Professor-rat's Blurty
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Wednesday, August 11th, 2010
| Time |
Event |
| 11:13a |
Cool hand leak
What we have here is a failure to communicate
Perfect activism means doing nothing - only the impotent are pure, and there are drawbacks to every form of activism known to humans. Take collateral damage...war is terrible, some damage is inevitable and the best way to deal with the guilt is to minimize it where you can. Certainly collateral damage in any illegal war of aggression is unforgivable however sometimes just wars require collateral casualties. In the case of Hitlers attempts to get heavy water from Norway it was decided that some innocent civilians had to die in order that didn't happen. And on a vastly larger scale it was decided to use the atomic bombs in order to save more lives overall. To take a purist position of absolutely no civilian casualties in these cases may have meant Hitler got the bomb and over a million people died making Japan surrender.
Wikileaks are being guilt tripped for not performing perfect activism. Its a risable accusation so long as the perfect remains the enemy of the good. The only guide I think they need to keep in mind is one of a jury. If they don't think they could convince a normal jury of what they were doing as right and good overall then they probably shouldn't do it. This ethical benchmark is no straight-jacket as juries will sometimes free admitted assassins in certain cases. ( The Ukrainian pogrom assassin and the Armenian genocide avenger ) Some of the commentary on the wiki leak is verging on the ridiculous. As though allied forces were waging WW4 for womens liberation! What a pathetic sham. No asked me for approval for any humanitarian intervention - it was supposed to be all about some 'hot pursuit'. Well when the trail goes cold and clearly counter-productive affects are exploding exponentially around you then maybe its time to re-appraise strategy. Instead of taking the WL opportunity for this now the sunk-costs fallacy seems to have kicked in instead. That and the usual mission creep ( Hi Barry ) Of course we have seen all this before in SE Asia. Right down to 'Vietnamization' and strategic hamlets. Those Afghans who are helping the invaders should know whats happened to previous invasions and if they don't then thats tough. As I said...war is terrible. Innocent people die. The best way to stop that is to stop the whole war imho.
As this wars rationale ran out somewhere along the line any more wikileaks can only help us end this insanity sooner and save more innocent lives overall. WL have no apologies to make to anyone even if placed on trial because the best way to support the troops from now on is to get them the hell out of there.
DEVELOPING...RELATED...theres a story on the future of the net in the paper this morning. Its about the Blackberry snafu's in the middle east and it states that the future lies in end-to-end encryption...a darknet replacing the present internet. This means a dark future for secret wars and secret states. It means WL will be safe and will grow large enough to take over the functions of intelligence as well as journalism. The future of the WWW is the wild wiki web and this future is happening already. Hopefully the old media and the old military-industrial complex won't cause too much collateral damage of their own as they exit. Please leave in an orderly fashion. Remain calm - we mean you no personal harm. Unlike you we do try our best to minimize violence. Freedom truth and democracy being discarded by you are now being picked up and used by us. Have you got your mind right yet? | | 11:15a |
Full caught press
Netwar. Octagon control. Immediately it is obvious: there is no line between gaming and hacking. It is all about beating the competition, cracking the code, moving to the next level. At DefCon the central challenge is Capture the Flag, a pure tap-tap-tap keyboard-based contest to see which team can break into a secure computer system. There was also a "social engineering" game which had attracted the interest of the FBI, in which hackers used a combination of internet searching, fake websites and old-fashioned phone calls to extract information from corporate employees.
It turns out that some dupes are extraordinarily willing to give up sensitive information about the IT infrastructure of multinational companies. And there are scores of less serious games. Every DefCon attendee gets an electronic badge with a USB port and an LCD screen, and is invited to hack into it – and into each other's.
For the dedicated hacker, life is lived as a computer game – except that they are not in a World of Warcraft, they are in the world of servers and data centres and telephone networks where your private information lives and travels. "Hacking is a skill set," says Jeff Moss, aka The Dark Tangent, the improbably youthful 40-year-old who created DefCon and now runs it alongside a more formal (and expensive) IT security conference called Black Hat.
"You might be a criminal hacker, a political hacker, a polite hacker, a humanitarian hacker, but most people don't want to destroy something, they want to make it better. They want to be able to say, 'I understand a little bit more about the way the world works than you do.'"
It is a tradition that has existed for as long as mechanical invention. And it is no coincidence that one of the attractions at DefCon is a lock-picking competition, where volunteer Houdinis must physically unchain themselves in front of an audience. It comes from the same human – or perhaps male – impulse to tinker that gives us the radio ham and souped-up cars. On my count, the ratio of men to women at the event was about 20 to one. The average age must be mid-twenties.
The term "hacking" can be traced back to the antics of the model railway club at the MIT university in Boston. Resident geniuses made rough-and-ready improvements to the signals and switches of their enormous train set, and then branched out into writing simple but groundbreaking programs on the university's first IBM.
Now that hackers are rebranding themselves as security consultants, and selling their services to corporations, they are often advising on how to fix the very hacks they have perpetrated. There is an echo of the protection racket: "Pay up, or we'll wreck the store." Increasingly, there are shady organisations willing to pay for information from hackers. Computer whizzes who might not have the stomach for burglary themselves might sell the skeleton key, ask no questions, and still get to sleep at night.
So this is a world where moral ambiguity abounds. The reassuring consequence is that its players are constantly debating morality. Most recently, the actions of Wikileaks, which published tens of thousands of leaked military reports and other secret documents from the war in Afghanistan, has sparked ferocious debate among the thinkers of hackerdom (for which, read "all of hackerdom"). Most of the founders of Wikileaks come from the hacker community, so there was already more than enough bitching and rivalry. Some are put off by Wikileaks' overtly liberal agenda. Others fear it won't turn out well for the community.
Jake Appelbaum, Wikileaks' senior editor in the US, wraps his legs into a yoga position on the floor of the hotel lobby as he discusses these big issues with me. Earlier, The Dark Tangent had wondered aloud if the furore over the Afghanistan leaks might prompt a new crackdown on hacking in the US; he would have winced to hear Appelbaum tell me that "all governments exist on a continuum of tyranny". Then again, the Wikileaks volunteer had just been detained for hours when he flew back into the US, and had had his phones confiscated for the FBI investigation into the leaks.
At DefCon, he was giving a talk on how the Chinese government manages to block off the parts of the world wide web that it deems seditious – and how hackers inside and outside China are working to foil its efforts. His "day job" is the Tor Project, which hitches together a chain of computers belonging to volunteers around the world in order to obscure the internet addresses of people searching the web at the start of the chain. His aim is to free the people of China and Burma.
I say that Wikileaks, owned by the carefully named Sunshine Press, seems a polar opposite of the Tor Project, which is all about keeping one's identity in the shadows. Perhaps the Afghan informants whose names appear in Wikileaks reports will want to debate the irony.
Appelbaum marries the two by declaring that "anonymity is a progressive value" (and adding that the US military should never have written down its informants' names). Moss, meanwhile, talks of "a balance" between privacy and openness – as you would expect from someone recently co-opted as a homeland security adviser to the Obama administration.
He quotes veteran hacker Chris Coggans (aka Erik Bloodaxe), who once took against the old hacker cry "information wants to be free". Not my information, it doesn't, he says.
So these are the hackers, playing both sides in the war for your data and pushing forward what we know about what can be done with technology. These are the people who will – eventually, inevitably – tear down the Great Firewall of China. Among their number are those who would unleash terrible viruses for their own amusement, or purloin your financial details for their personal gain, or hand over your supposedly seditious communication to an authoritarian government.
But why would there be more wrong 'uns in the hacker community than in the broader population? On the evidence of DefCon, the opposite is true. About the worst characteristic you could ascribe to the speakers here is vanity. A round of applause at a demonstration at DefCon is about the best accolade a hacker could get. Besides, who really wants to go to jail?
"We are risk analysts, in the end," says one veteran of the event, an affirmed white hat, whose hacker name is Dead Addict. He has attended since the very first DefCon in 1993, though he has shorn off his long hair and eschewed the black trenchcoat that used to be his trademark, better to reflect his new status as a security expert in the smartphone industry. "Sure, you could find an employer really quickly as a black hat, but then you find you are working for the mafia – and what exactly is the risk analysis on that?"
My reassurance is qualified by one worry. Can hacking keep its allure if it doesn't stay underground? Is the Electronic Frontier Found-ation, which defends hackers, really doing us all a favour by rebranding them as "security and encryption researchers"? What can be worse than a piece in a mainstream newspaper saying how wonderful they all are?
So, long may the FBI raids and the corporate lawsuits continue, and long may hacking keep its allure. Without this volunteer army, probing, testing and pushing the boundaries of the technology we rely on, we would all be the poorer – and less secure. | | 11:16a |
Dang me
Dang me - 9 August 2010
By mail and fax to: (703) 613-3007
Information and Privacy Coordinator
Central Intelligence Agency
Washington, D.C. 20505
Dear Coordinator:
Under the Freedom of Information Act, 5 U.S.C. subsection 552, I am requesting information or records on Wikileaks.org, Julian Assange and others unknown associated with Wikileaks and its affiliates.
Please supply the records without informing me of the cost if the fees do not exceed $1,000.00, which I agree to pay.
If you deny all or any part of this request, please cite each specific exemption you think justifies your refusal to release the information and notify me of appeal procedures available under the law.
Information or records provided by you will be published on the public education website Cryptome.org for which I am the administrator.
If you have any questions about handling this request, you may telephone me at (212) 873-8700.
Sincerely,
John Young
Cryptome.org
251 West 89th Street
New York, NY 10024
This could be good. Another way to use FOI is to request records of the dates that your own file was looked at. Nothing in the actual file itself. Just the times and dates it was looked at. If you get a list and some pig is looking at it regularly in the last year or so then you may be under active surveillance.
Date: Thu, 04 Jan 2007 05:41:07 -0800
To:
From: John Young
[This is a restricted internal development mailinglist for w-i-k-i-l-e-a-k-s-.-o-r-g.
Please do not mention that word directly in these discussions; refer instead to 'WL'.
This list is housed at riseup.net, an activist collective in Seattle with an established lawyer
and plenty of backbone.]
Aftergood's report was unexpected, particularly for showing
wikileaks.org was active and the first document was available.
When did access become public, and was that announced here?
Or did Aftergood release private information, say in disagreement
with WL purposes.
His comments on WL were disdainful, and appear to have
been made to buttress his own endeavor as more honorable and
respectable -- he has a habit of doing that, but so do others who
cherish their reputation (and carefully nuture support of those
who really have a problem with uncontrolled information as if
it is "dangerous to go too far, yadda, yadda.").
Reporters, and keep in mind they are competitors with WL as
much as any keepers of secrets and peddlers of inside
information, (all obsessed with appearing to be "responsible"
arbiters of what information gets published) will most certainly
dig for unfriendly aspects of WL to gain reader attention and to
show they are not complicit in WL unrespectable intentions.
Some will promise one thing to get information and do the opposite
for publication. Some will fuck you for failing to do what they
asked.
Expect agents of the authorities to pry into WL by way of
journalists, supporters, funders, advisory board members;
that is customary for those hoping to smoke out opposition.
Expect smears, lies, forgeries, betrayal, bribes, and the host
of common tools used to suppress dissent.
Expect taunts, insults, ridicule, praise, admiration, obsequiousness,
arrogance, skepticism, demands for who the fuck are you, I need
the information for an urgent deadline.
Expect accusations that someone else associated with WL has
already told me such and such so why are you being so coy?
Expect much flattery and disdain.
Beware of disclosing private information as a means to recruit.
Beware of releasing information about WL founders and supporters,
that will be grist for the truth twisters. Keep anonymous as possible
or WL is doomed.
This discussion list is going to be leaked. Anonymize, anonymize
every communication with the press and potential recruits.
Somebody is going to come at me as the name on the NSI registry.
The less I know about WL people the better. And I know for sure that
everyone associated with WL is a bald-faced liar, an agent of the
authorities and the worst of the worst.
FROM
Cryptome.org\Wikileaks Leak.
They ought to take a rope and hang me | | 11:17a |
The wild bunch
From: Julian Assange
Date: Mon, 8 Jan 2007 13:40:14 +0000
To: funtimesahead[a t]lists.riseup.net
Subject: [WL] cryptome disclosure
[This is a restricted internal development mailinglist for w-i-k-i-l-e-a-k-s-.-o-r-g.
Please do not mention that word directly in these discussions; refer instead to 'WL'.
This list is housed at riseup.net, an activist collective in Seattle with an established lawyer
and plenty of backbone.]
No idea what JYA was saying!
It's clear to me however, that he was not trying to protect people's
identities with his xxxxx'ing, but rather trying to increase the
sexiness of the document. Perhaps he feels WL is a threat to the
central status mechanism in his life? I think he just likes the
controversy.
He may have done us a great favor. There's a lot of movement in that
document. It's a little anarchist, but I think it generally reads
well and sounds like people doing something they care about.
Btw, I suggest we be careful with Wayne Madsen too. He seems to be
another case of someone who was fantastic a few years ago, but
recently has started to see conspiracies everywhere. Both cases
possibly age related.
I am not spending any more thought on it. Next week is going to be
busy. The weeks earlier stories will be already done and that'll set
the agenda for the rest of the week, not jya's attention seeker.
I'm willing to handle calls for .au, although my background may make
S a better bet. - FROM
\Wikileaks Leak 2.
Dear John - Maybe you and Wayne might be interested in forming a Hunter S Thomson paranoia appreciation society with moi? Have yr people call my people. We'll do lunch. I have a great pitch ready for a re-make of ' The Wild Bunch'. It'll star Jim of course. Maybe even Mongo. Wait till you see the rushes! | | 11:21a |
Cornhole revolutions In the opening chapters of Freedom(tm), the Daemon is firmly in control, using an expanded network of real-world, dispossessed darknet operatives to tear apart civilization and rebuild it anew. Soon civil war breaks out in the American Midwest, in a brutal wave of violence that becomes known as the Corn Rebellion. Former detective Pete Sebeck, now the Daemon's most powerful-though reluctant-operative, must lead a small band of enlightened humans toward a populist movement designed to protect the new world order. But the private armies of global business are preparing to crush the Daemon once and for all. In a world of conflicted loyalties, rapidly diminishing human power, and the possibility that anyone can be a spy, what's at stake is nothing less than human freedom's last hope to survive the technology revolution. http://www.gamedev.net/columns/books/bookdetails.asp?productid=786 | | 11:24a |
After the fox
Conservative Mexican ex-president Vicente Fox has spoken out in favour of legalising illegal drugs, as his country sinks ever deeper into bloody drug wars.
"What has to be made legal are the production, sale and distribution [of illegal drugs]," said Mr Fox, a former Coca Cola executive, in his weekly blog.
He says the changes have to come after years at the helm of a Mexican government cooperating with the United States' "war on drugs".
Since 2006, more than 28,000 people have been killed in deepening violence as drug gangs and mafias battle for control of shipment routes, mainly to the lucrative US market.
"We've got to see it as a strategy to fight back and break the economic structure that enables cartels to earn such tremendous profits," argued Mr Fox, a member of the National Action Party, of which current president Felipe Calderon is also a member.
Mr Fox said high taxes should be charged that would then be used to treat drug addictions.
Cocaine Kola - I'd like to see that...again. See also ' Malatesta cocaine ' and 'failed prohibition' | | 11:29a |
Joker sighting in Gotham
Sowing Anarchy in the Metropolis
A.G. Schwarz
In an article in the recent book, We Are an Image from the Future: the Greek Revolt of December 2008, I briefly made a point that a friend convinced me needs to be elaborated. The idea is that of “signals of disorder,” and their importance in spreading rebellion.
As far as Greece is concerned, the argument is that by carrying out attacks—primarily smashings and molotov attacks against banks and police stations, which constitute the most obvious symbols of capitalist exploitation and State violence for Greek society—insurrectionary anarchists created signals of disorder that acted as subversive seeds. Even though most people did not agree with these attacks at the time, they lodged in their consciousness, and at a moment of social rupture, people adopted these forms as their own tools, to express their rage when all the traditionally valid forms of political activity were inadequate.
An interesting feature of these signals is that they will be met with fear and disapproval by the same people who may later participate in creating them. This is no surprise. In the news polls of democracy, the majority always cast their vote against the mob. In the day to day of normality, people have to betray themselves to survive. They have to follow those they disbelieve, and support what they cannot abide. From the safety of their couch they cheer for Bonny and Clyde, and on the roadside they say “Thank you, officer” to the policeman who writes them a speeding ticket. This well managed schizophrenia is the rational response to life under capitalism. The fact that our means of survival make living impossible necessitates a permanent cognitive dissonance.
Thus, the sensible behavior is not to reason with the masses, to share the facts that will disprove the foundations of capitalism, facts they already have at their fingertips, and it is not to act appropriately, to put on a smiley face, and expect our popularity to increase incrementally. The sensible thing to do is to attack Authority whenever we can.
Attacking is not distinct from communicating the reasons for our attacks, or building the means to survive, because we survive in order to attack, and we attack in order to live, and we communicate because communicating attacks the isolation, and isolation makes living impossible.
Why do signals of disorder constitute attacks on capitalism and the State? After all, the police are basically the punching bag, the shock absorbers, for the State, and one of the limitations of the insurrection in Greece was that anarchists focused too much on police, rather than on the State in all its manifestations. And what about smashing insured bank windows? Creating a signal of disorder could even involve mere spraypainting, or hanging out on street corners. Isn't this just the ritualization of aimless and impotent rebellion, as the naysayers are so quick to say?
Turns out, the devil is in the details.
In a way, the idea of signals of disorder is an inversion of the Broken Windows Theory of policing. Wilson and Kelling's article, “Broken Windows,” first advanced the policing theory of the same name in 1982, but it wasn't until Kelling was hired by the NYC Transit Authority later in the decade that this flagship of minute social control was launched. When Rudolph Giuliani was elected mayor of New York in 1993, Broken Windows policing took on city-wide dimensions, and it soon spread to the rest of the country. By the early '00s, Broken Windows was being adapted for the social democracies of Europe.
Among the technocrats, Broken Windows is controversial, because it easily blurs causation with correlation: just because broken windows and other signals of disorder often accompany higher crime rates does not mean they are the cause of crime. Occasionally, you'll hear a whimper that without proper sensitivity training, Broken Windows policing encourages harrassment of minorities.
All this misses the point: the State is not interested in reducing crime, the State is interested in increasing social control, and Broken Windows policing is a critical expansion of its arsenal. Giuliani's reign of “zero tolerance” didn't just go after fare-dodgers, graffiti writers, and the squeegee men. Under his stewardship, the NYPD became the first ever police department in the history of the world to log more arrests than reported crimes. Entire neighborhoods became depopulated of certain demographics as young black men were shipped to the prisons upstate. A policing that targets the petty details of every day life, that criminalizes our minor strategies to cope with the impossibilities of life under capitalism, is part and parcel of an expansion of police power as a whole.
Why does the city government in San Francisco want to criminalize sitting or lying in the streets? Why did the city government in Barcelona ban playing music in the streets without a license? Why did the government of the UK prohibit a detailed list of “anti-social behaviors”?
Because the goal of the State is total social control. Because the trajectory of capitalism is towards the total commercialization of public space. Every time we identify another invasion of State and capitalism into the minutiae of daily life, every time we confront that invasion, we are potentially fighting for revolution. As Authority increasingly manages us at the nano level, the can of spraypaint, the rock, the molotov, deserve the same significance as the AK-47.
Spreading signals of disorder accomplishes a number of things. It increases our tactical strength, as we hone a practice of vandalism, property destruction, public occupation, and rowdiness.
It interrupts the narrative of social peace, and creates the indisputable fact of people opposed to the present system and fighting against it. It means the reason for this fight, the anarchist critiques, have to be taken more seriously because they already exist in the streets. In this way, the attacks create the struggle as a fact in a way that would otherwise only be possible in times of greater social upheaval and movement. To have this effect, the signals of disorder need to explicitly link themselves to a recognizable social practice, one that would otherwise be ignored or chopped up into disconnected eccentricities of lifestyle. People in the neighborhood must know that the graffiti and broken windows are the doing of “the anarchists” or some other group that has a public existence, because signals of disorder that can be isolated as phenomena of urban white noise can be legitimately and popularly policed with techniques reserved for inanimate objects and aesthetic aberrations; they would rub us off the streets with the same chemical rigor as they clean graffiti off the walls.
Signals of disorder are contagious. They attract people who also want to be able to touch and alter their world rather than just passing through it. They are easy to replicate and at times, generally beyond our control or prediction, they spread far beyond our circles. They allow us, and anyone else, to reassert ourselves in public space, to reverse commercialization, to make neighborhoods that belong to us, to create the ground on which society will be reborn.
In a neighborhood where the walls are covered with anarchist posters, beautiful radical graffiti stands alongside all the usual tags, advertisements never stay up for long, the windows of luxury cars, banks, and gentrifying apartments or restaurants are never safe, and people hang out drinking and talking on the street corners and in the parks, our ideas will be seriously discussed outside our own narrow circles, and the state would need a major counterinsurgency operation to have just the hope of uprooting us.
Whenever we can break their little laws with impunity, we show that the State is weak. When advertising is defaced and public space is liberated, we show that capitalism is not absolute.
But at the same time, we cannot make the mistake of exaggerating the importance of the attack, of signals of disorder. At times it may be necessary to be a gang, but if we are ever only a gang, if at any point only our antisocial side is visible, we are vulnerable to total repression. There is a lot of rage circulating, without an adequate outlet, which we resonate with through our attacks. But there is equally a lot of love that is even more lacking in possibilities for true expression. People desire the community and solidarity that capitalism deprives them of, and our way out of this laberinth of isolation is to go looking for the others and meet them where they're at. To encounter people, in our search for accomplices.
Except in the magical space of the riot, we cannot safely find spontaneous accomplices for the attack. But in the stultifying oppression of everyday, we can find accomplices to share in the little gestures of defiance, the small tastes of the commune we are building—a random conversation, a flyer someone is actually interested to read, the passing around of a stolen meal, collaboration in a community garden, the giving of gifts.
The anarchists must simultaneously be those who are blamed for acts of startling indecency, of inappropriate extremism in all the right causes (“they burned four police cars at our peaceful march!”) and those who are around town cooking and sharing free communal meals, holding street parties, projecting pirated movies on the sides of buildings, running libraries and bicycle repair shops, and appearing at protests (“oh look, it's those lovely anarchists again!”).
We will be safest from the right hand of repression and the left hand of recuperation when everyone is thoroughly confused as to whether we are frightening or loveable. | | 11:32a |
Lets not dwell on defeats
Let us think rather of the future. Today is the fourteenth of July, the national festival of France. A year ago in Paris I watched the stately parade down the Champs Elysees of the French Army and the French empire. Who can foresee what the course of other years will bring? Faith is given to us to help and comfort us when we stand in awe before the unfurling scroll of human destiny. And I proclaim my faith that some of us will live to see a fourteenth of July when a liberated France will once again rejoice in her greatness and in her glory, and once again stand forward as the champion of the freedom and the rights of man. When the day dawns, as dawn it will, the soul of France will turn with comprehension and with kindness to those Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, wherever they may be, who in the darkest hour did not despair of the Republic.
In the meantime, we shall not waste our breath nor cumber our thought with reproaches. When you have a friend and comrade at whose side you have faced tremendous struggles, and your friend is smitten down by a stunning blow, it may be necessary to make sure that the weapon that has fallen from his hands shall not be added to the resources of your common enemy. But you need not bear malice because of your friend's cries of delirium and gestures of agony. You must not add to his pain; you must work for his recovery. The association of interest between Britain and France remains. The cause remains. Duty inescapable remains. So long as our pathway to victory is not impeded, we are ready to discharge such offices of good will toward the French Government as may be possible, and to foster the trade and help the administration of those parts of the great French Empire which are now cut off from captive France, but which maintain their freedom. Subject to the iron demands of the war which we are now waging against Hitler and all his works, we shall try so to conduct ourselves that every true French heart will beat and glow at the way we carry on the struggle; and that not only France, but all the oppressed countries in Europe may feel that each British victory is a step towards the liberation of the Continent from the foulest thralldom into which it has ever been cast.
All goes to show that the war will be long and hard. No one can tell where it will spread. One thing is certain: the peoples of Europe will not be ruled for long by the Nazi Gestapo, nor will the world yield itself to Hitler's gospel of hatred, appetite and domination. | | 11:41a |
Rise above the pack
I hold a latchkey to American hearts.
Strong tides of emotion, fierce surges of passion, sweep the broad expanses of the Union in this year of fate. In that prodigious travail there arc many elemental forces, there is much heart-searching and self-questioning; some pangs, some sorrow, some conflict of voices, but no fear. The world is witnessing the birth throes of a sublime resolve. I shall presume to confess to you that I have no doubts what that resolve will be.
The destiny of mankind is not decided by material computation. When great causes are on the move in the world, stirring all men's souls, drawing them from their firesides, casting aside comfort, wealth and the pursuit of happiness in response to impulses at once awe-striking and irresistible, we learn that we are spirits, not animals, and that something is going on in space and time, and beyond space and time, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.
A wonderful story is unfolding before our eyes. How it will end we are not allowed to know. But on both sides of the Atlantic we all feel, I repeat, all, that we are a part of it, that our future and that of many generations is at stake. We are sure that the character of human society will be shaped by the resolves we take and the deeds we do. We need not bewail the fact that we have been called upon to face such solemn responsibilities. We may be proud, and even rejoice amid our tribulations, that we have been born at this cardinal time for so great an age and so splendid an opportunity of service here below.
Wickedness, enormous, panoplied, embattled, seemingly triumphant, casts its shadow over Europe and Asia. Laws, customs and traditions are broken up. Justice is cast from her seat. The rights of the weak are trampled down. The grand freedoms of which the President of the United States has spoken so movingly are spurned and chained. The whole stature of man, his genius, his initiative and his nobility, is ground down under systems of mechanical barbarism and of organized and scheduled terror.
For more than a year we British have stood alone, uplifted by your sympathy and respect and sustained by our own unconquerable will-power and by the increasing growth and hopes of your massive aid. In these British Islands that look so small upon the map we stand, the faithful guardians of the rights and dearest hopes of a dozen States and nations now gripped and tormented in a base and cruel servitude. Whatever happens we shall endure to the end.
But what is the explanation of the enslavement of Europe by the German Nazi regime? How did they do it? It is but a few years ago since one united gesture by the peoples, great and small, who are now broken in the dust, would have warded off from mankind the fearful ordeal it has had to undergo. But there was no unity. There was no vision. The nations were pulled down one by one while the others gaped and chattered. One by one, each in his turn, they let themselves be caught. One after another they were felled by brutal violence or poisoned from within by subtle intrigue.
And now the old lion with her lion cubs at her side stands alone against hunters who are armed with deadly weapons and impelled by desperate and destructive rage. Is the tragedy to repeat itself once more? All no! This is not the end of the tale. The stars in their courses proclaim the deliverance of mankind. Not so easily shall the onward progress of the peoples be barred. Not so easily shall the lights of freedom die.
But time is short. Every month that passes adds to the length and to the perils of the journey that will have to be made. United we stand. Divided we fall. Divided, the dark age returns. United, we can save and guide the world! | | 11:46a |
Songs of the doomed '...CNET caught up with Young at the Next HOPE hacker conference here last weekend, where he was attending the Wikileaks keynote speech. Following is a transcript made from a recorded interview with Young, lightly edited for space. Q: How many hours a day or days a week do you spend on Cryptome? Young: Well, it varies. When I'm doing professional practice work, it's very little. I just answer e-mail and when something hot comes in, I'll put it up. Most of my time is spent on my architectural practice. So I do Cryptome between when I have time to get to it. It's by no means a full-time activity. What you're doing sounds a lot like what Wikileaks is doing, no? Young: Only superficially, Declan, because, and we can talk more about this, I initially thought that was what they were going to be doing when I first agreed to participate. But it became clear right away that they were going to set up an operation with multiple people involved. So the first difference is that I don't run an operation. I don't have any people working on this. This is strictly--and I like the term myself, but other people hate it--it's strictly an amateur version. It's not like Wikileaks and their grand goals. I've never had any desire to overturn governments or do any of these noble things that they want to do. Or jack up journalism. This was just a way to get certain kinds of documents out to the public. And so when they explained the amount of money they were going to try to raise, that was the basis for parting company with them. I thought it was going to be more like Cryptome, which is a collective of people contributing their time to it and not a centralized operation raising lots of money. Cryptome is not into that kind of thing. We parted company at that point. We're still not like Wikileaks in that we don't do any promotional work for our activities. Who were the other Wikileaks founders? Young: I'm not going to talk about those. I'll say Julian (Assange) was clearly there. I elected to conceal those names when I published these messages. And I think it's basically a violation of Cryptome's policy--to publish the names of people who do not want to be identified. You had a falling-out with the other Wikileaks founders? Young: Yes. But it was over this: someone said that the initial goal was $5 million. That caught my attention. One, because I think the type of stuff I was going to publish, you should never do it for money. Only because that contaminates the credibility and it turns it into a business opportunity where there's great treachery and lying going on. And it will contaminate Wikileaks. It always does. In fact, that's the principal means by which noble endeavors are contaminated, the money trail. That's pretty obvious. I happen to think that amateur stuff is better than paid stuff. How long were you involved before you resigned? Young: Not long. A few weeks. It wasn't long. However, one of the things that happened is that somehow I got subscribed to that list under another nym and the messages kept coming in. I got to keep reading what they were saying about me after they booted me off. The messages kept coming in. So I published those too. Did they criticize you for, well, leaking about Wikileaks? Young: They certainly did. They accused me of being an old fart and jealous. And all these things that come up, that typically happen when someone doesn't like you. That's okay. I know you would never do that and journalists never do that, but ordinary people do this all the time. Because journalism is a noble profession in all its guises? Young: That's right. And there's no back-biting there. Over the years you've been running Cryptome, you've had some encounters with federal agencies. What visits did you have and what were the agents concerned about? Young: They were most concerned that we published lists. The names of spies. That was the first issue that brought us to their attention. There was a request, so we were told, from one of the British intelligence people to have that list removed. And did you remove it? Young: No. And not only that, but the FBI was always very polite. They said you've done nothing illegal, we're not pursuing a criminal investigation. These are just courtesies we're offering other governments. We had one with the Brits and one with the Japanese that brought them to our door. You had no other interaction with, say, Homeland Security? Young: The other was when we started our eyeball series of publishing photos. That brought one visit and one phone call. But again, they were polite and said there's nothing illegal about this. They never used a negative term. They just said the issue has been raised with us. And by the way, I did a FOIA trying to get records of these visits, but I could never find anything. I did get business cards, though, and I asked for ID. They were very polite and gave me business cards and I published all that. They asked me not to publish their names. But what the hell, Declan, what else do I have to go with? So if you've been publishing sensitive government information for so long, why have you not had the same encounters that Wikileaks has had? [Ed. Note: Wikileaks has claimed its representatives have been harassed by U.S. government agents.] I don't think they've had any encounters. That's bogus. But that's okay. I know a lot of people who talk about how the government's after them. It's a fairly well-worn path. You know it from your own field. It remains to be seen whether any of this stuff holds up or not. One of the tests is: unless you go to jail, it's all bogus. When I go to jail, you'll say he actually did it, finally. He came up with something that offended someone. So far that hasn't happened, no indictments or anything. These polite visits are the closest I've come...' http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20011106-281.htmlReminds me of the headstone that read...' I told them I was sick' | | 11:50a |
Stalins brains In a totally unastonishing move, Wikileaks has now reactivated all of its functions after adding new kit and code. Potential whistleblowers can now again submit documents securely online, both via SSL at https://sunshinepress.org or using Tor, at secure submission address http://suw74isz7wqzpmgu.onion/ - all that despite rumour mongers claiming Wikileaks was falling into disrepair, was going to be abandoned or the Wicked Witch of the West was going to transform Julian Assange into a monkey, decapitating the Great Leader and robbing its zombie minions of the capacity to think and act all by themselves. Webchat functionality has also been added, writes Wikileaks in its bog, connecting to the site's internal IRC server. New efficiencies lie ahead - see the new IBM System x3650 M3 Express Find 1000s of IT Jobs at CWJobs Ads by TechEyeFor people actually using an IRC client, the group says it has added extra bells and whistles to prevent identity leakage. After all, protecting identities is a core concern of the site and no one chatting with them would enjoy having his or her name scribbled into a list in a menacing little black book, in the dark corners of a non-descript office building containing stargates, securely boxed lesser minions of C’thulhu, Stalin’s brains and intelligence analysts. Read more: http://www.techeye.net/internet/wikileaks-revs-up-again#ixzz0wG3nlYT2 | | 11:54a |
Crean needs killing The Background In July 1995, an edition of Rabelais, the newspaper published regularly by the Students Representative Council of La Trobe University in Melbourne, included an article titled "The Art of Shoplifting". The editors at the time, Melita Berndt, Michael Brown, Ben Ross and Valentina Srpcanska, were students who had been elected at the most recent annual student elections. Following publication, there was a substantial level of media interest. Representatives of major retail chains and of the local police condemned the publication. The editors have defended and explained the article in terms of raising issues about the pattern of wealth distribution in Australian society, questioning the sanctity of private property, and highlighting the inadequacy of financial support for students. Background to the publication of the article and the political issues affecting university students, eg. the "Voluntary Student Unionism (VSU)" legislation, is available on the following pages: [BROKEN LINK] Political Censorship - Could it happen here? You bet, NoName, VUT Student Newspaper, September 1995. "...The 'VSU' legislation was put in by the state government in order to quash anti-state government sentiment on campuses. As a leaked Liberal Party policy document put it: 'we do not want compulsory student monies flowing out to anti-Kennett and anti-Coalition campaigns and other fringe activities of the hard student left.'..." [BROKEN LINK] A Guide to Successfully Shutting Down a Student Paper NOT! Catalyst, RMIT Student Newspaper, Issue #10, 1995 "...For many of the uninitiated, the goings on at La Trobe may seem a little bit confusing. Can an article about shoplifting close down a student union ? Well. the issues are varied and complex but one thing seems pretty clear: VSU fears materialise! ..." According to a report [BROKEN LINK] in The Melbourne Age, broadcaster Neil Mitchell drew the article to the attention of the chief of the Victorian Retail Traders Association (VRTA). NoName [BROKEN LINK] reports that VRTA issued a media statement condemning the article whereupon "[t]he papers echoed the Kennett agenda regarding student papers and the 'need for control'". On 8 August 1995, the then Federal Government Minister for Education, Simon Crean, was 'grilled' on a nationally syndicated radio program by John Laws (commonly known as "the king of talk back radio"). An undertaking was extracted from the Minister to pursue the student editors to determine if Federal Government funding to their paper could be cut, and to determine if the individuals could be prosecuted in the criminal courts. The exchange took place against a background of widespread speculation that an early federal election may have been imminent. http://libertus.net/censor/rdocs/rabelais.html | | 12:03p |
Xenomorph and Brown both favor net censorship
The Federal Government looks set to get its way on a temporary ban on Internet gambling. It's dealing though with an unlikely source of support - the Green Senator, Bob Brown.
That could give the Government the numbers in Senate for a 12 month moratorium to take effect retrospectively from May of this year, as Alexandra Kirk reports from Canberra.
ALEXANDRA KIRK: Green Senator Bob Brown can't remember the last time he supported a controversial piece of government legislation.
SENATOR BOB BROWN: No, I can't really. I don't share their philosophy on almost anything to do with social matters or the environment.
ALEXANDRA KIRK: But clearly he dislikes the Government's agenda less than he dislikes gambling.
SENATOR BROWN: It's got very insidious social losses involved. It leads people to bankruptcy. It breaks up families.
ALEXANDRA KIRK: In October when the Government first put up its planned 12 moratorium on Internet gambling, the Senate vote was tied and therefore lost.
The Coalition needs one more vote and Bob Brown says he's now willing to deal on one condition if Internet wagering on racing and sports events in Victoria and Tasmania is allowed because, unlike the rest, those two States failed to make provision for wagering before the proposed retrospective May 2000 cut off date. And the Government is talking turkey.
SENATOR BROWN: I think the Government is keen to get the moratorium back. Senator Alston has asked me the other day in a bit of talk within the Chamber if I was still abiding by that position. I've said yes. And if the Government cares to make it fair to all States, I'll be supporting their legislation.
ALEXANDRA KIRK: And do you think he's willing to play ball? Has he indicated that?
SENATOR BROWN: He indicated in the Chamber that he was looking at bringing this legislation back before the end of the year. He wanted to get that reassurance from me. He's got it, so now we have to wait and see.
ALEXANDRA KIRK: All the Government will say is it would like to see the legislation reintroduced this week. The Minister Richard Alston's office has confirmed negotiations have taken place but won't indicate with whom. But judging from the huge lobbying effort of Senator Brown's office by the gambling industry including the Packer camp over the past few days, a deal is afoot.
SENATOR BROWN: I know that this issue is on the Government agenda again and that there's four days of Senate sitting left this year. And if this legislation doesn't go through in those four days, that's for the moratorium, then the Government is unlikely to bring back on legislation for a moratorium in February that's only going to last until May.
ALEXANDRA KIRK: South Australia's No Pokies State MP Nick Xenophon says it's a defensible compromise.
NICK ZENOPHON: My advice to Senators Brown and Alston is to ignore the vested interests of the on-line gambling lobby; listen to the overwhelming community interest and just do it. Strike a deal; get on with it.
So - the xenomorph and Brownshirt Bob have both voted at least once for net censorship...Brown has promised to vote for it again if re-errected. These 2 pukes have now both richly earned killing. Yr fucking with us!
Not for long | | 12:09p |
The overlanders POLICE media managers went into damage-control to protect Victorian Chief Commissioner Simon Overland after his bullets in baggage blunder. They arranged two statements of "talking points" -- one draft referring to an unidentifiable man, the other naming him as the Victorian Chief Commissioner -- as part of a damage-control exercise after Mr Overland carried ammunition on a passenger jet. The pre-emptive media strategy by Victoria Police, signed off by senior AFP officers and run past the Rudd government, would not have identified Mr Overland for taking bullets on a Qantas jet if his apprehension at Canberra airport had not been seen and leaked by a member of the public. AFP documents obtained by The Australian under Freedom of Information show how the official strategy to limit the public fallout for Mr Overland became a high priority in the hours before his questioning over the bullets was disclosed. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/police-sought-to-protect-overland/story-e6frg6nf-1225903663470US defence head now reckons he wants to get away from the culture of endless money...maybe au cops could take a leaf from his book...maybe. A FORMER NSW police officer has been charged with a string of child sex offences including producing child pornography. The 40-year-old was arrested yesterday after police said they searched a Sydney home and business, uncovering a number of computer hard drives, discs, notes and photographs. The items were removed for forensic analysis and the man was taken to Camden Police Station, in Sydney's southwest. The man was charged with five counts of sexual intercourse with a child aged between 10 and 16 in circumstances of aggravation, two counts of producing child pornography and six counts of publishing child pornography. He was refused bail to appear in Campbelltown Local Court today. | | 12:25p |
The love I bear Barry '...The bar was recently raised for any future competition by the heroic efforts of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, in the Wikileaks story (which some of you may have read about). Assange has set up a high-volume website for government and corporate whistleblowers worldwide to publish leaked documents — and since it relies on an international server network, it is beyond the power of any government to shut down. Manning leaked the biggest cache of classified documents since the Pentagon Papers, subsequently published on said Wikileaks, which has resulted in an amusing impromptu dance in recent weeks by assorted members of the Obama administration’s national security apparatus. And now there’s Haystack It doesn’t exactly top Wikileaks, but it still ranks pretty high up there. Haystack is the baby of Austin Heap, a 20-something hacker who decided — after witnessing the turmoil in Iran following the disputed election — to put his geek skills to work on behalf of that country’s dissident community. Heap was helped enormously in the effort by a disgruntled Iranian government official, who provided considerable technical detail on the functioning of the government’s filtering software. Heap wound up developing desktop software — Haystack — which not only encrypts but disguises connections and outgoing data, so to the government it looks like someone surfing a revolutionary website is visiting some other popular site like The Weather Channel. Haystack is distributed on the same invitation-only, friend-of-a-friend model originally used by Gmail. That reflects Heap’s vision of steady, organic growth, rather than a rapid expansion of “low-value demand.” He specifically says he’d prefer it be used by freedom activists rather than file-sharers. But we all know how this is gonna turn out. Now that the genie’s out of the bottle, it will wind up in the hands of file-sharers sooner rather than later. (Anyway, I thought file-sharers WERE freedom activists). And the beauty of it is, the Copyright Nazis’ own authoritarian state is helping to distribute the rope to hang itself. Heap has talks scheduled with John McCain, and the State Department is on board with his project. The U.S. government is so gung-ho about the immediate appeal of helping dissidents undermine the system of power in an official enemy state, it’s lost sight of an important consideration: the technology of resistance has no borders. For the Obama administration to help Heap spread this technology to Iranian dissidents is the equivalent of attacking Iran with a virulently contagious biological weapon for which the United States has developed no vaccine. But there’s one big difference: this virus only kills THEM...' http://c4ss.org/content/3533The love I bear thee hath no better word than this - thou art a villain |
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