"Kettling," a.k.a. containment or corralling, is a police tactic for the management of crowds during demonstrations or protests.

More on "kettling" at Wikipedia.

What "O" Apparently Stands for

Assange à la Taiwan

From Next Media Animation.

Wikileaks: What's at Stake?

FURTHER UPDATE: For a more recent, complete statement of the case for Wikileaks, see here.

UPDATE: Anonymous's "Operation Payback" has now taken down the main Visa, Mastercard, and Paypal sites.

I'm more or less obsessed with this story for many reasons, some of which are roughly outlined as follows:

• For the chronological coincidence of the prospective disclosure of Bank of America secrets with the dramatic step-up in efforts to shut Wikileaks down by whatever means necessary (see also Market Ticker).
• For the fact that you can now donate to the KKK or the American Nazi Party with your MC or Visa, but you can't donate to Wikileaks.
• For the comparison between the hunt for Julian Assange and the hunt for Bin Laden.
• For the use of the women charging Assange with still unspecified sexual improprieties, considered together with the use of similar charges to neutralize other figures perceived as threats to the powers that be (e.g., Gary Hart, Bill Clinton, Gary Condit, John Edwards, Eliot Spitzer, et al. – see here re- the latter, and see here re- the charges against Assange).
• For the use of the mass media to slander or discount a public figure seen as dangerous to the powers that be (Jimmy Carter, Cindy Sheehan, Dennis Kucinich, Howard Dean, et al.).
• For the comparison between Wikileaks' publications and the publication by The New York Times of the Pentagon Papers.
• For the contrast – to date – between Dr. David Kelly's fate vs. that of Assange, in light of the precautions each did/did not take.
• For what it shows about the toothlessness of the law when it comes to redress for abuses of power – i.e., what redress will Wikileaks have, if it ever establishes that Paypal, Amazon, Mastercard, et al. wrongfully terminated its accounts?
• For the First Amendment/freedom of speech issues.
• For the Fourth Amendment/privacy issues.
• For the comparison between the "treason" alleged to have been committed – though Assange is not a U.S. citizen and, despite frantic, months'-long efforts by governments in the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Sweden, and elsewhere, Wikileaks' activities have yet to be argued plausibly to have broken the laws of any country – vs. that of members of the U.S. Congress and executive branch, who, despite their oaths to uphold the U.S. Constitution and laws, are known to have committed, acquiesced in, or failed to investigate the following, most of which are still ongoing:

The creation of a "Constitution-free zone" (see here);

NSA/AT&T violations of Fourth Amendment and privacy rights, including mass wire-tapping and mining of e-mails of U.S. citizens (see various posts here and sources cited therein);

TSA and other governmental or quasi-gov'l violations of Fourth Amendment and privacy rights, including unreasonable, invasive searches without the least pretext of probable cause (see posts here {may include some repeats from previous link} and sources cited therein);

Secret service and police violations of First Amendment rights, including preemptive round-ups and detentions of protesters in connection with RNC's and other events (see various posts here and sources cited therein, esp. here and here);

The institution of policies of torture and assassination of U.S. citizens and others (see, e.g., here, here, and here);

The invasion of Iraq based on lies;


Etc.

• For the contrast, speaking of treason, between the efforts made to find and prosecute Assange vs. the relative lack of serious investigation or prosecution of those responsible for the outing of Valerie Plame and attendant destruction of her anti-WMD operations (see here and sources cited therein), or the lies that led to the US invasion of Iraq, or any of the Constitutional violations listed above.
• For what the story shows about how free the internet still is (see essay here).
• For what it suggests about how free the internet isn't (see posts here and sources cited therein), including the terrible risks we take by relying on the Cloud.

Note, not one person is known to have died as a result of any Wikileaks disclosure ever – while as of this writing, the still-mounting, governmentally-confirmed Coalition military deaths in Iraq total 4,748 (not to mention contractors, or the wounded) and Iraqi deaths total 1,421,933 (see the left side bar of this blog).

The inescapable inference is that what the powers that be fear most is not terrorists, but the truth.

As set out in my previous post, a balance of power requires a balance of knowledge; but the way things are now, corporations and the government know everything about us and we know almost nothing important about them.

There's a great deal at stake here, and I greatly fear many possible, negative effects. Perhaps most importantly, I believe we must prepare for the fact that this affair will greatly benefit the powers that be by mapping out in considerable detail the areas in which their control is still relatively weak, e.g., control over internet and other infrastructure, applicable law, etc.

Future Attribute Screening Technology

No joke. More at Wikipedia.

Wikileaks: the Big Picture

There are a lot of issues implicated in Wikileaks' recent publications and the world's responses to them, and I'm not at all sure what the exact resolutions of those issues should be. But I think it's important to keep the big picture in view.

We are living in times of extraordinary incursions against the rightful liberties and powers of ordinary citizens.

A big part of the problem is that knowledge is power, and a balance of power requires a balance of knowledge. But the way things are now, corporations and the government know everything about us and we know almost nothing important about them.

There have been periods in the past when the mainstream media did a better job of fulfilling its proper function as the "watchdog of democracy." It hasn't been doing that for some while. Part of that problem is that, leaving the internet aside for the moment, the vast majority of media worldwide are directly or indirectly controlled by oligarchs (see Wikipedia and the sources cited there).

As for the internet, the oligarchs are already well on their way to controlling most of it; witness the latest proposed FCC regulations.

Wikileaks almost certainly has not broken any laws. The U.S. government and others have been struggling mightily to conjure something to charge someone with for some time now, without success; clearly, they're going to have to get a lot more, shall we say, creative.

W.r.t. the U.S. Embassy cables, WikiLeaks has posted online only a small portion of the material leaked to it, and most of what it's posted was published first by one of its newspaper partners (The New York Times, The Guardian, El Pais, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, et al.). Moreover, the material posted by WikiLeaks contains the redactions applied by those papers to protect innocent people and otherwise minimize harm. (See Salon and sources cited therein for details.)

Wikileaks is not a spy operation any more than The NYT is. Rather, it's a journalistic organization whose mission is to publish what other people want to leak to them, if the information is credible and significant (see here).

Basically, I believe that t.m.i. is better than too little. I have more faith in our ability as a species to collectively sort through the info and interpret it helpfully, than I have in the likelihood that any smaller group of individuals entrusted with the power to pick and choose what we should know, without meaningful oversight, will fail to abuse that power.

Do I think no one should be able to have secrets? No. I certainly don't want all my personal info to be known, let alone published.

But there's an important distinction to be made between information held by governments or public corporations vs. individuals' personal info. I am not entrusted with the welfare of large numbers of consumers or citizens; and if I were, again, to the extent any info in my possession related to matters that could affect them, I don't think I should be allowed unilaterally to decide what they get to know about it.

Perhaps, ideally, it would be better to only expose the "sausage-making" processes behind our leaders' decisions (diplomatic or otherwise) to the extent we've actually been misled about the facts justifying those decisions. E.g., maybe it doesn't matter so much who wanted what out of the Iraq war, as that we were lied to about the reasons for starting it.

But it's hard to expose those lies without also exposing the back-room realities of who wanted what, esp. when you're a relatively small, underfunded operation.

And one thing we should all thank Assange for is irrefutable proof that one person can still make a difference.

Finally, I can't resist noting that, w.r.t. timing, it appears to have been Wikileaks' promised release of information on a major bank, believed to be Bank of America, after the end of this year that triggered the recent, dramatic step-up in pressure on Assange.

Let me also just mention, (1) the UK Guardian has published some truly great pieces on the whole affair, w.r.t. both reporting and analysis, including this one and this one (I strongly encourage you to read both); (2) you can download an archive of Wikileaks' releases that's complete as least as of the date of this post here (it's only a few MB's; you'll need StuffIt or something to unzip it); and (3) as of this writing, you can still reach Wikileaks' site here. (You can also find previous c-Blog posts on Wikileaks here.)

UPDATE: "A Twitter posting by American poet and essayist John Perry Barlow[:] . . . . 'The first serious infowar is now engaged' . . . . 'The field of battle is Wikileaks. You are the troops . . . '" "Using the moniker 'I Am Wikileaks,' supporters . . . [have] created more than 570 mirror versions of the Wikileaks website and have called for a boycott of Paypal, Amazon and EveryDNS, three US-based websites that recently severed ties to Wikileaks. . . . More here.

FURTHER UPDATE: Hot off the "press," Assange's Op-Ed for The Australian here (also well worth the read).

Everything is NOT Ok

Photo doc here.

EVERYTHING IS OK

(Thanks, Ben!) More here.