2011-07-03 WikiLeaks Notes: Latest News on #Cablegate Releases & #WikiLeaks
This is a "WikiLeaks News Update," constantly updated throughout each day. The blog tracks stories that are obviously related to WikiLeaks but also follows stories related to freedom of information, transparency, cybersecurity, and freedom of expression. All the times are GMT.
08:15 PM Also, back from London from an inspirational and very entertaining discussion between Julian Assange and Slavoj Zizek, moderated by Amy Goodman. Much has been written about it already, both on twitter and the special blog opened by the Frontline Club (1 , 2) for the occasion.
A video of the event is available here.
Julian Assange on the origin and impact of Wikileaks:
“We need a cablegate for the CIA, we need a cablegate for the SVR, when need a cablegate for The New York Times, actually, one of the stories that have been suppressed and how they’ve been managed. And once we start getting that sort of volume and concretize and protect the rights of everyone to communicate with one another, which to me is the basic ingredient of civilized life…
It is not the right to speak. What does it mean to have the right to speak mean if you’re on the moon? There’s no one around. It doesn’t mean anything. Rather, the right to speak comes from our rights to know and the two of us together, someone’s right to speak and someone’s right to know produce a right to communicate and so that is the grounding structure for all that we treasure about civilized life.
By civilized I don’t mean industrialized, I mean people collaborating to not do the dumb thing. To instead learn from previous experiences and learn from each other to pull with each other together in order to get through the life that we live in a less adverse way.
So, that quest to protect the historical record, and enable everyone to be a contributor to the historical record is something that I’ve been involved in for about 20 years in one way or another. So that means protecting people who contribute to our shared intellectual record. And it also means protecting publishers and encouraging distribution of historical record to everyone who needs to know about it.
After all, a historical record that has something interesting in it that you can’t find is no record at all. So, that long term vision is something I developed in various ways and I saw in around 2006 that there was a way of achieving justice through this process that could be realized using the intellectual and social capital that I had available and so that’s quite a complex plan, you should perhaps read a couple of essays on Wikileaks that go into this in more detail. So, to pull all this together, was a difficult thing to do, and to plan it out and to marshal the resources and to build not only an ideology that people could support and were encouraged by and the sources were encouraged by, but that people would defend. I think it’s extremely interesting that although, twice the venue that we had rented for this was canceled including at the Institute for Education at the University of London under the basis that we’d be too controversial, that’s why we ended up at The Troxy, at this venue. That despite that, actually, Slavoj Zizek, myself and Amy Goodman have managed to pack out nearly 2000 people in London in a Saturday at £ 25 a seat. I see that as extremely encouraging.
On the one hand we have this everyday tawdry institution censorship of saying that something is too controversial therefore you can’t hold it in an Institute of Education, on the other hand all of you came and I’m not sure that it would have happened 5 years ago. In fact I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t have happened 5 years ago. That both of those things wouldn’t have happened 5 years ago.
When I said before that censorship is always and opportunity and censorship reveals something that is positive about a society and a society with no censorship is in a very bad state, if you the censorship of not giving us this venue so easily is also related to why you’re all here. It’s the other side of the coin, that people are worried that change is possible and you’re here because you think that change is possible and you’re probably right.
So that’s been a very interesting journey to see that. And I thought I was pretty cynical and worldly 5 years ago and of course I was simply a very young and naïve fool, in retrospect. Being inside the center of the storm, I have learned not just about the structure of the government, not just about how power flows in many governments around the world that we’ve dealt with, but rather how History is shaped and distorted by the media. And I think the distortion by the media of History, of all the things we should know so we can collaborate together as a civilization is the worst thing. It is our single greatest impediment to advancement.
But, it’s changing we are rafting around media that is closed to power in all sorts of ways. But it’s not a foregone conclusion, which is makes this time so interesting. That we can rest the Internet and we can rest the various communication mechanisms we have with each other into the values of the new generation that has been educated by the Internet, has been educated outside of that mainstream media distortion and all those young people are becoming important within institutions.
I do want to talk about what it means when the most powerful institutions from the CIA to News Corporation are all organized using computer programmers, using system administrators, using technical young people. What does that mean, when all those technical young people adopt a certain value system and that they are in an institution where they do not agree with the value system and yet, actually, they’re hands on the machinery. Because there has been moments in the past like that and it is those technical young people who are the most Internet educated and have the greatest ability to receive the new values that are being spread and the new information and the facts about reality that are being spread out the mainstream media distortions.” - Julian Assange
When a man of high moral calibre is put under stress, he becomes stronger, and this is the case with Bradley Manning. - Julian Assange
WikiLeaks has not simply changed the rules. It changed the way we violate the rules, the rules of bourgeois media. - Slavoj Zizek
07:30 PM Today we celebrate Julian Assange's birthday.
@x7o tweets:
40 years ago today, Julian was born. Congratulations, world.
Cables made public by WikiLeaks show that in February 2009 the Obama administration quietly tried to persuade China to open a supply route to US forces in Afghanistan but, as military relations with Washington soured, Beijing said no.
07:15 PM Yesterday, Queer Friends of Bradley Manning participated in the London LGBT Pride March and managed to successfully raise awareness about his situation. Click here for photos and report.