I’ve had a tough day today, taking in the full implications of Glenn Greenwald’s post (see also Heather Brooke’s piece) on the detention conditions of Bradley Manning.
Extremist opposition to Wikileaks by American career politicians may not be entirely out of a stated concern for American national security. A credible argument can be made that, instead, some political self-interest might be involved
The first wave of Wikileaks' Cablegate ground ashore Sunday night. (To search, visit rpgp.org's full text search site.) Coverage has been generally good. I have found Der Spiegel and The Guardian's websites invaluable.
A lot hangs in the balance this weekend. The telecoms infrastructure of our world is the theater for an attempt at a revolution – a fundamental change in the power and organizational structure of power – that is to my mind no less significant that those revolutions of the early modern era, which express still in the popular consciousness the core ideals of our now-broken democracies. Despite the insistence of its fiercest critics, it promises to be far less bloody than those. I dare to hope that it can succeed. An ever growing chorus of netizens, transnational in constituency, dares also...
Something might happen very soon.
You might hear about it.
If you do, and you want to know more...
(originally published November 25, 2010)
Today, Wikileaks’ Twitter account made two enigmatic announcements about its plans for future disclosures, and thereby, in usual style, confused the professional journalism sector. The comments hint at a future release of information that far eclipses the public interest value of 2010′s high profile Wikileak releases.
Wanting once to escape from a world where curiosity was no virtue, I made a circuitous approach to philosophy and higher learning. It was only gradually clear to me what universities were for. It seems I come late to most things in life. As late as my early 20s I felt as if my choices were informed by a body of knowledge constrained at its edges not only by my own ignorance, but by ignorance of the true extent of that ignorance. Understanding, for me, requires a grasp of the global to inform the local.
It has been 76 days since the news initially broke on August 20th about the Julian Assange rape allegations. It must be said it is getting to look a little bit suspicious. Chief Prosecutor Marianne Ny keeps issuing the same press release, intimating that a clear decision may come at any time, but may take a while too.
What happens now? What’s the point? I’ve heard this question a good few times over the last few days. Sometimes it’s not really motivated by a desire to find the answer. In these cases, it’s just a rhetorical question undercutting the importance of the documents or reflecting general cynicism about the susceptibility to change of the networks of power held culpable in the logs. I will write more about this later.
The notion of human interest journalism enjoys far too much custom in our media, but it still seems worthy of report. I encountered this tweet today. I’ve embedded the featured link into the image...
(originally published October 26, 2010)
Glenn Greenwald tweeted a link to an article on FoxNews, by Christian Whiton, in which Whiton calls for executive action on the threat that Wikileaks poses to the United States. The article is riddled with factual errors. For example, it perpetuates the false belief that the Iraq War Logs, released by Wikileaks on Friday, contains the names of informants, who might therefore be in danger. It has been well publicized by now that the Iraq War Logs are thoroughly redacted, but this doesn’t stop the propaganda apparatus in the United States pretending otherwise.
Wanting once to escape from a world where curiosity was no virtue, I made a circuitous approach to philosophy and higher learning. It was only gradually clear to me what universities were for. It seems I come late to most things in life. As late as my early 20s I felt as if my choices were informed by a body of knowledge constrained at its edges not only by my own ignorance, but by ignorance of the true extent of that ignorance. Understanding, for me, requires a grasp of the global to inform the local. The global was inadequately catered for in my education, as they prepared me for being useful to my economy. I wonder now what sort of awareness it was that I had then.
Intuitively then I knew that newspapers and television were no source of knowledge, and that neither was the conventional wisdom that informed all our guesses as to the nature of things the other side of the planet. I could speak on nothing with confidence, because it felt as if all that I knew was derived from hearsay and speculation, though it came from Organs of Truth that sufficed for most. Comfortable truths were never very comfortable for me, and sometimes I hated the casualness with which others repeated them, the cause for their ubiquity. It seemed like a conspiracy of wretchedness in which we all got to play a part.
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