Friday Video: Democracy Now interview with Julian Assange of Wikileaks

Posted in Politics & Law, video Tagged with: democracy now, wikileaks

Firday Reads: When Google Met Wikileaks by Julian Assange

Posted in Books, Politics & Law Tagged with: google, privacy, wikileaks

Friday Video: Julian Assange @ SXSW 2014

Recorded on Mar 8, 2014

With recent disclosures about online surveillance, Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, continues his dedication to the pursuit of individual privacy and transparency.

Labeled everything from martyr, anarchist, whistle-blower, hero or tyrant, Assange has ignited international headlines over the past six years, arguably becoming one of the most polarizing and provocative figures of our time.

During this one-on-one conversation with The Barbarian Group’s Benjamin Palmer, Assange will discuss the importance of online privacy, the ethical and political implications of releasing classified information into the public realm, and the concept of the “Internet Nation”.

The interview will also address subjects including the relationship between government surveillance and national security, the implications of online democracy, and the future of the Internet.

Text via SXSW.

Posted in Politics & Law, video Tagged with: privacy, secrecy, sxsw, wikileaks

Wikileaks leaks documentary script about Wikileaks

Wikileaks has released a transcript of a documentary about its history so it can add notes to each section saying “Wrong!”, a day before the film debuts.

The secret-spilling site has taken umbrage with We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks, which is set to debut in New York and Los Angeles today and released a transcript of the documentary online yesterday.

The annotated transcript, which can be found on the Justice4Assange website, comes with an introductory note claiming that the documentary is “filled with errors and speculation”.

“The stock footage used has been heavily edited, in some places distorting what was said,” the note said. “This is unprofessional and irresponsible in light of ongoing legal proceedings. It trivialises serious issues.”

Read the full article @ The Register.

Posted in Internet Tagged with: film, wikileaks

The Public Library of US Diplomacy

Wikileaks has added to their Cablegate documents a new collection titled “The Kissinger Cables” and created The Public Library of US Diplomacy Web site. There’s so much here I don’t know where to begin so for now you’ll just have to investigate it yourself.

The Kissinger Cables are part of today’s launch of the WikiLeaks Public Library of US Diplomacy (PlusD), which holds the world’s largest searchable collection of United States confidential, or formerly confidential, diplomatic communications. As of its launch on April 8, 2013 it holds 2 million records comprising approximately 1 billion words.

WikiLeaks’ publisher Julian Assange stated: “The collection covers US involvements in, and diplomatic or intelligence reporting on, every country on Earth. It is the single most significant body of geopolitical material ever published.”

THE KISSINGER CABLES

“The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.” — Henry A. Kissinger, US Secretary of State, March 10, 1975: http://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/P860114-1573_MC_b.html#efmCS3CUB

The Kissinger Cables comprise more than 1.7 million US diplomatic records for the period 1973 to 1976, including 205,901 records relating to former US Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger. Dating from January 1, 1973 to December 31, 1976 they cover a variety of diplomatic traffic including cables, intelligence reports and congressional correspondence. They include more than 1.3 million full diplomatic cables and 320,000 originally classified records. These include more than 227,000 cables classified as “CONFIDENTIAL” and 61,000 cables classified as “SECRET”. Perhaps more importantly, there are more than 12,000 documents with the sensitive handling restriction “NODIS” or ‘no distribution’, and more than 9,000 labelled “Eyes Only”.

At around 700 million words, the Kissinger Cables collection is approximately five times the size of WikiLeaks’ Cablegate. The raw PDF data is more than 380 Gigabytes in size and is the largest WikiLeaks publication to date.

WikiLeaks’ media partners will be reporting throughout the week on their findings. These include significant revelations about US involvements with fascist dictatorships, particularly in Latin America, under Franco’s Spain (including about the Spanish royal family) and in Greece under the regime of the Colonels.

The documents also contain hourly diplomatic reporting on the 1973 war between Israel, Egypt and Syria (the “Yom Kippur war”). While several of these documents have been used by US academic researchers in the past, the Kissinger Cables provides unparalled access to journalists and the general public.

Most of the records were reviewed by the United States Department of State’s systematic 25-year declassification process. At review, the records were assessed and either declassified or kept classified with some or all of the metadata records declassified. Both sets of records were then subject to an additional review by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Once believed to be releasable, they were placed as individual PDFs at the National Archives as part of their Central Foreign Policy Files collection. Despite the review process supposedly assessing documents after 25 years there are no diplomatic records later than 1976. The formal declassification and review process of these extremely valuable historical documents is therefore currently running 12 years late.

The form in which these documents were held at NARA was as 1.7 million individual PDFs. To prepare these documents for integration into the PlusD collection, WikiLeaks obtained and reverse-engineered all 1.7 million PDFs and performed a detailed analysis of individual fields, developed sophisticated technical systems to deal with the complex and voluminous data and corrected a great many errors introduced by NARA, the State Department or its diplomats, for example harmonizing the many different ways in which departments, capitals and people’s names were spelt. All our corrective work is referenced and available from the links in the individual field descriptions on the PlusD text search interface: https://search.wikileaks.org/plusd

Posted in Politics & Law Tagged with: government, history, wikileaks

Wikileaks Was Just a Preview: We’re Headed for an Even Bigger Showdown Over Secrets

Over at Rolling Stone, the spectacular Matt Taibbi has been taking a look at issues of privacy and secrecy when it comes to the US government. His observations don’t make for positive predictions.

I went yesterday to a screening of We Steal Secrets, Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney’s brilliant new documentary about Wikileaks. The movie is beautiful and profound, an incredible story that’s about many things all at once, including the incredible Shakespearean narrative that is the life of Julian Assange, a free-information radical who has become an uncompromising guarder of secrets.

I’ll do a full review in a few months, when We Steal Secrets comes out, but I bring it up now because the whole issue of secrets and how we keep them is increasingly in the news, to the point where I think we’re headed for a major confrontation between the government and the public over the issue, one bigger in scale than even the Wikileaks episode.

We’ve seen the battle lines forming for years now. It’s increasingly clear that governments, major corporations, banks, universities and other such bodies view the defense of their secrets as a desperate matter of institutional survival, so much so that the state has gone to extraordinary lengths to punish and/or threaten to punish anyone who so much as tiptoes across the informational line.

This is true not only in the case of Wikileaks – and especially the real subject of Gibney’s film, Private Bradley Manning, who in an incredible act of institutional vengeance is being charged with aiding the enemy (among other crimes) and could, theoretically, receive a death sentence.

Read the full article @ RollingStone.com.

Posted in Politics & Law Tagged with: government, privacy, secrecy, wikileaks

WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange on 60 Minutes

Part 1:

Part 2:

Posted in video Tagged with: politics, privacy, security, video, wikileaks