The Wikileaks Question

[82_28]

I sure wish I could be cool and totally get it.

[Montag]

I sure wish I could be cool and totally get it.

Apparently you haven't been microchipped yet...

[smiths]

So much shit happening at once!

I know! isn't it amazing!

its been an incredible week this week,

this one wintler, from an australian perspective, i think is dynamite

Arbib revealed as US embassy informant Major powerbroker in ruling party spying for a foreign power? Move along, nothing to see here!

it has been routine in australia to refer to Arbib as a powerbroker in labor from the right of the party, without ever really adequately explaining how one so young seemed to have so much power and influence, central figure in replacing rudd with gillard as PM,

the ripples of this will be fascinating to watch in australia and in Murdochs Australian over the next few weeks,

all of which continuing to rebut the case that nothing new is being revealed

[JackRiddler]

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So what if everything old is being confirmed? It's a hell of a difference between knowing this Arbib must be in tight with the Americans but he is still able to deny it, and having it in writing and watching him screech denials that even his friends will laugh off. Or for the Swedes to know that the US writes their copyright law and got their government to lean on the Pirate Bay. Or for Spaniards and Yemenis to get the confirmation on what they already knew or suspected.

Not only is much that is new being revealed; perhaps more importantly, everything old is being confirmed. Like this:

WikiLeaks cables: Shell's grip on Nigerian state revealed

US embassy cables reveal top executive's claims that company 'knows everything' about key decisions in government ministries
David Smith in Lagos
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 8 December 2010 21.34 GMT

Despite billions of dollars in oil revenue, 70% of people in Nigeria live below the poverty line. Photograph: George Osodi/AP

The oil giant Shell claimed it had inserted staff into all the main ministries of the Nigerian government, giving it access to politicians' every move in the oil-rich Niger Delta, according to a leaked US diplomatic cable.

The company's top executive in Nigeria told US diplomats that Shell had seconded employees to every relevant department and so knew "everything that was being done in those ministries". She boasted that the Nigerian government had "forgotten" about the extent of Shell's infiltration and was unaware of how much the company knew about its deliberations.

The cache of secret dispatches from Washington's embassies in Africa also revealed that the Anglo-Dutch oil firm swapped intelligence with the US, in one case providing US diplomats with the names of Nigerian politicians it suspected of supporting militant activity, and requesting information from the US on whether the militants had acquired anti-aircraft missiles.

Other cables released tonight reveal:

• US diplomats' fear that Kenya could erupt in violence worse than that experienced after the 2008 election unless rampant government corruption is tackled.

• America asked Uganda to let it know if its army intended to commit war crimes based on US intelligence – but did not try to prevent war crimes taking place.

• Washington's ambassador to the troubled African state of Eritrea described its president, Isaias Afwerki, as a cruel "unhinged dictator" whose regime was "one bullet away from implosion".

I wonder who the bullet is supposed to hit.

The latest revelations came on a day that saw hackers sympathetic to WikiLeaks target MasterCard and Visa over their decision to block payments to the whistleblowers' website.

The website's founder, Julian Assange, spent a second night in jail after a judge refused him bail prior to an extradition hearing to face questioning over sexual assault charges in Sweden.

Campaigners tonight said the revelation about Shell in Nigeria demonstrated the tangled links between the oil firm and politicians in the country where, despite billions of dollars in oil revenue, 70% of people live below the poverty line.

Cables from Nigeria show how Ann Pickard, then Shell's vice-president for sub-Saharan Africa, sought to share intelligence with the US government on militant activity and business competition in the contested Niger Delta – and how, with some prescience, she seemed reluctant to open up because of a suspicion the US government was "leaky".

But that did not prevent Pickard disclosing the company's reach into the Nigerian government when she met US ambassador Robin Renee Sanders, as recorded in a confidential memo from the US embassy in Abuja on 20 October 2009.

At the meeting, Pickard related how the company had obtained a letter showing that the Nigerian government had invited bids for oil concessions from China. She said the minister of state for petroleum resources, Odein Ajumogobia, had denied the letter had been sent but Shell knew similar correspondence had taken place with China and Russia.

The ambassador reported: "She said the GON [government of Nigeria] had forgotten that Shell had seconded people to all the relevant ministries and that Shell consequently had access to everything that was being done in those ministries."

Nigeria is Africa's leading oil producer and the eighth biggest exporter in the world, accounting for 8% of US oil imports. Although a recent UN report largely exonerated the company, critics accuse Shell, the biggest operator in the delta, and other companies, of causing widespread pollution and environmental damage in the region. Militant groups engaged in hostage-taking and sabotage have proliferated.

The WikiLeaks disclosure was today seized on by campaigners as evidence of Shell's vice-like grip on the country's oil wealth. "Shell and the government of Nigeria are two sides of the same coin," said Celestine AkpoBari, of Social Action Nigeria. "Shell is everywhere. They have an eye and an ear in every ministry of Nigeria. They have people on the payroll in every community, which is why they get away with everything. They are more powerful than the Nigerian government."

The criticism was echoed by Ben Amunwa of the London-based oil watchdog Platform. "Shell claims to have nothing to do with Nigerian politics," he said. "In reality, Shell works deep inside the system, and has long exploited political channels in Nigeria to its own advantage."

Nigeria tonight strenuously denied the claim. Levi Ajuonoma, a spokesman for the state-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, said: "Shell does not control the government of Nigeria and has never controlled the government of Nigeria. This cable is the mere interpretation of one individual. It is absolutely untrue, an absolute falsehood and utterly misleading. It is an attempt to demean the government and we will not stand for that. I don't think anybody will lose sleep over it."

Another cable released today, from the US consulate in Lagos and dated 19 September 2008, claims that Pickard told US diplomats that two named regional politicians were behind unrest in the Rivers state. She also asked if the American diplomats had any intelligence on shipments of surface to air missiles (SAMs) to militants in the Niger Delta.

"She claimed Shell has 'intelligence' that one to three SAMs may have been shipped to Nigerian militant groups, although she seemed somewhat sceptical of that information and wondered if such sensitive systems would last long in the harsh environment of the Niger Delta," the cable said.

Pickard also said Shell had learned from the British government details of Russian energy company Gazprom's ambitions to enter the Nigerian market. In June last year, Gazprom signed a $2.5bn (£1.5bn) deal with the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation to build refineries, pipelines and gas power stations.

Shell put a request to the US consulate for potentially sensitive intelligence about Gazprom, a possible rival, which she said had secured a promise from the Nigerian government of access to 17trn cubic feet of natural gas – roughly a tenth of Nigeria's entire reserves. "Pickard said that amount of gas was only available if the GON were to take concessions currently assigned to other oil companies and give them to Gazprom. She assumed Shell would be the GON's prime target." Pickard alleged that a conversation with a Nigerian government minister had been secretly recorded by the Russians. Shortly after the meeting in the minister's office she received a verbatim transcript of the meeting "from Russia", according to the memo.

The cable concludes with the observation that the oil executive had tended to be guarded in discussion with US officials. "Pickard has repeatedly told us she does not like to talk to USG [US government] officials because the USG is 'leaky'." She may be concerned that ... bad news about Shell's Nigerian operations will leak out."

Shell declined to comment on the allegations, saying: "You are seeking our views on a leaked cable allegedly containing information about a private conversation involving a Shell representative, but have declined to share this cable or to permit us sufficient time to obtain information from the person you say took part in the conversation on the part of Shell. In view of this, we cannot comment on the alleged contents of the cable, including the correctness or incorrectness of any statements you say it contains."
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/de ... as-afwerki

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December 8, 2010
Xipwire: The lone U.S. company standing with Wikileaks?

Some well-known American businesses have ostracized Wikileaks, even though the secrets-spilling organization has not been criminally charged for its leaks of classified U.S. State Department cables. Grounds for legal action against it remain murky, but that hasn't stopped some companies of accusing it of engaging in illegal activity as an excuse to dump Wikileaks as a customer.

Amazon shut down server access to secrets-spilling website Wikileaks, after pressured by Sen. Joe Lieberman. Next, PayPal, Visa and Mastercard cut off the group's ability to raise money from donations. A small New Hampshire company, everyDNS, cut off ties with the website, allegedly to protect its own network from crashing.

In all the hubbub, however, a Philadelphia startup has seized an opportunity to support Wikileaks -- and, of course, it's now getting some free marketing in the process. Ah, the land of the free -- and capitalism. (Facebook and Twitter, to their credit, have made statements that they are not closing off the site from its services -- for now. But financial support for Wikileaks, (what Xipwire is enabling) in some ways, is perhaps even more critical at the moment.)

XipWire Inc. allows people to transmit cash using their mobile phone's text messaging capabilities. The company has waived any fees associated with its service to support Wikileaks. People can make donations in $10 increments either from their website or from a mobile phone running their application.

Here's a statement from Xipwire from their Website:
While people may or may not agree with WikiLeaks, we at XIPWIRE believe that anyone who wishes to support the organization through a donation should be able to do so. We are waiving all fees so that 100% of the donations collected will be directly passed on to WikiLeaks.

I'm waiting to hear back from Xipwire folks; hoping to interview them soon for some more details. Stay tuned.

UPDATE:

Just got off the phone with Sharif Alexandre and Sybil Lindsay, of Xipwire and here are some more details:

Presently, Xipwire has received hundreds of donations to Wikileaks. The company has yet to establish formal ties with Wikileaks, so it is keeping the money in an account, and will transfer it when they connect with someone from the Website.

"They've been a little hard to get ahold of directly," Alexandre said.

Alexandre said Xipwire works with several charitable organizations and he believes people should have the right to donate to the causes they believe in, without interference from corporations.

"It's a completely different story if they (Wikileaks) were illegal on some level, then definitely that's a line we would not cross," Alexandre said. "But they haven't done anything different than The New York Times and The Guardian."

Alexandre said that the notion of his firm, which launched in May and has raised $500,000 in startup angel funding, is getting free publicity for its stance was a secondary concern. He said he is just as concerned about receiving negative publicity, since many believe Wikileaks is engaging in at least improper activity.

"We're fully aware that not everyone likes what Wikileaks is," Alexandre said. "But we are prepared to accept the consequences."

(FYI: I first learned about Xipwire's involvement from The Raw Story.)

http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/te ... ny_st.html

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[whipstitch]

A little comic relief...

Remarks on Internet Freedom
Remarks
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Secretary of State
The Newseum
Washington, DC
January 21, 2010

We are also supporting the development of new tools that enable citizens to exercise their rights of free expression by circumventing politically motivated censorship... Both the American people and nations that censor the internet should understand that our government is committed to helping promote internet freedom. - Hilary Clinton (Jan 2010)

[JackRiddler]

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Greenwald on Brian Lehrer Show, in debate vs. Rubin and Burns

Greenwald gets on the Brian Lehrer Show and cuts up the hostile host's lies of the past few days with some support from callers, then goes into the lion's den against NYT's John Burns and Robert Rubin in audio segments now up at his blog:

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn ... index.html

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[JackRiddler]

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State Department half right: Turns out the alpha barked generally at everyone, and Pay Pal responded like a good dog.

State Department: We did not ask PayPal to cut off WikiLeaks
Posted By Josh Rogin Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - 6:37 PM Share


The State Department denied a report today that it contacted the online money transfer service PayPal and asked them to cut ties with WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, who remains behind bars in the United Kingdom.

"It is not true," State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told The Cable. "We have not been in touch with PayPal."

Osama Bedier, vice president at PayPal, told an audience Wednesday at Paris' tech conference Le Web'10 that PayPal had shut down its business with WikiLeaks, which used the electronic money transfer service to collect donations, at the request of the State Department.

"The State Department told us these were illegal activities. It was straightforward. We first comply with regulations around the world making sure that we protect our brand," Bedier reportedly said..

Crowley said that PayPal made the decision based on a publicly available letter sent last week to Assange and his lawyer from State Department counselor Harold Koh, which called the disclosure of 250,000 diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks an "illegal dissemination" of classified documents and said the leaks "place at risk the lives of countless innocent individuals -- from journalists to human rights activists and bloggers to soldiers to individuals providing information to further peace and security."

A reporter from the TechCrunch blog confirmed with Bedier after his speech that he was in fact working from the Koh letter that State had sent to WikiLeaks.

Crowley also responded to the remarks of Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd, who seemed to alter his country's position on Assange, who is an Australian citizen, "Mr. Assange is not himself responsible for the unauthorized release of 250,000 documents from the US diplomatic communications network," said Rudd Tuesday. "The Americans are responsible for that."

"He's correct in that the primary responsibility for the leak existed within the United States government," Crowley said, being careful not to criticize Rudd and create yet one more diplomatic problem.

As for whether the United States will seek to prosecute Assange under the Espionage Act of 1917 or some other U.S. laws, Crowley said that decision would be made by the Justice Department and the Defense Department. But he was clear about the State Department's position on the matter.

"Certainly, we believe that what Mr. Assange has done in the aftermath of that leak has put the interests of our country and others at risk, and put the lives of people who are reflected in these documents at risk," Crowley said. We haven't changed our view."


AFP / Getty Images

State Department: We did not ask PayPal to cut off WikiLeaks http://bit.ly/hkhmeF
4 hours ago

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts ... _wikileaks

[JackRiddler]

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http://gawker.com/5709789/noose-closes- ... vigilantes

Noose Closes Around Pro-Wikileaks Vigilantes

Operation Payback is facing a little payback of its own. First Twitter closed the pro-Wikileaks hacker movement's account. And now we hear the Feds are shutting down some online discussion of Operation Payback attacks.

Some sites have received federal court orders to cease any further online documentation of the attacks, which targeted Visa, Mastercard and other financial companies who froze Wikileaks accounts, a source close to the situation tells us. Among the sites where content is coming down is Encyclopedia Dramatica, which we're told received one of the orders. The 4chan-affiliated reference wiki within the past hour had the number three Google hit for a search on "Operation Payback." It has since deleted its article, though the entry remains accessible via Google cache (NSFW). Here's what it looks like now (click to enlarge):

Shit, can I even post the goddamn deleted encyclopedia dramatica page here? It's still viewable on the cache at http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/s ... clnk&gl=us

The headline may be deceptive as far as the coppers' progress in catching Payback people, but the chill is pretty clear.

The message board 4chan has also reportedly deleted threads documenting Operation Payback, but the anarchic image-sharing site is notorious for its churn and heavy moderation even in the absence of federal orders, so it's hard to tell exactly what's going on. (If you know of other sites affected, or have documentation on this reported court order, we'd love to hear from you.)

On Twitter, meanwhile, some people writing about the hacker raids have switched from using the hashtag #payback to using #payitforward, since, some believe, Twitter has been monitoring the original #payback tag and moderating some of those tweets.

Whatever its stance on discussion of the raids, Twitter is clearly done being used as the rallying point from which to organize them. The company shut down the @Anon_Operations account, which was being used to synchronize successful denial of service attacks on companies like Visa and Mastercard. (The account name has since been claimed by an apparent parody version, while a kindred site has sprung up at @AnonOps.)

Operation Payback was meant to punish companies like PayPal, Visa and Mastercard for freezing Wikileaks' assets. The effort, believed to be affiliated with the anti-Scientology 4chan spinoff Anonymous, was successful in the case of Visa and Mastercard, taking down both companies' websites. Whether the victory extends beyond those brief symbolic wins remains to be seen; both credit card firms claim their processing networks were not affected by the attacks.

The attempted punishment is also likely to produce a nasty PR backlash. Hacking Wikileaks' enemies might be cathartic, but it also reinforces the notion that there's something illicit about Wikileaks — and about the practice of publishing information the government would prefer, usually for its own selfish reasons, to keep secret.

[Photo of Assange via AP]

Send an email to Ryan Tate, the author of this post, at ryan@gawker.com.

[stefano]

The deleted Encyclopedia Dramatica page doesn't mention WikiLeaks at all (or at least the cached one doesn't), it's all about attacks on RIAA and Gene Simmons. Anti-anti-piracy stuff. On the other hand Wikipedia has a page. So maybe you're just not allowed to be funny.

Anyway the "anti-Scientology 4chan spinoff Anonymous" (that's not quite right) is still at it:

[82_28]

You're really on the case bro. I'm not. Frankly, I don't give a shit. As long as I can still log in to COD4 the Internet works for me. But please do, keep overturning the obvious rocks which need to be overturned which is exactly what some were saying oh about 23 pages ago.

I got no problem with anybody here, period. I really don't want any kind of a snark fest. But I am here to tell you, that each and every story and awesome sum up of what's going down, I was speculatively all over from the beginning. Instead I'm being treated like a dick and an idiot by those who know far more, read the tea leaves with exceptional aplomb and leave the likes of me in the dust. How is one to keep up without being a dick right back?

[82_28]

Not you stefano. . .

[AlicetheKurious]

^^^
My advice, if you haven't read the article by Andrew Gavin Marshall that vanlose kid posted, you really should go back to page 23 and do so!

It's brilliant and covers all the issues we've been talking about.

Here
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=30362&start=315#p370129

Wikileaks and the Worldwide Information War
Power, Propaganda, and the Global Political Awakening

by Andrew Gavin Marshall
Global Research, December 6, 2010

SNIP

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? ... &aid=22278

*

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Just a lot of blah-blah-blah: for a supposedly well-informed and savvy RI readership hardly "brilliant" unless your definition of brilliant is that it says what JackRiddler wants it to say.

In contrast to the Marshall piece, for a truly informative and eye-opening look at Wikileaks and Assange, where they come from and their role within a larger pattern of sophisticated manipulation and misdirection techniques, invest a half-hour or so listening to this:

Tarpley on Wikileaks limited hangout ... Here's just the audio...:
http://tarpley.net/2010/12/05/assange-t ... a-enemies/

[wintler2]

..it has been routine in australia to refer to Arbib as a powerbroker in labor from the right of the party, without ever really adequately explaining how one so young seemed to have so much power and influence, central figure in replacing rudd with gillard as PM,
the ripples of this will be fascinating to watch in australia and in Murdochs Australian over the next few weeks,

David Combe (minister in Hawke govt) was sacked for less in 1983, now not even an investigation? and why did Arbib want the US to keep his identity hidden if its all so regular like? And what was/is Arbib getting from the US in return for being so helpful?

Maybe parliament should start with a cautionary ballad from the Minister for the Arts.

[eyeno]

"We are also supporting the development of new tools that enable citizens to exercise their rights of free expression by circumventing politically motivated censorship... Both the American people and nations that censor the internet should understand that our government is committed to helping promote internet freedom. - Hilary Clinton (Jan 2010)"


whip thanx for that it was indeed comic relief. But at the same time so toxic that I will need two weeks worth of intensive vitamin and mineral therapy to get the poison out of my system. Right now I have so much much "royal we" snarled in my brain that it may take a month and a tow truck to get it all unsnarled. This one wiki leak is going to plug so many freedom holes before it is all over with that I have yet to identify but a few of them.

[stefano]

Nominations are sought for UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize 2011.

The purpose of the Prize [...] is to honour a person, organization or institution that has made a notable contribution to the defence and/or promotion of press freedom anywhere in the world, especially if this involved risk.

If you can think of a person who matches this description, maybe someone you read about recently, and you can sign on behalf of a "regional and international organizations, professional and non-governmental organizations working in the field of journalism and freedom of expression", you can download a nomination form on the linked page and send it to Unesco.