Guy Sues Both Wikipedia & Wikileaks To Get 'His Side Of The Story' Told

from the unclear-on-the-concept dept

Ah, the ridiculous and silly pro se lawsuits... Eric Goldman points us to one of these crazy lawsuits that will be dismissed quite quickly, from a guy suing both Wikipedia and Wikileaks, demanding that both companies tell his side of "the story." The guy claims that false information has been distributed concerning his own responsibility in someone else's death, and he hopes to set the record straight. Within the lawsuit, the guy claims that:

"The real story is a such a hoot it someday will be told."

That may be true, but it won't be told due to Wikipedia and/or Wikileaks being forced to tell it via this lawsuit. The guy doesn't even seem to attempt to explain what either Wikipedia or Wikileaks have to do with his side of the story or under what claims he's suing. He just wants his story told. Perhaps someone should let him know he can just set up his own website.

Filed Under: lawsuits, pro se
Companies: wikileaks, wikipedia

Just Weeks After Cutting Off Wikileaks, Amazon Brags About How US Federal Gov't Is One Of Its Biggest AWS Customers?

from the must-be-a-coincidence,-huh? dept

While Senator Joe Lieberman took credit for pressuring Amazon to stop hosting Wikileaks content via its Amazon Web Services infrastructure, Amazon insisted that government pressure had nothing to do with it. Still, it seems rather odd that just weeks after booting Wikileaks, Amazon sent out a press release bragging about how the US federal government is one of its biggest customers (found via Slashdot). Now, obviously, lots of tech companies do plenty of business with the federal government, but the timing of the two events at least creates an impression that Amazon will kick you off its service if the federal government disapproves of what you've done (even if no legal charges have been filed against you). Again, no one is saying that Amazon has no right to deny service to whomever it wishes, but it does seem a bit odd from a PR standpoint, and raises questions about how much anyone should trust working with Amazon web services. I know it's making me reconsider my own use of the platform for various projects.

Filed Under: amazon web services, us government
Companies: amazon, wikileaks

NY Times Finally Speaks Out Against Financial Firms Blocking Wikileaks

from the took-'em-long-enough dept

One of the more annoying things about watching the major news publications discussing the Wikileaks controversy is how infrequently they seem to realize that many of the attacks they themselves have been directing (or redirecting) at Wikileaks could come back to haunt them as well, as many could apply to them when they do things such as publish information about leaked documents. In fact, just last week, we wondered how come all those financial firms (including Visa, MasterCards, Bank of America and Paypal) were not cutting off the NY Times after it revealed military secrets. It appears that some folks on the NY Times editorial board have realized the same thing and published an editorial condemning the decision to cut off Wikileaks by these financial firms:

[A] bank's ability to block payments to a legal entity raises a troubling prospect. A handful of big banks could potentially bar any organization they disliked from the payments system, essentially cutting them off from the world economy...

[...] Still, there are troubling questions. The decisions to bar the organization came after its founder, Julian Assange, said that next year it will release data revealing corruption in the financial industry. In 2009, Mr. Assange said that WikiLeaks had the hard drive of a Bank of America executive.

What would happen if a clutch of big banks decided that a particularly irksome blogger or other organization was "too risky"? What if they decided -- one by one -- to shut down financial access to a newspaper that was about to reveal irksome truths about their operations?

That said, part of the editorial is a bit worrisome, as it seems to be suggesting that banks themselves should not be able to decide who they can and cannot work with, and that since they are "not too unlike other public utilities," perhaps they should be regulated, in the same way that a telco cannot refuse to provide phone or internet service to an operation who it does not like. I'm not sure that's necessarily the lesson we should be taking from this, however. The larger lesson is more about the lack of real competition in the space, where a very small number of intermediaries are effectively able to block off much of the money supply. That's the real problem. The answer should be to encourage greater competition in the space, such that if a few firms decide to cut off a service, it doesn't really matter, since there are many others to step in and help in their place.

Filed Under: ny times, wikileaks
Companies: ny times, wikileaks

Jaron Lanier's Virtual Reality: Secrecy Is Good Because Secrecy Is Necessary

from the head-in-the-virtual-sand dept

There is now a well-established class of writers about the digital world, whom I fondly dub the Old Curmudgeons. Basically, they agree, things are getting worse all the time -- this modern online nonsense is bad for us and will give us all fallen arches or something. Leading exponents of this view include Nicholas Carr, Andrew Keen and Jaron Lanier.

I think Mr. Lanier is the most interesting of these, because he has a solid technical background and has been creative in the digital sphere for a long time. That makes his Savonarola-like denunciations of the same particularly striking.

Against that background, it was perhaps inevitable that he would weigh in on the Wikileaks business -- and equally inevitable what his line would be, as his title makes clear: "The Hazards of Nerd Supremacy: The Case of WikiLeaks".

If I had several hours to spare, I might try to go through it addressing his various arguments, from those which amount to unsubstantiated assertions about "the ideology that drives a lot of the online world," to ad-hominem sniping (for example, "we didn't necessarily get to know where Mr. Assange was at a given moment" -- maybe because he is doing things a lot of governments and organisations don't like and so discretion is the better part of valour), to outright misapprehension ("Wikileaks isn't really a "wiki," but it is designed to look and feel like the Wikipedia" -- er, well, no actually, it doesn't look like it in the slightest), and to various straw men: "What if we come to be able to read each other's thoughts? Then there would be no thoughts. Your head has to be different from mine if you are to be a person with something to say to me." As far as I am aware, nobody is calling for mandatory telepathy.

But I'd rather examine Lanier's peroration, because I think it exposes the fundamental flaw in his indubitably entertaining essay:

Anarchy and dictatorship are entwined in eternal resonance. One never exists for long without turning to the other, and then back again. The only way out is structure, also known as democracy.

We sanction secretive spheres in order to have our civilian sphere. We furthermore structure democracy so that the secretive spheres are contained and accountable to the civilian sphere, though that's not easy.

There is certainly an ever-present danger of betrayal. Too much power can accrue to those we have sanctioned to hold confidences, and thus we find that keeping a democracy alive is hard, imperfect, and infuriating work.

The flip side of responsibly held secrets, however, is trust. A perfectly open world, without secrets, would be a world without the need for trust, and therefore a world without trust. What a sad sterile place that would be: A perfect world for machines.

What the Wikileaks cables show is precisely that those sanctioned "secretive spheres" are not currently accountable to the civilian sphere. They show all of the shady deals made in backrooms, the outright lies told to the public to keep us quiet, and the connivance with big business to ensure that profit comes before ethics.

Lanier's logic seems to be that everything's fine and the revelations of Wikileaks will only mess things up. And until Wikileaks' revelations, people might have gone along with that analysis, since that was the story that governments were feeding us. But in the wake of Wikileaks, that is simply not a tenable position: as the words of diplomats delineate time and again, everything is not fine and the social pact of accepting those "secretive spheres" in return for a responsible use of the advantage they bring has been broken.

I would love it to be the case that Lanier's analysis were true and in some scaled-up, digitised version of Athenian democracy we could have a responsible wielding of state powers, with secrecy applied wisely and justly. But Wikileaks has confirmed what many have suspected, but have hitherto been unable to prove: that politicians use secrecy to hide their continual and continuing breaches of the trust we placed in them.

Until they change in the light of what Wikileaks is showing, we cannot trust them as we did before. And the more they -- and their defenders, however well intentioned -- deny the situation revealed by their own words through Wikileaks and try to stop us from seeing it, by hook or by crook, the longer that is likely to take and the messier it will be.

And given that proven record of abuse, when they do finally change we will need more transparency about what they are doing -- but not total transparency, which is neither feasible nor necessary -- to make sure that they are not falling back into their bad, old ways under the convenient, comforting cover of secrecy.

Cross posted from Open...

Filed Under: jaron lanier, secrecy, wikileaks
Companies: wikileaks

Leaked Cable Shows That ACTA Secrecy Is Way Beyond Normal

from the didn't-we-say-that? dept

As more and more attention was paid to the ridiculous level of secrecy concerning the ACTA negotiators last year, a bunch of ACTA supporters tried to claim that the level of secrecy (such as calling it a state secret involving national security) was perfectly normal for such agreements. A year ago, we went through a rather detailed explanation of how similar negotiations were much more open. The response we heard was that we were wrong and that this was "entirely normal." Turns out, even the diplomats involved knew this was bunk. One of the latest cable leaks from Wikileaks shows an Italian diplomat complaining to a US official about the level of secrecy involved in ACTA, noting that it's much higher than normal and that it makes it more difficult to get stuff done:

The level of confidentiality in these ACTA negotiations has been set at a higher level than is customary for non-security agreements. According to Mazza, it is impossible for member states to conduct necessary consultations with IPR stakeholders and legislatures under this level of confidentiality.

Can't wait to see defenders of ACTA secrecy try to backtrack their claims that the secrecy level was perfectly normal.

Separately, this particular cable shows some of the problems with the USTR's annual Special 301 report in which it makes up a list of who's been naughty and who's been nice when it comes to intellectual property issues -- based not on evidence, but almost entirely on entertainment industry and pharma industry say so. The Italian official complained to the US that Italy had been working hard to crack down on infringement in Italy, but the USTR slammed them anyway and made no mention of all of the efforts they'd already put towards pushing through changes that Hollywood (via the State Department) was demanding. The Italian official was worried that this would actually lead to a setback, as Italian government officials wondered why they should bother if the USTR was just going to slam them no matter what they did.

Of course, none of this is a surprise. The same points about both the Special 301 process and ACTA secrecy were made by many folks, including us at Techdirt, and every time we did, supporters mocked us for "crying wolf" and making stuff up. Yet, now, it turns out that the points many folks were raising were also being stated by government officials.

Filed Under: acta, italy, secrecy, sweden, wikileaks
Companies: wikileaks

UN Investigating Whether Or Not US Is Torturing Bradley Manning

from the good-for-them dept

We recently posted about the conditions under which the US was holding Bradley Manning, the private accused of leaking documents to Wikileaks, and noting that they seemed to reach the level of torture, based on some excellent reporting by Glenn Greenwald. This news was troubling just because we should not torture at all, and was made even worse by the fact that the guy hasn't even been convicted of any crime (though, as many commenters pointed out, even if he was convicted of a crime, torture is still not appropriate). Not surprisingly, the comments on that post expressed a variety of opinions, with two specific statements repeated against my post: the first is that solitary confinement is not torture, and the second is that Manning deserves whatever he gets.

The latter response should be sickening to anyone who is an American or believes in the concept of innocent until proven guilty. It's about the most anti-American thought I can think of to say that someone deserves punishment even when they have not been found guilty of a crime. As for the first comment, as many people suggested, you should read Atul Gawande's fascinating and disturbing article on solitary confinement, and then see how you feel about solitary confinement. The number of people who claimed that people were just coddled and weak if they couldn't handle solitary appear to be quite ill-informed about the nature of solitary confinement, and I would imagine they would not last long under such conditions themselves.

Since then, a lot more information has come out, including some explicit details about the serious negative effects the treatment has had on Manning's health and mental well-being. On top of that, while the Defense Department has tried to minimize the complaints by presenting their side of the story, the article above references Manning's specific comments to one of the only two people he is allowed to meet with, which indicates that the Defense Department was not being entirely truthful. The scary part is that it really appears that the treatment is having a significant impact on his health already. Even if you believe that what Manning did was the worst thing a person could do, can we at least let him be tried before issuing punitive measures?

Separately, the UN has now said that it will investigate how Manning is being treated, though, as with so much the UN does, I do wonder how much impact they would have even if they did find the treatment to reach the level of torture.

Glenn Greenwald has another detailed report, which highlights how the US State Department has condemned solitary confinement in other countries:

As is true for so much of what it does, the U.S. Government routinely condemns similar acts -- the use of prolonged solitary confinement in its most extreme forms and lengthy pretrial detention -- when used by other countries.  See, for instance, the 2009 State Department Human Rights Report on Indonesia ("Officials held unruly detainees in solitary confinement for up to six days on a rice-and-water diet"); Iran ("Common methods of torture and abuse in prisons included prolonged solitary confinement with extreme sensory deprivation . . .Prison conditions were poor. Many prisoners were held in solitary confinement . . . Authorities routinely held political prisoners in solitary confinement for extended periods . . . All four [arrested bloggers] claimed authorities physically and psychologically abused them in detention, including subjecting them to prolonged periods of solitary confinement in a secret detention center without access to legal counsel or family"); Israel ("Israeli human rights organizations reported that Israeli interrogators . . .  kept prisoners in harsh conditions, including solitary confinement for long periods"); Iraq ("Individuals claimed to have been subjected to psychological and physical abuse, including . . . solitary confinement in Ashraf to discourage defections"); Yemen ("Sleep deprivation and solitary confinement were other forms of abuse reported in PSO prisons"); Central African Republic ("As of December, there were 308 inmates in Ngaragba Prison, most of whom are pretrial detainees. Several detainees had been held for seven months without appearing before a judge"); Burundi ("Human rights problems also included . . . prolonged pretrial detention").

Once again, it appears that the US State Department believes in different rules for itself than what it pushes on everyone else. Once again, I find that I am disappointed by my government not coming even close to the standards it purports to hold, and which it regularly argues other countries should follow as well.

Filed Under: bradley manning, solitary confinement, torture, united nations
Companies: wikileaks

Apple The Latest To Convict Wikileaks Despite No Charges Or Trial; Kills Wikileaks App For Violating Unnamed Laws

from the say-what-now? dept

There's been a lot of attention paid this morning to the fact that Apple, in its typically arbitrary manner, has pulled a Wikileaks app from its iTunes store just days after it was approved. While there was a variety of speculation as to why it did so -- from the claim that it was useless to the claim that it allowed users to donate money, Apple released a statement giving similar reasons as Visa, MasterCard and Paypal did before, falsely claiming that Wikileaks obviously violated the law:

"We removed the WikiLeaks app from the App Store because it violated our developer guidelines. Apps must comply with all local laws and may not put an individual or targeted group in harm's way."

The thing is, Wikileaks hasn't even been charged with a crime yet, let alone found guilty of one, so it's not clear why all these companies claim that the app does not comply with he law. Also, while we're still waiting for evidence of anyone actually put in "harm's way" due to Wikileaks, that reasoning doesn't make any sense either. The information found on Wikileaks is being written about in all sorts of major news publications -- so if a Wikileaks app is putting people in harm's way, then so is the Safari browser on the iPhone that can be used to access all the same information. And, before anyone says it, yes, Apple is absolutely free to do whatever it wants with the iTunes store, including blocking apps if it doesn't like them. I'm just pointing out that it's stated reason for doing so doesn't make much sense.

Filed Under: app store, blocks, iphone, wikileaks
Companies: apple, wikileaks

US Government Seeks 'Willful Denial' Software That Will Block Wikileaks Data From Federal Employees

from the are-they-serious? dept

It's been both depressing and amusing to watch the federal government react to Wikileaks with some of the dumbest policy decisions possible. First, we saw the Library of Congress block access to Wikileaks' site, not realizing that the site was barely a part of how the documents were being distributed, while still frustrating Congressional Research Service analysts who needed to access the site as a part of their research. Then, we had reports of the Defense Department crudely blocking access to any website that had Wikileaks in the title, followed by the Air Force's decision to block access to news sites, such as the NY Times, that are discussing Wikileaks.

This is all downright bizarre. Basically, this is content that everyone else in the world can access and read about, except for government employees who don't look at it at home. The whole exercise seems like a complete waste of time and money by the US government, and it's about to get worse. According to some reports, the federal government is reaching out to security firms to see if they can build a system to block all access to Wikileaks content from within the federal government's computer system. One company asked about this notes that it's different than what they normally do, which is focused on keeping documents in a network (too late for that), rather than architecting a system to keep documents out.

At what point will the government finally admit that if a classified document is leaked and widely available, it's counterproductive to keep pretending that it's still classified. It doesn't help anyone, and it just makes the government look silly and in denial. I prefer my government to respond to reality, not pretend reality doesn't exist.

Filed Under: denial, federal government, firewall, us government, wikileaks
Companies: wikileaks

Bank Of America -- Thought To Be Wikileaks Next Target -- Suddenly Tries To Block Payments To Wikileaks

from the barn-door-back-there dept

This is pretty amusing. Back at the end of November, Wikileaks had indicated that its next leak involved a very large US bank that was apparently doing some bad things -- and many people zeroed in on Bank of America as the target. And then, just a few weeks later, Bank of America announces (late on a Friday night, in an attempt to hide it) that it will join Paypal, Visa and Mastercard in trying to block all payments to Wikileaks.

Of course, I don't quite see how Bank of America does that. Is Bank of America really saying that it can block you from spending your money the way you want to? About the only thing it can really do is stop direct wire transfers, but I'd imagine not too many people are doing that. As for systems like Flattr, which is currently a way of supporting Wikileaks financially, I really don't see how any of the above firms can block people from using Flattr to support Wikileaks. All anyone knows with Flatter is that they're supporting Flattr, so you can use Visa or MasterCard via Paypal to pay Flattr, and then Flattr Wikileaks, and those financial firms won't know the difference.

It seems like all these financial firms are really doing is highlighting how they, too, don't quite understand the nature of a distributed internet, and a distributed payment infrastructure -- even if they think they power it.

Filed Under: blocks, payment, wikileaks
Companies: bank of america, wikileaks

Will The Journalists Who Outed CIA's Pakistan Chief Be Treated Like Julian Assange?

from the questions,-questions dept

Richard Kulawiec pointed us to the news that got a lot of attention last week concerning how the CIA had recalled its chief in Pakistan back to the US after his name was outed in a lawsuit. The lawsuit was filed by a guy who blames the CIA for his relatives being killed in a drone attack. Apparently, two Pakistani journalists gave him the name of the CIA chief, and the guy included it in his lawsuit, leading to the recall. While the American press is not reporting the guy's name, it's widely available in foreign coverage.

That said, Richard asks a key question: given how many people have complained that Julian Assange should face trial/imprisonment/death etc. for his work with Wikileaks -- which it's been claimed, with little proof, has actually put Americans in danger -- why are we not seeing the same sort of claims about the Pakistani journalists who put this CIA boss in danger? After all, the situations are similar. In both cases, these are non-Americans who had certain information, which they revealed. Except, in the case of Assange and Wikileaks, there's actually been an ongoing effort to redact names and keep important details like that secret. That didn't happen with the Pakistani journalists and the CIA chief. So why is one so evil, and the others mostly being ignored?

Filed Under: cia, intelligence, outing, pakistan, wikileaks
Companies: wikileaks