Howard Zinn speaking on the importance of activism at the University of Chicago in November 2009. Must see for anyone committed to social change.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Lady Gaga CD Used To Smuggle Top Secret US Government Details
David Renshaw reports for PopDash:
Lady Gaga has found herself at the centre of the much publicised 'Wikileaks Scandal' after it was discovered that thousands of sensitive US government documents were copied onto CD's officers believed contained the 'Bad Romance' stars music.
Amongst the information leaked to the infamous Wikileaks website include claims that the Chinese government regularly hack computers, discussions regarding a US invasion of Iran and allegations of 'innapropriate behaviour' from a member of the British Royal Family.
The documents were allegedly leaked by Bradley Manning, a gay soldier who claimed he wanted to unleash "worldwide anarchy" with the documents.
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And, from WikiLeaks release dumps on diplomacy byTommy Maple by Tommy Maple [The Independent Florida Alligator]:
WikiLeaks spewed out a bunch of classified American diplomatic documents this week, and it was disheartening to learn that what passes for statecraft these days could easily be mistaken for a worldly version of Us Weekly.
That the documents were all stolen and given to WikiLeaks by a young gay dude lip-synching Lady Gaga only ups the ante on the farcical nature of our spy networks.
Bradley Manning, giving plenty of ammunition to those in favor of keeping Lady Gaga fans out of the U.S. military, is quoted in London's Guardian newspaper telling a fellow hacker that he "would come in with music on a CD-RW labeled with something like 'Lady Gaga' … erase the music … then write a compressed split file. No one suspected a thing ... [I] listened and lip-synched to Lady Gaga's 'Telephone' while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history."
It is of vital importance to the future of our country to immediately outlaw the access of critical national security documents to military or non-military personnel while they are listening to music featuring Lady Gaga, with additional punishment written into the law for any sort of fist-pumping or air drums.
The latest document dump by WikiLeaks mainly involves transmissions by our various ambassadors and diplomats that amount to snarky and inane musings about world leaders — most of which are patently obvious to even the most casual observer of geopolitics.
Back in the day, the fight against communism honed our spies in the cutthroat, zero-sum game of international espionage.
Now, in the mushy age of global materialism, we have spies like us.
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An Interview With WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange [Forbes]
From the interview by Andy Greenberg, Forbes
How much of this trove of documents that you're sitting on is related to the private sector?
About fifty percent.
You've been focused on the U.S. military mostly in the last year. Does that mean you have private sector-focused leaks in the works?
Yes. If you think about it, we have a publishing pipeline that's increasing linearly, and an exponential number of leaks, so we're in a position where we have to prioritize our resources so that the biggest impact stuff gets released first.
So do you have very high impact corporate stuff to release then?
Yes, but maybe not as high impact…I mean, it could take down a bank or two.
That sounds like high impact.
But not as big an impact as the history of a whole war. But it depends on how you measure these things.
When will WikiLeaks return to its older model of more frequent leaks of smaller amounts of material?
If you look at the average number of documents we're releasing, we're vastly exceeding what we did last year. These are huge datasets. So it's actually very efficient for us to do that.
If you look at the number of packages, the number of packages has decreased. But if you look at the average number of documents, that's tremendously increased.
So will you return to the model of higher number of targets and sources?
Yes. Though I do actually think…[pauses] These big package releases. There should be a cute name for them.
Megaleaks?
Megaleaks. That's good. These megaleaks…They're an important phenomenon, and they're only going to increase. When there's a tremendous dataset, covering a whole period of history or affecting a whole group of people, that's worth specializing on and doing a unique production for each one, which is what we've done.
We're totally source dependent. We get what we get. As our profile rises in a certain area, we get more in a particular area. People say why don't you release more leaks form the Taliban. So I say hey, help us, tell more Taliban dissidents about us.
These megaleaks, as you call them that, we haven't seen any of those from the private sector.
No, not at the same scale for the military.
Will we?
Yes. We have one related to a bank coming up, that's a megaleak. It's not as big a scale as the Iraq material, but it's either tens or hundreds of thousands of documents depending on how you define it.
Is it a U.S. bank?
Yes, it's a U.S. bank.
One that still exists?
Yes, a big U.S. bank.
The biggest U.S. bank?
No comment.
When will it happen?
Early next year. I won't say more.
What do you want to be the result of this release?
[Pauses] I'm not sure.
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Grimsson: Iceland Faring Much Better After Permitting Banks To Fail
From Iceland Is No Ireland as State Free of Bank Debt, Grimsson Says by Jonas Bergman and Omar R. Valdimarsson, Bloomberg:
Iceland's President Olafur R. Grimsson said his country is better off than Ireland thanks to the government's decision to allow the banks to fail two years ago and because the krona could be devalued.
"The difference is that in Iceland we allowed the banks to fail," Grimsson said in an interview with Bloomberg Television's Mark Barton today. "These were private banks and we didn't pump money into them in order to keep them going; the state did not shoulder the responsibility of the failed private banks."
Ireland's Prime Minister Brian Cowen said this week his government has discussed an 85 billion-euro ($112 billion) bailout with the European Union and International Monetary Fund after the country's banks threatened to bring the euro member to the brink of bankruptcy. Iceland's banks, which still owe creditors about $85 billion, were split to create domestic units needed to keep the financial system running, while foreign liabilities remained within the failed lenders.
As a consequence, "Iceland is faring much better than anybody expected," Grimsson said. The Icelandic state's liability on foreign depositor claims stemming from Icesave accounts at failed Landsbanki Islands hf should be put to a national referendum, he said.
"How far can we ask ordinary people -- farmers and fishermen and teachers and doctors and nurses -- to shoulder the responsibility of failed private banks," said Grimsson. "That question, which has been at the core of the Icesave issue, will now be the burning issue in many European countries."
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