US Government Seeks 'Willful Denial' Software That Will Block Wikileaks Data From Federal Employees

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the are-they-serious? dept

It’s been both depressing and amusing to watch the federal government react to Wikileaks with some of the dumbest policy decisions possible. First, we saw the Library of Congress block access to Wikileaks’ site, not realizing that the site was barely a part of how the documents were being distributed, while still frustrating Congressional Research Service analysts who needed to access the site as a part of their research. Then, we had reports of the Defense Department crudely blocking access to any website that had Wikileaks in the title, followed by the Air Force’s decision to block access to news sites, such as the NY Times, that are discussing Wikileaks.

This is all downright bizarre. Basically, this is content that everyone else in the world can access and read about, except for government employees who don’t look at it at home. The whole exercise seems like a complete waste of time and money by the US government, and it’s about to get worse. According to some reports, the federal government is reaching out to security firms to see if they can build a system to block all access to Wikileaks content from within the federal government’s computer system. One company asked about this notes that it’s different than what they normally do, which is focused on keeping documents in a network (too late for that), rather than architecting a system to keep documents out.

At what point will the government finally admit that if a classified document is leaked and widely available, it’s counterproductive to keep pretending that it’s still classified. It doesn’t help anyone, and it just makes the government look silly and in denial. I prefer my government to respond to reality, not pretend reality doesn’t exist.

Filed Under: denial, federal government, firewall, us government, wikileaks
Companies: wikileaks

Bank Of America — Thought To Be Wikileaks Next Target — Suddenly Tries To Block Payments To Wikileaks

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the barn-door-back-there dept

This is pretty amusing. Back at the end of November, Wikileaks had indicated that its next leak involved a very large US bank that was apparently doing some bad things — and many people zeroed in on Bank of America as the target. And then, just a few weeks later, Bank of America announces (late on a Friday night, in an attempt to hide it) that it will join Paypal, Visa and Mastercard in trying to block all payments to Wikileaks.

Of course, I don’t quite see how Bank of America does that. Is Bank of America really saying that it can block you from spending your money the way you want to? About the only thing it can really do is stop direct wire transfers, but I’d imagine not too many people are doing that. As for systems like Flattr, which is currently a way of supporting Wikileaks financially, I really don’t see how any of the above firms can block people from using Flattr to support Wikileaks. All anyone knows with Flatter is that they’re supporting Flattr, so you can use Visa or MasterCard via Paypal to pay Flattr, and then Flattr Wikileaks, and those financial firms won’t know the difference.

It seems like all these financial firms are really doing is highlighting how they, too, don’t quite understand the nature of a distributed internet, and a distributed payment infrastructure — even if they think they power it.

Filed Under: blocks, payment, wikileaks
Companies: bank of america, wikileaks

Will The Journalists Who Outed CIA's Pakistan Chief Be Treated Like Julian Assange?

Politics

from the questions,-questions dept

Richard Kulawiec pointed us to the news that got a lot of attention last week concerning how the CIA had recalled its chief in Pakistan back to the US after his name was outed in a lawsuit. The lawsuit was filed by a guy who blames the CIA for his relatives being killed in a drone attack. Apparently, two Pakistani journalists gave him the name of the CIA chief, and the guy included it in his lawsuit, leading to the recall. While the American press is not reporting the guy’s name, it’s widely available in foreign coverage.

That said, Richard asks a key question: given how many people have complained that Julian Assange should face trial/imprisonment/death etc. for his work with Wikileaks — which it’s been claimed, with little proof, has actually put Americans in danger — why are we not seeing the same sort of claims about the Pakistani journalists who put this CIA boss in danger? After all, the situations are similar. In both cases, these are non-Americans who had certain information, which they revealed. Except, in the case of Assange and Wikileaks, there’s actually been an ongoing effort to redact names and keep important details like that secret. That didn’t happen with the Pakistani journalists and the CIA chief. So why is one so evil, and the others mostly being ignored?

Filed Under: cia, intelligence, outing, pakistan, wikileaks
Companies: wikileaks

So After Torturing Bradley Manning For Months, US Officials Offer Him A Deal If He Says Assange 'Conspired' With Him

Free Speech

from the dirty-tricks dept

This is hardly a surprise, but after locking up Bradley Manning in solitary confinement for seven months — a condition that much of the world has deemed to be torture — and looking for ways to use a computer hacking law to charge Julian Assange, rumors are that officials have offered Bradley Manning a plea deal, in which he would claim that Assange “conspired” with him to get and leak the documents. From all the info that’s come out already, there’s been little to suggest that there was any actual conspiring, but it appears that our Justice Department has decided (incorrectly) that Julian Assange is the more important target than Bradley Manning, and so it wants to bring Assange down.

Of course, as many have been saying all along, bringing charges against Assange, even with Manning accepting a plea bargain, will do serious harm to the US. It will highlight how the Justice Department twists laws in an attempt to harm the publisher of information, very much against the basic principles of the First Amendment. If this does come to pass, it will represent a massive chilling of free speech rights, from an administration that has put itself forth as a champion of such free speech rights around the globe. However, the one thing it won’t do is actually chill such leaks from happening. As more and more competitors to Wikileaks pop up, you can bet that a legal attack on Assange will only increase the resolve of some of the folks behind those other offerings.

Filed Under: bradley manning, conspiracy, julian assange, plea bargain, wikileaks
Companies: wikileaks

Congressional Hearing On Wikileaks Surprisingly Focuses More On Gov't Overly Secretive Actions

Politics

from the good-for-them dept

Earlier today, Congress held hearings about Wikileaks and, given how the government has been reacting so far, I fully expected pure grandstanding about how “evil” Wikileaks is and how Julian Assange must be brought to justice. There was some of that, but it appears much more of it was focused on how the US government was abusing the classification system to make things secret that never should have been secret — and how that was the real problem. Panel chair John Conyers apparently kicked off the hearing by saying that criminal charges against Assange would be “extreme” and saying that “caution is needed” before anything is done:

“Prosecuting WikiLeaks would raise the most fundamental questions about free speech, about who is a journalist and what citizens can know about their government,” Conyers said. “The problem today is not too little secrecy but too much secrecy.”

He also noted — in contrast to much of the hysteria we’ve heard — that while the releases have been embarassing “the real-world consequences have been fairly modest.” Rep. William Delahunt appeared to echo these sentiments and again noted that secrecy by the government has been the real issue:

“Secrecy is the trademark of totalitarianism. In contrast, transparency and openness is why democracy is all about,” Delahunt said.

“There is far too much secrecy and overclassification in the executive branch, and I think it puts American democracy at risk.”

Rep. Bob Goodlatte also noted that expansion of government secrecy was “out of control” and “illegitimate,” while Rep. Bobby Scott noted that we need to remember the 1st Amendment. Rep. Hank Johnson warned of the “chilling effects” of prosecuting Wikileaks.

Many panelists appeared to make similar points as well. Thomas Blanton, the director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, told the panel that the government always overreacts to leaks and that “more openness makes us more secure.” He also urged the government to “use a little restraint” and to avoid rushing into charging Julian Assange with violating the Espionage Act.

Of course, not everyone argued this way. Many of the Congressional Reps still seemed pretty bloodthirsty to charge Assange. And some of the panelists seemed to agree. Kenneth Wainstein, a lawyer from O’Melveny and Myers, warned the panel that any lawsuit against Wikileaks would raise serious First Amendment issues but then argued that the government could easily distinguish Wikileaks from the media though he did so by misstating that Wikileaks was “indiscriminately” dumping documents — a point that has been debunked already. Gabriel Shoenfeld, who is a big supporter of government secrecy, spent a lot of time talking about how there’s too much secrecy and that the government leaks info to the press all the time but ended his talk by saying that doesn’t apply to Wikileaks.

However, even those who seemed to think that the government should still seek to prosecute Assange, they all seemed to admit that the government is way too secretive and abuses its classification privileges.

Filed Under: congress, espionage, hearings, secrecy, wikileaks
Companies: wikileaks

How Wikileaks & Operation Payback Have Exposed Infrastructure That Should Be Decentralized, But Isn't

Culture

from the real-trend dept

The classic line about how “the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it,” is certainly being proven true yet again these days, but there is an interesting corollary that might be worth considering in this as well: which is that sometimes these attempts at censorship expose the need for new routes, and those routes are quickly created.

We’ve been pointing out repeatedly for a while now that the real issue we’re witnessing with things like Wikileaks and Operation Payback is the confusion a centralized/closed system has when it comes up against a more distributed and open system. Much of what we’ve seen concerning both Wikileaks and Operation Payback over the past few weeks is exposing the cracks in the system where things that should be more decentralized and distributed are not.

However, it seems that each time new centralized intermediaries spring up to cause problems, all it’s really done is to drive more people to figure out ways to create more distributed and decentralized alternatives. We’ve already discussed a more decentralized DNS system, but now the EFF is listing out a variety of distributed and decentralized projects that it hopes will help people route around censorship attempts.

As the EFF notes, many of those individual projects probably won’t succeed or catch on, but others will. In a few years, it will be interesting to look back and see just how many new, more distributed and decentralized infrastructure systems really came out of the “fights” we’re seeing splashed across the news today. The real shame, of course, is that the US government, who has been speaking so forcefully about being against online censorship over the last year or so, may ultimately be the leading cause for these new infrastructure tools to be built, and not because it supported them directly, but because of its current attempts at censorship.

Filed Under: centralized, closed, decentralized, infrastructure, open, operation payback, wikileaks
Companies: wikileaks

US Looking To Use Computer Hacking Law Against Assange

Legal Issues

from the stretchety-stretch-stretch dept

It appears that the US government is realizing the fact that an espionage charge against Julian Assange over Wikileaks is unlikely to succeed and would probably freak out the press (at least those in the press who remember the details of the First Amendment). So, instead, it’s moved on to trying to use the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), commonly known as our anti-hacking law.

Of course, as we noted a few months ago, this law has been twisted and abused regularly to bring charges against people by pretending it covers things it doesn’t. The most famous, of course, was the Lori Drew case, where prosecutors tried to charge Lori Drew with computer hacking, because she was part of a trio of people who used MySpace to bully a young girl, who later committed suicide. How was that “hacking”? Well, the prosecutors claimed that she didn’t obey MySpace’s terms of service, and thus “illegally accessed” MySpace. Luckily, the judge eventually tossed that out.

So what about Julian Assange? How could he have possibly violated a US anti-hacking while not being in the US at all? Well, the feds are apparently scanning through the chat logs between Bradley Manning and Adrian Lamo to see if there’s any evidence at all that Assange could be charged with conspiracy under the CFAA in somehow aiding Manning in leaking the secrets. You can read the CFAA here if you want to see the full act. The argument, then, is that if they can drum up enough proof that Assange somehow aided Manning, it becomes a conspiracy and Assange can be charged under that act as well. So far, about the best they’ve apparently come up with is that Manning hinted that he had a “relationship” with Assange — but the details in the chat logs suggest they talked a few times and that’s about the extent of the “relationship.” Separately, Assange gave Manning (and potentially other sources) a more direct FTP account to upload materials. Once again, this seems like grasping at straws, and seems so trumped up that it will continue to do more to hurt America’s reputation than anything leaked by Wikileaks.

The problem is that it seems pretty clear that any association between Assange and Manning was a loose one. Suggesting that working with a source, and offering them an easy way to give you information is a conspiracy to commit computer hacking would create a massive chilling effect on anyone in the press who regularly reports on secret information. Bob Woodward, Seymour Hersh and a variety of other famous investigative reporters have clearly been much more closely connected to their sources, but it would be ridiculous to charge them with “conspiracy.” It’s really sad that our government is wasting tax dollars trying to find trumped up charges for Assange.

Filed Under: bradley manning, hacking, julian assange, us government, wikileaks
Companies: wikileaks

Columbia Journalism School Staff Warns Obama That Prosecuting Wikileaks Will 'Set A Dangerous Precedent'

Free Speech

from the heed-the-warning dept

While it’s been unfortunate watching the traditional press attack Wikileaks for doing the job it refused to do itself, it’s nice to see the staff of Columbia’s journalism school (still considered one of the top journalism schools) come out and warn the Obama administration that prosecuting Wikileaks will set a dangerous precedent for freedom of the press, even for those who disagree with Wikileaks’ methods:

While we hold varying opinions of Wikileaks’ methods and decisions, we all believe that in publishing diplomatic cables Wikileaks is engaging in journalistic activity protected by the First Amendment. Any prosecution of Wikileaks’ staff for receiving, possessing or publishing classified materials will set a dangerous precedent for reporters in any publication or medium, potentially chilling investigative journalism and other First Amendment-protected activity.

As a historical matter, government overreaction to publication of leaked material in the press has always been more damaging to American democracy than the leaks themselves.

The U.S. and the First Amendment continue to set a world standard for freedom of the press, encouraging journalists in many nations to take significant risks on behalf of transparency. Prosecution in the Wikileaks case would greatly damage American standing in free-press debates worldwide and would dishearten those journalists looking to this nation for inspiration.

Seems to more or less summarize the position we’ve taken over the last few weeks as well…

Filed Under: free speech, journalism, obama, professors, wikileaks
Companies: wikileaks

US Is Apparently Torturing Bradley Manning, Despite No Trial And No Conviction

Legal Issues

from the this-is-not-the-america-we-were-told-about dept

While there’s been a ton of attention paid to Julian Assange’s arrest and situation, much less attention has been paid to Bradley Manning, the Army Private who has been accused of being the source of many of Wikileaks’ more recent leaks concerning the US government and military. It seemed like a reasonable question to ask, upon his arrest, whether or not he was simply whistleblowing or breaking the law. Certainly this is a question that is open for debate. What is pretty clear is that his intentions were absolutely to be a whistleblower.

In his internet chat with Adrian Lamo (the guy who turned him in), Manning made it clear that if he was trying to cause problems for the US or had malicious intentions, he could have sold the info to foreign governments. However, his reasoning for leaking the info was clear, saying he was hoping it would cause “worldwide discussion, debates and reform.” He also noted that he was driven to do this after being involved in detaining Iraqis who had simply done a scholarly critique of the current government, which he believed went against basic free speech principles. Again, no matter what you believe about his specific actions, it’s pretty clear his intent was to whistleblow. He was upset about what he felt were illegal activities and his goal was to get that information out and to create discussion leading to reform. That’s the classic definition of whistleblowing.

I knew Manning had been arrested and was being held somewhere, but Glenn Greenwald is now covering how he is being tortured, despite the fact he has not been tried. He has been held in intensive solitary confinement, meaning he spends 23 hours of the day in total isolation. He has not even been given a pillow or sheets for his bed. As Greenwald highlights, there is widespread agreement that such prolonged solitary confinement is well beyond the standard level of torture, is forbidden in many modern civilizations, and leads to long term psychological issues for those who go through it.

And all this for a guy who has not even been convicted of anything.

Again: I recognize that some people believe that Manning is a “traitor” or some sort of “enemy.” But even if that’s the case, why should he not be put on trial for it, before he’s put into solitary confinement? As Greenwald notes, “Manning has been a model detainee, without any episodes of violence or disciplinary problems.” Solitary confinement is normally used as punishment for such outbreaks for those already convicted. Putting Manning in such conditions is a purely punitive attempt to torture him, without him even being convicted.

We’ve already covered just how bad the Defense Department is at protecting whistleblowers, but this goes way beyond any of that. The message being sent here is that, even if your intentions are to expose wrongdoing, the military may lock you up and torture you for months without end and with no due process. This is not what America is supposed to be about. We’re not supposed to support torture. We’re not supposed to ignore due process. We’re supposed to encourage whistleblowing. Instead, we’re locking it up and torturing it with no trial or conviction.

This is, frankly, horrifying.

I’m not convinced that Manning did the right thing in leaking all of those documents. Rather, I think there’s a compelling argument that he went way too far in releasing way too much. But it’s a point that can be debated. However, Manning has no such opportunity to debate it. Instead, he’s being psychologically tortured with no method of even making his own case.

Filed Under: bradley manning, due process, solitary confinement, torture, whistleblowing, wikileaks
Companies: wikileaks

Congressional Research Service Analysts Complaining About Blocked Access To Wikileaks

News You Could Do Without

from the can't-do-their-job dept

With the Library of Congress blocking access to Wikileaks over some misguided notion of what its legal responsibilities are, Copycense points us to a report about how librarians across the nation are now arguing over whether or not this was the right move, with many feeling that it was decidedly a bad move.

However, perhaps more interesting is the claim, in the middle of the article, that analysts at the Congressional Research Service are negatively impacted by this as well:

“Since the Congressional Research Service is a component of the Library, this means that CRS researchers will be unable to access or to cite the leaked materials in their research reports to Congress. Several current and former CRS analysts expressed perplexity and dismay about the move, and they said it could undermine the institution?s research activities.”

“It’s a difficult situation,” one unidentified CRS analyst told Aftergood. “The information was released illegally, and it’s not right for government agencies to be aiding and abetting this illegal dissemination. But the information is out there. Presumably, any Library of Congress researcher who wants to access the information that WikiLeaks illegally released will simply use their home computers or cell phones to do so. Will they be able to refer directly to the information in their writings for the Library? Apparently not, unless a secondary source, like a newspaper, happens to have already cited it.”

In other words, as expected, all the block is really doing is making it more difficult for our government to do its job. That’s what you get when your reaction to information like this getting out is to pretend it’s not actually out.

Filed Under: blocks, congressional research service, wikileaks
Companies: wikileaks