Tom Watson: The WikiLeaks War. The United States and Great Britain have fired 110 cruise missiles and French jets have destroyed four tanks today belonging to the forces of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, and thus the lightning-flash pivot from Western concerned non-intervention (and love for the status quo) to hellbent-for-leather regime change is complete in this season of revolt in the super-charged Arab world.
Call it the first WikiLeaks War. Certainly all who credited the anarchist libertarian "transparency" organization with throwing the initial stones of American diplomatic intelligence judgments into the calm pool of Tunisian domestic waters must certainly embrace this new armed coalition in Libya as a product - at least in part - of those actions. As Julian Assange is proud to proclaim, American revelations about the Tunisian regime fueled the fire in those streets, which fed Egypt and Tahrir Square, which also stoked the challenges to power in Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, and now Syria. Bradley Manning Hit with New Charges in WikiLeaks Case, Including "Aiding the Enemy" This is a rush transcript.
Copy may not be in its final form. JUAN GONZALEZ: We end today’s show with an update on Bradley Manning, the imprisoned U.S. Army private accused of illegally downloading hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. military and State Department documents that were then publicly released by WikiLeaks. On Wednesday, the Army filed 22 additional charges against Manning. Live with the WikiLeakable world or shut down the net. It's your choice.
Screen shot of a browser showing WikiLeaks' home page and Julian Assange after the move to a Swiss host.
WikiLeaks: Strained relations, accusations – and crucial revelations. Three men were in the Belgian hotel courtyard cafe, ordering coffee after coffee.
They had been arguing for six hours through the summer afternoon, with a break to eat a little pasta, and evening had fallen. Eventually, the tallest of the three picked up a cheap yellow napkin, laid it on the flimsy modern cafe table and started to scribble. Ian Traynor, the Guardian's European editor, recalls: "Julian [Assange] whipped out this mini-laptop, opened it up and did something on his computer. He picked up a napkin and said, 'OK you've got it.' "We said: 'Got what? ' Traynor adds: "I was stunned. This was the password. This encounter in Brussels – the fruit of Davies' eager pursuit of Assange would result in an extraordinary, if sometimes strained, partnership between a mainstream newspaper and WikiLeaks: a new model of co-operation aimed at publishing the world's biggest leak.
WikiLeaks under attack: the definitive timeline. On Sunday 28 November WikiLeaks began releasing the first of its 250,000 leaked US embassy cables.
Almost immediately, a hacking attack known as a "DDoS" – distributed denial of service – attack tried to knock it off the net. These are the attacks that have followed in the succeeding days. Sunday 28 November 2010 • TECH: DDoS attack hits WikiLeaks as first set of US diplomatic cables is published. Wednesday 1 December 2010 • TECH: Tableau Software, which offers free software for data visualisation, removes the public views of graphics built using information about the diplomatic cables.
. • POLITICS: Lieberman, chairman of the Senate's committee on homeland security, calls for WikiLeaks to be taken offline. . • TECH Amazon removes WikiLeaks's content from its EC2 cloud service, but later insists it did so because the content could cause harm to people and did not belong to WikiLeaks – and that it was not due to political pressure or the hacker attacks against the site. Friday 3 December 2010. Anti-WikiLeaks lies and propaganda - from TNR, Lauer, Feinstein and more - Glenn Greenwald. The Swiss postal system stripped WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of a key fundraising tool Monday, accusing him of lying and immediately shutting down one of his bank accounts.
The swift action by Postfinance, the financial arm of Swiss Post, came after it determined the “Australian citizen provided false information regarding his place of residence during the account opening process.” Assange had told Postfinance he lived in Geneva but could offer no proof that he was a Swiss resident, a requirement of opening such an account. Postfinance spokesman Alex Josty told The Associated Press the account was closed Monday afternoon and there would be “no criminal consequences” for misleading authorities.
“That’s his money, he will get his money back,” Josty said. “We just close the account and that’s it.” The setback leaves Assange with only a few options for raising money for his secret-spilling site through a Swiss-Icelandic credit card processing center and accounts in Iceland and Germany. Wikileaks and the Long Haul. Like a lot of people, I am conflicted about Wikileaks.
Citizens of a functioning democracy must be able to know what the state is saying and doing in our name, to engage in what Pierre Rosanvallon calls “counter-democracy”*, the democracy of citizens distrusting rather than legitimizing the actions of the state. Wikileaks plainly improves those abilities. On the other hand, human systems can’t stand pure transparency. For negotiation to work, people’s stated positions have to change, but change is seen, almost universally, as weakness. People trying to come to consensus must be able to privately voice opinions they would publicly abjure, and may later abandon.