Unsubstantiated drive by smears of Wikileaks et al.

[url=http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22371]If We Lose our Internet Freedoms Because of Wikileaks, You Should At Least Know Why[/url]

Why would Time Magazine be writing about WikiLeaks in 2007 when they hadn't done anything yet? Apparently there really are people who hate us for our freedoms.

Actually, it looks as of Friday Night (December 10th) Manning's defense has received the grand total of [b]zero dollars[/b] from WikiLeaks, not the the 10-20k they said they would donate earlier in the week.

According to [url=http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503543_162-20025358-503543.html]CBS News[/url]:

Quote:

However, WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said last week they would be donating only $20,000 to the funds. Late Tuesday, Hrafnsson said in an e-mail to The Washington Post that there had been a misunderstanding about the status of the payment had been "rectified" and the "payment is being processed now." 

Paterson said he had an email exchange later in the week with someone in Germany who can reportedly release the funds, [b]but, as of late Friday afternoon, the money had still not arrived[/b].

Sorry Private Manning, you're SOL.  Should have never trusted that Assange fellow (too busy criss-crossing the world in search of blow jobs on the WikiLeaks dime).

Honestly, I'd be surprised if Manning ever sees one red cent from WikiLeaks; though I've been wrong before.

Cueball wrote:

I guess you have never tried to send money overseas. Bank transfers can take up to a week, sometimes more, especially large amounts, since of course they are investigated for fraud, money laundering, links to international terrorism and so on and so forth. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the money gets hung up in transit for months, even just to feed this silly little smear campaign against wikileaks.

WAU foundation has basically been cut off from the usual routes of commerce to the USA, in case you haven't been reading the press. That is what instigated the DDoS attacks you have been going on about. Speaking of which, I see they have arrested some snot nosed kid in the Netherlands for his involvement in that heinous international crimnal conspiracy. Booh! Scary.

I suppose you think that Martin Luther King's legacy is forever tarnished because he was caught partying with Hookers in Stockholm when he won his Nobel Prize. Rightly, for the morally pure, such as yourself, MLK should have sworn celibacy and slept on a blanket in the cold until each and every impoverished black sharecropper in the USA was living in a 3 bedroom house with a 2 car garage.

Cold uncaring bastard that MLK was.

Let me know when you promise to give up fucking until they free Tibet, or whatever cause it is that you like to think you support.

I did some googling, and it seems these allegations of King and prostitutes are false.  It seems though that he did have numerous extramarital affairs.  It doesn't lower my opinion of him, however.

What would lower my opinion is if he had raised money for say an imprisoned Freedom Rider, and then, instead of forwarding money to that person's defense, spent it on prostitutes or affairs instead.  That is a betrayal of the solidarity all civil rights movements depend on.

I raised the issue of Assange sleeping with WikiLeaks volunteers originally in the context of Naomi Wolf's hypocrisy in excusing him, while having denounced almost exactly the same behaviour in Harold Bloom previously.

Here's some more rife hypocrisy emanating from the WikiLeaks camp.

This is how Assange lectured the [url=http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jul/14/julian-assange-whistleblower... in July on the treatment of journalistic sources:

Quote:

"There has been an unconscionable failure to protect sources," [Assange] says. "It is those sources who take all the risks. I was at a journalism conference a few months ago, and there were posters up saying a thousand journalists had been killed since 1944. That's outrageous. How many policemen have been killed since 1944?"

Though I suppose keeping Manning in jail is one way to protect a source.  At least Tom Flanagan won't be able to call in a drone hit on him.

Gonna add another smear here against WikiLeaks.  The out-of-control pro-WikiLeaks hacker movement based on the 4chan boards has dumped more than 250,000 user accounts and passwords from the Gawker website.  Gawker is the slightly gossipier sister of the feminist Jezebel blog (same media group).

From the [url=http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/dec/13/gawker-hackers-password...

Quote:

The hackers cracked more than a quarter of a million passwords in the website's database, dumping the information on the internet, where it could easily be found – including the personal details of Gawker's British founder and mastermind, Nick Denton.

[...]

The first sign of the attack was a tweet posted to the Twitter account of the Gawker gadget site, Gizmodo, which said "Support WikiLeaks" and added "Gawker.com hacked, 1.5 million usernames/emails/passwords taken."

Gawker's crime appears to have been criticizing 4chan's anti-social behaviour:

Quote:

The image board has been the subject of regular posts on Gawker written in the site's trademark snarky and forthright style. Gawker has called 4Chan the "ground zero for internet mischief", "[home of] the internet's worst trolls", and likened the experience of reading it to consuming "heroin mixed with fibreglass".

[b]Last July, Gawker accused the wholly anonymous frequenters of 4Chan of hounding an 11-year-old girl so ferociously that she required police protection.[/b]

Within hours 4Chan hit back, organising a group attack on Gawker that succeeded in slowing, though not bringing down, the site.

So add bullying of preteen girls to general 4chan hacker homophobia and racism.  If I was a campaigner for integrity, transparency and decency among actors in the public sphere, these are the people I would want on my side (not).

I wonder also if this attack on Gawker was not in some way retaliation for Jezebel's feminist critique of Assange's problems in Sweden.  Jezebel has been pretty uncompromising in dissecting the "blame the victim"/"psycho-feminist laws" narrative prevalent in some quarters.

Finally, as has been said elsewhere, the WikiLeaks camp is dogged by serious criminality that they have not sufficiently distanced themselves from.  There is no way this latest hack can be spun as a "grassroots uprising".  This is basically just common burglary.

Roscoe, that comment is a personal attack as well as anti-labour. It's also wasteful, as I see no reason why you needed to quote -=+=-'s entire post to make one lousy comment. While the last point only offends me as a person, the first two are against babble policy. Knock it off.

ETA. omg. STOP QUOTING ENTIRE POSTS FOR NO REASON.

Quote:

Actually, I'm self-employed and I work at home.

I agree though, it is hard to keep a life/work balance and avoid stealing from either side of that ledger.

Fair  enough.

I am sorry that I won't be quoting anyone in particular and I apologize for the coming monster post, but I kind of feel that there is a disconnect from what I am seeing online and what is being said on babble. Take this ramble as you will, but don't dismiss it. It may seem wild and pointless, but what isn't?

What we are seeing right now is the opening stages of a world-wide cyberwar. It is a campaign of pacification being fought on many fronts. It will affect you. You will not be able to escape the long term consequences and implications of this war. You are seeing World War III begin to unfold in a world that no one bothered to think was 'real'.

To accept what is happening, to understand it, to be a part of it...you have to really question what is 'real'. I sincerely hope that everyone will start to think about this, the implications for progressive discourse and the nature of change are extremely important. The first thing you have to realize is that all day, every day, even if you're not on your computer - you're online. Everything that you've written online, submitted - it doesn't matter if you haven't either, because you're in a database somewhere - is now just as real and powerful as your words in 'real' life.

We're seeing the blurring of the lines. People have become slacktivists en masse via facebook and other social media. Inherently anarchic ideals have promulgated like no other time in human history - all thanks to the World Wide Web. So too has the military spread into the internet and have begun to see it as an inviable part of the national security mandate. You and I are civilians in a rapidly re-militarizing network - a network that has become an inescapable and integral part of your life (my proof is that if you read this, you can not do anything but accept it as true). This is how we organize, spread our words and ideas, learn, meet, entertain ourselves, love - whatever. It can all happen online, it all DOES happen online - whether you're doing it or not.
This 'whether you're doing it or not' trope now comes to an important point. Net neutrality activists hope to see the internet free of many sorts of interference. We fear the rise of the a la carte internet, where you will pay for individual services like you pay for individual channels when you're choosing digital television programming. But it goes far deeper than that - as I mentioned, the military is on the game in a major way.

All around the world the governments, militaries and law enforcement agencies are catching up to these new realities through the formation of new groupings of techies and attendant policies to empower them to police the internet. There are some extreme examples like the 'Great Firewall of China' that, just like the real Great Wall, is no more than a show of extravagance and power. There are some less extreme examples, like Australia's continuing censorship of the internet. Even closer to home, the Canadian government will shut down a variety of extremist websites. One can argue the moral implications of government intereference an make all sorts of equivocations, but few are understanding the fact that your online self - as real as your flesh and blood 'reality' - are increasingly becoming civilians and cannon fodder in major operations around the world.

The internet is huge, let's get that out of the way. People like myself and most of you who will read this post don't quite 'get it'. I know people who do 'get it' and it is every bit as massive as what we know about the universe. What we all surf and access is mostly the top, most visible layer of the internet. Thus, a metaphor must be constructed. We are the life that lives visibly near the shores of reality and the internet. Some of us dive a bit deeper and nestle ourselves in the comforting coral infrastructures of ISPs and online gaming. Deeper still will others venture until light stops falling beneath the waves of bits and bytes. This is a very important part of this entry and I hope that those that read this will take me serious - just as we know that there is so much water in the deepest depths of the ocean, swarming with life, so too is the internet deep and dark. This is a world where criminals lurk, a land of spooks, spies, pimply teenagers, electronic mercenaries, freelancers, hackers, well versed journalists, weirdos, pedophiles, security freaks - it doesn't matter what we think of these people, they have generated more information, more reality (sick, twisted, vile as some of it may be) than any other group of people on the planet. They sink into these depths and eat the detrus that falls from the brilliant regions that we inhabit. It gets stored in a whole other ecosystem where whole other cultures have developed, where different rules exist, where criminality and legitimacy are so blurry as to not make sense - an ecosystem of pure data, filled with bots, worms, malignant code and a whole other host of digital flora and fauna. Mark my words, this is a world that is near impossible to truly know. What is beyond the light is difficult to understand to those who do not live beyond it. This is the world of Wikileaks.

This world is unbridled and wild and untameable. But attempts are being made to bring it under control. Right now it is being done with the guise of actually good work, like stopping the proliferation of child pornography. Soon, though, more and more pressure will be put on the freedom of this world and it augers poorly for us up here in the bright, mainstream world. Not many of us are paranoid about our world, we aren't hosting TOR nodes or custom coding our own security measures. Most of us aren't smart enough or technically adept enough for that. God knows I'm not. But these people are. These people are factions in a hugely complicated conflict of occupation, pacification, crime, legitimacy, transparency, challenges for the sake of being challenges, etc. Wikileaks is one such facet of this complicated puzzle.

Wikileaks is being pursued because it has broken a status-quo and brought this Othernet, this dark world I speak of, to public light. How many people here honestly knew about SIPRNET before Wikileaks brought this to everyone's attention? How many people sat around and wondered about the growth of cyberwarrior platoons, the design of new cyberweapons, the crossing over of brilliant techies into the military internet? Well, time to stop wondering and thinking and time to start knowing. These are the insurgents in this new world war. While the Americans and Chinese and Russians are all vying to one up each other, every nation and every organization is getting in on the Othernet game. The US will become especially precocious. Their attempts at controlling the Othernet is going to destroy the internet just as much as the RIAA and other malignant forces. The internet was born as an integral part of the national security SIOP/COG state - it was called DARPANET and was designed to allow the military to function more easily in a post-nuclear war world. The internet doesn't matter anymore, really. It is nice that we can talk and that Wikileaks can share their information. What matters is the Othernet, where all of the dark information floats around waiting for someone to find it. Smokey rooms in Foggy Bottom and Langley, VA have been replaced by bottles of Faygo and Mountain Dew and IRC denizens.

This brings me to 4chan and Anon which have been referenced in passing without any major insights or even knowledge, just vague misunderstandings and mainstream media interpretations. Believe me when I say this, 4chan is full of racism, bigotry, homophobia, all of that - I know this because I would be what is termed an 'oldfag' (the same way that I can't really be considered a newbie around here) in that internet culture. People here on babble are going to have to really come to grips with a whole other culture that most of us will find repugnant and difficult to understand. It will be written off as juvenile teenagers. This is sheer foolishness. What has arisen is a whole separate culture to ourselves on babble. Just like anything in the world, you can only read so much about it - it is arrogant to make broad assumptions about these things without immersing yourself in these bizarre worlds. 4chan is made up of a variety of imgboards, a Japanese standard that is very different to the bb and forum culture that arose in North America. Each of these imgboards fulfill a variety of niches. Some of them are more mature than one would give it credit for, some of them are conspiracy based, some of them are to show off art, some of them are pornographic.
One of them is /b/ or the Random board. This is where a lot of people will get hung up with the bizarre shock humour of 4chan. This is a world where everyone from teenagers on up to adults fraternize and insult each other with increasingly shocking and offensive content. Say what you will about this, but it is a whole other culture that is not within the mainstream and mainstream media interpretations of it will not fully flesh out the nature of this - just like life amongst radical leftists or many of the 'cults' or anything like that. There is a reflexive urge to dominate and minimize the importance of what is new. 4chan is a very complicated website that is immensely popular and generates all sorts of memes that spread across the internet (I even see their bastard offspring crop here from time to time as jokes that get spread online - chances are it has been repeated by some homophobic, racist 14 year old on 4chan, perhaps they were its originator?). And guess what? /b/ for all of its offensiveness does not allow child pornography to be posted. Their rules are very different than ours here. What would get you banned on babble would get you applause at 4chan. What would get you applause on babble would draw dirision and irrelavance on 4chan. A further point is that /b/ and its related IRC channels and cultural mores would be where Anon originated.

4chan is thusly the birthplace of Anon. Anon is not your army. Anon will rouse itself to do its own bidding when the horde says so. Understanding their motives and actions can be difficult for outsiders - mostly because of the lack of mainstream internet traditions in their means of organizing. Mostly because most progressives would think it beneath them, driven by the puritanical PC discourse of the mainstream media, to visit these places online where far more change is driven than any NDP listserv. Whether we like it or not, the face of this insurgency is pimply, will tell you to fuck off, will question your sexuality and round out the conversation with a static racist comment followed by a stately LULZ. Welcome to the new world.

This new world is being shaped by groups like Anon which are spread out across the internet - all across the world - from parent's basements to dorm rooms to successful 30-something programmers with a sick sense of humour. A common theme is that many of these people are technically adept and have relevant ties to people in the Othernet. They can come together and effect real change through these technical skills. They are footsoldiers and insurgents on one side of grand, unseen battle. And these people are in it to win. The horde allows for crowd driven media to rise up and allow for actions to take place. It limits accountability sure, but as I said, these are people in it to win. For the challenge, for the lulz, for a variety of reasons. And since they are in it to win the tactics are diverse. The DDoS attacks on a variety of websites that have recently made headlines have become blackened by the criminal element. I said it already, but it has to be stressed, these people are in it to win. You can't win by playing nice. You think all the cuddly cyberwarriors in the Pentagon are above using criminal elements to take down a system? The Chinese, the Russians, THE BELGIANS? Of course not, so why should their opponents be held to a bizarre standard of disproportionality?
The criminal element of the DDoS attacks was necessary for them to be successful. You can't just have volunteers tossing themselves on the stake. Sometimes you, as the leaders and the technically adept, have to take chances. You call on those ties in the Othernet who have overlapping interest and you use their abilities. In this case a lot of zombie computers were called into action to continue the DDoS. For the thousands of non-techies that downloaded the script, there isn't much they can do beyond running it and then bragging. Those people have made themselves martyrs. They're not, for the most part, too security conscience. But guess what? They meet on IRC and discuss it. They've already committed crimes by using that DDoS attack, so the media is going to play up the 'criminal' element. This is war, not idealism - and the media is going to be behind the government in this war just like they were in the lead up to Afghanistan or Iraq. The editorials will blare justice as our precious realm of freedom - that we made real through our information - is going to become more of a commodity and we will lose control. Boom.

But back to the point of criminality. Of course there is criminality when there are overlapping interests. It is going to be internationally distributed, just like Wikileaks formed on information gleaned by hackers in China working over a TOR node - so too will Anon and other internet vigilante groups use their available resources to meet their goals. They are going to take tactical risks and lose soldiers to make larger strategic gains. That's the name of the game. And of course they are concerned (link: http://i.imgur.com/LJNdB.png). They're going to be rounded up and hunted down regardless of the 'criminality' of their actions. Legality in this war matters as little as it does in 'real' life, its just that so few of us have been true casualties in the cyberwar. Sure, some identity theft goes on. Maybe some Russian criminals linked to a Brazilian hacker group that operates servers through friends in the US is using their connections to commit crimes. That's going to happen whether Anon does or not. I'm not going to excuse the culture of 4chan that is based on shock and offense, but at the same time I'm not going to stick my head in the sand and scream 'lalalalala' when it comes to the fact that 'criminality' is a damned blurry topic when it comes to the online world.
So, what does this mean for us? Well, guess what, the past ways of fighting conflicts for change are over. No longer are the majority of those raging against the system (with some success) radical leftists. No, now they're people are who are apolitical that value the freedom that the internet engendered - good and bad sides of it. These are techies and programmers and hackers who are going to be fighting an increasingly scary war against increasingly powerful government arms. The revolution will be digitized.

BABBLE GOODNIGHT (I'll probably further this rant, but it was actually several posts that were ironically all stopped when the previous wikileaks threads got closed, so I saved bits and pieces and stitched them into an incoherent whole. BEHOLD THE POWER OF THE DROPOUT)

Well done PB now join us back in the dark, which I rarely refer to here

Thanks for the heads up Papal Bull.

I can't think of anything better than a world of heterosexual men who are unsure of their sexuality calling me fag.  Sounds like paradise.

And how is that different than the world we currently have?

-=+=- wrote:

Thanks for the heads up Papal Bull.

I can't think of anything better than a world of heterosexual men who are unsure of their sexuality calling me fag.  Sounds like paradise.

And how is that different than the world we currently have?

So, are you going to say anything of substance?

I mean, I'd certainly love for you to back up your assertions about Anon and child pornography. Or anything deeper than what is being repeated in the main stream media?

Fidel wrote:

[url=http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/wikileaks-web-to-revoluti..., web to revolutionize reporting:[/color] Pilger[/url]

John Pilger wrote:

“I think the WikiLeaks disclosures have been like watching a great parade of wonderful scoops,” Pilger said in the interview.

“(It is) basic rich journalism that is telling people how the world works. It’s not just telling them what a prime minister said. It’s not framing it in how governments or other vested interests want us to think about something.

“It’s giving us the story in their words. I think it’s a revolution in journalism.”

Personally, I think Pilger is making a mistake by supporting WikiLeaks and Assange (he should be supporting OpenLeaks instead).  However, by this point in his career, Pilger has earned the right to do whatever the heck he wants.

I don't know what to think, -=+=-. I'll have to defer to Pilger when it comes to news journalism. He's got lefty cred whereas I am just an anonymous babbler. I think it's possible that some of Assange's leaks could be orchestrated by the right without him being aware but not all of them. Hard to say. Because he doesn't support the 9/11 truth movement is neither here nor there. Wikileaks wasn't in play then, and that's too bad for the 9/11 truth movement.