His political views come across as inchoate. When asked, he has trouble recalling any specific outrages that needed exposing. His cause was "open diplomacy" or — perhaps in jest — "worldwide anarchy."

More from the Lamo chat log: It virtually opens with Manning saying he had seen evidence of "awful things" such as at Gitmo and Bagram. Then he mentions "criminal political dealings" and cites the "buildup to the Iraq war." He details what he saw on the "Collateral Murder" video and why he wanted it released ("I want people to see the truth"). He wants to get this and much else out (he IDs more) because it might "actually change something." As for the State Dept. cables, he hopes they will spark "worldwide discussion, debates and reforms." Yet Keller claims this was all "vague."

He, personally, had access to material higher than top secret, higher than Bill Keller has ever seen.... He chose not to put out the top secret communications intelligence, to which he clearly had access. He put out only material that he felt would be embarrassing [rather than harmful], and which, three years later we can say, only was embarrassing.

Subscribers' contentions fail for several reasons. First, the record shows that the magistrate judge considered the stated public interests and found that the Government's interests in maintaining the secrecy of its investigation, preventing potential subjects from being tipped off, or altering behavior to thwart the Government's ongoing investigation, outweighed those interests.

Further, we agree with the magistrate judge's findings that the common law presumption of access to § 2703 orders is outweighed by the Government's interest in continued sealing because the publicity surrounding the WikiLeaks investigation does not justify its unsealing. The mere fact that a case is high profile in nature does not necessarily justify public access.... Additionally, Subscribers' contention that the balance of interests tips in the public's favor because the Government approved the disclosure of the existence of its investigation by moving the district court to unseal the Twitter Order is adequately counterbalanced by the magistrate judge's finding that the "sealed documents at issue set forth sensitive nonpublic facts, including the identity of targets and witnesses in an ongoing criminal investigation."

It's hard to see what WikiLeaks thought it would gain from making these statements, other than some quick publicity, perhaps. But that seems a very transient gain in the face of the long-term dangers it may have exposed others to. Moreover, those four tweets may also have compromised its credibility with potential sources, who must now be asking themselves whether WikiLeaks can really be trusted again.

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The charges were filed eariler today with the Swedish Finansinspektionen, the authority which oversees bank licenses and abuse of position. This follows an earlier initiative from the Pirate Party to regulate credit card companies on the European level in order to deny them the ability to determine who gets to trade and who doesn’t.

“The blockade is a serious threat against the freedoms of opinion and expression”, says the Pirate Party’s Erik Lönroth, who has been preparing the formal charges. “It must not be up to the individual payment provider to determine which organizations are eligible for donations. At the same time, these charges will bring clarity as to whether the bank regulations of today are sufficient, or if regulations need to be tightened to protect freedom of expression.”

Mr Assange said plans to register an Australian WikiLeaks party were ''significantly advanced''. He indicated he would be a Senate candidate, and added that "a number of very worthy people admired by the Australian public" have indicated their availability to stand for election on a party ticket.

He said a WikiLeaks party would advance WikiLeaks' objectives of promoting openness in government and politics, and it would combat growing intrusions on individual privacy.

If Mr Assange were elected but he was unable to return to Australia to take up his position, a nominee would occupy a Senate seat.

The testimony is dramatic and the overarching issues are important.

The Times should be there.

We’ve covered him and will continue to do so. But as with any other legal case, we won’t cover every single proceeding. In this case, doing so would have involved multiple days of a reporter’s time, for a relatively straightforward story.

Manning did not plead guilty to the charged offenses in the plea notice. However, significantly, he did indicate with this notice that he is willing to admit to the fact that the act of providing information to WikiLeaks did occur or that the government has evidence that would prove he did commit the act and so he is willing to plea to it.

The notice was a plea to lesser-included offenses—charges with different elements that the judge could agree upon if there is no evidence for the more severe charges. Pleading to lesser-included offenses makes it possible to not plea to committing offenses under the Espionage Act or Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Importantly, he can plead guilty without accepting the government’s charge that he “aided the enemy” or “exceeded authorized access” on his computer

Metropolitan Transit Authority police arrested a man for photographing them at Penn Station in New York City this afternoon – deleting his photo – before releasing him from a jail cell an hour later.

Clark Stoeckley was issued a summons charging him with “engaging in threatening behavior.”

“I was walking through Penn Station and I came across these MTA cops with semi-automatic weapons,” he said in a phone interview with Photography is Not a Crime.

“I stopped to take a photo and the cop came up to me and arrested me. I asked, ‘why am I being arrested?’

“’Because you’re a dick,’” the officer responded.

Sometime earlier this year, a provider of communication services in the United States "perhaps a phone company, perhaps Twitter" got a letter from the FBI demanding it turn over information on one, or possibly even hundreds, of its customers. The letter instructed the company to never disclose the existence of the demand to anyone "in particular, the target of the investigation..."

[....]

But this time, the company that received the request pushed back. It told the agency that it wanted to tell its customer that he or she was being targeted, which would give the customer a chance to fight the request in court, as a group of Twitter users did last year when the Justice Department sought their records under a different kind of request. The minor defiance in this latest case was enough to land the NSL request in a federal court docket last Friday, where the government filed a request for a court order to force the company to adhere to the gag order.

On the surface this is pretty hypocritical, and more than a little ironic: in the past, the UK government asked media outlets to brief them on government secrets they received from Wikileaks before publishing them. Now, a government-run inquiry is asking Wikileaks to hand over information on UK media outlets. Apparently they don't hate leaks as long as they flow in the right direction.

Hopefully this represents another step towards governments recognizing that Wikileaks isn't pure evil, even if there are questionable things about the operation. Though there are risks, bringing sensitive information to light is often in the public's best interest—indeed, that's the whole spirit behind public inquiries. The Leveson Inquiry was convened when the News of the World phone-hacking scandal pointed to a secret culture of corruption in the press, and now Wikileaks is helping to expose it further. If governments attempt to maintain secret cultures of their own, they too will be exposed.

Sonic said it fought the government's order and lost, and was forced to turn over information. Challenging the order was "rather expensive, but we felt it was the right thing to do," said Sonic's chief executive, Dane Jasper. The government's request included the e-mail addresses of people Mr. Appelbaum corresponded with the past two years, but not the full e-mails...

Despite the lead role of AFACT and the inclusion of Australian companies Village Roadshow and the Seven Network, this is an MPAA/American studios production. Mike Ellis, the Singapore-based President for Asia Pacific of the Motion Picture Association, briefed Ambassador on the filing on November 26. Ellis confirmed that MPAA was the mover behind AFACT's case (AFACT is essentially MPAA's Australian subcontractor; MPAA/MPA have no independent, formal presence here), acting on behalf of the six American studios involved. MPAA prefers that its leading role not be made public. AFACT and MPAA worked hard to get Village Roadshow and the Seven Network to agree to be the public Australian faces on the case to make it clear there are Australian equities at stake, and this isn't just Hollywood "bullying some poor little Australian ISP."

Why iiNet? Ellis said they were the right target on several levels. First, they are big enough to be important - iiNet is the third largest ISP in Australia. (Telstra, owners of top Australian ISP BigPond which has about half of the market, are the "big guns", Ellis admitted. It was clear Ellis did not want to begin by tangling with Telstra, Australia's former telecom monopoly and still-dominant player in telephony and internet, and a company with the financial resources and demonstrated willingness to fight hard and dirty, in court and out.) Ellis also said iiNet users had a particularly high copyright violation rate, and that its management has been consistently unhelpful on copyright infringements.

In truth, it almost doesn’t matter who is responsible: the eventual release of the unredacted cables was inevitable. The message of Wikileaks — and the amoral cult of leaking for lulz that came in its wake — has always been one of callous contempt for the human cost of “free information”. From Assange’s well-publicised remarks to Guardian reporters that “if [informants] get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.”, to LulSec [sic] and Anonymous’ willingness to publish the personal details of anyone even tangentially associated with their ‘enemies’, what we see time and time again from mass-leakers is a sociopath’s disregard for individuals, combined with a Hollywood serial killer’s hunger for attention. Sooner of later — for attention, to make some misguided political point, for the lulz — someone was bound to obtain and leak the raw documents.

Given that all those memos have already been covered by the news media, why bother to declassify them anyway? "The point is to expose the legal fiction that the secrecy system rests on," says Ben Wizner, a staff attorney for the ACLU. "The government uses this formality of secrecy to avoid having to answer for real violations of the law."

Wizner says that keeping the documents classified makes them much more difficult to use in courts, for instance, and allows the government to avoid confirming their authenticity.

The files that WikiLeaks released on Guantanamo detainees in April, for example, can’t be used by the defense lawyers for those prisoners unless they’re viewed in a secure government facility. “Government employees can’t read the New York Times. When I go to court in a real lawsuit seeking to get compensation for a victim’s ordeal and hold people liable, I can’t use this information,” Wizner says.

“The US diplomats actually came out looking pretty good because the same thing they were saying in private was the same thing they were saying in public," he said.

"The data that was divulged provided a lot of the justification for policies that the US government had been undertaking for years."

Nelson said that the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, held a press conference to denounce WikiLeaks as a fraud because of leaked cables describing meetings between US ambassadors and heads of state in Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

"Memo after memo said, 'The head of state reports that the guy across the [Persian] Gulf is crazy and they want the US government to do something about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad'," Nelson said.

"In public the heads of state would never say that, which was why Ahmadinejad concluded the memos were fake because he thought he was well-loved by his Arab brothers.

"Releasing this information is giving people a better understanding of the challenges that [US] foreign policy makers face."

"If there is a corrupt official taking million dollar bribes from the Russians, maybe that should be public knowledge rather than hidden in a WikiLeaks cable?" he said.

But it also highlights a very important potential controversy: the refusal of numerous witnesses to cooperate in any way with this pernicious investigation. One witness who has appeared before the Grand Jury has already refused to answer any questions beyond the most basic biographical ones (name and address), invoking the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to do so, and other witnesses are highly likely to follow suit.

One option for federal prosecutors when facing a witness who refuses to answer questions on this basis is to offer them immunity, meaning that nothing they say when testifying can be used to prosecute them (they can still be prosecuted, just not with the aid of anything they say while testifying). Such an offer then precludes further invocations of the self-incrimination privilege as a grounds for refusing to answer questions, as it means there is no longer any danger that the witness could incriminate themselves by testifying. In the event the government makes such an offer, the court would almost certainly compel the witness to answer questions. But at least some of those witnesses -- ones who have already been subpoenaed or are likely to be -- intend to refuse to answer questions anyway, risking an almost-certain finding of contempt of court, which typically carries jail terms as a means of forcing testimony.

One witness or potential witness who is considering that form of civil disobedience told me they view the attempt to criminalize WikiLeaks as such a profound assault on basic freedoms, including press freedoms -- one motivated by a desire to conceal government wrongdoing and illegality -- that they would rather be imprisoned than cooperate in any way with those efforts. That is the mindset of true principled heroism, and if it actually comes to that, anyone committed to transparency and preservation of press freedoms should do everything possible to support such persons in any way they can...

"Except when we have a separately negotiated confidentiality agreement… we reserve the right to disclose any information about you to law enforcement authorities or to a requesting third party, without notice, in order to comply with any applicable laws and/or requests under legal process, to operate our systems properly, to protect the property or rights of Dow Jones or any affiliated companies, and to safeguard the interests of others."

We have all witnessed the power that this surge in connectivity can have in shaping society and holding governments accountable. New media empowers individuals around the world to share information and express opinions in ways unimaginable just ten years ago.

Even as we celebrate innovations that make information easier to share, we are reminded that in many places around the world, journalists are still targeted for harassment and abuse, and are sometimes killed. Today, we remember that journalism is a calling of everyday heroes. We must continue to stand up for those who speak out in perilous circumstances as they pursue, record, and report the truth.