RON PAUL on WikiLeaks - WOW! He's RIGHT! Government Blocks Access to Bradley Manning’s Hearing. Bans on recording devices and Internet access and other arbitrary rules are preventing the public from witnessing this historic trial. The WikiLeaks saga is centered on issues of government transparency and accountability, but the public is being strategically denied access to the Manning hearing, one of the most important court cases in our lifetime. About the Author Rainey Reitman Rainey Reitman, a steering committee member of the Bradley Manning Support Network, reported live from Manning’s... Twenty-four-year-old Private First Class Bradley Manning is facing life in prison or even the death penalty for leaking hundreds of thousands of documents about US wars and diplomacy to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks.
No full transcript available The details of Bradley Manning’s prosecution aren’t making their way into the public domain in large part because there is no full transcript being made public. Computers and recording devices banned Media access denied or rescinded Access denied Lt. Don't lose sight of why the US is out to get Julian Assange | Seumas Milne.
Considering he made his name with the biggest leak of secret government documents in history, you might imagine there would be at least some residual concern for Julian Assange among those trading in the freedom of information business. But the virulence of British media hostility towards the WikiLeaks founder is now unrelenting. This is a man, after all, who has yet to be charged, let alone convicted, of anything. But as far as the bulk of the press is concerned, Assange is nothing but a "monstrous narcissist", a bail-jumping "sex pest" and an exhibitionist maniac. After Ecuador granted him political asylum and Assange delivered a "tirade" from its London embassy's balcony, fire was turned on the country's progressive president, Rafael Correa, ludicrously branded a corrupt "dictator" with an "iron grip" on a benighted land.
WikiLeaks provided fuel for the Arab uprisings. Vice-president Joe Biden has compared Assange to a "hi-tech terrorist". The solution is obvious. Why WikiLeaks Changes Everything by Christian Caryl. WikiLeaks changes everything. We can act as if the old standards of journalism still apply to the Internet, but WikiLeaks shows why this is wishful thinking. On November 28 the Internet organization started posting examples from a cache of 251,287 formerly secret US diplomatic cables. The few thousand journalists in this country who regularly track the State Department’s doings would have needed a couple of centuries to wheedle out this volume of information by traditional methods; the linkage of disparate government computer networks (a well-meaning response to the compartmentalization of data in the pre–September 11 period) apparently allowed one disgruntled Army private to pull it off in a few moments.
As WikiLeaks itself boasts, this is “the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain.” The scale is unprecedented. So, too, is the intent—or, more precisely, the lack thereof. Why Wikileaks Will Never Be Closed Or Blocked. Last weekend, rather than read stories about the US diplomatic cables that Wikileaks has released, I decided to read them directly myself.
In doing so, I better understood why no one — certainly not the US State Department — is going to shove those cables back into the darkness. Finding Wikileaks My first step was to go to the Wikileaks site — which meant, as it does for many people, doing a Google search to find it. I discovered that Google wasn’t listing the site in its new location. Bing was, so I found it that way. The story below goes into more depth about that mess (Today, for me, Google STILL lists the non-functional Wikileaks.org site tops): Google, Bing & Searching For The New Wikileaks Website The story also explains that while finding the main Wikileaks site might be tough, it exists in many different locations.
Cables, Meet Distributed Torrents When I arrived, there was no way to actually browse the cables. Selecting that download link causes a torrent file to be downloaded. The First WikiLeaks Revolution? | WikiLeaked. WikiLeaks, a Postscript. Add to that the three or four documentaries on the WikiLeaks adventure, the dozen books — including, weirdly, Assange’s unauthorized autobiography — and a couple speculative Hollywood projects, in which I have a twofold interest. (1. The very slight possibility that I might make some money for my small piece of the story. 2.
The exceedingly remote chance that a director will take up my wife’s brilliant idea that Assange be played by Tilda Swinton.) It’s amazing they keep inviting me to these things, since I’m a bit of a spoilsport. My consistent answer to the ponderous question of how WikiLeaks transformed our world has been: really, not all that much. It was a hell of a story and a wild collaboration, but it did not herald, as the documentarians yearn to believe, some new digital age of transparency. In fact, if there is a larger point, it is quite the contrary. Bart: “How ya doin’, Mr. Julian: “That’s my personal information, and you have no right to know about it.” Bada-bing. WikiLeaks in Latin America: Online Whistleblower’s Wide Impact in Region Where Assange Seeks Asylum. This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. AMY GOODMAN: We’re on the road in Baltimore, Maryland. Well, the mother of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had wrapped up a visit to Ecuador in a bid to campaign for her son’s asylum request.
Julian Assange has spent the last six weeks taking refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London as he fights extradition to Sweden and ultimately, he says, seeks to avoid being handed over to the United States. After meeting with Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, Assange’s mother, Christine Assange, said her son would enjoy living in Ecuador should he receive asylum. CHRISTINE ASSANGE: This is a sovereign decision, and I respect that. AMY GOODMAN: Ecuador’s foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño, vowed to wait until the end of the London Olympic Games on August 12th to announce a decision.
JULIAN ASSANGE: President Correa, why did you want us to release all the cables? Peter Kornbluh, welcome back to Democracy Now! Show Full Transcript › Why WikiLeaks Is Good for America | Threat Level. A truly free press — one unfettered by concerns of nationalism — is apparently a terrifying problem for elected governments and tyrannies alike. It shouldn’t be. In the past week, after publishing secret U.S. diplomatic cables, secret-spilling site WikiLeaks has been hit with denial-of-service attacks on its servers by unknown parties; its backup hosting provider, Amazon, booted WikiLeaks off its hosting service; and PayPal has suspended its donation-collecting account, damaging WikiLeaks’ ability to raise funds.
MasterCard announced Monday it was blocking credit card payments to WikiLeaks, saying the site was engaged in illegal activities, despite the fact it has never been charged with a crime. Meanwhile, U.S. politicians have ramped up the rhetoric against the nonprofit, calling for the arrest and prosecution and even assassination of its most visible spokesman, Julian Assange. WikiLeaks is not perfect, and we have highlighted many of its shortcomings on this website. Derrick Ashong: The Truth About Transparency - Why Wikileaks Is Bad for All of Us. Last night while waiting for some friends to arrive for a long-overdue hangout, I checked in to the NY Times and ran headfirst into this article on the latest diplomatic dish from Wikileaks.
As a brand-new HuffPo blogger I planned this morning to write my first post about sunshine, puppies & jelly-donuts -- the usual things I wake up thinking about on Mondays. But after reading what one witty reporter described as "TMZ for the Diplomatic set," I had to kick things off with a comment on the news of the day. There is a difference between holding government accountable for its decisions and holding government officials hostage to their words.
When I first heard about the latest impending Wiki leak last week, I couldn't help but wonder what was the purpose? I was impressed last Spring when I first saw their footage of the 2007 murder of a journalist & Iraqi civilians. With this release I am questioning both the value and motives of WikiLeaks itself. LeakDirectory. The Official WikiLeaks Forum - Index. WikiLeaks Volunteer Was a Paid Informant for the FBI | Threat Level. Thordarson with Julian Assange. Photo: Courtesy Sigurdur Thordarson On an August workday in 2011, a cherubic 18-year-old Icelandic man named Sigurdur “Siggi” Thordarson walked through the stately doors of the U.S. embassy in Reykjavík, his jacket pocket concealing his calling card: a crumpled photocopy of an Australian passport. The passport photo showed a man with a unruly shock of platinum blonde hair and the name Julian Paul Assange. Thordarson was long time volunteer for WikiLeaks with direct access to Assange and a key position as an organizer in the group.
With his cold war-style embassy walk-in, he became something else: the first known FBI informant inside WikiLeaks. For the next three months, Thordarson served two masters, working for the secret-spilling website and simultaneously spilling its secrets to the U.S. government in exchange, he says, for a total of about $5,000. The FBI declined comment. Instead, Thordarson used his proximity to Assange for his own purposes.