Freedom of Information Act

For more than six months, Wired‘s Senior Editor Kevin Poulsen has possessed — but refuses to publish — the key evidence in one of the year’s most significant political stories//salon

“We’ve led the coverage on this story, and we would gain nothing by letting another scoop simmer unreported on our hard drives…He doesn’t cite what authority he believes the government should wield to strip convicted hackers of their First Amendment rights.”//K.Poulsen:::wired

The Wikileaks Chats

It’s a high-stakes conflict between corporations that have grown fat and powerful off the web over nearly two decades and the first generation to grow up with the modern internet as a daily element in their lives.//wired

Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy; “To destroy this invisible government”

“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people,”..“To destroy this invisible government, to befoul this unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of statesmanship.”//Theodore Roosevelt

There is a certain vicious amorality about the Mark Zuckerberg-ian philosophy that all transparency is always and everywhere a good thing, particularly when it’s uttered by the guy who’s busily monetizing your radical transparency…….But Assange is not trying to produce a journalistic scandal which will then provoke red-faced government reforms or something, precisely because no one is all that scandalized by such things any more. Instead, he is trying to strangle the links that make the conspiracy possible, to expose the necessary porousness of the American state’s conspiratorial network in hopes that the security state will then try to shrink its computational network in response, thereby making itself dumber and slower and smaller.///zunguzungu.

Wikileaks Timeline

“The right to access information held by public authorities is a fundamental human right subject to a strict regime of exceptions,” the statement reads. “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.”//UN@register

Suffice to say, there are very few entities, if there are any, which pose as much of a threat to the ability of governmental and corporate elites to shroud their corrupt conduct behind an extreme wall of secrecy. //salon

“This is a normal police investigation. Let the police find out what actually happened. Of course, the enemies of WikiLeaks may try to use this, but it begins with the two women and Julian. It is not the CIA sending a woman in a short skirt.”//guardian

Assange’s intolerance of any questioning of his decisions is well documented, so the Guardian can hardly be surprised at its former friend’s reaction.//Reg

“You can never take that information back once it’s out there,” he said. “And it takes very little information to ruin a person’s life.”//RS

Merged Manning-Lamo Chat Logs

“They did everything they could, but you can’t really identify that someone’s going to do what he’s accused of at that level. You can never tell what somebody’s going to do.”//wired

And second, if technological change causes respectable old-media organisations such as the Guardian and the New York Times to go bust and be replaced by blogs, what happens to freedom of the press, and indeed to freedom of speech?//LBT

Who Controls the Internet?

With free software, we can at least control what software does in our own computers.//R.Stallman

“the world’s coolest smartest people, it’s amazing!”

headline:::::FDL

The future isn’t dead. We simply overtook it — and then shot off into new territory that we don’t have the maps for yet.//Warren Ellis

NASA has discovered a new life form, a bacteria called GFAJ-1 that is unlike anything currently living in planet Earth….Instead of using phosphorus, the newly discovered microorganism—called GFAJ-1 and found in Mono Lake, California—uses the poisonous arsenic for its building blocks.////gizmodo.

The results, published in the Lancet, showed that aspirin reduced death due to any cancer by around 20% during the trials. But the benefits of aspirin only became apparent after taking the drug for 5 years or more, suggesting aspirin works by slowing or preventing the early stages of the disease so that the effect is only seen much later.//U.ofOxford

“Our study offers compelling evidence that it is the social aspects of religion rather than theology or spirituality that leads to life satisfaction,” said Chaeyoon Lim, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who led the study. “In particular, we find that friendships built in religious congregations are the secret ingredient in religion that makes people happier.”//escience

One study found a nasal spray of oxytocin — a frequently used way to deliver the hormone, because it provides a direct route to the brain — made people more trusting. Participants were more willing to hand over money in an experimental game than those not given the spray. “Given that some of the things that are suspected of triggering oxytocin — massage, sex, touch, eye contact — given that those are uniformly likable, it’s hard not to recommend them,” he said.//livescience

“Persian Gulf Oasis” may have been host to humans for over 100,000 years before it was swallowed up by the Indian Ocean around 8,000 years ago.//sciencedaily

 

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The engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process, the freedom to persuade and suggest. – (Edward L. Bernays, “The Engineering of Consent”, 1947)

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“Information has never been so free,” declared Clinton. “Even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.”//guardian

Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences!

The Internet is the last bastion of freedom in this evolving technical world. The Internet is capable of connecting us all. When we are connected we are strong. When we are strong we have power. When we have power we are able to do the impossible.//anon

Governments don’t like to be embarrassed. They don’t like their secrets aired on the internet. Sure, it’s okay for governments to tap all of your secrets by monitoring your phone calls, emails and web browsing habits, but every government seeks to protect its own secrets at practically any cost. That’s why the upshot of this Wikileaks release may be that governments will now start to look for new ways to censor and control the internet in order to prevent such information leaks from happening in the future.///naturalnews

Now I know that for the time being, my forecast is still science fiction and therefore fantastic, but I can’t help imagining state agents riding discreetly in stagecoaches along untrackable routes, bearing only memorised messages or, at most, the occasional document concealed in the heel of a shoe.//Umberto Eco

Despite all its drawbacks, and against all odds, WikiLeaks has rendered a sterling service to the cause of transparency, democracy and openness.//Eurozine

You talk of times of peace for all, and then prepare for war.

Over the long haul, we will need new checks and balances for newly increased transparency — Wikileaks shouldn’t be able to operate as a law unto itself anymore than the US should be able to. In the short haul, though, Wikileaks is our Amsterdam. Whatever restrictions we eventually end up enacting, we need to keep Wikileaks alive today, while we work through the process democracies always go through to react to change.//Clay Shirky

January 21, 2010 will go down as a dark day in the history of American democracy, and its decline…..In effect, the decision permits corporate managers to buy elections directly, instead of using more complex indirect means, though it is likely that to avoid negative publicity they will choose to do so through trade organizations…..The conception of corporate personhood evolved alongside the shift of power from shareholders to managers, and finally to the doctrine that “the powers of the board of directors … are identical with the powers of the corporation.” Furthermore, the courts determined that these state-established “natural entities” must restrict themselves to pursuit of profit and market share, though the courts did advise corporations to support charitable and educational causes, or an “aroused public” might take away the privileges granted to them by state power.///Noam Chomsky

 

Essentially, the argument is that global warming is a collective action problem that only an international entity will have incentives to solve. If not a world government, it will have to be a “global governance” structure that is to a large degree independent of individual governments and has the power to compel them to take necessary measures, such as reducing carbon dioxide emissions.//Volokh

“The people will once again decide their own fate”

the future is ours: ‘Do something. Interrupt the connection. Disconnect him.’

Most what i read online is trash and copy paste but your blog is different. Keep it like this.//Julietta Segal

Using the tools of corporations to reprogram global society and distribute a new cultural operating system

The financial elite engineered a massive transfer of assets over the last decades, and they are now completing the procedure of creating a two-tier society resembling a serfdom…The ruling elite employ teams of experts in social psychology and neuro-linguistic programming, trained in places like the Tavistock Institute, in order to keep the multitudes from recognizing their own interests in a movement of unified defiance…As civil society recognizes its self-interest in creating a peaceful and regenerative culture, the movement will include direct challenges to corporate practices that create unnecessary waste and toxic trash….In this final phase of post-industrial capitalism, when immaterial production has become the main driver of economic life, the corporate form can be transmuted from poison to medicine, repurposed to transform society, from the culture of ruin to one of regeneration….The next surprising yet logical phase in this dance is for the opposition to define the desired alternative, co-opt the propaganda tools and financial instruments of the dominant culture, and redirect or reverse the momentum of the system as a whole…//Business Shamanism::Reality Sandwich

Demand the truth.

Secrecy is routinely posited as a critical component for effective governance, a premise that’s so widely accepted that even some journalists, whose job is to reveal the secret workings of governments, have declared WikiLeaks’ efforts to be out of bounds.//wired

Assange wrote that illegitimate governance was by definition conspiratorial—the product of functionaries in “collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population.” He argued that, when a regime’s lines of internal communication are disrupted, the information flow among conspirators must dwindle, and that, as the flow approaches zero, the conspiracy dissolves. Leaks were an instrument of information warfare.//infoproc

'In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win.'//Rupert Murdoch

Meeting ‘Coldblood’, a member of the Anonymous community

It sounds like science fiction – Dr. Siegfried Hekimi and his student Dr Wen Yang, researchers at McGill’s Department of Biology, tested the current “free radical theory of aging” by creating mutant worms that had increased production of free radicals, predicting they would be short-lived. But they lived even longer than regular worms!//medical_news_today

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Die Festnahme des WikiLeaks-Gründers Julian Assange zeugt laut dem russischen Regierungschef Wladimir Putin von Demokratie-Defiziten.//RIA_Novosti

Diplomatie ist eine alte Profession, vielleicht die zweitälteste der Welt. Sie wird diese Krise überleben, und deutliche Worte werden weiter in die Heimatländer gekabelt werden – allerdings unter strengeren Sicherheitsvorkehrungen als bisher.//taz

“Unabhängig davon, was man von Wikileaks oder Julian Assange hält, hoffen wir, dass sich die Regierung zu grundsätzlichen Prinzipien bekennt”//stern

Was vor uns liegt ist ein gigantisches Projekt. Wir werden es gemeinsam angehen und wir werden mit Sicherheit keine Zeit für Helden haben.//Markus_Fuchs::3sat_neues

Die Wau Holland Stiftung wird auch in Zukunft Projekte und Aktionen, die ihren Stiftungszielen entsprechen, fördern. Dazu gehören neben der Aktion gegen Wahlcomputer, die Unterstützung der Anonymisierungsplattform TOR und anderen auch Projekte wie Wikileaks.//wauland

If anything, the current debacle demonstrates just how tightly controlled the net remains in its current form, as well as just what would have to be done to create the sort of peer-to-peer network capable of upending corporate and government power over mass communication and society itself.//Douglas_Rushkoff

“The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops.”