Aztlan-Network-News Blog

Monday, December 06, 2010

Hugo Chávez praises WikiLeaks ~He criticized Hillary Clinton

http://bit.ly/hl5gLm

Hugo Chávez praises WikiLeaks ~He criticized Hillary Clinton
"The empire stood naked. I do not know what the United States is going to do. Well, they do not care about this. But how many things have been disclosed! They disrespect their allies with all these spying activities!" Chávez said during a cabinet meeting broadcast by state-run TV network Venezolana de Televisión (VTV)

The Venezuelan president thinks that Julian Assange is a brave man (Photo: Efe)

Politics
Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez said on Tuesday that leaks of diplomatic correspondence by whistleblower website WikiLeaks have exposed a "naked empire." Chávez added that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton "should resign, it is the least she can do" given the seriousness of the revelations.

"The empire stood naked. I do not know what the United States is going to do. Well, they do not care about this. But how many things have been disclosed! They disrespect their allies with all these spying activities!" Chávez said during a cabinet meeting broadcast by state-run TV network Venezolana de Televisión (VTV), Efe reported

The Venezuelan president said that according to the documents leaked by WikiLeaks, the United States "refers to its allies in a very unusual way." The documents show "an attack against governments, people and international organizations."

The United States "is a failed and illegal state that disrespects ethical principles, and has lost respect for its own allies... and this (the documents leaked by WikiLeaks) shows it clearly," he added.

"I have to congratulate the people of WikiLeaks," Chávez said, and his director, Julian Assange, "for their courage and bravery."

"This man (Assange) has gone underground; he is making statements in a secret place. He even fears for his life," Chávez said.

Chávez criticized the reaction of the US Secretary of State, who on Monday condemned in harsh terms the "theft" of diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks and said that "it is an attack on the United States and the international community."

Clinton should resign, Chávez suggested. "It is the least she can do, together with all those other spies and delinquents working in the State Department. They should give an answer to the world rather than attacking and saying that it was a theft," the Venezuelan president said.

Chávez was outraged because the documents leaked by WikiLeaks show that Clinton allegedly ordered a "study on the mental health of Argentine President" Cristina Fernández. The Venezuelan head of state expressed his solidarity with his Argentine counterpart.

"Somebody should study Mrs. Clinton's mental state," said Chávez.

Translated by Gerardo Cárdenas

An Interview With WikiLeaks' Julian Assange

http://bit.ly/hl5gLm

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Analysis: #WikiLeaks stirs debate on #Information #Revolution

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Analysis: WikiLeaks stirs debate on info revolution
Related News

Highlights: Latest WikiLeaks developments

WikiLeaks »

A screen shot of a web browser shows the wikileaks.ch home page with a portrait of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange next to the out of service wikileaks.com domain, in Lavigny December 4, 2010. WikiLeaks moved its website address from http://wikileaks.org to the Swiss http://wikileaks.ch on Friday after two U.S. Internet providers ditched it and Paris tried to ban French servers from hosting its database of leaked information. REUTERS/Valentin Flauraud

By Peter Apps, Political Risk Correspondent

LONDON | Mon Dec 6, 2010 10:50am EST

LONDON (Reuters) - Heroes to some, villains to others, WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange highlight divisions over data security and show the tech-fueled information revolution is outpacing debate over its use.

An apparent campaign by the United States to lock down the WikiLeaks website sits awkwardly with its rhetoric on free speech. It comes only months after the State Department criticized Gulf states for threatening to block Blackberry smart phones over access to encrypted messages.

The fact that some 250,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables -- as well as almost the entire military logs of the Iraqi and Afghan wars -- could be downloaded and leaked has sent shock waves around all those with sensitive data.

The WikiLeaks.com website has since found itself shut down after apparent political pressure on service providers, although mirror sites in several European countries mean the data so far released remains readily available. Social networking sites such as Twitter swiftly pointed users to the new sites.

Around the world, opinion is increasingly polarized.

"There's always been a divide between those who want the Internet to be open and free and those who view that as a risk, who want information to be protected and controlled," said Jonathan Wood, global issues analyst at Control Risks. "This obviously highlights those divisions."

Opinions look to be becoming polarized further. Officials and security experts expressed outrage on Monday after WikiLeaks released a list of facilities around the world deemed essential by the U.S., saying it heightened the risks of militant attack.

Meanwhile, viral emails and websites supporting Assange called on Internet users around the world to fight censorship by disseminating cables as far and wide as possible and boycotting sites such as Amazon and PayPal that had moved to obstruct him.

"The first infowar is now engaged," said one.

A French minister said on Friday Paris was looking at ways of blocking attempts to host the site in France, and some senior U.S. politicians have called for Assange to be charged with treason or treated as a terrorist. WikiLeaks says its sites have been under near continuous cyber attack.

"This is the first time we have seen an attempt at the international community level to censor a website dedicated to the principle of transparency," said press freedom group Reporters Sans Frontieres.

"We are shocked to find countries such as France and the United States suddenly bringing their policies on freedom of expression into line with those of China."

CONVERSATION LAGS TECHNOLOGY

What WikiLeaks has shown is how much data can now be stolen in one go and how widely it can be disseminated. In a previous decade, removing that much paper information would have taken a fleet of trucks. Now, the Internet allows it to be disseminated instantly across international borders.

Corporations and governments say a measure of secrecy and privacy is vital. Firms must be able to keep proprietary technology secret as well as business information if they are to compete. Lives can be put at risk when individuals are named as, for example, helping Western forces in Iraq or Afghanistan.

People are increasingly nervous about the security of personal information. Britain's government has been embarrassed several times after losing the personal data of thousands on disks and memory sticks. No one, after all, wants their credit card details leaked.

But there is little if any agreement on what legal controls could prevent misuse of data or whether such controls could be enforced on a national, let alone global level.

"I think the conversation hasn't kept pace with technology -- people are only just realizing how much data is being stored and how much information can be derived from it," said Jack Hembrough, CEO of U.S. tech firm Vaporstream. "Once it is out there, I don't think there's any way of controlling it."

Vaporstream's answer is relatively simple -- a piece of messaging software it says never saves messages, meaning they can therefore not be stolen. Since the WikiLeaks story broke last week, it says downloads of its test software have increased 20-30 percent.

ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT FEELING?

But often, sensitive information simply has to be saved and transferred around an organization. State Department cables cannot be electronically vaporized after the first person has read them, nor can internal company financial discussions.

There are other debates just beginning across the digital world. Governments might be building ever more sophisticated cyber weapons to attack infrastructure control systems, but experts say the policy framework for their use lags well behind.

Most agree police and spy agencies need the ability to occasionally hack electronic messaging to detect militancy and crime -- but what if that crosses the line into corporate espionage or invasion of privacy?

While almost all governments have deplored the release, there is no doubt WikiLeaks enjoys popular support amongst many particularly a younger generation. On sites such as Twitter, many view Swedish charges against Assange as politically motivated.

WikiLeaks's facebook page has some 850,000 fans and rising -- up from 500,000 on Friday and that looks set to increase further. Some see a larger cultural trend.

"It's no surprise that there has been a rise in antiestablishment feeling coming out the financial crisis," said Control Risks analyst Wood. "We haven't really seen what that means yet but this (WikiLeaks) is probably linked."

(Editing by Janet McBrid

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Sunday, December 05, 2010

Julian Assange, Media Mogul + Comment

http://bit.ly/gk4KtK
Julian Assange, Media Mogul
The selling of Cablegate shows WikiLeaks learning how to keep its audience's attention.

By Nancy Scola
Published Dec 3, 2010

Illustration by Dienstelle 75

(Photo: Photoshot/Newscom)

As we struggle with what to make of Julian Assange—watchdog? Menace? Both?—it's worth evaluating him as one thing he unquestionably is: a new-media entrepreneur. With WikiLeaks' dump of secret U.S. State Department cables, the U.S. government finds itself facing an organization not only willing to shred officialdom's veil of secrecy but committed to figuring out how best to distribute its scoops. The episode is playing out the way it is partly because of the strategy the group developed for sending those 250,000 documents into the world, complete with a custom Twitter hashtag.

For WikiLeaks, the Internet is a blessing and a curse. It's what makes it possible for the group to be a supranational leak collector and disseminator. At the same time, as a medium for news, the web is unfriendly to big, meaty stores of content. What Assange dreads is a repeat of November 2007, when his team published a cache of U.S. military records the world promptly ignored. "This was such a fucking fantastic leak: the Army's force structure of Afghanistan and Iraq, down to the last chair," Assange told The New Yorker. "And nothing." This October's release of 400,000 tactical reports from the Iraq War made a big splash but produced little ripple. And so we see Assange and WikiLeaks adjusting their approach in a bid to sustain interest.

Since its 2006 launch, WikiLeaks has experimented with ways to get traction, from auctioning documents to reporters to mulling a subscription service. But its content is determined by what's sent its way, which is why it's moved from discrete disclosures—Gitmo's operations manual, e-mails of climate-change scientists—to its "megaleaks" of documents allegedly pilfered by Army private Bradley Manning. Dealing with that sort of volume has demanded further adaptation. As WikiLeaks did with the Afghanistan and Iraq war logs, it prepped the diplomatic cables for maximum impact by co-opting old media, advancing documents to Der Spiegel, Le Monde, El País, and the Guardian (which passed them to the Times). But this time, Assange and his team diversified. Up went Cablegate.Wikileaks.org, a veritable Ikea of state secrets, with cables searchable by country of origin, topic, and security classification.

Just as important, WikiLeaks paired that site with a social-media campaign, imploring people to use Twitter, Reddit, plain old mail—"whatever suits your audience best"—to spread the conversation. Along with #cablegate, the group is encouraging hashtags named for individual cables, an especially savvy tactic. The overarching takeaway of Cablegate, that diplomats speak more frankly behind closed doors than in public, has a limited ability to change hearts and minds, but the cables become more compelling on a granular level.

The example WikiLeaks served up in its reader instructions—Cable #66BUENOSAIRES2481—tells of possible Argentine plans to unilaterally claim jurisdiction into the high seas over an area including the disputed Falkland Islands. That's news that might actually spark meaningful microdebate and eventual action. Meanwhile, WikiLeaks keeps the revelations coming, doling out another 200, or twenty, cables every day. In blogspeak, that's called feeding the beast.

Last week, WikiLeaks.org was booted from Amazon's cloud servers and knocked out of service two other times. But the site was still accessible through a Swiss server and will surely pop back up elsewhere. Such technical adaptability is expected from the group, but its salesmanship of the State Department documents has revealed another, perhaps more valuable kind of flexibility. In his 2006 paper "Conspiracy As Governance," Assange detailed his theory on restoring global justice by exposing the "connected graphs" of information linking the powers-that-be. For all that high-minded self-seriousness, he and WikiLeaks are now demonstrating a Gawker-like willingness to go for the gut reaction. Not for nothing is Assange using the -gate suffix, that post-seventies all-purpose scandal labeler. The secrets Assange has made public have spooked his targets. His eagerness to master the new news environment should strike them as equally frightening.

http://bit.ly/gk4KtK

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Comment: Clearly there are great lessons to be learned from the whole #WikiLeaks flood of information in relation to #Cablegate. This last week or so we have witnessed the power of information, the power of sharing using Internet Power, the power of cyber-warfare and the power of the Amerikan Fascist state to wield its own power to suppress the distribution of information. In all this we should remember the basic community work the needs to be done on the local level to raise community consciousness, including the essential work involving community-based computer literacy.
Venceremos! We Will Win!
Peta_de_Aztlan
rSacramento, California
Email: peter.lopez51@yahoo.com
http://twitter.com/Peta_de_Aztlan
http://www.facebook.com/Peta51
http://help-matrix.ning.com/
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F.Kennedy ~ c/s

VIDEO ~Developing_Mass_Internet_Power via Peta_de_Aztlan

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Developing_Mass_Internet_Power via Peta_de_Aztlan
http://youtu.be/Lcl_wM_Zo3c
~2:39~ December 03, 2010
Unidos Venceremos! United We Will Win!
PETER S. LOPEZ AKA: Peta-de-Aztlan
Sacramento, California
Email: peter.lopez51@yahoo.com
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http://help-matrix.ning.com/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/THIRD-WORLD-NEWS/
"An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come." ~ Victor Hugo c/s