Why Wikileaks is critical to Democracy

JULIAN ASSANGE:

Well, WikiLeaks has become the rebel library of Alexandria. It is the single most significant collection of information that doesn’t exist elsewhere, in a searchable, accessible, citable form, about how modern institutions actually behave. And it’s gone on to set people free from prison, where documents have been used in their court cases; hold the CIA accountable for renditions programs; feed into election cycles, which have resulted in the termination of, in some case—or contributed to the termination of governments, in some cases, taken the heads of intelligence agencies, ministers of defense and so on. So, you know, our civilizations can only be as good as our knowledge of what our civilisation is. We can’t possibly hope to reform that which we do not understand.

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About internet privacy

Excellent discussion here, Amy Goodman interviewing Julian Assange of Wikileaks. This addresses an issue that repeatedly occurs to me: Unless we can know what the spy agencies are actually doing, how can we know that any legislative enactments are having any effect at all? Even if Congress passed a law stating that the NSA should cease collecting any information about any person in the absence of probable cause and a warrant, how could we possibly know that the NSA is obeying that law. Even if the NSA is sued, how do we know that the NSA would honestly comply with subpoenas or discovery? Here is an excerpt from the interview:

AMY GOODMAN: Before we get to Germany and what you’ve revealed there, I want to stay with the U.S. for a minute, because President Obama famously said that the debate over privacy and surveillance would have been had without Edward Snowden. Can you respond to that? JULIAN ASSANGE: Oh, I think it’s obvious to everyone that that is false. How can you have a debate with secret interpretations of the law? How can you debate them? They’re secret. Similarly, what are the actual actions that are occurring, not just in policy, but what is actually happening? What are these bureaucracies actually doing? If you don’t know, how can you possibly have the debate? Information is classified, no debate is possible.

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John Oliver and Edward Snowden reframe the NSA Debate

Brilliant framing of a complex topic by John Oliver. Why should people care about NSA spying on American citizens? This video combines interviews with people on the street with an in-person discussion between John Oliver and Edward Snowden in Russian. The reframing: dick pics.

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War on Terror: The medicine is worse than the disease

Common Dreams reports:

In their joint report— Body Count: Casualty Figures after 10 Years of the 'War on Terror—Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival, and the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War concluded that this number is staggering, with at least 1.3 million lives lost in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan alone since the onset of the war following September 11, 2001. ... According to Gould's forward, co-authored with Dr. Tim Takaro, the public is purposefully kept in the dark about this toll. "A politically useful option for U.S. political elites has been to attribute the on-going violence to internecine conflicts of various types, including historical religious animosities, as if the resurgence and brutality of such conflicts is unrelated to the destabilization cause by decades of outside military intervention," they write. "As such, under-reporting of the human toll attributed to ongoing Western interventions, whether deliberate of through self-censorship, has been key to removing the 'fingerprints' of responsibility."

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Claim by Editor of Major German Newspaper: CIA planted pro-war stories

Here's an excerpt from this stunning but unsurprising admission: Becoming the first credentialed, well-known media insider to step forward and state publicly that he was secretly a "propagandist," an editor of a major German daily has said that he personally planted stories for the CIA. Saying he believes a medical condition gives him only a few years to live, and that he is filled with remorse, Dr. Udo Ulfkotte . . . said . . . he accepted news stories written and given to him by the CIA and published them under his own name.

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