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by Plutonia » Tue Dec 28, 2010 3:29 am
by Plutonia » Tue Dec 28, 2010 3:53 am
The Original WikiLeaker
By Thomas Golianopoulos
December 7, 2010 | 10:53 p.m
*snip*
"There are no secrets that shouldn't be published," Mr. Young said. He doesn't believe that Cryptome or WikiLeaks has published risky secrets. "Only low-grade stuff like what WikiLeaks does, but they just exaggerate it."
His dream leaks: The IAEA, the Red Cross, tax authorities, banks and the Vatican. "Go down the list of all the sacred cows and say, 'Open them up.' That stuff will come someday but not easily and it will be fought over fiercely."
In late 2006, Mr. Young was invited to join WikiLeaks before its launch—he was on the same Cypherpunks mailing list as Julian Assange in the mid-1990s. He grew irritated, especially after WikiLeaks announced a $5 million fund-raising goal. On Jan. 7, 2007, Mr. Young emailed the restricted internal WikiLeaks mailing list: "Fuck your cute hustle and disinformation campaign against legitimate dissent. Same old shit, working for the enemy." Of course, the entire chain of emails was published on Cryptome.
His current view on WikiLeaks is complicated. "I'm a member of WikiLeaks. I'm an insider of WikiLeaks. I'm a devotee of WikiLeaks. I'm a critic of WikiLeaks," he said. "My current shtick is to pretend that I am an opponent of WikiLeaks. It's called friendly opposition. Praising each other is so insipid. Your parents praise you. Your friends never do. They know it's a con job, so praise is manipulation. Criticism is more candid. [Assange] hasn't returned the favor."
His relationship with Mr. Assange, who was arrested Tuesday morning in London on sex crimes allegations, is equally convoluted.
Do you consider Julian Assange a friend?
"A friend? I don't know him. I don't know him at all. I don't recall hearing of him during the Cypherpunks days. I didn't learn about him until this brief association with setting up WikiLeaks. I learned more about him since then. However, in the American vein, they are all 'my friends.' 'My friends across the aisle'. 'My dear friends.'"
He was silent after I asked if he's ever had a telephone conversation with Mr. Assange—Mr. Young wrote on Cryptome that he spoke with Mr. Assange once earlier this year. That, of course, might not be true—but then, minutes later, he offered insight into his personality. "Assange appears to be humorless but I know that he is a very funny guy in private," Mr. Young said. "He loves to poke fun at pretentious people, so I think it's a good acting job. You have to admire that."
ON THE DAY of our meeting, Mr. Young wrote a story on Cryptome about WikiLeaks redacting names from some of the classified files it had recently posted.
"This redaction is some reputation-building shit and WikiLeaks is a coward for adopting this mode," Mr. Young said, his voice rising. "They promised never to do that. And now they are doing that. And why? Because there is money in it and reputation in it, and they want to be part of the players. ... [The mainstream media] have used flattery, attention and bribery, all the usual ways that you bring people in the fold because it's irresistible if you have a narcissistic streak."
Mr. Young then cited the profile picture of Mr. Assange that adorned the skyline of the WikiLeaks site and his flair in promoting upcoming leaks. "I have separated 'WikiLeaks' from 'Julian,'" he said. "He has now taken off on his own track. WikiLeaks is still out there as a wonderful idea of a large number of people working without being celebrated or known—the wiki—and the leaks are still needed by multiple people but not a singular person running it. He's on the verge of a career of being Julian Assange. He's used WikiLeaks to leverage that. So now WikiLeaks is breaking away from him and other wikis are being set up by other people disaffected by his monomania."
Mr. Young said that in some cases, he has funded these "new wikis." "We are talking about generic sites," he said, vaguely refusing to offer further details.
Soon after, I asked him if he was this curious about information as a youth in Texas. "Now, don't go into this background shit," he snapped. "C'mon, you don't need to do that. I'll just get up and leave."
We then had a friendly argument about picking up the check and discussed the benefits of living in New York City. A second later, he pivoted, creating a sudden shift in the conversation. "I don't know if The Observer will publish this if it's not a screw job, because it won't be interesting."
He asked to see my credentials, so I handed him a business card. "I've been fucked several times these last six months by people who say they are journalists and they are not," he said, fingering the card. "It happened this morning. I got punked."
He was still unconvinced, so I brandished my social security card. "Is this a good thing to carry around," I said. "You want this, too?"
"I'll take that, too," he said, reaching for it. But I snatched it away, thinking the better of it.
"Give me your editor's name and phone number," he demanded then.
I hesitated, fumbled some words and looked out the window, exasperated. And that's when he took my digital recorder.
"Journalists are real shits," he said. "What did you think was going to happen? You thought I was going to be a pushover?"
He ordered me to email my editor and confirm that the story was for The New York Observer. He even dictated the email: "Please confirm to John Young that I am authorized by The Observer to interview him for The Observer ... or he will not give me my recorder back."
"What do we do now?" I wondered.
"You can fight me for the recorder if you like. These are my worlds. You can't take them without me setting conditions."
The standoff lasted 16 minutes. My editor didn't email, but without explanation Mr. Young eventually returned the recorder.
"This is not how you do this," he scolded. "You need to find someone I trust and get them to vouch for you to me and not just send me an email. Otherwise, I think you are up to no good."
"I don't think you trust anybody."
"You are completely clueless," he said, growing angrier. "You did a lousy job. You didn't do anything that made me want to open up to you. You never gave me any information. It's just about as bad as you can get."
"Then why did you meet up with me?"
"Because I wanted to give you a tip not to do it this way anymore. It's usually not done in such a clumsy way. It's an insult to approach me in such a clumsy way. It's just bad. It's a pretty awful thing that you've done. You've basically wasted my time and seem to have no problem with that."
Now, he tied his scarf around his neck, put on his coat and continued his tirade. "It's all me giving you stuff," he said. "Even now. It's all about me talking to you. All these trappings—the notepad, the recorder. Don't you know how much that is fake? Anyway."
He then shuffled toward the exit. Meanwhile, I quickly packed my recorder and notepad and—yes, clumsily—dropped some computer discs onto the floor. After recovering them, I looked up and saw that he had turned left and was walking uptown on Broadway. I ran past the host.
"Thank you, sir," he said. "Please come again."
by Plutonia » Tue Dec 28, 2010 4:23 am
Hackers Wanted is an unreleased American documentary film.
Directed and written by Sam Bozzo, the film explores the origins and nature of hackers and hacking by following the adventures of Adrian Lamo, and contrasting his story with that of controversial figures throughout history. The film is narrated by Kevin Spacey.
Stealthy Government Contractor Monitors U.S. Internet Providers, Worked With Wikileaks Informant
Aug. 1 2010 - 5:44 pm
Posted by Andy Greenberg
Updated with IDG’s confirmation from Adrian Lamo, changes in wording to address Vigilant staff’s volunteer status.
A semi-secret government contractor that calls itself Project Vigilant surfaced at the Defcon security conference Sunday with a series of revelations: that it monitors the traffic of 12 regional Internet service providers, hands much of that information to federal agencies, and encouraged one of its “volunteers,” researcher Adrian Lamo, to inform the federal government about the alleged source of a controversial video of civilian deaths in Iraq leaked to whistle-blower site Wikileaks in April.
Chet Uber, the director of Fort Pierce, Fl.-based Project Vigilant, says that he personally asked Lamo to meet with federal authorities to out the source of a video published by Wikileaks showing a U.S. Apache helicopter killing several civilians and two journalists in a suburb of Baghdad, a clip that Wikileaks labeled “Collateral Murder.” Lamo, who Uber said worked as an “adversary characterization” analyst for Project Vigilant, had struck up an online friendship with Bradley Manning, a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst who currently faces criminal charges for releasing the classified video.
In June, Uber said he learned from Lamo’s father that the young researcher had identified Manning as the video’s source, and pressured him to meet with federal agencies to name Manning as Wikileaks’ whistleblower. He then arranged a meeting with employees of “three letter” agencies and Lamo, who Uber said had mixed feelings about informing on Manning.
“I’m the one who called the U.S. government,” Uber said. “All the people who say that Adrian is a narc, he did a patriotic thing. He sees all kinds of hacks, and he was seriously worried about people dying.”
Uber says that Lamo later called him from the meeting, regretting his decision to inform on Manning. “I’m in a meeting with five guys and I don’t want to do this,” Uber says Lamo told him at the time. Uber says he responded, “You don’t have any choice, you’ve got to do this.”
“I said, ‘They’re not going to throw you in jail,’” Uber said. “‘Give them everything you have.’”
Wikileaks didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. IDG reporter Robert McMillan confirmed Uber’s relationship with Lamo, who told McMillan that “Mr. Uber was, among a few others, an instrumental voice in helping me come to my ultimate decision.”
Uber’s Wikileaks revelation is one of the first public statements from the semi-secret Project Vigilant. He says the 600-person “volunteer” organization functions as a government contractor bridging public and private sector security efforts. Its mission: to use a variety of intelligence-gathering efforts to help the government attribute hacking incidents. “Bad actors do bad things and you have to prove that they did them,” says Uber. “Attribution is the hardest problem in computer security.”
According to Uber, one of Project Vigilant’s manifold methods for gathering intelligence includes collecting information from a dozen regional U.S. Internet service providers (ISPs). Uber declined to name those ISPs, but said that because the companies included a provision allowing them to share users’ Internet activities with third parties in their end user license agreements (EULAs), Vigilant was able to legally gather data from those Internet carriers and use it to craft reports for federal agencies. A Vigilant press release says that the organization tracks more than 250 million IP addresses a day and can “develop portfolios on any name, screen name or IP address.”
“We don’t do anything illegal,” says Uber. “If an ISP has a EULA to let us monitor traffic, we can work with them. If they don’t, we can’t.”
And whether that massive data gathering violates privacy? The organization says it never looks at personally identifying information, though just how it defines that information isn’t clear, nor is how it scrubs its data mining for sensitive details.
ISP monitoring is just one form of intelligence that Vigilant employs, says Uber. It also gathers a variety of open source intelligence and employs numerous agents around the world. In Iran, for instance, Uber says Vigilant created an anonymous Internet proxy service that allowed it to receive information from local dissidents prior to last year’s election, including early information indicating that the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was skewed by fraud.
Uber, who formerly founded a private sector group called Infragard that worked closely with the FBI, compares the organization’s techniques with Ghostnet, the Chinese cyber espionage campaign revealed last year that planted spyware on computers of many governments and NGOs. “We’ve developed a network for obfuscation that allows us to view bad actors,” he says.
Uber says he’s speaking publicly about Vigilant at Defcon because he wants to recruit the conference’s breed of young, skilled hackers. By July 2011, the organization hopes to have more than 1,300 new employees.
The organization already has a few big names on its roster. According to a San Francisco Examiner article last month, its volunteer staff includes former NSA official Ira Winkler and Suzanne Gorman, former security chief for the New York Stock Exchange
by hava1 » Tue Dec 28, 2010 5:48 am
by hava1 » Tue Dec 28, 2010 5:57 am
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Posted 12/22/2010 10:15:00 AM
http://stevenplaut.blogspot.com/2010_12_01_archive.html
1. http://thejewishpress.blogspot.com/2010 ... ks-of.html
We are caring leftist progressives. We believe in openness. We
salute Wikileaks and its chief, Julian Assange. He really taught the
world a lesson. We adore his courage! We oppose the right to secrecy
of public bodies. We believe in the public's right to know. It
trumps everything, including national security and the right to
privacy. We send Assange money by Paypal. We demand that Assange not
be prosecuted for anything, even for rape. He is our role model. He
is our hero.
And that is why we are so outraged! How dare anyone steal
documents from the Far-Leftist anti-Israel "human rights" group "Yesh
Din."
We adore Yesh Din. It battles for the human rights of
Palestinians to set up their own state in the West Bank in which no
Jews can be present to offend their delicate sensitivities. It
collects information about settlement construction and turns it over
to anti-Israel groups around the world. It has never gotten around to
acknowledging that Jews are entitled to any human rights.
But now it turns out that some local Israeli Wikileaker or sorts
stole hundreds of documents from the Yesh Din offices and computers,
and from the computer of the Yesh Din legal advisor, anti-Israel
extremist Michael Sfard. See this news story in the Palestinian
newspaper published in Hebrew:
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/ne ... s-1.331912
Note the wonderful non sequitur in the title of the Haaretz news
item: "No signs of forced entry were found in their offices, raising
suspicion that rightist groups managed to plant a mole in the
organization." Moles? Surely Haaretz means a leaker of secrets
which the public is entitled to know and see! After all, the world
is safer without any secrets!
Here is the full story from Haaretz:
Human rights NGO (sic) monitoring Palestinians' legal rights (sic)
gets robbed of internal use documents
No signs of forced entry were found in their offices, raising
suspicion that rightist groups managed to plant a mole in the
organization.
By Yaniv Kubovich and Akiva Eldar
Hundreds of documents have been stolen from the database of Yesh Din,
the NGO monitoring the legal situation of Palestinians in the West
Bank. The group's legal adviser, attorney Michael Sfard, said his
office also had also internal use documents stolen.
This may be the first case of information theft from a human rights
organization (sic) in Israel.
No signs of forced entry were found in either Tel Aviv office, raising
the suspicion that rightist groups have managed to plant a mole in the
organization.
In a complaint filed on Tuesday with the police, Sfard, and Yesh Din's
chief investigator, Lior Yavne, said that they've been approached by
reporters from Makor Rishon and free sheet Yisrael Hayom for comment
on the content of documents copied or stolen from cases dealing with
property and physical damage to Palestinians. A photograph of one of
the documents was published in Makor Rishon, a newspaper with a marked
pro-settler stance. The newspaper quoted from a dozen cases available
only to a few members of Yesh Din, and said it was in possession of
other material.
A check by Sfard's staff found that notebooks with internal memos and
call records were stolen from one of the office drawers. The missing
documents refer to Yesh Din activity, but also to other clients, and
Sfard told police the use of the documents violates attorney-client
privilege. Tel Aviv police said that the complaint was being
investigated.
"It seems we are witnessing a new and dangerous phase of the assault
on human rights organizations (sic) in Israel and the territories,"
Sfard said. "We should hope the law enforcement authorities will take
the appropriately serious view of the matter."
Uri Elitzur, editor of the Makor Rishon weekend supplement, told
Haaretz: "We do not hold any stolen documents. We didn't send in
reporters or Watergate-like plumbers, and we most certainly did not
steal any documents. The documents reached us and, as is customary
here, we cannot disclose their sources." Yisrael Hayom did not respond
to a request for comment.
by Bruce Dazzling » Tue Dec 28, 2010 12:59 pm
The merger of journalists and government officials
By Glenn Greenwald
Tuesday, Dec 28, 2010 05:29 ET
The video of the CNN debate I did last night about WikiLeaks with former Bush Homeland Security Adviser (and CNN contributor) Fran Townsend and CNN anchor Jessica Yellin is posted below. The way it proceeded was quite instructive to me and I want to make four observations about the discussion:
(1) Over the last month, I've done many television and radio segments about WikiLeaks and what always strikes me is how indistinguishable -- identical -- are the political figures and the journalists. There's just no difference in how they think, what their values and priorities are, how completely they've ingested and how eagerly they recite the same anti-WikiLeaks, "Assange = Saddam" script. So absolute is the WikiLeaks-is-Evil bipartisan orthodoxy among the Beltway political and media class (forever cemented by the joint Biden/McConnell decree that Assange is a "high-tech Terrorist,") that you're viewed as being from another planet if you don't spout it. It's the equivalent of questioning Saddam's WMD stockpile in early 2003.
* Continue reading
It's not news that establishment journalists identify with, are merged into, serve as spokespeople for, the political class: that's what makes them establishment journalists. But even knowing that, it's just amazing, to me at least, how so many of these "debates" I've done involving one anti-WikiLeaks political figure and one ostensibly "neutral" journalist -- on MSNBC with The Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart and former GOP Congresswoman Susan Molinari, on NPR with The New York Times' John Burns and former Clinton State Department official James Rubin, and last night on CNN with Yellin and Townsend -- entail no daylight at all between the "journalists" and the political figures. They don't even bother any longer with the pretense that they're distinct or play different assigned roles. I'm not complaining here -- Yellin was perfectly fair and gave me ample time -- but merely observing how inseparable are most American journalists from the political officials they "cover."
(2) From the start of the WikiLeaks controversy, the most striking aspect for me has been that the ones who are leading the crusade against the transparency brought about by WikiLeaks -- the ones most enraged about the leaks and the subversion of government secrecy -- have been . . . America's intrepid Watchdog journalists. What illustrates how warped our political and media culture is as potently as that? It just never seems to dawn on them -- even when you explain it -- that the transparency and undermining of the secrecy regime against which they are angrily railing is supposed to be . . . what they do.
What an astounding feat to train a nation's journalist class to despise above all else those who shine a light on what the most powerful factions do in the dark and who expose their corruption and deceit, and to have journalists -- of all people -- lead the way in calling for the head of anyone who exposes the secrets of the powerful. Most ruling classes -- from all eras and all cultures -- could only fantasize about having a journalist class that thinks that way, but most political leaders would have to dismiss that fantasy as too extreme, too implausible, to pursue. After all, how could you ever get journalists -- of all people -- to loathe those who bring about transparency and disclosure of secrets? But, with a few noble exceptions, that's exactly the journalist class we have.
There will always be a soft spot in my heart for Jessica Yellin because of that time when she unwittingly (though still bravely) admitted on air that -- when she worked at MSNBC -- NBC's corporate executives constantly pressured the network's journalists to make their reporting favorable to George Bush and the Iraq War (I say "unwittingly" because she quickly walked back that confession after I and others wrote about it and a controversy ensued). But, as Yellin herself revealed in that moment of rare TV self-exposure, that's the government-subservient corporate culture in which these journalists are trained and molded.
(3) It's extraordinary how -- even a full month into the uproar over the diplomatic cable release -- extreme misinformation still pervades these discussions, usually without challenge. It's understandable that on the first day or in the first week of a controversy, there would be some confusion; but a full month into it, the most basic facts are still being wildly distorted. Thus, there was Fran Townsend spouting the cannot-be-killed lie that WikiLeaks indiscriminately dumped all the cables. And I'm absolutely certain that had I not objected, that absolute falsehood would have been unchallenged by Yellin and allowed to be transmitted to CNN viewers as Truth. The same is true for the casual assertion -- as though it's the clearest, most obvious fact in the world -- that Assange "committed crimes" by publishing classified information or that what he's doing is so obviously different than what investigative journalists routinely do. These are the unchallenged falsehoods transmitted over and over, day after day, to the American viewing audience.
(4) If one thinks about it, there's something quite surreal about sitting there listening to a CNN anchor and her fellow CNN employee angrily proclaim that Julian Assange is a "terrorist" and a "criminal" when the CNN employee doing that is . . . . George W. Bush's Homeland Security and Terrorism adviser. Fran Townsend was a high-level national security official for a President who destroyed another nation with an illegal, lie-fueled military attack that killed well over 100,000 innocent people, created a worldwide torture regime, illegally spied on his own citizens without warrants, disappeared people to CIA "black sites," and erected a due-process-free gulag where scores of knowingly innocent people were put in cages for years. Julian Assange never did any of those things, or anything like them. But it's Assange who is the "terrorist" and the "criminal."
Do you think Jessica Yellin would ever dare speak as scornfully and derisively about George Bush or his top officials as she does about Assange? Of course not. Instead, CNN quickly hires Bush's Homeland Security Adviser who then becomes Yellin's colleague and partner in demonizing Assange as a "terrorist." Or consider the theme that framed last night's segment: Assange is profiting off classified information by writing a book! Beyond the examples I gave, Bob Woodward has become a very rich man by writing book after book filled with classified information about America's wars which his sources were not authorized to give him. Would Yellin ever in a million years dare lash out at Bob Woodward the way she did Assange? To ask the question is to answer it (see here as CNN's legal correspondent Jeffrey Toobin is completely befuddled in the middle of his anti-WikiLeaks rant when asked by a guest, Clay Shirky, to differentiate what Woodward continuously does from what Assange is doing).
They're all petrified to speak ill of Bob Woodward because he's a revered spokesman of the royal court to which they devote their full loyalty. Julian Assange, by contrast, is an actual adversary -- not a pretend one -- of that royal court. And that -- and only that -- is what is driving virtually this entire discourse:
by Bruce Dazzling » Tue Dec 28, 2010 1:32 pm
by JackRiddler » Tue Dec 28, 2010 1:41 pm
Plutonia wrote:What's TNR, Jack?
by JackRiddler » Tue Dec 28, 2010 1:48 pm
Bruce Dazzling wrote:Here's an ABC interview from 12/26 with Assange.
Stick around until the end to hear him call the interviewer a "tabloid schmuck."
by nathan28 » Tue Dec 28, 2010 3:07 pm
JackRiddler wrote:Two observations from that describe aspects of the probable future that were on their way regardless, but do not yet rate as certainties:* The fact that politicians are generally helpless in terms of public policy doesn’t mean to say I think they are stupid. They do have a vague sense of what might be coming and they’re acting accordingly. To judge their efficiency take a good look at the remaining public funds and public infrastructure and see who owns it in 5 years time. Our leaders are reassuring us that the ship will certainly survive the growing storm. But on closer inspection they are either quietly pocketing the silverware or discreetly making their way to the lifeboats.
SNIP
* Apple, Google, Facebook and the more geographically challenged traditional governments will try to make all of humanity enter their remaining secrets, they’ll try to make attribution of every bit on the internet a part of the switch to IPv6, they’ll further lock us out of our own hardware and they’ll eventually attempt to kill privacy and anonymity altogether.
What a contrast to the Pollyanna stuff from TNR. The end of Big Everything may be on the way, but not without a disaster or a big fight. It won't be a gift from the technology.
.
In a Wikileaks world, the greater the number of people who intimately understand your organization,* the more candidates there are for revealing that information to millions of voyeurs...
There will be redundant layers of security and activity, so that the loss of any one node can’t disable the whole network. Which is to say, thanks to Wikileaks, the organizations of the future will look a lot like … Wikileaks.
Whether connected to WikiLeaks or not: Cryptowars 2.0 has just been announced. There’s a new American proposal to make all providers of any kind of online service provide the authorities with cleartext of everything that happens. As a result of WikiLeaks, authorities the world over will probably try even harder to clamp down on internet freedom, so organizations resisting this will have to work harder also.
by seemslikeadream » Tue Dec 28, 2010 6:24 pm
Conspiracy Theory Links Israel to WikiLeaks
ADL says Latest 'Big Lie' is Taking Root Among Anti-Israel Conspiracy Theorists
NEW YORK, Dec. 28, 2010 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The unauthorized publication of thousands of pages of classified U.S. diplomatic cables by the WikiLeaks organization has had a serious unintended consequence: the proliferation of anti-Israel conspiracy theories claiming that Israel and the "Israel lobby" played a secret role in the documents' release.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) said the WikiLeaks affair was "being exploited to spread false and malicious conspiracy theories against Israel," as a part of a disinformation campaign that has gained traction with those catering to the far right and the left, some Arab and Islamic Web sites and others dedicated to spreading "anti-Zionist" messages like Islam Times and Hezbollah's Al Manar.
"Once again, as we saw with the 9/11 attacks and the financial meltdown, we are seeing yet another manifestation of the Big Lie against Jews and Israel," said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. "The WikiLeaks affair has given new life to the old conspiracy theories of underhanded Jewish and Israeli involvement in an event with significant repercussions for the U.S. and many nations around the world. The news is being exploited by conspiracy theorists, some world leaders, and various Web sites across the ideological spectrum to spread false and malicious conspiracy theories against Israel."
After 9/11, a widely circulated conspiracy theory suggested that Israel and the Mossad were the true perpetrators of the terrorist attacks and that "4,000 Jews" who worked at the World Trade Center had been forewarned and did not show up for work that day. And during the financial crisis in 2008, a rumor widely circulated on the Internet suggested that just prior to the collapse of Lehman Brothers and other major investment banks, $400 billion in funds was secretly transferred to Israeli banks.
According to ADL, WikiLeaks conspiracy theories are being promoted on several Arab and Islamic sites and have also surfaced in articles on conspiracy-oriented Internet sites catering to the far right and the left. Among the claims is that WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, "struck a deal" with Israel to withhold those cables that were "embarrassing to Israel," or that Assange actually works for Israel as a "spy" and that Israel's intelligence agencies orchestrated WikiLeaks as a public relations campaign.
On December 1, Huseyin Celik, a deputy leader of AKP, Turkey's ruling party, hinted in comments during a press conference that Israel could be responsible for WikiLeaks. "Israel is very pleased [with the WikiLeaks controversy]," he said. "Israel has been making statements for days, even before the release of these documents."
Similar claims have surfaced on anti-Zionist sites and even on Al Manar, a Lebanon-based news service run by the terrorist group Hezbollah. According to an ADL analysis, the narrative about Israel negotiating with Assange may have first surfaced in Al Haqiqa, an online publication affiliated with a Syrian opposition group.
"A number of commentators, particularly in Turkey and Russia, have been wondering why the hundreds of thousands of American classified documents leaked by the website last month did not contain anything that may embarrass the Israeli government," reads an article titled "WikiLeaks 'Struck a Deal' to Keep Away Anything Damaging to Israel," published on Al Manar. "The answer appears to be a secret deal struck between the WikiLeaks 'heart and soul,' as Assange humbly described himself once, with Israeli officials, which ensured that all such documents were 'removed' before the rest were made public."
Many of the conspiracy theories about Israel and WikiLeaks were promulgated by Gordon Duff, an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist, and posted on his Web site, Veterans Today. Duff's articles have also appeared on white supremacist sites, including Stormfront, a popular forum for extremists.
Other allegations against Israel had their origins in the left-leaning Web site Indybay, which furthered the claim that WikiLeaks collaborated with Israel to restrict the publication of cables that could appear damaging to Israel.
by Plutonia » Tue Dec 28, 2010 6:33 pm
nathan28 wrote:Whether connected to WikiLeaks or not: Cryptowars 2.0 has just been announced. There’s a new American proposal to make all providers of any kind of online service provide the authorities with cleartext of everything that happens. As a result of WikiLeaks, authorities the world over will probably try even harder to clamp down on internet freedom, so organizations resisting this will have to work harder also.
I want to draw attention to this, but am not sure I'll get to it just now--this is gross power (see, again, Bradley Manning's terms of confinement) being deployed "in realtime" against what is, essentially, thought. Not necessarily against freedom of speech, but an attempt to focus on "thinking" or knowledge etc. as the newest site of explicit control. I'm not sure I can really get to this that well ATM, it'll take some digesting.
Participants in the Bohmian form of dialogue "suspend" their beliefs, opinions, impulses, and judgments while speaking together, in order to see the movement of the group's thought processes and what their effects may be. According to Dialogue a Proposal [Bohm, Factor, Garrett], this kind of dialogue should not be confused with discussion or debate, both of which, says Bohm, suggest working towards a goal or reaching a decision, rather than simply exploring and learning. Meeting without an agenda or fixed objective is done to create a "free space" for something new to happen.
"...it may turn out that such a form of free exchange of ideas and information is of fundamental relevance for transforming culture and freeing it of destructive misinformation, so that creativity can be liberated." David Bohm
Link
The public sphere has a number of interlinking functions. Through dialogue, particularly through critical discussion and debate, the public sphere generates opinions and attitudes (Soules 2001: para 2) and is a foundation for “emancipatory social thought” (Holub 1997: para 7). Ideally it is a mediator between society and state, the source of public opinion needed to affirm and guide the affairs of state (Soules 2001: para 2), and challenge and legitimize governments and authority (Rutherford 2000: 18 ). . Link
by Plutonia » Tue Dec 28, 2010 6:37 pm
@evgenymorozov Evgeny Morozov
WikiLeaks is a brand that keeps on giving: WikiLeaks condoms distributed at a hacker conference http://bit.ly/htRJ3B
by Joe Hillshoist » Wed Dec 29, 2010 6:44 am
by 82_28 » Wed Dec 29, 2010 8:15 am
Let's see, there was the Red Scare and that worked for a while. Then there was the post 9-11 Terror Scare and before that the Crime-wave/Nigga/Gangsta Scare of the 80's/90's. Oh yeah, pre-war there was the Anarchist Scare and the Jew Scare. So are we entering a period of Hacker Scare to frighten people into shut-the-fuck-up? More fear-your-neighbour propaganda except now it's your digital compatriot who may be spying on you. Maybe so, maybe so.
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