Wikileaks.org has set a cat among the pigeons. Or you may say it has upset the (rotten) apple cart with what it calls its “Hillary Leaks Series.” Follow the @wikileaks twitter account to get interesting bits. However if you are a real political junkie, you can search through the entire collection of “19,252 emails and 8,034 attachments from the top of the US Democratic National Committee.”
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Wikileaks
Snowden’s German TV Interview
This video is from 26th January, 2014. Truthdig.com has the details: The Edward Snowden Interview the U.S. Media Didn’t Want You to Watch. Excerpts from it below the video.
http://www.liveleak.com/ll_embed?f=e2ce8368acfc
“Every time you pick up a phone, dial a number, write an email, make a purchase, travel on the bus carrying a cell phone, swipe a card somewhere, you leave a trace, and the government has decided that it’s a good idea to collect it all, everything, even if you’ve never been suspected of a crime.”
That revelation is actually from a second interview given by former Central Intelligence Agency and former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, this time to German broadcast giant ARD.
And even though ARD is the second largest public broadcaster in the world (after the British Broadcasting Company), and Snowden’s message easily unearths the largest violations of the Constitution by the US to date, our dinosaur media does not believe this is mainstream enough to cover.To be clear, you cannot find the 30-minute interview – released via the international video-sharing site LiveLeak on Jan. 27 – on one single American news outlet.”
Bradley Manning’s Conviction
Julian Assange of Wikileaks, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden point to a very disturbing trend. The people are losing control of their government. The government is getting bigger and more intrusive. An opinion piece by Jesselyn Radack in The Washington Post (Aug 2nd) says, “Bradley Manning’s conviction sends a chilling message.” Here’s an excerpt, for the record.
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The War You Don’t See
I have never met anyone who sincerely wishes other people harm. I believe this experience of mine must be common to all of us. We have never met anyone who wishes to vaporise others by lobbing a megaton nuclear weapon at them. Continue reading
Wikileaks is good for the Third World
The other day a friend asked me, “I have often heard about India being a third-world country. What exactly is the third world?” It struck me that most of us are ignorant about what that exactly means. I said to my friend that “third world” was an euphemism for “desperately poor extremely underdeveloped starving nations utterly misgoverned by unimaginably corrupt kleptocrats.”[1] And, I added, as a consequence, the third world is a world of human-created misery.
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Wikileaks Will Make The World A Safer Place
Jonathan Swift, author of the English classic Gulliver’s Travels (1726), had pithily observed that “when a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.” I would be going over the top to pass Julian Assange on that genius test but seeing the army of powerful people and institutions arrayed against him, I am getting more convinced that Wikileaks has changed the world in ways that are only dimly understood today. I am careful to distinguish between the man and the institution since confusing the two can lead to the unfortunate mistake of shooting the messenger for delivering an unpalatable message.
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Wikileaks is Good for You and Me
Wikileaks is good for you and me. Evidently it is not good for the targeted governments. That fact lends additional weight to my claim that Wikileaks is good for you and me. Here I will try to explain why I believe that Wikileaks is good for you and me. I keep repeating “good for you and me” to underline the fact that what is good for you and me need not necessarily be good for our government, and vice versa.
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Wikileaks and the Terrorist State of Pakistan
I have read arguments that what Wikileaks is doing is not good. I have read them arguments but not understood them. For the love of everything sensible, I cannot for the life of me understand why information that is good for the leaders is somehow not good for the people. I can understand that dictators don’t want people to know the truth. But in democratic societies? Why?
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The Actual State of the World: Wikileaks
This one has the makings of something earth-shatteringly great. Starting today, Wikileaks will post American diplomatic cables to the web. NYT says, Continue reading
The Theater of the Absurd: The War Log Edition — Part 2
In the Google Age, it is hard not to take the easy way out and just google the answer to many a question which one could have otherwise enjoyed solving and learn a lot from the exercise. I hope that some gave at least a few brain cycles to figure out the puzzle mentioned in the post “The Theater of the Absurd: The War Log edition.” Here’s the follow up to that post.
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