The People's Record

President Obama prosecutes more whistle-blowers than all previous administrations combined.

Democracy Now! Exclusive: Julian Assange on Wikileaks, Bradley Manning, Cypherpunks & the Surveillance State

“When we look at what happens when civilization moves onto the Internet, how is it controlled at the moment? A lot of the problems we face on the Internet & the idea of the Internet is guys with guns can simply turn up to any Internet server & tell the people there to behave in a certain way just like they do with oil wells or they do with customs.

So as an international news civilization, a forum were people intellectually express themselves, where we deposit our history, political ideals & ambition, the Internet is suffering from mass interception, but on the other hand it is still subservient to the physical force in the various states that its infrastructure is located in.

Cryptography offers a way, an abstract a way from the physical world, to create as a sort of mathematical barrier between the physical world & the intellectual world, & in that way slowly declare independence from nation states. Our intellectual world cannot simply be deleted or taxed in the manner which we have suffered from for so long in nation states.”

Compare Amy Goodman & Juan Gonzalez’s great interview to CNN’s really annoying, unprofessional interview with Assange yesterday. 

Anonymous hacker behind Stratfor attack faces life in prison
November 23, 2012

A pretrial hearing in the case against accused LulzSec hacker Jeremy Hammond this week ended with the 27-year-old Chicago man being told he could be sentenced to life in prison for compromising the computers of Stratfor.

Judge Loretta Preska told Hammond in a Manhattan courtroom on Tuesday that he could be sentenced to serve anywhere from 360 months-to-life if convicted on all charges relating to last year’s hack of Strategic Forecasting, or Stratfor, a global intelligence company whose servers were infiltrated by an offshoot of the hacktivist collective Anonymous.

Hammond is not likely to take the stand until next year, but so far has been imprisoned for eight months without trial. Legal proceedings in the case might soon be called into question, however, after it’s been revealed that Judge Preska’s husband was a victim of the Stratfor hack.

According to the indictment filed in March, Hammond illegally obtained credit card information stolen from Stratfor and uploaded it to a server that was unbeknownst to him maintained by the federal government. Months earlier the FBI had arrested Hector Xavier Monsegur, a New York hacker who spearheaded LulzSec under the alias “Sabu,” and relied on from thereon out to help the authorities nab other individuals affiliated with Anonymous and LulzSec. The feds say Hammond openly admitted to compromising Stratfor’s data in online chats with their informant and unsealed a three count indictment against him relating to hacking back in March.

After Anons gained access to Stratfor’s servers, they collected a trove of internal emails and more thousands of credit card details belonging to the firm’s paid subscribers that were released last Christmas. A class action suit was filed against Strafor over the breach of security, and in June the company settled with its customers at an estimated cost of $1.75 million. Just now, though, it’s been learned that Judge Preska may have a vested interest in seeking a prosecution by any means necessary.

Among the thousands of Statfor client’s whose credit card data was compromised in the hack alleged to be linked to Hammond is Thomas J. Kavaler, a partner at the law firm of Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP and the husband of Judge Preska. The archived document dump released by LulzSec last year includes personal information from Mr. Kavaler that suggests he was victimized in the attack and thus qualifies for the class action settlement.

In a press release issued under the branding of the Anonymous collective, supporters for Hammond call for Judge Preska’s immediate resignation from the case.

“Judge Preska by proxy is a victim of the very crime she intends to judge Jeremy Hammond for. Judge Preska has failed to disclose the fact that her husband is a client of Stratfor and recuse herself from Jeremy’s case, therefore violating multiple Sections of Title 28 of the United States Code,” the statement reads.

“Judge Loretta Preska’s impartiality is compromised by her Husband’s involvement with Stratfor and a clear prejudice against Hammond exists, as evident by her statements,” it continues. “Without justice being freely, fully, and impartially administered, neither our persons, nor our rights, nor our property, can be protected.”

According to Sue Crabtree, a member of the Jeremy Hammond Solidarity Network and a witness to his bail hearing this week, Judge Preska ordered the continue incarceration of Hammond on the basis that he is a danger to the community and likely to flee the country if released from holding. Crabtree notes that Hammond does not now nor has he ever had a passport, though, and has also since been added to a terrorist watch list.

“In the end, Jeremy was denied bail because he was deemed a flight risk and more dangerous than [a] sexual predator. And yes, if you are asking yourself if this was said, it was said. Jeremy’s legal team stated they would appeal this denial of bail,” she writes on a Facebook group for Hammond.

After Anonymous went public with the hack of Strafor in December 2011, the internal emails from the intelligence firm were handed off to WikiLeaks, who soon after began publishing the findings. Among the information stored in the emails was documentation alleging that law enforcement agencies spied on Occupy Wall Street protesters and proof of an international surveillance system called Trapwire. Hammond is at this point likely to be the first US citizen tried in a civilian court for crimes relating to the whistleblower site.

Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) tells The Real News network this week that the denial of bail is both “very disturbing” and “legally wrong.”

“The bigger story is what they’ve done in this country to Jeremy Hammond, Bradley Manning, and what they have proposed to do to Julian Assange, and that’s really say that they’re going to come down as heavily as they can on people who expose government secrets, whistleblowers,” Ratner says.

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European Parliament votes to protect Wikileaks against financial blockade
November 21, 2012

European Parliament votes to protect WikiLeaks. In a landmark decision today the European Parliament initiated the drafting of legislation that would stop the arbitrary banking blockades against WikiLeaks and other organizations facing economic censorship. This is an important signal from the European lawmakers. It is a recognition of the seriousness of the precedents set in December 2010, still in force, when Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Western Union and Bank of America launched a unilateral, extrajudicial banking blockade against donations to WikiLeaks. The blockade has cost the organization more than US$50 million. The US Treasury formally found last year that there is no lawful reason why WikiLeaks should be placed on the US embargo list, but the highly political blockade continues. WikiLeaks welcomes the support of MEPs on this important issue and agrees with the European Parliament, which “considers it likely that there will be a growing number of European companies whose activities are effectively dependent on being able to accept payments by card; [and] considers it to be in the public interest to define objective rules describing the circumstances and procedures under which card payment schemes may unilaterally refuse acceptance.”

This underlines the claim by WikiLeaks that if the financial blockade against WikiLeaks is not stopped, US financial giants will be free to unilaterally decide which European companies and organizations live or die. As WikiLeaks has previously pointed out, this is an attack on fundamental rights that cannot be left unchallenged. The organization has already launched lawsuits in two European jurisdictions and is awaiting the final outcome in its complaint to the European Commission against the major credit card companies for violations of competition laws. The Commission’s decision is expected before the end of the year. WikiLeaks has been victorious in all court hearings about this issue to date.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said: “I welcome this response from EU lawmakers. European independence is important. But there is no sovereignty without economic sovereignty. Politicized US financial monopolies must not be able to censor European organizations with impunity.”

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Wikileaks comment on the reelection of President Obama
November 7, 2012

Obama promised a more open government. But instead his administration has built a state within a state, placing nearly five million Americans under the national security clearance system, replete with secret laws, secret budgets, secret bailouts, secret killings, secret mass spying, and secret detention without charge.

Four more years in the same direction cannot be tolerated.

The Obama administration continues to conduct a “whole of government” investigation of “unprecedented scale and nature” into WikiLeaks and its people. It has fuelled the extrajudicial banking blockade against the WikiLeaks and has held an alleged WikiLeaks source, Bradley Manning, for 899 days without trial, in conditions that the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan Mendez, formally found amounted to torture.

Mr Assange has been formally found to be a political refugee over the Obama administration’s behavior, U.S. ambassadors publicly warned countries such as Switzerland not to offer him asylum.

The Obama-Biden campaign brags of having prosecuted twice as many national security whistleblowers as “all previous administrations combined”. This must change.

Politicians always say your decision, come election-time, will determine the future. But, as has been seen with the Obama administration, deciding on who gets into formal office is not a meaningful choice, because when you vote your party into government you also vote the government, including all its agencies and contractors, into your party.

Parties taking office are eliminated as the restraining voice of opposition. The last four years, like the next four years, will see the U.S. republican party as the ‘restraining’ voice of opposition. 

But there is another option.

It was WikiLeaks’ revelations – not the actions of President Obama – that forced the U.S. administration out of the Iraq War. By exposing the killing of Iraqi children, WikiLeaks directly motivated the Iraqi government to strip the U.S. military of legal immunity, which in turn forced the U.S. withdrawal. 

It was WikiLeaks’ revelations and pan-Arab activists, not the Obama administration, that helped to trigger the Arab Spring. While WikiLeaks was exposing dictators from Yemen to Cairo, Vice-President Joseph Biden was calling Hosni Mubarak a democrat, Hillary Clinton was calling his government “stable” and the U.S. administration was colluding with Yemeni dictator Saleh to bomb his own people.

And it was WikiLeaks’ revelations, not the White House, that led to the reform of the largest children’s hospital network in the United States. 

Just over a month ago, on 28 September, the Pentagon again threatened WikiLeaks. Pentagon spokesman George Little demanded WikiLeaks destroy its publications, including the Iraq War logs which revealed the killings of more than 100,000 civilians. Little said: “continued possession by WikiLeaks of classified information belonging to the United States government represents a continuing violation of law”. The Pentagon also again “warned Mr Assange and WikiLeaks” against “soliciting” material from U.S. military whistleblowers.

Don’t ‘hope’. ACT.

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Agreed.

Obama’s reelection marks the 899th day of detention without charge for Pfc. Manning.

Here’s to four more years of drone strikes, the war on whistleblowers, indefinite detention of Americans in military camps without trial or charge, more Guantanamo renovations, the expansion of the prison industrial complex, billions in funding for the Israeli apartheid, public education cuts, the ever-expanding targeted kill/capture list, the failed War on Drugs, etc. etc. etc.!

Now, let’s organize. 

Pentagon prisons revealed: Wikileaks publishes terror detainee manuals
October 25, 2012

Whistleblowing website WikiLeaks is releasing over 100 classified documents detailing US Department of Defense procedures for running Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca and other infamous prisons where terror suspects are detained.

The directives and manuals, which for more than a decade directed the US military’s policy for treatment of its detainees, will be released chronologically over the next month, WikiLeaks said in a statement.

The first batch of the documents released is the 2002 Camp Delta – Guantanamo Bay prison – Standing Operating Procedure manuals.

“This document is of significant historical importance. Guantanamo Bay has become the symbol for systematized human rights abuse in the West with good reason,” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said.

Several of the documents slated for publishing “can only be described as ’policies of unaccountability,’” WikiLeaks said in its press release.

One document such document that has been previewed but not yet published is the ’Policy on Assigning Detainee Internment Serial Numbers’. Wikileaks claims it is a manual on how to “disappear” sensitive prisoners “by systematically holding off from assigning a prisoner record numbers”.

Another apparently contains the notorious instructions to “purge” interrogations tapes, which became notorious following the Abu Ghraib torture scandals in the mid 2000s. WikiLeaks called on NGOs, activists and the general public to thoroughly read the documents to gain a better understanding of the evolution of the Pentagon’s post-9/11 attitude towards prisoners.

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The importance of these files is monumental. They illustrate how the United States is the terrorist, unlawfully detaining prisoners, violating human rights & committing acts of torture. This is why Wikileaks is so important. Despite any outside conflicts the organization may currently have, it needs our support because no one else is providing this kind of in-depth information about policies the US government fights to keep secret.

We’ll continue to post about Wikileaks’ Detainee Policies as they are released. 

Whistleblower who revealed CIA torture sentenced to prison
October 23, 2012

Former CIA agent John Kiriakou pleaded guilty Tuesday morning to crimes related to blowing the whistle on the US government’s torture of suspected terrorists and was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Kiriakou, 48, agreed to admit to one count of disclosing information identifying a covert agent early Tuesday, just hours after his attorney entered a change of plea in an Alexandria, Virginia courtroom outside of Washington, DC.

Kiriakou was originally charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 after he went public with the Central Intelligence Agency’s use of waterboarding on captured insurgents in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack. On Monday morning, though, legal counsel for the accused former CIA agent informed the court that Kiriakou was willing to plead guilty to a lesser crime.

Initially, Kiriakou pleaded not guilty to the charge that he had outted two intelligence agents directly tied to the drowning-simulation method by going to the press with their identities.

As RT reported last week, defense attorneys had hoped that the government would be tasked with having to prove that Kiriakou had intent to harm America when he went to the media. Instead, however, prosecutors were told they’d only need to prove that the former government employee was aware that his consequences had the potential to put the country in danger.

Had Kiriakou been convicted under the initial charges filed in court, he could have been sentenced to upwards of five decades behind bars.

“Let’s be clear, there is one reason, and one reason only, that John Kiriakou is taking this plea: for the certainty that he’ll be out of jail in 2 1/2 years to see his five children grow up,” Jesselyn Raddack, a former Justice Department official who blew the whistle on Bush administration’s mishandling in the case of “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh, wrote Tuesday.

Kiriakou, Raddack wrote, was all but certain to enter the Alexandria courthouse on Tuesday and plead guilty to the lesser charge of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA), explaining, “there are no reported cases interpreting it because it’s nearly impossible to prove—for “outing” a torturer.”

“’Outing’ is in quotes because the charge is not that Kiriakou’s actions resulted in a public disclosure of the name, but that through a Kevin Bacon-style chain of causation, GITMO torture victims learned the name of one of their possible torturers,” Raddack wrote. “Regardless, how does outing a torturer hurt the national security of the U.S.? It’s like arguing that outing a Nazi guarding a concentration camp would hurt the national security of Germany.”

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a former government official told Firedoglake recently that the CIA was “totally ticked at Kiriakou for acknowledging the use of torture as state policy” and allegedly outing the identity of a covert CIA official “responsible for ensuring the execution” of the water-boarding program.

Kiriakou “outted” to the reporters the identities of the CIA’s “prime torturer” under its Bush-era interrogations, Firedoglake wrote. “For that, the CIA is counting on the Justice Department to, at minimum, convict Kiriakou on the charge of leaking an agent’s identity to not only send a message to other agents but also to continue to protect one of their own.”

Former National Security Agency staffer Thomas Drake suffered a similar fate in recent years after the government went after him for blowing the whistle on the NSA’s poorly handled collection of public intelligence. A grand jury indicted Drake on five counts tied to 1917’s Espionage Act as well as other crimes, but prosecutors eventually agreed to let him off with a misdemeanor computer violation that warranted zero jail time.

Together, Drake and Kirakou are two of six persons charged under the Espionage Act during the administration of US President Barack Obama. The current White House has indicted more people under the antiquated World War 1-era legislation than all previous presidents combined.

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Expose torture? Two years in prison. Commit acts of torture? You’re called a government agency.

Spread the word & come out if you’re in the DC area. We need lots of support for Pfc. Manning & his heroism! 

Check out the Facebook event here. 

US and Australia in cahoots for years over Assange intel

October 19, 2012

Australia has been handing key intelligence on Julian Assange to Washington for over two years. Newly-released cables indicate the US conducted an “active and vigorous enquiry” as early as 2010 to ascertain if they could try Assange for espionage.

The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) revealed it had been in cahoots with the US over the Assange case for over two years, saying it had turned over documents as early as 2010 that pertained to the whistleblower’s activities.

One of the cables dated November 2011 includes a communiqué between former Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd and former Attorney-General Robert McClelland on the subject of how best to prosecute Assange.

The cable stipulates that the most successful route to prosecution “would be to show that Mr. Assange had acted as a co-conspirator – soliciting, encouraging or assisting [US Army private] Bradley Manning, to obtain and provide the documents.”

US officials put pressure on Canberra following the release of thousands of cables, saying that “the WikiLeaks case was unprecedented both in its scale and nature.”

The government body also confirmed they had sent intelligence to the US government on June 1 prior to Assange’s appeal of his extradition to Sweden to be questioned over sexual assault charges.

The Australian government had previously refuted claims that they had any knowledge of a conspiracy to put Assange to trial in the US.

“I’ve received no hint that they’ve got a plan to extradite him to the US … I would expect that the US would not want to touch this,” said Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr in June.

The subject matter of the cables has not been released by Australia on the basis that they are intelligence agency documents and as such they have the potential to damage the country’s relations with the US.

Assange strikes back

Assange announced he would sue Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard over false claims that WikiLeaks acted illegally when they leaked 250,000 US diplomatic cables in 2010.

The whistleblower said that the PM’s claims prompted Mastercard Australia to join the financial blockade of WikiLeaks.

Assange told activist group Get Up! In an interview in the Ecuadorian Embassy where he is currently held up evading arrest that Gillard statements “directly affect the financial viability of WikiLeaks.”

”We are considering suing for defamation. So I have hired lawyers in Sydney and they are investigating the different ways in which we can sue Gillard over that statement,” said Assange.

Assange has been holed up for four months in London’s the Ecuadorian Embassy where he has been granted political asylum by the country’s government. However, he has thus far been unable to leave as UK authorities have threatened to arrest him and extradite him to Sweden should he set foot outside the embassy.

Assange has repeatedly voiced fears that once in Sweden he would be handed over to US authorities to be put to trial.

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Are liberals too eager to believe sex charges against Julian Assange? Yes.

September 1, 2012

What happens when the predatory interests of a national security state and those of women’s rights advocates seem to coincide, as in the case of WikiLeaks publisher and accused rapist Julian Assange? A murky witch hunt, in which some liberals forget that suspects are innocent until proven guilty, JoAnn Wypijewski writes in The Nation.

Wypijewski reminds us that Swedish police were unusually quick to initiate the process of arrest when one of the women now involved in the charges against Assange asked authorities to require that he take an STD test after the two had unprotected sex. Upon seeing the authorities’ eagerness to arraign Assange, that woman refused to give further testimony. Not long after, the Swedish prosecutor’s office withdrew the arrest warrant for rape and molestation on the grounds that the charges were not appropriate to the women’s claims. For some reason, that decision was overturned a week later, after the Swedish authorities allowed Assange to leave the country. (A detailed account of this sequence of events, with statements from the women that seem to exonerate Assange, can be read here.)

The dubious circumstances surrounding Sweden’s sexual misconduct charges—taken with Assange’s status as public enemy No. 1 in the West—suggest that the public’s legitimate desire to see officials investigate suspects of rape and violence against women is being exploited by governments looking to protect their own interests—namely, their ability to continue committing illegal acts in secret worldwide. In their eagerness to defend the rights of women, Wypijewski argues, some writers and activists, however just their cause in general, may have become unwitting supporters of a government’s malicious attempt to silence one of its ablest critics.

—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly. Follow him on Twitter: @areedkelly.

JoAnn Wypijewski in The Nation:

If the Swedish claims against Assange had involved anything but sex, it’s unlikely that liberals, and even some self-described radicals, would be tiptoeing around this part of the story, either by asking “So I guess he’s a bad guy?” or by arguing “Of course he needs to answer for his crimes.” If it were anything but sex, we would insist on the presumption of innocence. We have instead gotten comfortable with presuming guilt and trusting in the dignified processes of law to guarantee fairness.

“Believe the victim” entered the lexicon decades ago for historically understandable reasons. Women had been denied their own due process, in a sense—their right to make a complaint and expect justice, not vilification or worse. They are still being denied and derided, as the idiot spewings of Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin illustrate. The mutation of basic rights into an imperative for belief, and of full citizens into victims, has not made women any safer, but its cultural manipulation—particularly in high-profile cases—has struck at the foundations of civil liberty in a way that may not have been anticipated.

So here is the spectacle of Assange, as yet unindicted, bearing the dual brand of Sex Offender and Terrorist, the subhuman beings of the twenty-first century. The fusing of abuse and terror in his case thus implies two victims who must be believed, the women and the state. But the women’s claims are murky, and the state is not credible.

Read more

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Liberals who confidently condemn Assange as a rapist turn my stomach. Rape isn’t a joke or a weapon and it isn’t something to be taken lightly. As a survivor of sexual violence, I find the foaming-at-the-mouth, ready to ignore facts & condemn attitudes of liberals supporting Assange’s extradition to be deplorable and disgusting. 

I guess that’s why Women Against Rape DO NOT support Assange’s extradition. 

For more information, see our interviews with Christine Assange.

MUST WATCH: Amy Goodman speaks with Slavoj Žižek & Julian Assange about the importance of Wikileaks, Pfc. Manning & the new age of information. 

Read the transcript here.

From August 03 - lots of important tidbits & an interesting discussion about the impact of Wikileaks in Latin America.

“The only country sure to never have a coup d’état is the United States, because it doesn’t have a U.S. embassy.”

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