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Wikileaks Founder Wanted By The Us
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» databoy replied on Mon Jun 14, 2010 @ 1:57pm |
 Coolness: 106070 | Wanted by the US: WikiLeaks Founder Keeps His Head Down
by Dylan Welch It reads like a James Bond novel: an enigmatic white-haired computer hacker; a soldier turned whistleblower; secret government correspondence; and the world's most powerful country desperate to contain the situation. Julian Assange, the Australian-born face of the web iconoclast WikiLeaks, is in hiding overseas after the US military arrested one of its own soldiers, Bradley Manning, and accused him of leaking a a secret video of a US Army helicopter gunning down civilians in Iraq in 2007. The video was released on Wikileaks this year, and the US is now desperate to find Mr Assange before he leaks thousands of hugely embarrassing state diplomatic cables, which are believed to discuss the Middle East, its governments and leaders. Mr Assange, 38, is an enigmatic figure who moves frequently between countries and has bases in Iceland, Kenya, Australia and elsewhere. He was due to speak at a conference in Las Vegas on Friday but cancelled shortly before he was due to appear. At the same time a US gossip website published an article claiming that Pentagon investigators were engaged in a ''manhunt'' for Mr Assange. WikiLeaks, set up in 2007, is a clandestine international organisation that relies on anonymous leaks of confidential documents from government and industry. Although it has a history of funding difficulties and opposition from governments - Australia's Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, threatened to call in the Federal Police when the site published a confidential internet blacklist - it has continued to operate sporadically and garnered worldwide attention when it released the helicopter attack video. But it appears that the latest leak may have pushed the US too far, and there have even been suggestions that Mr Assange may be in physical danger. Daniel Ellsberg, who famously leaked a top secret US history of the Vietnam War dubbed the Pentagon Papers at the height of that war, told US television he had spoken to Mr Assange last week. ''He ... understood that it was not safe for him to come to this country,'' Mr Ellsberg said. The arrest of US Army Specialist Manning was proof that Mr Assange was at risk of prosecution or worse in the US, he said. ''When the Bradley Manning arrest was announced, he said 'now you understand why I didn't come' ... I think he would not be safe, even physically, entirely, wherever he is.'' © 2010 Sydney Morning Herald [ www.commondreams.org ] |
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| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» crimson replied on Mon Jun 14, 2010 @ 2:19pm |
 Coolness: 66380 | Sucks, I do hope he's ok and this blows over. Wikileaks is a great service, and I don't think this will bring it down but it just shows how fucked up some situations are. Sad day indeed. |
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| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» databoy replied on Mon Jun 14, 2010 @ 2:52pm |
| Coolness: 106070 | God forbid the U.S. public recieve anything but federaly sanctioned propaganda. |
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| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» Wizdumb replied on Fri Jun 25, 2010 @ 10:29am |
 Coolness: 122265 | i don't know about you guys, but i prefer my news information edited and censored for my own protection
common if we knew everything they didn't want us to know, imagine what kind of world we'd live in? oh wait a second.... |
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| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» DynV replied on Mon Jun 28, 2010 @ 7:36am |
 Coolness: 108760 |  |
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| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» databoy replied on Wed Jul 14, 2010 @ 2:01pm |
| Coolness: 106070 | The Motive Behind Whistle Blower Prosecutions
by Glenn Greenwald One of the more flamboyant aspects of the Bradley Manning arrest was the claim that he had leaked to WikiLeaks 250,000 pages of "diplomatic cables." Those were the documents which anonymous government officials pointed to when telling The Daily Beast's Philip Shenon that the leaks "could do serious damage to national security." Most commentary on the Manning case has tacitly assumed that the leaking of "diplomatic cables" would jeopardize national security secrets. But a new BBC article today contains this quote from former UK intelligence analyst Crispin Black: Diplomatic cables don't usually contain huge secrets but they do contain the unvarnished truth so in a sense they can be even more embarrassing than secrets. As usual, government concern over leaks is about avoiding embarrassment and other accountability; national security harm is but the fear-mongering excuse. Similarly, a new Washington Post article today details the Obama DOJ's prosecution of NSA whistle blower Thomas Drake, whose disclosures resulted in no claimed national security harm, but rather, was evidence of "waste, mismanagement and a willingness to compromise Americans' privacy without enhancing security" (leaked only after his use of the official channels resulted in nothing, as usual). As is true for virtually every whistle blower prosecution or threatened prosecution, there is no actual national security harm identified from that leak. Other than when a covert agent's identity is blown (as happened to Valerie Plame), has anyone ever heard of any actual, concrete national security harm from any of the high-profile leak cases, whether it be the illegal NSA eavesdropping program, the network of CIA black sites, the release of the Apache helicopter attack video, or the corruption and privacy infringements revealed by Drake? The Post today quotes Obama DOJ spokesman Matthew Miller's justification for the administration's escalated war on whistle blowers as follows: "We have consistently said that leaks and mishandling of classified information are matters that we take extremely seriously." There's no doubt that they take such acts "extremely seriously," but what's the reason for it? There's been no identified harm to national security from any of these leaks. What these leaks have actually accomplished is to "embarrass" the Government by revealing what the intelligence analyst quoted by the BBC calls "the unvarnished truth" about the illegal, corrupt, and embarrassing acts it undertakes. In all of these cases where the Obama DOJ is persecuting whistle blowers, they're punishing the greatest sin there is -- exposure of high-level government wrongdoing -- not harm to national security. Amazingly, that was even the explicit rationale used by Obama when he and the Democratic Congress re-wrote FOIA to shield photographs of detainee abuse from court-ordered disclosure: these photos would reflect poorly on the U.S. government and therefore harm national security. And, of course, the administration's repeated, Bush-replicating invocation of the "state secrets" privilege has been justified with vague appeals to National Security but actually motivated by a desire to shield government crimes of detention, surveillance and interrogation from disclosure and accountability. Most of what the U.S. Government does of any significance -- literally -- occurs behind a vast wall of secrecy, completely unknown to the citizenry. While a small portion of that is legitimately classified, these whistle blower prosecutions and other disclosure controversies demonstrate that the vast majority of this secrecy is devoted to avoiding embarrassment and accountability. It has nothing to do with "national security" -- one of the all-justifying terms (along with Terrorism) for what the Government does. Secrecy is the religion of the political class, and the prime enabler of its corruption. That's why whistle blowers are among the most hated heretics. They're one of the very few classes of people able to shed a small amount of light on what actually takes place. The great irony is that there is a perfect inverse relationship between the secrecy powers of the Government (which rapidly increases) and the privacy rights of citizens (which erodes just as rapidly). The citizenry meekly acquiesces to the notion that it must sacrifice more and more privacy to the Government in order to deter and expose criminality, corruption and other dangerous acts of private citizens, yet refuses to apply that same rationale to demand greater transparency from the Government itself. The Government (and its private corporate partners) know more and more about citizens, while citizens know less and less about the actions of the government-corporate axis which governs them. Read the full article at [ Salon.com ] |
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Wikileaks Founder Wanted By The Us
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