Sara Krugman at Flux Factory

Exhibition Jan. 14 - 21.

(Left, Pump Skin series, #1. Pig and human skin, Animas Ping insulin pump (2010).)

Some Cool WL Graphics AND a WL-Inspired M.I.A. Mixtape

Click on any image for a larger version.

The first graphic (top right), shows the numbers of civilians killed in Afghanistan per the leaked logs; interactive version at The UK Guardian.

The second (left), lets you browse a database of cables based on location; interactive version also at The UK Guardian.

The third (below right), maps the cables by source; original version also at The Guardian.

The last graphic (bottom left), shows some of the kinds of efforts to silence Wikileaks; really big version at Daily Infographic.

And you can download a rockin' WL-inspired M.I.A. mixtape for free, here.

Student Protests TSA Searches

On Thur., Dec. 30, Aaron Tobey, a student at the University of Cincinnati, stripped down to his underwear at a Richmond, Virginia airport in protest of TSA scannings and pat downs, exposing the following message written on his chest and abdomen: "Amendment 4: The right of the people to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated." Tobey was charged with disorderly conduct. Details here.

Just added this to the quotes in the sidebar at left:

Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders . . . . and millions have been killed because of this obedience . . . . Our problem is that people are obedient allover the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves . . . [and] the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.

(Howard Zinn, Failure to Quit, South End Press, 2002; originally published 1993). But I have to admit, I also like this solution:

FINALLY – A great alternative to body scanners at airports . . .

The Israelis are developing an airport security device that eliminates the privacy concerns that come with full-body scanners at the airports.

It’s a booth you can step into that will not x-ray you, but will detonate any explosive device you may have on you. They see this as a win-win for everyone . . .

More at the link.

Wikileaks Update 2010-12-31: Wired Hung Out, Assange Dis-Implicated, Theories of System Collapse, & What Happens When You Steal a Hacker's Computer

During the last week, there's been a furious exchange of articles and tweets in/re- the Greenwald-Wired fight over the Manning-Lamo chat logs, which at present constitute the only evidence outside of the participants' heads that might either implicate or exonerate Assange of any accusations that he actively conspired to bring about Manning's alleged leaks. The issue is seen as critical because (1) Wired has published only about 25% of the logs, and (2) Manning's been incommunicado in solitary for over seven months, while (3) Lamo's been talking rather freely to the media, with the result that The NYT reported that he said Manning said Assange was actively involved in setting up special arrangements for Wikileaks' receipt of Manning's leaks, including a dedicated FTP server, which might or might not suffice as a basis for the US to charge Assange with conspiracy, although that's a whole 'nother issue.

The dust now seems to be settling, with Wired personnel confirming that the unpublished portions of the chat logs contain no reference to any such special facilities; which means there's no such reference in any of the logs except for one reference to an FTP in the portions of the logs that Wired's already published; and the consensus seems to be that that one reference cannot fairly be construed to prove anything amounting to conspiracy on Assange's part – i.e., Lamo's been misremembering or misreported. Sean Bonner and Rob Beschizza at boingboing have the best summary of the spat I've seen to date, plus additional info; and there's more background here (worth reading for its characterization of Assange as "international man of demystery," among other things.) UPDATE: The Guardian now has its own summary.

More great work at emptywheel by Marcy Wheeler, who originated much of the research/analysis relied on by Firedoglake and Glenn Greenwald re- inconsistencies re- the Manning-Lamo internet chats. In "Lamo's Two (?!) Laptops," she highlights additional, disturbing discrepancies in Lamo's statements (worth reading for yourself), and in "Assange Alerts His Hostages!" she spotlights the fact that his "insurance file" probably contains the names of top Arab officials alleged to have close ties to the CIA – info the US is probably just as interested to keep secret as are the Arab officials named.

Floyd Abrams, an attorney who represented The NYT in its battles over the Pentagon Papers, has, to the surprise and disappointment of many, put out a piece attacking Wikileaks. There have been a number of good rebuttals, but Marcy Wheeler may have shredded him best.

Lynn Parramore at HuffPo has an informative and eloquent essay decrying the lengthy detention of Manning under inhumane conditions, "Tortured Until Proven Guilty." And Kevin Carson has defended Manning as "One Soldier Who Really Did 'Defend Our Freedom.'"

Here's another list of "How Wikileaks Enlightened Us in 2010."

Apparently, Western Union has joined the effort to execute Wikileaks through financial strangulation without due process of law. Lasers_pewpewpew responded, "[s]o they are only too happy for you to send money to an African prince who will give you a cut of his fictional $20 million (ala 419 scam), but not to Wikileaks? . . . f*cking Epic!"

There's a fascinating new piece, "The Transparency Paradox," at colayer, re- what I've called Assange's theory of "the cost of tightened secrecy to organizational I.Q.," or as Volatility puts it more succinctly (see below), Assange's "secrecy tax." The author at colayer makes the point that, while greater transparency maximizes efficiency and profits for a group as a whole, individuals within the group profit most when they're not transparent while others in the group are. Just like, when you're negotiating, you have an advantage if you know what cards the other parties are holding but they're ignorant of yours. And the internet and other technologies now available have greatly reduced the cost of transparency.

Re- the big, "systems" picture, there's a great article at Volatility on "racketeering":

According to Joseph Tainter’s theory of imperial collapse, as societies become more complex, they must expend an ever greater portion of the energy they have available simply on maintaining their complexity. Although social and technological advances may achieve profitable returns for awhile, once a certain level of complexity is reached, diminishing returns set in. Eventually, at the late imperial stage, the complexity of the power structure, the military infrastructure, the bureaucracies, all the rents involved in maintaining an ever more bloated parasite class, their luxuries, the police state required to extract these rents and keep the productive people down, and the growing losses due to the response of the oppressed producers, everything from poor quality work to strikes to emigration or secession to rebellion, reaches a point where the system can only cannibalize itself and eventually collapse.

Julian Assange’s theory of the secrecy tax he’s trying to impose through Wikileaks is one example of these diminishing returns on imperial complexity. All the indications are that Wikileaks has been successful in this.

* * * * *
This is a welter of parasites battening on the same host. They’re in a zero sum game, not only against the people, but among themselves. Each has an interest in just exploiting the host, not killing it. But together they are killing it and therefore themselves. It’s clear none is capable of organizing or regulating the others. The federal government isn’t capable of doing it. If one big bank tried to do it, it would be subverted by the others. Each racket, from highest to lowest, is going to maximize its bloodsucking until there’s no blood left.

Note that, theoretically, so long as the system as a whole remains mostly transparent, it's not a zero-sum game (or at least, its productivity growth would be subject only to such physical limits as peak oil or climate change), because problem-solving and efficiency are maximized by pervasive info-sharing, and everyone's equally incentivized. In contrast, where transparency has sufficiently deteriorated, workers become less productive, both because of reduced info-sharing and because they're disincentivized – i.e., those not sharing info are still incentivized to continue to exploit the others, but once those who are being exploited figure out what's going on, they're discouraged from sharing and working hard just to enrich the exploiters. At this point, the competition devolves from who can produce the most of the best, into who can loot the most the fastest.

To this analysis, Assange adds the dimension of time and the role of foresight, in his 2006 essay for counterpunch, "Of Potholes and Foresight." To put part of his point in other words, a stitch in time often saves nine, and transparency makes that kind of foresight possible, which otherwise tends to give way to political pressures to allocate resources in more near-sighted ways.

Here's an article on governments' moves to control the internets. Not the most precise writing I've seen, but pulls together a few items of interest.

Here's a list of cables published in the Norwegian newspaper, Aftenposten, and not elsewhere. It was not one of the original Wikileaks partners, and everyone's mystified as to how they got the full cable cache. One observer says there are impt. revelations in there that the original partners haven't yet published.

Here's a good discussion of the nature of the Anons and how they view the evolution of collective intelligence. Roughly speaking, they believe their non-authoritarian, open (transparent), emergent mode of collective info-processing and action should and eventually will supplant the authoritarian, top-down, constricted mode common among big corporations and governments.

The FBI has seized a server allegedly used in some of the Anons' DDoS attacks.

And here's a presentation about what happens when you steal a hacker's computer:



Happy New Year, everyone! And remember, "the truth shall make you free." – John 8:32, the Bible, King James Version.

Homeland Security – Psyops on US?

We now have two reported instances of trolling traced to Homeland Security IP addresses:

Homeland Security Trolling We Won’t Fly Blog (comments on a blog re- TSA's illegal scannings and gropings).

Racist Web Posts Traced to Homeland Security (comments on a local newspaper article re- detention of Mexican immigrants).

Operation Bling

By embedding this video, we do not necessarily endorse any activity suggested therein to the extent, if any, prohibited by applicable law.

Living in Post-Reality (Re- Wikileaks)

This post unpacks and explores a bit further some thoughts I first touched on here.

The Infowar

As I've long said, knowledge is power, and a balance of power requires a balance of information.

As I've also said, at present, there's a serious imbalance, in that governments and big businesses know everything about us, and we know nothing important about them.

In 2009, Assange gave one of his many good speeches. Below is a transcript of a portion of it (I'm probably including a bit more than necessary for purposes of this post, but I'm not aware that this much of the speech has been transcribed elsewhere, and it may be of interest):

Censorship is actually an opportunity. That censorship is some form of arbitrage, to keep information concealed in a limited market from a bigger market. But politically, what does censorship reveal? It reveals fear. So, China has a lot of fear of freedom of the press. Iran . . . China and Iran do actively censor us [Wikileaks]. Both these countries have a fear of freedom of the press. That means that they perceive that if information is released, it's going to have some kind of reform effect. Now, depending on your position, if you're in that authority or your outside it, you may say this effect is positive or negative. But it does show that their perception, and they probably know best because they are the author of these documents, is that those documents are politically powerful.

In the West we do have a bit more of a problem, in that the basic structural relationships in highly developed Western countries are fiscal, they are not political, and it's much harder to affect fiscal relationships through free speech than it is to affect political relationships. So, is freedom of speech free in the West because the West is so enlightened? Or, is freedom of speech free in the West because . . . relative to China . . . is it free in the West because perhaps it's hard to do much with freedom of speech, that the basic power structures that exist in the West are fiscalized and hidden from social opprobrium?

I think maybe speech is free like the birds and the bees when they have no chance of political impact. Now of course there's many counter-examples; but I think, you know, these fiscal relationships have been structurally engineered in such a way that they're complex and opaque, and so that when we, operating with The Guardian, have revealed information about complex structural arrangements that Barclays Bank takes to push money through thirteen or fourteen different countries, to 'rob,' if you like, the United Kingdom and other countries of the money that they need to sustain their social system, but it's so complex, how can people become angry with information that's that complex? Well, it's hard; you have to work a lot harder as a journalist to turn that into an emotionally impactful story. So that's a kind of 'tax' on powerful revelation.

But anyway, when countries and organizations fight to suppress things, you know you have a foot in the door, you know you have a chance for reform. In other countries where information seems to be free, maybe actually the basic structures are so locked up that it’s going to be hard to make an effect. Anyway, I encourage everyone to try.

[Assange is warned his time's run out.] On these USB keys is 573,000 intercepted pager messages from September 11th, that haven't been released yet . . . . So, that's a lot of information . . . . We will release this tomorrow on the web, but I will give this to people here who want it now, and you can go and explore it and investigate it. Remember, it's 573,000 messages. We can't do it alone; the idea is that you do it. We spend our efforts getting it to you and allow you to publish it. But you've got to turn it into a story and make it moving to the population.

(Emphasis supplied; from a speech at the New Media Days 2009 conference, Denmark.)
Note that Assange speaks of information as a commodity for which there are manipulable markets; i.e., among other things, knowledge is a form of wealth. This makes sense; perhaps the very definition of real wealth is, after all, power.

We're now witnessing an infowar. It is a war not just using info as a weapon but also about who will control it. In Assange-ist terms, the powerful have been conspiring against the rest of us, in the sense that they've been keeping secret things that were being done to us or in our name and that they feared we'd object to if we knew about them. W.r.t. these things, the powerful have not been giving us all the material info, and/or they've actively fed us disinformation or distractions. The struggle currently led by Wikileaks is to give the rest of us access to the truths that those to whom we've entrusted power have hidden from us.

As Robin Bloor put it, "This is an info war and info wars take place between power structures not countries. It’s the US power structure, not the US itself, that currently has a side in this war. Info wars are, by their very nature, civil wars between groups of citizens that live under the aegis of a given information control structure. One side wishes to conserve it, while the other wishes to change it."

In other words, it's a class war, with "class" defined by wealth measured not in terms of money but in terms of information.

In my prior analysis, I suggested that part of Assange's strategy may actually be to provoke the powers that be to tighten their security. This suggestion was based on Assange's own writings, in which he describes organizations such as governments as computational systems and proposes that, when their secrecy is threatened, they tend to try to tighten their security, throttling down the flow of information internally as well as externally. In that event, as a result of this throttling down, the system becomes "dumber," since those within it become less able or willing to share all the info and ideas needed in order for the regime to act as effectively in its own behalf as it otherwise could. Provoking such regimes to tighten their security should therefore weaken them and hasten their downfall or reform. If this is in fact part of Assange's strategy, the "throttling down" seems to be proceeding like clockwork.

(One might infer that the more corrupt the organization, the more secrets it needs to keep, the more throttling down required, the dumber it becomes. If the corruption gets bad enough, the regime must either get so dumb, or its corruption become so open a secret, then the regime will no longer be able to rely solely on secrecy to maintain itself but must resort to brute force.)

The P.R. War

As I've also suggested, Assange's insight into the cost of tightened secrecy to organizational I.Q. sheds new light on why the inventor of "public relations," Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, was such a godsend to the the powerful – because p.r./propaganda help them manipulate populations through their basic instincts and emotions, rather than through secrecy.

To fully grasp the situation, one has to understand the kind of p.r. being used. We're not just talking about packaging, or looking at the bright side of bad news; and we're not just talking about any old lies. We're talking about techniques designed to reach deep into the most primitive parts of our psyches and stimulate our most basic, powerful instincts – fear, anger, greed, and lust – in ways such that our higher faculties are completely bypassed (see Adam Curtis's excellent Century of the Self, here or here).

When this kind of p.r. is deployed successfully, the truth simply no longer matters. Thus, e.g., revelations in recent years of US propaganda illegally directed at its own citizens (see here and here) have had little effect.

It's clear from Assange's speech above that he recognizes that it's not just info that counts; it's also the art. The initial, non-trivial challenges faced by Wikileaks are to get the information while ensuring the confidentiality of leakers, to verify it, redact it, and get it published. But the next, no-less-vital challenge is – to edit one of Assange's phrases into another – "turning it into an emotionally impactful story." Wikileaks needs not just potential leakers and fellow journalists and publishers, therefore, but also literary and other artists.

For some time, I've had a few quotations have been bouncing around in my head:

I am constantly haunted by a quote from Harry Overstreet, who wrote the following in his 1925 groundbreaking study, Influencing Human Behavior: "Giving people the facts as a strategy of influence" has been a failure, "an enterprise fraught with a surprising amount of disappointment."
– David DeGraw, "Wall Street's Pentagon Papers," Global Research [I haven't located the text referred to online]

Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.
– attributed to Marshall McLuhan

And this:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.". . . "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

The source of the term is a quotation in an October 17, 2004, The New York Times Magazine article by writer Ron Suskind, quoting an unnamed aide to George W. Bush (later attributed to Karl Rove) . . . .

From Wikipedia's entry on the phrase, "Reality-Based Community." (Emphasis in the foregoing quotations supplied.)
So part of the challenge for Wikileaks is that this is not just an infowar; it is also a p.r. war. Because, among other reasons, theoretically, within a sufficiently powerful and immersive p.r. environment, efforts such as Wikileaks' to publish truth might simply be rendered moot.

And not just in the sense that most people might no longer care about the truth. But it would also be the case that the regime in power, even if corrupt, would need no longer be so concerned with secrecy. It would have to invest some of its resources in creating and propagating p.r.; but it would not have to reduce the flow of information internally or externally – meaning that it wouldn't have to make itself dumber, and thus needn't hasten its own demise.

(Again, one might infer that if the corruption got bad enough, the regime might need to use brute force to maintain itself. But it would seem that the combination of a moderate level of secrecy with a lot of p.r. might enable a regime to maintain itself longer while engaging in a higher level of corruption than might be possible if it relied on either secrecy or p.r. alone, without relying too heavily on brute force. {Not to mention the fact that since the regime now knows everything about us, it's well-prepared to take out any troublemakers.})

Post-Reality

The onslaught of p.r. aimed at neutralizing the threats posed by Wikileaks and Assange has been extraordinary, even in our p.r.-saturated times.

It's interesting to speculate about what it is that prompted the oligarchs to bring out the big guns against Wikileaks and Assange. Was it the content of the US State Dept. cables? Was it that material leaked from within a major US bank is expected to be published next? Or was it the fact that the info is now being reported not just by a lone, rebel website but by the great newspapers of the world?

Because it was when Wikileaked stories covered half the front page of The NYT that citizens began to sit up and pay attention.

But The NYT isn't exactly independent from the powers that be. What if sufficient numbers of people won't listen to the truth unless it comes through outlets like The NYT? What if The NYT et al. refuse to continue to publish it (as it's done so often before)? Are we about to find out that we are, in fact, living in a post-reality world?

Wikileaks also faces financial and infrastructure challenges – a variety of brute force.

To those who predict the internet and hackers will save Wikileaks and us, I can only say, don't be so confident that you fail to do all you can to help.

Wikileaks Update 2010-12-18: Greenwald v. Wired, Infowar as Civil War, WL Copycats, & More

I've updated "The Case for Wikileaks" here. It lays out the arguments and includes lots of links to sources and resources; please use and share it.

Glenn Greenwald at Salon has been pounding on Wired. US Army PFC Bradley Manning is the accused leaker of the cables to WL, allegedly having outed himself to Adrian Lamo, who turned him in. Lamo is a convicted hacker and just two weeks earlier had been released from involuntary psychiatric hospitalization. "For more than six months, Wired's Senior Editor Kevin Poulsen has possessed – but refuses to publish – the key evidence [i.e., the complete internet chat logs between Manning and Lamo] in one of the year's most significant political stories." Meanwhile, Lamo has continued to talk, and his descriptions have contained certain inconsistencies, as shown in analyses by Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake. Poulsen's continued refusal to publish the complete chat logs, Greenwald writes, "has long ago left the realm of mere journalistic failure and stands as one of the most egregious examples of active truth-hiding by a 'journalist' I've ever seen." Most of FDL's analyses and other resources can be found here. (UPDATE: Poulsen and Wired's editor, Evan Hansen, respond here, both attacking Greenwald in return. In addition, Hansen suggests they've held back the full logs because they contain Manning's non-relevant, "sensitive personal information," and Poulsen says the stories published in Wired have already "either excerpted, quoted or reported on everything of consequence Manning had to say about his leaking.")

(The Hired and Apocaleaks Now images are from the right hon. exiledsurfer, whose works all reward attention.)

At some point one has to wonder, is the US holding Manning in solitary just because they're trying to make him talk, or also because they need to keep him from talking while the US spreads its own disinfo?

There's a great piece by Robin Bloor on the big picture, "Wikileaks: This Is Just The Beginning," comparing the current situation to the conflict between Pope Leo X and Martin Luther, which she says arose from the invention of the Gutenberg press. I disagree on a few of her points but think she nails one important aspect of the situation: "it’s a mistake to see the US government as a specific side in this war. This is an info war and info wars take place between power structures not countries. It’s the US power structure, not the US itself, that currently has a side in this war. Info wars are, by their very nature, civil wars between groups of citizens that live under the aegis of a given information control structure. One side wishes to conserve it, while the other wishes to change it." The whole article's well worth reading, including her list of virtual infrastructure needs highlighted by developments in the current conflict.

Great essay by Robert Meerpol, son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg:

I view the Espionage Act of 1917 as a lifelong nemesis. My parents were charged, tried and ultimately executed after being indicted for Conspiracy to Commit Espionage under that act.

The 1917 Act has a notorious history. It originally served to squelch opposition to World War I. It criminalized criticism of the war effort, and sent hundreds of dissenters to jail just for voicing their opinions. It transformed dissent into treason.

Many who attacked the law noted that the framers of the Constitution had specifically limited what constituted treason by writing it into the Constituton: “Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort” (Article III, section 3). The framers felt this narrow definition was necessary to prevent treason from becoming what some called “the weapon of a political faction.” Furthermore, in their discussions at the Constitutional Convention they agreed that spoken opposition was protected by the First Amendment and could never be considered treason.

It appears obvious that the Espionage Act is unconstitutional because it does exactly what the Constitution prohibits. . . . To this day, with a few notable exceptions that include my parents’ case, it has been a dormant sword of Damocles, awaiting the right political moment and an authoritarian Supreme Court to spring to life and slash at dissenters.

More at the link.

Here's the script for a fascinating speech by Rop Gonggri at the 27th Chaos Communication Congress of hackers, referring to his contacts with Wikileaks: "WikiLeaks could well come out victorious in a new generational conflict, mentioned in the same line with the suffragettes and the Vietnam protesters. But as it stands today, my friend Julian is potentially facing prison time or even assassination for what essentially amounts to practicing journalism." He also notes, "[t]here’s a new American proposal to make all providers of any kind of online service provide the authorities with cleartext of everything that happens." Gonggri's main focus in recent years has been electronic voting machines around the world; specifically, demonstrating how easily they can be hacked. (As I've feared, easily-manipulated machines are already in use in many countries.)

In case you hadn't heard, the CIA has launched a "Wikileaks Task Force," a.k.a. W.T.F.; more here.

The NYT has published an op-ed, "Banks and Wikileaks," making a point similar to the one I raised eight days earlier under the heading, "Payment Process Usurps Due Process" – that the payment processing services performed by banks are in the nature of an essential public utility, and banks should not be allowed to financially strangle individuals or enterprises just because they're exposing embarrassing truths.

Indeed, it should be obvious by now that there are a number of essential services in the nature of public utilities that should not be entrusted entirely to private control. The trend, however, has been in the opposite direction; i.e., to privatize more and more. To the extent that trend prevails, there will be nothing to stop people like Dick Cheney from acquiring control of our financial system, prisons, roads, military, media, elections, schools, social networks, internet, etc., and running them like Halliburton for their own personal benefit and that of their buddies, at the expense and to the detriment of the rest of us.

The Anons targeted Bank of America yesterday (because of its refusal to process payments to WL), achieving intermittent outages; I haven't checked on that situation today.

A highly-plausible explanation for Amazon's decision to terminate service to WL: per Amazon, "the U.S. federal government continues to be one of our fastest growing customer segments," utilizing Amazon's web services for its Recovery Accountability and Transparency website. More here.

Here's an article about other, WL-like facilities now starting up. According to Robin Bloor (see above), at last count there were six such sites: BalkanLeaks in the Balkans, BrusselsLeaks in Belgium, Indoleaks in Indonesia, Rospil in Russia, Tunileaks in Tunisia, and OpenLeaks, in addition to WL itself. More info about OpenLeaks at techPresident. I.m.h.o., the more, the merrier. (UPDATE: Here's an updated list of copycat sites. Note, these sites vary widely w.r.t. what they do, including what kind of security they afford leakers, what they publish, how they publish, what language they publish in, etc.

1. BalkanLeaks
2. BrusselsLeaks (Belgium)
3. Cryptome (existed before Wikilekas)
4. Der Western Recherche (Germany)
5. Indoleaks (Indonesia)
6. Israelileaks
7. PirateLeaks (Czech Republic)
8. Rospil (Russia)
9. Tunileaks (Tunisia; but this just looks like a site re- cables released by WL)
10. Opennu.nl (Netherlands)
11. OpenLeaks
12. TradeLeaks
13. ScienceLeaks
14. Wikispooks)

UPDATE: A Croation version is also in the works.

Here's an article re- WL from Columbia Journalism Review:

[I]t’s quite difficult to see significant legal differences between what WikiLeaks has done and what newspaper, television, and magazine reporters do all the time. . . . The classification system has been established by our democratically elected officials to obscure the hand of the state. Sometimes it rightly keeps us safe, and sometimes it wrongly keeps us in the dark. . . . But the fundamental problem is that the government cannot be trusted to make these decisions for themselves. . . . [T]here’s nothing to say that every future iteration of something like WikiLeaks would [deal with leaked material as responsibly as WL has]. It’s a frightening prospect.

But the idea that the solution to this potential problem lies in uprooting freedom of speech, and the status quo that has allowed the press to be a persistent, comprehensive watchdog of the national security state is frightening, too.

"Wikidrips": per Greg Mitchell at The Nation, The NYT's publications re- the cables have dried to a trickle, and it's been even longer since the gray lady published anything not already published elsewhere. I note that WL did not bother including The NYT among the original, privileged recipients – it was The Guardian that shared; but it's coverage, too, has dwindled. Today Mitchell notes that, although The Guardian had a you-ask, we-search feature on their site, inviting readers to suggest terms for searching the trove of cables, it discontinued the feature six days ago.

Just learned that all the days of Mitchell's "Blogging the Wikileaks" can be found here.