Wikileaks and 21st Century Statecraft. Have 250,000 leaks sunk the State Department’s ‘Internet Freedom’ policy? By Roy Revie As the fallout of Cablegate continues to consume column inches, gigabytes, and cabinet meetings across the world, the realisation that this is about more than one man, one organization, and one massive leak seems to be slowly sinking in. While some argue that stories and comment focusing on the process of the leak and the fallout for the organisation only distract from the stories contained within the cables themselves, it is clear that this element is as vital (in the short term at least) as the contents of the cables. We find ourselves in the middle of an unprecedented public debate on Internet freedom and the role of the state online.
Perhaps ominously, the speech was prefaced by a shout-out to Joe Lieberman for aiding the “passage of the VOICE Act, which speaks to Congress’s and the American people’s commitment to internet freedom, a commitment that crosses party lines and branches of government”. South West England: severe weather warnings. US criticises court that may decide on Julian Assange extradition, WikiLeaks cables show | Law. US officials regard European human rights standards as an "irritant", secret cables show, and have strongly objected to the safeguards which could protect WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from extradition.
In a confidential cable from the US embassy in Strasbourg, US consul general Vincent Carver criticised the Council of Europe, the most authoritative human-rights body for European countries, for its stance against extraditions to America, as well as secret renditions and prisons used to hold terrorist suspects. He blamed the council for creating anti-US sentiment and hampering the US war on terror. "The Council of Europe (COE) likes to portray itself as a bastion of democracy, a promoter of human rights, and the last best hope for defending the rule of law in Europe – and beyond," Carver said. "[But] it is an organisation with an inferiority complex and, simultaneously, an overambitious agenda. The cables also reveal the pettiness of diplomatic exchanges within the Council of Europe.
Google Labs - Books Ngram Viewer. Complex snow shovel prank. How WikiLeaks is morphing into WMD 2.0. Glenn Greenwald is right. We’re watching a re-run of the stenographers to power in the mainstream media picking up the signals from the political establishment (especially in the US) and obligingly parroting the party line. “The government and establishment media”, writes Greenwald, are jointly manufacturing and disseminating an endless stream of fear-mongering falsehoods designed to depict them as scary villains threatening the security of The American People and who must therefore be stopped at any cost. An example: the way most media outlets (even the august New York Times) have relayed the lie that WikiLeaks has “dumped” 250,000 cables into the public domain. This seems to be entirely untrue: only a tiny fraction of the trove has actually been published — and not by WikiLeaks but by the five serious newspapers that have been given access to the material.
It’s no surprise that the US official reaction to WikiLeaks seems hysterical: it is. I don’t think there’s any damage. Rumors of the Death of Delicious - The Rat's Midden. Free Student Membership - Limited Time Only. Written by Editor on 16 December, 2010 - 23:51 I am please to announce that for the rest of December we are allowing students to join Pirate Party UK absolutely free! To take advantage of this, and get 4 months membership of PPUK free of charge, just complete the following simple steps. First Register an account by following the link at the top right of the homepage. Read the terms and conditions posted below and make sure you agree. Send an email from your university/collage/higher education institute email address to f.archibald@pirateparty.org.uk including the folowing information Username Full Name Full UK address and Postcode Date of Birth Contact telephone no (optional) Prefered Region.
Get involved! Terms and conditions Northern Ireland residents must read this disclaimer first! I am registered on a UK electoral register at the address I give on the this form. I agree to abide by the rules and constitution of the Pirate Party. Open source online intelligence mining still in infancy, official says. The arm of the CIA that combs the Internet and other public sources for unclassified but insightful intelligence is still in its infancy, its director acknowledges, five years after the Bush administration created the agency to overcome analytical limitations that in 2003 helped bring on the Iraq War.
After President George W. Bush sent troops to invade Iraq based in part on what turned out to be flawed information that the country was rebuilding its nuclear capacity, the U.S. government charged a new Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission with recommending steps to improve the nation's intelligence gathering. One such step was the creation of an open source directorate that would apply sophisticated information technology to gather fleeting, online materials for permanent availability across the intelligence community. "We've made progress, but we're still nascent," said Douglas Naquin, who has directed the DNI Open Source Center, based at the CIA, since its inception in 2005.
Extended exposure to Fox News makes voters stupid, university study finds | ... By Stephen C. WebsterThursday, December 16, 2010 16:53 EDT The troublesome record of spin by conservative television station Fox News has long been a cause for concern to many Americans, who frequently allege that the nation’s most viewed “news” network has the effect of dumbing down voters. Turns out, they were right. A University of Maryland study (PDF) published earlier this month found that people in the survey who had the most exposure to Fox News were more likely to believe falsehoods and rumors about national and world affairs when compared to those who paid attention to other news outlets. In a summary carried by Alternet, the following falsehoods were most relayed by Fox News viewers: The poll’s findings seem to sync with those of an NBC News survey (PDF) taken during the height of America’s health care reform debate, where Fox News viewers were found to be most likely to have believed wildly inaccurate interpretations of the legislation.
Copyright 2010 The Raw Story Stephen C. The French Government Can Now Censor the Internet. A Cardiff Story: A migrant city | Cardiff. "It's just by Tesco," I found myself saying the other day, "I'll be over there now, in a minute. " It's amazing how quickly a person can pick up the sayings of a local area. Two years ago I'd have thought you were kidding if you'd told me that I'd one day feel like a true Cardiffian.
But just a short time in this city which boasts that it is the best in Wales, and I'm already at home here. I now pronounce all the place names in the proper Cardiff way – names that baffle visitors like Crwys and Llanedeyrn, which we Cardiffians (if you will permit me to call myself that) pronounce in a way that pretty much ignores the rules of both Welsh and English, but suits us fine. The Kairdiff accent did not just appear by chance, and I have been privileged, as a relative newcomer to Cardiff, in being able to get to know this city and its language through my work as a researcher for the new museum, the Cardiff Story. Back then it was a poverty stricken back street. Inside Datasift: A quick review. I managed to get my hands on a alpha preview of Datasift – the tool that I’ve been raving on about since I first saw a preview of the service. Essentially, its like a Yahoo Pipes for social media, allowing you to see a plethora of data that is happening in real-time on the web, and more easily curate, organise and consume that content.
From my initial play around with the service I’ve been gradually getting to grips with some of the things that it can do, and I am really impressed with the Twitter feature set alone. The power of this web application has warranted a full review – these guys are going to be a big deal for programmers, as the layer that they’ve provided takes information extraction from the real time web to a whole different level. Who’s it for Anyone who has an interest in mining the firehose of information that is happening out there on the web in real time. Streaming my life away Authorisation for the service follows Twitter’s original programming model.
FSDL Language. The Americans are in our House. What will the Taliban Think? KUNDUZ, Afghanistan—Life in troubled Kunduz Province can be summed up in a word: precarious. [see Alissa J. Rubin's Times story Taliban Extend Reach to North, Where Armed Groups Reign] Visiting there for a couple of days unembedded, I could only get a glimpse of it: The provincial council chairman cut short an interview because dusk was falling and he did not feel safe even in Kunduz City after dark.
The New York Times A young man told me that it was best for him not to go too early in the morning to his home district of Char Dara because the Taliban had not yet cleared roadside bombs from the roads. “The Taliban are putting the mines and fuses across the roads for the government and the foreign forces at night, and they are clearing them up in the morning so local people can travel,” he said. A Year at War By JAMES DAO The men and women of First Battalion, 87th Infantry are deployed to Kunduz. “There are no major skirmishes ongoing between the Taliban and arbakais now,” he said. Using WikiLeaks to Shape History as it Happens. The problem with working to change United States foreign policy is that you're never really sure what it's going on behind the curtain. By the time you have submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and the government deems the information you're asking for safe, the present has passed into history.
Which raises the question, will WikiLeaks bring us the transparency we need to be able to understand the internal workings of U.S. covert operations? The world of top-secret America has grown exponentially since 9/11, with over 263 organizations created or reorganized. Much is happening in this world that is not only hidden from us, but from itself. Guest author Jeremy John is a Technologist at EchoDitto, a leading digital strategy and technology firm leveraging new media and participatory technologies to affect positive social change. The ability to excavate the doings of the CIA and FBI comes years after the ability to do anything about it has long past. Veterans For Peace :: Home. The War You Don't See, a film by John Pilger. Black Mass › You lucky people.
Important, radical ideas have been popularised by cinema: people experiencing movies together, as part of an audience. Today’s protest movements could learn a thing or two by studying old films, and old film movements… Britain’s students. Lord love them. It brings a tear to the eye of many a middle-aged political agitator to see 16 and 17 year olds out on the streets, fighting for their future and ours. It’s the students’ turn to try to change things for the better. If there’s a basis to the rumours being put about by some of the protesters and the Met, that (a posh musician’s son notwithstanding) the thuggery is mainly down to infiltration by the Far Right, then with great and unintentional irony the EDL is trying to subvert the very thing that proves that they’re irrelevant.
What better expression of the eclecticism of the student protesters can there be than the choice of Dubstep as their anthemic sound? There is a timeless logic to this. This was written by Tim. . [...] 1. LOPPSI: Censure administrative du Net adoptée, les pédophiles sont tranquilles. Paris, 15 décembre 2010 -- L'Assemblée nationale a adopté l'article 4 de la LOPPSI mettant en place le filtrage administratif d'Internet, via le cheval de Troie de la protection de l'enfance. Un tel dispositif permettra de généraliser la censure des contenus sur Internet, tout en laissant les pédophiles et la pédopornographie prospérer. Le rejet de la supervision par le juge illustre clairement la volonté de l'exécutif de contrôler Internet.
Les députés ont cédé en laissant au gouvernement la possibilité de recourir au filtrage du Net sans supervision de l'autorité judiciaire. Sans moyen pour les citoyens de contrôler les conditions dans lesquelles les sites seront censurés ou de s'opposer aux décisions, le pouvoir exécutif pourra désormais faire la police sur le Net au mépris des droits fondamentaux. Le filtrage de sites pédopornographiques revient à se donner bonne conscience au mépris de la liberté de communication.
Lien vers le dossier sur le site de l'Assemblée Nationale. Julian Assange bail decision made by UK authorities, not Sweden | Media. The decision to have Julian Assange sent to a London jail and kept there was taken by the British authorities and not by prosecutors in Sweden, as previously thought, the Guardian has learned. The Crown Prosecution Service will go to the high court tomorrow to seek the reversal of a decision to free the WikiLeaks founder on bail, made yesterday by a judge at City of Westminster magistrates court.
It had been widely thought Sweden had made the decision to oppose bail, with the CPS acting merely as its representative. But today the Swedish prosecutor's office told the Guardian it had "not got a view at all on bail" and that Britain had made the decision to oppose bail. Lawyers for Assange reacted to the news with shock and said CPS officials had told them this week it was Sweden which had asked them to ensure he was kept in prison. Karin Rosander, director of communications for Sweden's prosecutor's office, told the Guardian: "The decision was made by the British prosecutor. Kosovo PM is head of human organ and arms ring, Council of Europe reports | World news. Kosovo's prime minister is the head of a "mafia-like" Albanian group responsible for smuggling weapons, drugs and human organs through eastern Europe, according to a Council of Europe inquiry report on organised crime.
Hashim Thaçi is identified as the boss of a network that began operating criminal rackets in the runup to the 1998-99 Kosovo war, and has held powerful sway over the country's government since. The report of the two-year inquiry, which cites FBI and other intelligence sources, has been obtained by the Guardian. It names Thaçi as having over the last decade exerted "violent control" over the heroin trade.
Figures from Thaçi's inner circle are also accused of taking captives across the border into Albania after the war, where a number of Serbs are said to have been murdered for their kidneys, which were sold on the black market. Legal proceedings began in a Pristina district court today into a case of alleged organ trafficking discovered by police in 2008. Lessons Learned From the Gawker Hack. 'Allegations regarding OpenBSD IPSEC' - MARC. We Support WikiLeaks.
Services The Salsa Client Services team handles all new client set-ups as well as custom projects such as data clean-up, large-scale content and campaign migration, webpage customization and custom reporting. For more services including everything from strategic consulting to development, we have a community of partners ready to help too. Support The folks in support help you be successful in Salsa in a friendly, clear and efficient manner. You can count on the support specialists to ask you questions to target the specific problem and determine how to best address your concerns. Training We provide weekly online training, certification courses and strategic best practices webinars and resources at a variety of levels so you can customize your education the way you need it.
Emergent Futures Mapping with Futurescaper. European news agenda - halfblog. US appoints first cyber warfare general | World news | The Observer. The mouse in the room - Unleashed. Iceland may ban MasterCard, Visa over WikiLeaks censorship | Raw Story. Attempts to prosecute WikiLeaks endanger press freedoms - Glenn Greenwald. Helsingin Sanomat - International Edition - Home. Greenwald Gets It on WikiLeaks Coverage. More on the media's Pentagon-subservient WikiLeaks coverage - Glenn Greenwald. Do we hold the state to be legitimate? « BuzzMachine. Multiplication: The Japanese Way.
27 theses on WikiLeaks (and counting… The psychology of media statists - Unleashed. Free Julian Assange! RT @UnlockDemocracy: find out how much power your local goverment has compared to 10 other countries. These astroturf libertarians are the real threat to internet democracy | George Monbiot. ~> @hubmum @dominiccampbell @carriebish @emsciecoops... Greenwald quits CREW over WikiLeaks - Ben Smith. US Diplomats in the EU: Manipulating the Political Dwarves of Europe - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International. Leicester Business School Lecture Series | De Montfort University - Leicester, UK.
Thesystemsthinkingreview.