Wikileaks Redactions Are Cowardly?

Wikileaks Redactions Are Cowardly
http://cryptome.org/0003/wikileaks-coward.htm

Wikileaks should stop the redactions of names in the diplomatic cables and war files and release untampered documents.

Name redactions are immensely deceptive -- like knee-jerk claiming there are valid grounds for some vital secrets -- they are used to hold hostages under guise of protection. Continue to obey or your name will be revealed. Redact or you will be pilloried in public. (Toot: The New York Times tried the "responsible redaction" scam on Cryptome with the CIA Mossadeq overthrow report.)

Dozens, perhaps hundreds of people are being put at risk by believing they are protected by the phony redaction scam Wikileaks has cowardly joined under pressure to conform to authoritative demands to be "responsible." Far better to tell the truth that the names are already loose so the victims know what the cabal of secretkeepers knows.

As if those who know the true names at redacting authoritatives, at Wikileaks and among the lawyers, editors and personnel at its new big media bedmates will never tell, will tightly control the original documents, will never be subject to betrayal or a burglary or a leak, will never have a trusted insider who acts to inform the world, will never write a tell-all best seller like Daniel Schmidt, will never aspire to be Time's Person of the Year, a Nobelist, a movie star, a sexual predator eager to cut a deal with the authorities.

Assange's craven desire to be an important world player is destructive to the Wikileaks initiative to engage many participants equally with preference for documents not personal fame. Fortunately, multiple wikis for leaking are now being set up unbound by Assange's lack of courage -- presuming that lack of courage is not contagious to the newcomers.

Never redact. No vital secrets. No deals with cheating dealers. No gulling of more Bradley Mannings.

Does WikiLeaks Qualify as a 'Whistleblower' Site?

Does WikiLeaks Qualify as a 'Whistleblower' Site? | The Atlantic Wire

By Ray Gustini

Over the past week, news organizations Reuters, NBC, and the Associated Press have formally decided to stop identifying WikiLeaks as a "whistleblower" organization. "We think we have a better, clearer description" to replace it with, AP spokesman Paul Colford told Yahoo's Michael Calderone. On the Internet, debate about the validity of the "whistleblower" designation rages on. A sampling of opinions:

• Why It Matters  It seems like a small point, acknowledges Calderone, but "whistleblower" remains one of the more loaded phrases in journalism. Traditionally used to describe someone "who risks a career to speak out against corruption or fraud," the media's use of the term "can affect public perceptions." A whistleblower is "probably viewed positively, as an individual speaking out against wrongdoing." Withholding the designation from WikiLeaks and Julian Assange is likely to please critics of the leaks who "wouldn't opt for any description that suggests publication of classified documents has had a positive effect."

• Curious Timing  Gawker's Ryan Tate thinks it is telling that the three news outlets amended their style guidelines to fit with the White House's official characterization of the leaks. "What a coincidence!" he marvels. Tate is also skeptical of the AP's claim that "a website that specializes in displaying leaked information" is a clearer and more accurate designation. "[That] rolls right off the tongue," Tate scoffs.

• Good Move The Wall Street Journal's J. Gordon Crovitz says the change reflects an enhanced understanding of Assange's motives. Explains Crovitz:

Mr. Assange is misunderstood in the media and among digirati as an advocate of transparency. Instead, this battening down of the information hatches by the U.S. is precisely his goal. The reason he launched WikiLeaks is not that he's a whistleblower--there's no wrongdoing inherent in diplomatic cables--but because he hopes to hobble the U.S., which according to his underreported philosophy can best be done if officials lose access to a free flow of information

• Tacit Approval  By identifying Assange as a whistleblower, news outlets legitimize what Slate's Christopher Hitchens believes to be an "unscrupulous" organization. The cables are informative and compulsively readable, but that doesn't mean Assange is deserving of "mush-headed approval" from media outlets that choose to sample his "mart of ill-gotten goods."

Sources

• Interesting Timing Ryan Tate, Gawker
• Assange's Agenda Christopher Hitchens, Slate
• A Whistleblower? Michael Calderone, Yahoo
• Information Anarchist L. Gordon Crovitz, The Wall Steet Journal

Anonymous is not an organisation

source : Crikey
Anonymous is not an organisation, its embarrassing to read journalists continually making this mistake.

Anonymous is just the huge userbase of the 4chan forums (the name comes from the fact that people don’t log in to post). There is no guiding motive, there are no leaders. Someone (anyone) can shout fire! and the users move like a herd.

via ScribeFire

Internet Wars

WikiLeaks News: hackers go to war on anti-WikiLeaks companies | Crikey

Welcome to the internet wars
by Bernard Keane

Whoever christened the WikiLeaks saga the first major war over the internet was right. Quite apart from what you’re seeing in the mainstream media, the internet equivalent of a shooting war has broken out and shows no signs of dying down.

The online group Anonymous – usually, but somewhat erroneously christened “hacker activists” by the mainstream media – have launched a series of attacks on the websites of those associated with the campaign against Wikileaks and Julian Assange. Targets under “Operation Payback”, coordinated via an IRC channel and Twitter, have included Joe Lieberman’s website, Sarah Palin’s website and the website of the Swedish prosecution service responsible for handling the s-xual assault case against Assange.

In the last 24 hours, however, it’s stopped being quite so symbolic. Yesterday Anonymous coordinated a distributed denial of service attack on Mastercard’s corporate website, www.mastercard.com, and took it offline for several hours. More to the point, the attacks took Mastercard’s Securecode service offline as well, preventing transactions from being processed. The website has since got back online.

This morning it was Visa’s turn. Anonymous gave a full hour’s notice via its Twitter account @Anon-Operation that it was going to target Visa. At 8am, the tweet went out:

“TARGET: WWW.VISA.COM: FIRE FIRE FIRE!!! WEAPONS.”

They didn’t miss. The Visa site went down almost instantly, and stayed down for nearly three hours.

Twitter had by this stage woken up to the fact that its service was being used to coordinate DDOS attacks and suspended @anon_operation (Facebook had removed another Anonymous-related page earlier in the day). Anonymous was already using multiple accounts and immediately created another one, @anonops. Twitter’s action prompted participants to turn their attention to the service itself, and Twitter itself came under fire.

At that point, Anonymous appeared to secure a significant victory. Twitter was said to have advised that the deletion was “accidental” and restored the suspended account (minus previous tweets), although another ANonymous-related account remained suspended. The new account, @anonops, continued to operate. The attack on Twitter was then called off, and www.visa.com briefly went down again as the attack as redirected back at Visa.

A short while later the group declared via @anonops “IRC is not secure do not use unauthorized channels for operation #payback. We will announce next target here!! http://bit.ly/1hSngD #anonops”. Presumably law enforcement agencies had by this stage accessed the channel (it’s accessible if you know whom to ask and are happy to have the Federal Police start paying attention to you).

Meantime, in an unrelated development, PayPal had succumbed to criticism and released donations to Wikileaks.

Throughout, the mainstream media desperately tried to keep up. “Do you know more? email us” implored Fairfax, whose journalists took to haunting the birthplace of Anonymous, the 4chan site (warning – DEFINITELY NSFW) to find out what was going on. The coverage looked all a bit redundant, though, given much of what was going on was being played out under the Twitter hashtag #anonops.

This may look like a bunch of kids fooling around on the internet (one tweeter compared it to a “geek action movie”) but it’s altogether more serious than that. In the space of 24 hours two of the world’s key transactional sites have been taken offline. In the case of Visa, the company was actually given warning that it would be attacked, and yet it was still taken down for several hours. If we’re talking “critical infrastructure”, as per the WikiLeaks cables of earlier this week, we’ve had a clear demonstration of where it is on the internet.

This is the flipside of war against WikiLeaks being waged by the US Government and its proxies. Taking away its access to servers and taking away its financial conduits has undoubtedly harmed the organization – probably more so than arresting Julian Assange. It shows that, for all the decentralization of the internet, you can exploit the corporate control of key elements of the internet, particularly of financial transactions, to inconvenience or disrupt the operations of even an online entity. The further the balance tips toward private, corporate control of key online systems, the easier it becomes for governments - and other forces of centralised control, like large companies - to strike back at online opponents.

But it cuts both ways. The fragility of those transactional systems is suddenly on display with the successful attacks on Visa and Mastercard. Private control of key systems can be a vulnerability as well as a strength. And what’s been happening to key transactional systems in Australia in recent days? No one targeted NAB’s website – it managed to take itself offline without any help from “hacktivists”, causing massive financial disruption to its customers.

We’ve become dependent on online systems that are assumed to be both secure and resilient. Suddenly they look fragile, capable of disruption not just at the hands of Anonymous, but because of under-investment, or incompetence, or a single corrupted file.

There’ll doubtless be a lot of rubbish written about the Anonymous attacks, from both sides, in coming hours and days. There’ll be a strong sense of “the internet has fought back” from supporters, and law enforcement-flavoured outrage from opponents, governments and the mainstream media.

But at least one lesson is already clear – on the internet, the “critical infrastructure” may not be as resilient and stable as we all assume it is.

Our Julian: Restoring our distrust in institutions

December 8, 2010 – 10:26 am, by W H Chong

If you’re still tabulating the pros and cons of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, flip over to Jack Shafer’s article, “Why I Love Wikileaks: For restoring distrust in our most important institutions.” The headline pretty much tells the story. Shafer is Slate’s estimable and original media critic; his follow-up is: “Julian Assange’s Great Luck: Why his arrest and jailing in the United Kingdom is good news for him.”

Our Julian, cyberhero for the common man:

Shafer’s argument boils down to this:
– We shouldn’t be surprised by the recurrence of scandals, but, of course, we always are…
– Information conduits like Julian Assange shock us out of that complacency…
– Assange and WikiLeaks, while not perfect, have punctured the prerogative of secrecy with their recent revelations.*

(*As the Economist put it … “secrecy is necessary for national security and effective diplomacy.” But it “is also inevitable that the prerogative of secrecy will be used to hide the misdeeds of the permanent state and its privileged agents.” … “The untold story is that while doing the United States’ allies, adversaries, and enemies a favor with his leaks, he’s doing the United States the biggest favor by holding it accountable.”)

Shafer’s articles backs these assertions with lucid detail, but also a clear-eyed assessment of this strange new cyberhero: “He looks like an alien, talks more insane trash than an NBA point guard (he says he’s practising “scientific journalism”), believes that the ends justify the means, and possesses such an ego-swollen head it’s a miracle that he can walk without toppling over.” And this quip: “But if you want to dismiss him just because he’s a seething jerk, there are about 2,000 journalists I’d like you to meet.” We could substitute any number of professions there.

The Spartacus effect: “The more WikiLeaks leaks while Assange is in jail, the more he’ll become like Spartacus, making him an inspirational figure, not just a controversial one. The mirroring of the WikiLeaks information to hundreds of servers around the globe is one manifestation of the Spartacus effect.” (It’s started happening. And the amazing Spartasian mirror list.)

Our Julian: Larrikin, Leakywick, Not the Messiah just a naughty boy

One unintended side-effect of the circus is the confirmation of Julia Gillard as a Great Disappointment. Her reaction to the case — “Let’s not try to put any glosses on this”: muesli-ejecting laughable — is a nostalgic reminder of Mark Latham’s line: something, what was it? about suckholes and congalines.

It seems Assange is no longer fit to be a citizen, by Prime Ministerial decree. Our export quality pets: Our Nic, Our Russ, Our Hugh, Cate, Shane, Cathy, Thorpey et al … but not Our Julian: this is serious, Mum. On the legal points, lawyer Malcolm Turnbull points out, Ms Gillard doesn’t know what she is talking about. Assange is not the Messiah, though he may be a naughty boy — you don’t crucify him, you respond like a responsible parent.

It seems the larrikin is no longer a suitable Australian character. No doubt Australia will not be represented at the Nobel Prize ceremony as we will be supporting China’s suppression of Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo for protesting human rights, the ungrateful rat.

The American outrage, too, is confusing — the whole point of the Tea Party is distrust in big government. The pale and weedy Assange would fit perfectly into a long line of dissenting American heroes. (Recall the seminal leaks of Watergate.)

As for the Swedish ’sex-by-surprise’, the most sensible reading comes from the mouth of babes, Assange’s son Daniel, as reported in Crikey: “I haven’t seen any evidence that there was any actual non-consensual sex involved at any point, so it looks to me that it’s just some sort of cultural misunderstanding or general social failure on the part of my father or the women that’s led to the situation.” Shades of Helen Garner’s The First Stone. But it’s also an inevitable conclusion that this hook is to catch a fish they cannot net or web by any other means. A leaky wick, maybe, smell a fish, you bet.

The Big Gov-Industrial-Military-Money complex want Assange gagged and WikiLeaks destroyed. Gosh, I wonder which side is the right side?

+ + +

Leak winks

Julian Assange defends WikiLeaks, in the Australian.

Salon’s fierce and forensic Glenn Greenwald’s reality check: “Anti-WikiLeaks lies and propaganda”

The Time interview.

At 3 Quarks Daily, a very nuanced analysis of a deep reading by Aaron Bady of Julian Assange’s 2006 essays (pdf) explaining the motives behind WikiLeaks. Convolute and sail gliding over the chasm of theory and philosophy, it does seem to lead back to Assange’s original ideas.

The Guardian’s editorial, “WikiLeaks: The man who kicked the hornet’s nest” makes an ironic reference to “Mrs Clinton’s powerful January 2010 speech on internet freedom…: ‘As in the dictatorships of the past, governments are targeting independent thinkers who use these tools.’ ”

Clay Shirky has mixed feelings in his admirably balanced analysis, “WikiLeaks and the Long Haul.” He does conclude: “If it’s OK for a democracy to just decide to run someone off the internet for doing something they wouldn’t prosecute a newspaper for doing, the idea of an internet that further democratizes the public sphere will have taken a mortal blow.”

Sex-by-surprise: Outside the Beltway is suspicious; Feministe is damning.