they have to be trained that way in the national interest. I feel sorry for their plight. I can enter into the shame and bitterness that afflicts them now.

The cables that Assange leaked have, to date, generally revealed rather eloquent, linguistically gifted American functionaries with a keen sensitivity to the feelings of aliens. So it’s no wonder they were of dwindling relevance and their political masters paid no attention to their counsels. You don’t have to be a citizen of this wracked and threadbare superpower — (you might, for instance, be from New Zealand) — in order to sense the pervasive melancholy of an empire in decline. There’s a House of Usher feeling there. Too many prematurely buried bodies.

For diplomats, a massive computer leak is not the kind of sunlight that chases away corrupt misbehavior; it’s more like some dreadful shift in the planetary atmosphere that causes ultraviolet light to peel their skin away. They’re not gonna die from being sunburned in public without their pants on; Bill Clinton survived that ordeal, Silvio Berlusconi just survived it (again). No scandal lasts forever; people do get bored. Generally, you can just brazen it out and wait for public to find a fresher outrage. Except.

It’s the damage to the institutions that is spooky and disheartening; after the Lewinsky eruption, every American politician lives in permanent terror of a sex-outing. That’s “transparency,” too; it’s the kind of ghastly sex-transparency that Julian himself is stuck crotch-deep in. The politics of personal destruction hasn’t made the Americans into a frank and erotically cheerful people. On the contrary, the US today is like some creepy house of incest divided against itself in a civil cold war. “Transparency” can have nasty aspects; obvious, yet denied; spoken, but spoken in whispers. Very Edgar Allen Poe.

That’s our condition. It’s a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel, but it’s not a comedy that the planet’s general cultural situation is so clearly getting worse. As I sit here moping over Julian Assange, I’d love to pretend that this is just me in a personal bad mood; in the way that befuddled American pundits like to pretend that Julian is some kind of unique, demonic figure. He isn’t. If he ever was, he sure as hell isn’t now, as “Indoleaks,” “Balkanleaks” and “Brusselsleaks” spring up like so many filesharing whackamoles. Of course the Internet bedroom legions see him, admire him, and aspire to be like him — and they will. How could they not?

Even though, as major political players go, Julian Assange seems remarkably deprived of sympathetic qualities. Most saintly leaders of the oppressed masses, most wannabe martyrs, are all keen to kiss-up to the public. But not our Julian; clearly, he doesn’t lack for lust and burning resentment, but that kind of gregarious, sweaty political tactility is beneath his dignity. He’s extremely intelligent, but, as a political, social and moral actor, he’s the kind of guy who gets depressed by the happiness of the stupid.

I don’t say these cruel things about Julian Assange because I feel distant from him, but, on the contrary, because I feel close to him. I don’t doubt the two of us would have a lot to talk about. I know hordes of men like him; it’s just that they are programmers, mathematicians, potheads and science fiction fans instead of fiercely committed guys who aspire to topple the international order and replace it with subversive wikipedians.

The chances of that ending well are about ten thousand to one. And I don’t doubt Assange knows that. This is the kind of guy who once wrote an encryption program called “Rubberhose,” because he had it figured that the cops would beat his password out of him, and he needed some code-based way to finesse his own human frailty. Hey, neat hack there, pal.

So, well, that’s the general situation with this particular scandal. I could go on about it, but I’m trying to pace myself. This knotty situation is not gonna “blow over,” because it’s been building since 1993 and maybe even 1947. “Transparency” and “discretion” are virtues, but they are virtues that clash. The international order and the global Internet are not best pals. They never were, and now that’s obvious.

The data held by states is gonna get easier to steal, not harder to steal; the Chinese are all over Indian computers, the Indians are all over Pakistani computers, and the Russian cybermafia is brazenly hosting wikileaks.info because that’s where the underground goes to the mattresses. It is a godawful mess. This is gonna get worse before it gets better, and it’s gonna get worse for a long time. Like leaks in a house where the pipes froze.

Well… every once in a while, a situation that’s one-in-a-thousand is met by a guy who is one in a million. It may be that Assange is, somehow, up to this situation. Maybe he’s gonna grow in stature by the massive trouble he has caused. Saints, martyrs, dissidents and freaks are always wild-cards, but sometimes they’re the only ones who can clear the general air. Sometimes they become the catalyst for historical events that somehow had to happen. They don’t have to be nice guys; that’s not the point. Julian Assange did this; he direly wanted it to happen. He planned it in nitpicky, obsessive detail. Here it is; a planetary hack.

I don’t have a lot of cheery hope to offer about his all-too-compelling gesture, but I dare to hope he’s everything he thinks he is, and much, much, more.

Bruce Sterling

[Wombaticus Rex]

“One might also ask, however, if a government is acting intelligently when it organizes its entire diplomatic correspondence on a network that can be accessed by 2.5 million people.”

Hot damn if that ain't the best single sentence on the whole circus, right there. Amen.

[vanlose kid]

longish piece by Bruce Sterling... comments and links at source...

The Blast Shack
...

Then there is Julian Assange, who is a pure-dye underground computer hacker. Julian doesn’t break into systems at the moment, but he’s not an “ex-hacker,” he’s the silver-plated real deal, the true avant-garde. Julian is a child of the underground hacker milieu, the digital-native as twenty-first century cypherpunk. As far as I can figure, Julian has never found any other line of work that bore any interest for him.

...

Ever the detail-freak, Assange in fact hasn’t shipped all the cables he received from Manning. Instead, he cunningly encrypted the cables and distributed them worldwide to thousands of fellow-travellers. This stunt sounds technically impressive, although it isn’t. It’s pretty easy to do, and nobody but a cypherpunk would think that it made any big difference to anybody. It’s part and parcel of Assange’s other characteristic activities, such as his inability to pack books inside a box while leaving any empty space.

While others stare in awe at Assange’s many otherworldly aspects — his hairstyle, his neatness, too-precise speech, his post-national life out of a laptop bag — I can recognize him as pure triple-A outsider geek. Man, I know a thousand modern weirdos like that, and every single one of them seems to be on my Twitter stream screaming support for Assange because they can recognize him as a brother and a class ally. They are in holy awe of him because, for the first time, their mostly-imaginary and lastingly resentful underclass has landed a serious blow in a public arena. Julian Assange has hacked a superpower.

He didn’t just insult the captain of the global football team; he put spycams in the locker room. He has showed the striped-pants set without their pants. This a massively embarrassing act of technical voyeurism. It’s like Monica and her stains and kneepads, only even more so.

Now, I wish I could say that I feel some human pity for Julian Assange, in the way I do for the hapless, one-shot Bradley Manning, but I can’t possibly say that. Pity is not the right response, because Assange has carefully built this role for himself. He did it with all the minute concentration of some geek assembling a Rubik’s Cube.

In that regard, one’s hat should be off to him. He’s had forty years to learn what he was doing. He’s not some miserabilist semi-captive like the uniformed Bradley Manning. He’s a darkside player out to stick it to the Man. The guy has surrounded himself with the cream of the computer underground, wily old rascals like Rop Gonggrijp and the fearsome Teutonic minions of the Chaos Computer Club.

Assange has had many long, and no doubt insanely detailed, policy discussions with all his closest allies, about every aspect of his means, motives and opportunities. And he did what he did with fierce resolve.

Furthermore, and not as any accident, Assange has managed to alienate everyone who knew him best. All his friends think he’s nuts. I’m not too thrilled to see that happen. That’s not a great sign in a consciousness-raising, power-to-the-people, radical political-leader type. Most successful dissidents have serious people skills and are way into revolutionary camaraderie and a charismatic sense of righteousness. They’re into kissing babies, waving bloody shirts, and keeping hope alive. Not this chilly, eldritch guy. He’s a bright, good-looking man who — let’s face it — can’t get next to women without provoking clumsy havoc and a bitter and lasting resentment. That’s half the human race that’s beyond his comprehension there, and I rather surmise that, from his stern point of view, it was sure to be all their fault.

Assange was in prison for a while lately, and his best friend in the prison was his Mom. That seems rather typical of him. Obviously Julian knew he was going to prison; a child would know it. He’s been putting on his Solzhenitsyn clothes and combing his forelock for that role for ages now. I’m a little surprised that he didn’t have a more organized prison-support committee, because he’s a convicted computer criminal who’s been through this wringer before. Maybe he figures he’ll reap more glory if he’s martyred all alone.

I rather doubt the authorities are any happier to have him in prison. They pretty much gotta feed him into their legal wringer somehow, but a botched Assange show-trial could do colossal damage. There’s every likelihood that the guy could get off. He could walk into an American court and come out smelling of roses. It’s the kind of show-trial judo every repressive government fears.

It’s not just about him and the burning urge to punish him; it’s about the public risks to the reputation of the USA. They superpower hypocrisy here is gonna be hard to bear. The USA loves to read other people’s diplomatic cables. They dote on doing it. If Assange had happened to out the cable-library of some outlaw pariah state, say, Paraguay or North Korea, the US State Department would be heaping lilies at his feet. They’d be a little upset about his violation of the strict proprieties, but they’d also take keen satisfaction in the hilarious comeuppance of minor powers that shouldn’t be messing with computers, unlike the grandiose, high-tech USA.

...


Assange is no more a “journalist” than he is a crypto mathematician. He’s a darkside hacker who is a self-appointed, self-anointed, self-educated global dissident. He’s a one-man Polish Solidarity, waiting for the population to accrete around his stirring propaganda of the deed. And they are accreting; not all of ‘em, but, well, it doesn’t take all of them.

Julian Assange doesn’t want to be in power; he has no people skills at all, and nobody’s ever gonna make him President Vaclav Havel. He’s certainly not in for the money, because he wouldn’t know what to do with the cash; he lives out of a backpack, and his daily routine is probably sixteen hours online. He’s not gonna get better Google searches by spending more on his banned MasterCard. I don’t even think Assange is all that big on ego; I know authors and architects, so I’ve seen much worse than Julian in that regard. He’s just what he is; he’s something we donâ’t yet have words for.

He’s a different, modern type of serious troublemaker. He’s certainly not a “terrorist,” because nobody is scared and no one got injured. He’s not a “spy,” because nobody spies by revealing the doings of a government to its own civil population. He is orthogonal. He’s asymmetrical. He panics people in power and he makes them look stupid. And I feel sorry for them. But sorrier for the rest of us.

Julian Assange’s extremely weird version of dissident “living in truth” doesn’t bear much relationship to the way that public life has ever been arranged. It does, however, align very closely to what we’ve done to ourselves by inventing and spreading the Internet. If the Internet was walking around in public, it would look and act a lot like Julian Assange. The Internet is about his age, and it doesn’t have any more care for the delicacies of profit, propriety and hierarchy than he does.

So Julian is heading for a modern legal netherworld, the slammer, the electronic parole cuff, whatever; you can bet there will be surveillance of some kind wherever he goes, to go along with the FREE ASSANGE stencils and xeroxed flyers that are gonna spring up in every coffee-bar, favela and university on the planet. A guy as personally hampered and sociopathic as Julian may in fact thrive in an inhuman situation like this. Unlike a lot of keyboard-hammering geeks, he’s a serious reader and a pretty good writer, with a jailhouse-lawyer facility for pointing out weaknesses in the logic of his opponents, and boy are they ever. Weak, that is. They are pathetically weak.

...

Well… every once in a while, a situation that’s one-in-a-thousand is met by a guy who is one in a million. It may be that Assange is, somehow, up to this situation. Maybe he’s gonna grow in stature by the massive trouble he has caused. Saints, martyrs, dissidents and freaks are always wild-cards, but sometimes they’re the only ones who can clear the general air. Sometimes they become the catalyst for historical events that somehow had to happen. They don’t have to be nice guys; that’s not the point. Julian Assange did this; he direly wanted it to happen. He planned it in nitpicky, obsessive detail. Here it is; a planetary hack.

I don’t have a lot of cheery hope to offer about his all-too-compelling gesture, but I dare to hope he’s everything he thinks he is, and much, much, more.

Bruce Sterling

first, justdrew, thanks for this. i've been hitting Bill Gibson's site on and off for quite some time and he's said nary a word of this and the forum there is "television tuned to a dead channel".

there's some stuff i don't agree with there and some of it that just reads like a good author getting carried away by his powers of rhetoric, but what he does get right is Assange, he's an entirely new animal.

and i think this is why so many who (here at RI too) find him suspicious or are convinced he can't be for real – because to them he isn't. what motivates him is nothing they can recognize, so they try their best to fit him into some category that makes sense, to them.

he doesn't even make sense to the US and other authorities who are after him. – they, like the "sceptics", just don't get where he's coming from, so they focus on catch phrases like freak, geek, albino (and if they had paid attention they'd have known by now that his hair color went white due to some pretty harrowing personal experiences), and what not. there's been a lot of that bandied about. and they still don't get him.

asymmetrical. that's it. and alone. clear eyed and clear headed.

he knows what he's doing and has thought it all through. he's no martyr, no.

just doing what he does best. hack.

it's the why of it that has some folks befuddled.

*

edit, for typos and bad syntax and grammar and...

*

[lupercal]

they, like the "sceptics", just don't get where he's coming from, so they focus on catch phrases like freak, geek, albino

Good grief, we get him, we got him a year ago. What difference does it make if he's James Earl Ray or Lee Harvey Oswald, or James Bond for all it matters, he's still a patsy and this wiki business is about as obvious as the sky is blue. I wish JA well but I don't expect it will end well for him so I hope he enjoys his 15.

[justdrew]

...
there's some stuff i don't agree with there and some of it that just reads like a good author getting carried away by his powers of rhetoric, but what he does get right is Assange, he's an entirely new animal.

and i think this is why so many who (here at RI too) find him suspicious or are convinced he can't be for real is because to them he isn't. what motivates him is nothing they can recognize, so they try their best to fit him into some category that makes sense, to them.

he doesn't even make sense to the US and other authorities who are after him. – they, like the "sceptics", just don't get where he's coming from, so they focus on catch phrases like freak, geek, albino (and if they had paid attention they'd have known by now that his hair color went white due to some pretty harrowing personal experiences), and what not. there's been a lot of that bandied about. and they still don't get him.

asymmetrical. that's it. and alone. clear eyed and clear headed.

he knows what he's doing and has thought it all through. he's no martyr, no.

just doing what he does best.

yeah, I think he plays it a bit wrong in saying WL 'hacked' - really no hacking involved in the Manning releases and none from WL ever. I assume he means hacked in the broadest sense of the term, which I guess is fine, but I worry it plays wrong to call it that.

The whole "people don't get him" angle though, I guess that's true and it isn't too... on the one hand his actions are clear and motives clear to anyone who cares to read a bit and take the writing at it's word. It's the strategy that isn't "got" - but I guess it's also true that a lot of people don't know anyone like him at all and so have no model for him in their minds. I'm not sure if that's a problem or an asset really. Probably an asset.

One thing that bothers me is all the wringing of hands and billions that will be wasted on "developing more secure systems"

The fact is the system was woefully insecure by design. The DB files manning jacked should have been encrypted. There was no reason a private should have needed access to cleartext DBs like that in order to administrate the infrastructure systems or otherwise do his job. but now I'm moving into ranting about poor systems design and how it afflicts our information systems at all levels. We've known for decades how to make a system like that secure even from insiders. It's poor design and reflective of the generally poor design of all "our" systems (not just information systems). Particularly the social systems that put clueless know-nothing management in charge of design and implementation decisions.

It's too bad he didn't link to some more info on darknets and blacknets, both of which concepts have seen trial implementations over the course of at least the last 7 years. So things there should be coming along. but in the end good encryption practice is usually "harder" and not generally of interest for dissidents, who's goals are opposite, and who should need no secrets.

hey - here's an idea... how about a simple way to send encrypted twits, that can only be read by people who already have the password? That might raise up some kerfuffle.

[JackRiddler]

.

Bruce Sterling: Never heard of him before. excellent writer! Very sharp insights.

there's some stuff i don't agree with there and some of it that just reads like a good author getting carried away by his powers of rhetoric, but what he does get right is Assange, he's an entirely new animal.

Yes to all that. He sketches both Manning and Assange brilliantly, but can't resist his own flourishes, and some unfair or puzzling statements (I'm sure that lots of people in the world other than cypherpunks care about the History Insurance file, and it probably has or will help keep Assange alive.)

He's right that Assange is endeavoring a vision of the Internet already 20 years in the making. And about how the state is still having trouble understanding it. (The idea that "All is Psyop" seems increasingly remote and absurd.) Also, that this is a very specific subculture -- where anarchists and "real" libertarians and hippies cross with hackers and math talents -- and this is why Assange seems so strange to those who've had no contact with that subculture. But there are many thousands just like him, although he is very well-spoken and charismatic for the group.

"Hacked the planet" is an unfortunate choice of words because it sounds like computer hacking, but very apt in describing what Sterling means: a planned disruption of the world's political programming, for the moment.

Good read. Thanks.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/ ... an-Assange

My Exclusive Interview with WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange

by Cenk Uygur
Wed Dec 22, 2010 at 04:19:36 PM PST

on MSNBC's The Dylan Ratigan Show 12/22/2010

CENK UYGUR, GUEST HOST: First, our exclusive interview with WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, who sparked a global uproar with his release of hundreds of thousands of pages of secret government documents and diplomatic cables, information ranging from the outrageous -- we had innocent and unarmed reporters and Iraqi civilians being killed by U.S. troops -- to the downright embarrassing, comments about the hard partying and the corruption of different world leaders.

Not long after that latest release, Assange found himself in legal trouble in Sweden. But not for any reasons having to do with the leaks. Instead, he was booked on a series of sex charges.

With the help of people like the American filmmaker and activist, Michael Moore, Mr. Assange is now out on bail and speaking out to us.

Let's now go to Ellingham Hall in Norfolk, England, where Julian Assange is currently on house arrest.

Julian, great to have you with us.
Cenk Uygur's diary :: ::



JULIAN ASSANGE, FOUNDER, WIKILEAKS: Good evening, Cenk.

UYGUR: All right, the first question I have for you, Julian, is do you consider yourself a member of the press?

Are you a journalist?

ASSANGE: Well, I have been a member of the Australian press union for many years. I co-authored my first book when I was 25 and have been involved in setting up the -- the very fabric of the Internet in Australia since 1993 as a publisher.

So quite interesting that this is something that is being raised.

It's -- it's actually a quite deliberate attempt to split off our organization from the First Amendment protections that are afforded to all publishers.

You know, as time has gone by and our journalism has increased, I've been pushed up into senior management, into a position where I manage other journalists. I now even am in a -- in a position where I'm managing the interrelations between "The Guardian," "Spiegel," "The New York Times," "Al Jazeera" and so on, which were used in -- in our last production.

So, yes, unfortunately, I don't write that much anymore, because I'm busy being editor-in-chief, coordinating the actions of other journalists. But a quite deliberate attempt to split us off in the mind of the public from those "good" traditions of the United States, protecting the rights of the press to publish, to split us off from the support of the press in the United States, the support of journalists.

Some of those journalists have fallen for that.

And why?

Because they're worried that they're going to be next. They believe that if they sell us out, if they say, well, he's not really a journalist, they can have the U.S. -- have the Washington authorities target us and destroy us and somehow steer clear of the crossfire, which they worry will -- will scatter out through all journalists.

But I have a message to them. They're going to be next. And we're seeing these statements that "The New York Times" is -- is, you know, is now also being looked at in terms of whether it has engaged in what they call a conspiracy to con -- commit espionage.

So us journalists and publishers and writers, we all have to stick together to resist this sort of reinterpretation of the First Amendment, this attempt to use the 1917 Espionage Act, something that was put in place in the middle of World War -- toward the end of World War II, in the middle of the U.S. involvement in World War I, to stop bona fide espionage in World War I.

Now, we've got this antiquated act that they are trying to apply to publishers, arguably, unconstitutional. But that will take many years to get through the court.

And in the meantime, what happens?

In the meantime, we have our people harassed. We have calls to apply this to -- to other newspapers.

All members of the press and -- and all the American people who believe in freedom and the -- and the good founding principles of revolution -- of the revolutionary fathers have got to pull together and resist this attack on the First Amendment.

UYGUR: And do you think they have pulled together or do you think that large portions of -- whether it's the American media or the international media -- have abandoned you and not come to your defense when people in government call you a high tech terrorist?

ASSANGE: Yes, well, they were. They were. But we saw a bit of a shift around 10 days ago. You know, once I was put in prison, this really focused the mind of people intently into what was happening. So we -- we have seen a turnaround.

We saw the -- the House Judiciary Comm -- Committee issue a finding that this would be a -- a grave step and -- and an attack on the First Amendment. We've seen the New York-based Human Rights Watch saying that this would be a very grave step and should not be done. We've seen Reporters Without Borders issue an open letter to Obama condemning that sort of interpretation.

And we have seen a number of members of the mainstream press rightly stopping forward and understanding that there has to be a line drawn in the sand, that this erosion of the First Amendment must be stopped.

And so I'm quite hopeful about that. I think people are -- are saying that it's going too far. You know, always in this sort of situation, you have an institution like the State Department connected with military contractors and an institution like the Pentagon, an institution like the CIA, able to respond fairly quickly and get its agenda up fairly quickly because they are organized. They have a chain of command. They have internal e-mail communications and systems. They have existing contacts with the press. They spend an enormous amount of money on public relations. So they're -- they're able to get their message out quickly.

But the reality is that a large swathe of the population sees things differently, not just in the United States, but in Australia, my home country, where the -- the prime minister made similar sort of statements to the United States.

Now, that's completely turned around in Australia and Australians have gotten together --

UYGUR: Well --

ASSANGE: -- to even take out a full page ad in "The New York Times" condemning that -- that sort of behavior.

As time goes by, the large number of people -- the silent majority start to become organized. And that's what we've seen over the last two or so weeks -- the gradual organization of the silent majority to resist a new type of tyranny, a new type of privatized censorship, a new type of digital McCarthyism that is being pushed from Washington.

People don't like it. Around the world, people don't like it. They don't like it in the United States, especially because of these good First Amendment, revolutionary traditions about the rights and freedoms of all people to criticize and open up their government.

UYGUR: Well, Julian, I want to get to as much as possible here. So I want to give you a chance to respond one by one to your critics.

First to Mitch McConnell, who is, of course, the leader of the Republicans in the Senate and to Joe Biden, who both said that -- called you a high tech terrorist.

How do you respond to -- to Joe Biden, the vice president of the United States, saying that to you?

ASSANGE: Well, let's look at the definition of terrorism. The definition of terrorism is a group that uses violence or the threat of violence for political ends.

Now, no one in our four year publishing country covering over 120 countries has ever been physically harmed as a result of what we have done. And that's not just us saying that. It's the Pentagon saying that. That's NATO in Kabul saying that. No one -- not a shred of evidence. There are -- believe me that if they could find or even easily manufacture a shred of evidence, they would be doing that immediately.

So it's clear that whoever the terrorists are here, it's not us.

But we see constant threats from people in the Re -- you know, Republicans in the Senate trying to make a -- a name for themselves, the people like Sarah Palin, top shock jocks on Fox and, unfortunately, some members, also, of the Democratic Party, calling for my assassination, calling for the illegal kidnapping of my staff.

And -- and just a few days ago, it was in Fox, that was the phrase that was used -- illegal. He should be illegally murdered if necessary-- assassinated by the law, if possible, if not, illegally.

What sort of message does that send about the rule of law in the United States?

That is conducting violence in order to achieve a political end -- the elimination of this organization or the threat of violence to achieve a political end, the elimination of a publisher. And that is the definition of terrorism.

UYGUR: Now, I want to give you a chance to respond personally, though, because here Mike Huckabee is making it very personal. You saw that quote we had up. He says, I think anything less than execution is too kind a penalty for you. Sarah Palin is saying that you are like al Qaeda and the Taliban and he -- you should be pursued with the same urgency.

So how would you respond to Mike Huckabee, who is a top Republican leader, who's likely to run for president again?

How do you respond to Sarah Palin, a top Republican leader who might run for president again?

ASSANGE: Oh, it's just another idiot trying to make a name for himself. But it's a -- it's a serious business. I mean if we are to have a civil society, you cannot have senior people making calls on national TV to go around the judiciary and illegally murder people.

That is incitement to commit murder. That is an offense. You cannot have senior people on national TV asking people to commit an offense.

That is not a country that obeys the rule of law.

Does the United States obey the rule of law?

Because Europeans are starting to wonder whether it is still obeying the rule of law?

And it needs to be very careful.

Is it going to descend into an anarchy where we don't have due process, where those great Bill of Rights traditions about due process are just thrown to the wind, when -- whenever some shock jock politician thinks that they can use it to make a name for themselves?

Or do we take things according to laws expressly made by the people and their representatives?

That is the way things should be done. And -- and when people call for illegal, deliberate assassination and kidnapping of others, they should be held to account. They should be charged for incitement to commit murder.

UYGUR: Well, that's a very strong charge. And what they're saying is very strong.

What -- what's actually happened, the only person who's actually been arrested on any leak is actually Private Bradley Manning. He's actually been in prison for the last seven months. And I know you spent a week in prison and you got a little sense of how bad it can be. He's had 200 days of solitary confinement in a small cell for 23 hours a day. He gets a 5:00 a.m. Wake up call. He's not even allowed to exercise in his cell. He's not allowed to have sheets or a pillow, etc. Etc. Etc.

A lot of people, including some of the top human rights analysts in-- in the world, believe that this is cruel and inhumane treatment.

Do you think Private Manning is, one, a hero?

And, number two, do you think the American government is treating him wrong by keeping him in isolation for so long?

ASSANGE: We don't know whether this young man is our source or not. Our technology is set up so we don't know that. That is the best way to protect people.

But let's look at the allegations. Regardless of whether he was the whistleblower behind some of these res -- revelations or not, he is a young man that has been caught up in this, kept in solitary confinement for some six months -- some 5,000 hours now -- in conditions that were even worse than the ones that I was in, held in a -- he's now held in a military brig. His visits are very limited, only once a week. And his lawyer has said that they have been getting worse and that his psychological health has been getting worse.

If we are to believe the allegations, then this man acted for political reasons. He is a political prisoner in the United States. He has not gone to trial. He's been a political prisoner without trial in the United States for some six or seven months. That's a serious business. Human rights organizations should be investigating the conditions under which he is held and is there really due process there?

Now, we've recently heard calls to try and set up a plea deal with Brad -- Bradley Manning to testify against me, personally, to say that we engaged in some kind of conspiracy to commit espionage -- absolute nonsense. Absolute nonsense. That's not how our technology works.

UYGUR: Well --

ASSANGE: That's not how our organization works. I never heard of the name Bradley Manning before it appeared in the media.

But actually, mainstream journalists in the United States, mainstream investigative journalists, how do they operate when they're investigating a story?

They do actually ring up their sources and say, do you have anything on this?

That is how they operate.

And if we are to -- if they want to push the line that when a newspaperman talks to someone in the government about looking for things relating to potential abuses, that that is a conspiracy to commit espionage, then that's going to take out all the good government journalism that occurs in the United States.

And, fortunately, as an organization, we're not too exposed to that because that's not how our technology works. But other journalists are. And they need to take action now.

And they need to understand another thing, that in this case of Bradley Manning, his conditions have been getting worse and worse and worse in his cell as they attempt to pressure him into testifying against me.

That's a serious problem.

UYGUR: Right. Right, Julian.

And I want to let the audience know that Private Manning, of course, has not been convicted of anything. He's in isolation as we keep our most serious criminals, even though he has not been convicted.

ASSANGE: But Julian Assange, we -- we really appreciate your time today.

Thank you for joining us.

ASSANGE: All right.

Merry Christmas.

UYGUR: And -- all right. Merry Christmas to you, as well.

[justdrew]

a fictional resonance might be found with Assange as sort of a low rent less-sheltered version of L.

It's not simple to describe what L is like, you'd need to see at least the first few episodes, which would be worth doing

[vanlose kid]

they, like the "sceptics", just don't get where he's coming from, so they focus on catch phrases like freak, geek, albino

Good grief, we get him, we got him a year ago. What difference does it make if he's James Earl Ray or Lee Harvey Oswald, or James Bond for all it matters, he's still a patsy and this wiki business is about as obvious as the sky is blue. I wish JA well but I don't expect it will end well for him so I hope he enjoys his 15.

dude, your playbook is so old your mama uses it as kindle in her range oven. it's so old it went out of style 213 times. in fact, it's so old the first Gutenberg print was the 197th edition with a 334 page appendix of obsolete terms.

...
yeah, I think he plays it a bit wrong in saying WL 'hacked' - really no hacking involved in the Manning releases and none from WL ever. I assume he means hacked in the broadest sense of the term, which I guess is fine, but I worry it plays wrong to call it that.

...

i think its a hack in the strictest sense.

.

Bruce Sterling: Never heard of him before. excellent writer! Very sharp insights.

there's some stuff i don't agree with there and some of it that just reads like a good author getting carried away by his powers of rhetoric, but what he does get right is Assange, he's an entirely new animal.

Yes. He sketches both Manning and Assange brilliantly. He's right that Assange is endeavoring a vision of the Internet already 20 years in the making. And about how the state is still having trouble understanding it. (The idea that All is Psyop seems increasingly remote and absurd.) Also, that this is a very specific subculture -- where anarchists and "real" libertarians and hippies meet hackers -- and this is why Assange seems so strange to those who've had no contact with that subculture. But there are many thousands just like him, although he is very well-spoken and charismatic for that group.

"Hacked the planet" is an unfortunate choice of words because it sounds like computer hacking, but very apt in describing what Sterling means: a planned disruption of the world's political programming, for the moment.

Good read. Thanks.

yep, the coldest systems hack ever, in broad daylight, and in meatspace to boot.

eversion – and in a way Gibson never imagined.




*

[hanshan]

they, like the "sceptics", just don't get where he's coming from, so they focus on catch phrases like freak, geek, albino

Good grief, we get him, we got him a year ago. What difference does it make if he's James Earl Ray or Lee Harvey Oswald, or James Bond for all it matters, he's still a patsy and this wiki business is about as obvious as the sky is blue. I wish JA well but I don't expect it will end well for him so I hope he enjoys his 15.

dude, your playbook is so old your mama uses it as kindle in her range oven. it's so old it went out of style 213 times. in fact, it's so old the first Gutenberg print was the 197th edition with a 334 page appendix of obsolete terms.

...
yeah, I think he plays it a bit wrong in saying WL 'hacked' - really no hacking involved in the Manning releases and none from WL ever. I assume he means hacked in the broadest sense of the term, which I guess is fine, but I worry it plays wrong to call it that.

...

i think its a hack in the strictest sense.

.

Bruce Sterling: Never heard of him before. excellent writer! Very sharp insights.

there's some stuff i don't agree with there and some of it that just reads like a good author getting carried away by his powers of rhetoric, but what he does get right is Assange, he's an entirely new animal.

Yes. He sketches both Manning and Assange brilliantly. He's right that Assange is endeavoring a vision of the Internet already 20 years in the making. And about how the state is still having trouble understanding it. (The idea that All is Psyop seems increasingly remote and absurd.) Also, that this is a very specific subculture -- where anarchists and "real" libertarians and hippies meet hackers -- and this is why Assange seems so strange to those who've had no contact with that subculture. But there are many thousands just like him, although he is very well-spoken and charismatic for that group.

"Hacked the planet" is an unfortunate choice of words because it sounds like computer hacking, but very apt in describing what Sterling means: a planned disruption of the world's political programming, for the moment.

Good read. Thanks.

yep, the coldest systems hack ever, in broad daylight, and in meatspace to boot.

eversion – and in a way Gibson never imagined.




*

haha - the kid precedes... excellent

Jack - try getting out more - you might like it




...

[Plutonia]

Well, it's official- the UN wants their CC's and DNA back:

UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection
the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression

Inter-American Commission on Human Rights
Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression

Joint Statement On Wikileaks

December 21, 2010 – In light of ongoing developments related to the release of diplomatic cables by the organization Wikileaks, and the publication of information contained in those cables by mainstream news organizations, the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression see fit to recall a number of international legal principles. The rapporteurs call upon States and other relevant actors to keep these principles in mind when responding to the aforementioned developments.

1. The right to access information held by public authorities is a fundamental human right subject to a strict regime of exceptions. The right to access to information protects the right of every person to access public information and to know what governments are doing on their behalf. It is a right that has received particular attention from the international community, given its importance to the consolidation, functioning and preservation of democratic regimes. Without the protection of this right, it is impossible for citizens to know the truth, demand accountability and fully exercise their right to political participation. National authorities should take active steps to ensure the principle of maximum transparency, address the culture of secrecy that still prevails in many countries and increase the amount of information subject to routine disclosure.

2. At the same time, the right of access to information should be subject to a narrowly tailored system of exceptions to protect overriding public and private interests such as national security and the rights and security of other persons. Secrecy laws should define national security precisely and indicate clearly the criteria which should be used in determining whether or not information can be declared secret. Exceptions to access to information on national security or other grounds should apply only where there is a risk of substantial harm to the protected interest and where that harm is greater than the overall public interest in having access to the information. In accordance with international standards, information regarding human rights violations should not be considered secret or classified.

3. Public authorities and their staff bear sole responsibility for protecting the confidentiality of legitimately classified information under their control. Other individuals, including journalists, media workers and civil society representatives, who receive and disseminate classified information because they believe it is in the public interest, should not be subject to liability unless they committed fraud or another crime to obtain the information. In addition, government "whistleblowers" releasing information on violations of the law, on wrongdoing by public bodies, on a serious threat to health, safety or the environment, or on a breach of human rights or humanitarian law should be protected against legal, administrative or employment-related sanctions if they act in good faith. Any attempt to impose subsequent liability on those who disseminate classified information should be grounded in previously established laws enforced by impartial and independent legal systems with full respect for due process guarantees, including the right to appeal.

4. Direct or indirect government interference in or pressure exerted upon any expression or information transmitted through any means of oral, written, artistic, visual or electronic communication must be prohibited by law when it is aimed at influencing content. Such illegitimate interference includes politically motivated legal cases brought against journalists and independent media, and blocking of websites and web domains on political grounds. Calls by public officials for illegitimate retributive action are not acceptable.

5. Filtering systems which are not end-user controlled – whether imposed by a government or commercial service provider – are a form of prior censorship and cannot be justified. Corporations that provide Internet services should make an effort to ensure that they respect the rights of their clients to use the Internet without arbitrary interference.

6. Self-regulatory mechanisms for journalists have played an important role in fostering greater awareness about how to report on and address difficult and controversial subjects. Special journalistic responsibility is called for when reporting information from confidential sources that may affect valuable interests such as fundamental rights or the security of other persons. Ethical codes for journalists should therefore provide for an evaluation of the public interest in obtaining such information. Such codes can also provide useful guidance for new forms of communication and for new media organizations, which should likewise voluntarily adopt ethical best practices to ensure that the information made available is accurate, fairly presented and does not cause substantial harm to legally protected interests such as human rights.


Catalina Botero Marino
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression


Frank LaRue
UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression

[hanshan]

It is like Wittgenstein's one armed brother playing chess against a player piano.
Is it real, or is it Memorex?
It is information.
It appears much of it is verifiable fact of various episodes forgotten or unknown of embarrasing indecencies of men at war and empires at play.
The game to be played rests in a diamond that stretches from gag orders and lawsuits and corporate foreplay bowing confidently to the masses slumbering, waiting to be told in bold, red headlines:
IT'S OVER! EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OKAY!

If Wikileaks is a psyop it is part of a max factored measurement to see if the zombies in the bleechers have any life left in them at all.

So far, doesn't look like it...

But just what would it take, at this stage, anyway?

Missed this 1st time 'round. Bumping from pure pleasure

...

[JackRiddler]

.

Very interesting article, unrelated to Wikileaks, but in which see some authorities in Switzerland is willing to put Swiss laws above the CIA's concerns, despite pressure from Washington, suggesting why the Wikileaks domain now has a .CH at the end. Also, raising the question of what the intent of the CIA involvement in the A.Q. Khan network really was, since Pakistan did develop nuclear weapons in the end...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/24/world ... ml?_r=1&hp
Archived here as strictly non-commercial fair-use for education and debate, with link given.

December 23, 2010
Swiss Judge Presses for Nuclear Trial Despite C.I.A. Link
By DAVID JOLLY

PARIS — Three engineers suspected of violating Switzerland’s nuclear nonproliferation laws should face charges, an investigating magistrate said on Thursday in a case with national security implications for the United States.

The Swiss magistrate, Andreas Müller, said in a telephone interview that he was recommending that the three Swiss men — Friedrich Tinner and his two sons, Marco and Urs — be tried for violating a Swiss law on the use of war material, “specifically in supporting the development of nuclear weapons.”

The investigation stems from the Tinners’ relationship with Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani atomic bomb pioneer who later peddled his knowledge on the black market. The three family members are alleged to have acted as middlemen in Mr. Khan’s dealings with rogue nations seeking nuclear equipment and expertise.

The Tinners have acknowledged working for Mr. Khan, but they maintain that they believed he was developing peaceful nuclear power applications. Judge Müller said that that defense did not hold up after May 1998, when Pakistan tested an atomic bomb. “After that, they had to know it was for bombs,” he said.

Judge Müller, an independent federal judge, said that the government was not bound by his recommendation to prosecute, and he noted that the state had been dragging its heels or actively obstructing the investigation.

The Tinners’ involvement with Mr. Khan was born of Friedrich Tinner’s expertise in vacuum technology, which aided Mr. Khan’s development of atomic centrifuges to produce fuel for Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. American officials have said that in 2000, Urs Tinner was recruited by the C.I.A. to work secretly for the agency, and that he later persuaded his father and younger brother to join him as moles.

Lawyers for the Tinners did not immediately respond to requests for comment, and Paula Weiss, a spokeswoman for the C.I.A., declined to comment.

The six-year investigation has been hampered at times by the Swiss government’s insistence that it had to destroy evidence — which included plans for nuclear arms and technologies — in the name of national security.

The New York Times reported in 2008 that the administration of President George W. Bush had also urged the Swiss government to destroy the files. The reason, according to officials, was less to thwart terrorists than to hide evidence of a clandestine relationship between the Tinners and the C.I.A. The officials told The Times that the Tinners had been paid as much as $10 million to deliver secret information that helped to end Libya’s bomb program, to reveal Iran’s atomic labors and, ultimately, to undo Mr. Khan’s nuclear black market.

“I would appreciate it if the attorney general would go to court with the case,” Judge Müller said on Thursday. “With all that’s happened, with the destruction of files and all, we need to see if the whole procedure still withstands the rule of law. I think that’s a very big question mark.” In the Swiss system, the prosecutor makes decisions independently of the federal government. Regardless of whether officials pursue prosecution, it will take time, he said, and it will “be midyear, at the least,” before anything concrete happens in the case.

He also said that as far as the investigation is concerned, the Tinners’ involvement with the C.I.A. is an established fact, though he said that no one from the agency or from the executive branch of the Swiss government had ever explicitly said that it was true. The involvement of an American intelligence agency in the case has been important not only for the Tinners’ defense, he said, “but also for the prosecution, in that it limits the duration of the time they were working illegally for the Khan network until June 2003,” when they began working for the agency.

“We were not allowed to prosecute their work for the C.I.A., even though it is illegal to work for foreign secret services in Switzerland,” which is a neutral country, Judge Müller said.

Jeannette Balmer, a spokeswoman for the federal prosecutors’ office, said officials would analyze Judge Müller’s 174-page final report “and decide what action to take.” She declined to comment further.

The Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington-based research organization, said in a report this week that Swiss federal prosecutors believe the Tinners should be brought to justice regardless of their assistance to the C.I.A., because they illegally supported Libya’s nuclear weapons program. The prosecutors believe “this assistance was probably forced, and Swiss courts are the rightful place to determine their guilt or innocence and decide on any extenuating circumstances,” the report said.

The case has been extremely controversial in Switzerland. The Swiss Parliament issued an opinion saying the executive had acted “disproportionately” in destroying the evidence.

“It was the first time that the executive had interfered that hard with justice,” Judge Müller said. “The separation of powers was overrun.”

William J. Broad and David E. Sanger contributed reporting.