Julian Assange Dancing. Flight Club feat: Ben Ali & Gamal Mubarak. The WikiLeaks Revolt. The current popular unrest in the Arab world has a lot of lessons for Washington. Undoubtedly one of the most jarring is this: The leak of a simple series of cables from a U.S. ambassador in an obscure country — officially condemned by Washington — may have done more to inspire democracy in the Arab world than did a bloody, decadelong, trillion-dollar war effort orchestrated by the United States. The toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003 and America’s much-bedeviled efforts to install democracy in Iraq certainly worried Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and other Arab autocrats, who were uneasy about George W.
Bush’s much-touted “model” for the Arab world. But these leaders are much less disturbed by that nearly eight-year effort than by a few weeks of spontaneous popular eruption in Tunisia, which has now spread to the cities of Egypt and Yemen. The developments of the past few weeks have thus done much to resurrect questions about the so-called neoconservative program. Ex-UK spy boss says WikiLeaks sparked Egyptian revolution. 10 Ways to Build a Better Big Data Security Strategy The former head of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service has credited WikiLeaks and other secret-spilling sites with sparking the revolutions sweeping the Middle East.
At what was supposed to be an off-the-record appearance last month at the Cambridge Union Society, Former MI6 Chief Richard Dearlove said that the technology WikiLeaks harnesses is fundamentally strengthening the hand of the individual as he goes up against powerful organizations. “I would definitely draw parallels at the moment between the wave of political unrest which is sweeping through the Middle East in a very exciting and rather extraordinary fashion and also the WikiLeaks phenomenon,” Dearlove said.
“Really, what ties these two events together, and of course a number of other events, is the diffusion of power, away from the states and the empowerment of individuals, and small groups of individuals, by technology.” 100 Revelations to Mark 100 Days. *Special thanks to C-Cyte for recording my tweets and posting them online in a post for people to view if they do not normally use Twitter. One hundred days ago, WikiLeaks began to release the US State Embassy cables. The release event, which continues, became known as Cablegate.
A future post will include a look at Cablegate and what its impact on journalism, international diplomacy, and human rights has been and what its role has been in world events like the uprisings and revolutions the world that are currently unfolding. For now, it is worth recounting what has actually been revealed because of the release. One common denominator can be found in a majority of the cables: corruption. For all the talk of this country and that country being corrupt and that country being so corrupt it's gone, the plain fact is that between all the countries of the world, perhaps as a result of American coercion and/or threat of force, the world is one corrupt planet. 100. 99. 98. 97. 96. 95. 94. 93. 92. WikiLeaks, the Internet and Democracy. Implications Of Wikileaks.
I'm not often a huge fan of panel discussions, since it's tough to get together enough people who really have something interesting to say. However, I was definitely intrigued by the lineup at The Churchill Club's event last night, entitled: WikiLeaks: Why it Matters. Why it Doesn't? The headliner on the panel, was clearly Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, who has been quite vocal about the Wikileaks situation, and outspoken in his support for both Bradley Manning and Julian Assange. However, the panel also included astute commentators on the modern tech, media and legal worlds: Clay Shirky, Jonathan Zittrain and Peter Thiel. This was clearly an A-list panel. The fifth member of the panel was Roy Singham, the founder and chair of ThoughtWorks, a company that sponsored the event -- which made me initially assume that he wouldn't have much interesting to say.
This turned out to be wrong as he added quite a lot to the conversation. Exclusive interview: Julian Assange on Murdoch, Manning and the threat from China. In this week's New Statesman, the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange talks to John Pilger about Bradley Manning, his "insurance" files on Rupert Murdoch and News Corp – and which country is the real enemy of WikiLeaks. To read the entire feature, pick up a copy of this week's New Statesman, available on news-stands from tomorrow. Some highlights of the piece are below: The "technological enemy" of WikiLeaks is not the United States, but China, according to Assange. "China is the worst offender" when it comes to censorship, says the controversial whistleblower. On Bradley Manning, the US soldier accused of leaking diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, Assange says: "I'd never heard his name before it was published in the press.
" "Cracking Bradley Manning is the first step," says the Australian hacker. Such conspiracy would be impossible, he says. And despite the pressure the website has been under, reports of trouble at WikiLeaks are greatly exaggerated, he claims. "There is no 'fall'.
Comments on essay J.A. (en Español) (auf Deutsch) (in het nederlands) “To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us, and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not. The piece of writing (via) which that quote introduces is intellectually substantial, but not all that difficult to read, so you might as well take a look at it yourself. He begins by positing that conspiracy and authoritarianism go hand in hand, arguing that since authoritarianism produces resistance to itself — to the extent that its authoritarianism becomes generally known — it can only continue to exist and function by preventing its intentions (the authorship of its authority?)
Authoritarian regimes give rise to forces which oppose them by pushing against the individual and collective will to freedom, truth and self realization. Rebooting The News. Scroll to the bottom of this post for the mp3. As Dave said Dec. 3rd, “We’re having a Rebooting The News moment here with WikiLeaks.” Indeed. Now we know how the open Net comes crashing down. * First came the denial of service attacks. (Dave: “How do we know that?”)
* Next, Amazon Web Services kicked Wikileaks off its cloud servers. * Then it was EveryDNS.net. , which stopped serving the domain wikileaks.org * Then Tableau Software removed data visualizations Wikileaks had running there. * Then PayPal started choking off the air supply : donations. * The U.S. Library of Congress even got into the act, shutting down access to Wikileaks at its terminals. Look who is not on this list: Twitter . Dave at Scripting News : “When does the situation reach equilibrium? @xenijardin writes on Twitter: Great idea “@hrana: surprised @wikileaks hasn’t set up utorrent compatible RSS feed to automatically distribute updated #cablegate archives” (Dave: that’s what the two technologies were made for.) Conspiracy Theories Linking Israel. Updated: January 18, 2011 As the story about WikiLeaks's release of diplomatic cables gained media attention around the world, a number of Web sites across the ideological spectrum began to circulate conspiracy theories alleging that was secretly involved in the publication of the cables.
Although the theory that orchestrated the WikiLeaks' affair is circulating on a relatively small number of Web sites, it has gained traction with those catering to the far right and the left, as well as on some Arab and Islamic sites, and others dedicated to spreading "anti-Zionist" messages like Islam Times and Hezbollah's Al-Manar Web site. To date, these sources have promoted two major claims regarding WikiLeaks's relationship to . One claim is that WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange "struck a deal" with to withhold the cables that were "embarrassing" to .
Some cartoons featured in mainstream Arab papers echoed this same theme. Videos circulating this conspiracy have also surfaced on YouTube.