we learn more about wikileaks

[metalman]

http://wikileaks.ch/IMG/pdf/WikiLeaks_Response_v6.pdf

[Chomsky]

Re: we learn more about wikileaks

That it's a serious threat to corporate malfeasance?

[lektrode]

Re: we learn more about wikileaks

That it's a serious threat to corporate malfeasance?

heh...

"...describes itself as “an uncensorable
system for untraceable mass document leaking.”

they still need some lessons, apparently.

[Serge_Tomiko]

Re: we learn more about wikileaks

http://wikileaks.ch/IMG/pdf/WikiLeaks_Response_v6.pdf

The essence of their strategy is "divide and conquer" with a bit of "blitzkrieg".

No kidding. If only we could apply that strategy against the bankers.

[lektrode]

Re: we learn more about wikileaks

The essence of their strategy is "divide and conquer" with a bit of "blitzkrieg".

No kidding. If only we could apply that strategy against the bankers.

yes - if only we could some have some of the 'fearless leaders' of the 4th estate to actually do what they are all the time reminding us about why we should look to them to 'keep us informed' - but after all thats happened the past few years?

methinks the lamestream media = is providing cover/comfort for The Enemy
and its all PARTISAN warfare, with krugman as the point man - with him now blaming abe lincoln and the pub's, using the slavery/race card, demogoguery & whatevah else it takes with lies, propaganda, confusion, obfuscation to further the banksters aims, with the DC 'aristocracy' along for the ride, feathering their nests and filling thier wallets as they go merrily along the path to bankrupting our once great nation.

to wit:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/op...11krugman.html
Op-Ed Columnist

Abraham Lincoln, Inflationist

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: February 10, 2011

There was a time when Republicans used to refer to themselves, proudly, as “the party of Lincoln.” But you don’t hear that line much these days. Why?

The main answer, presumably, lies in the G.O.P.’s decision, long ago, to seek votes from Southerners angered by the end of legal segregation. With the old Confederacy now the heart of the Republican base, boasting about the party’s Civil War-era legacy is no longer advisable.

But sooner or later, Republicans were bound to notice other reasons to disavow Lincoln. He was, after all, the first president to institute an income tax. And he was also the first president to issue a paper currency — the “greenback” — that wasn’t backed by gold or silver. “There is nothing more insidious that a country can do to its people than to debase its currency,” declared Representative Paul Ryan in one of two hearings Congress held on Wednesday on monetary policy. So much, then, for the Great Liberator.
Which brings me to the story of what went on in those monetary hearings.
One of the hearings was called by Representative Ron Paul, a harsh critic of the Federal Reserve, who now has an oversight role over the very institution he wants abolished in favor of a return to the gold standard. Mr. Paul’s subcommittee called three witnesses, one of whom was an odd choice: Thomas DiLorenzo, a professor at Loyola University and a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
What was odd about that choice? Well, Mr. DiLorenzo hasn’t actually written much about monetary policy, although he has described Fed policy — not just recently, but since the 1960s — as “legalized counterfeiting operations.” His main claim to fame, instead, is as a critic of Lincoln — he’s the author of “Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed to Know About Dishonest Abe” — and as a modern-day secessionist.
No, really: calls for secession run through many of Mr. DiLorenzo’s writings — for example, in his declaration that “healthcare freedom” won’t be restored until “some states begin seceding from the new American fascialistic state.” Raise the rebel flag!
O.K., it’s going to be a while before the G.O.P. as a whole embraces neo-secessionism, and Mr. Paul, although highly visible, is, in fact, a somewhat marginal figure even within his own party. But Mr. Ryan, who led the other hearing — the one at which Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, testified — is a rising Republican star. So it’s worth noting that Mr. Ryan’s hard-money rhetoric was nearly as bizarre as Mr. DiLorenzo’s.
Start with that bit about debasing our currency. Where did that come from? The dollar’s value in terms of other major currencies is about the same now as it was three years ago. And as Mr. Bernanke pointed out, consumer prices rose only 1.2 percent in 2010, an inflation rate that, for the record, is well below the rate under the sainted Ronald Reagan. The Fed’s preferred measure, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, was up only 0.7 percent, well below the target of around 2 percent.
But Mr. Ryan is sure that the dollar is being debased and won’t take no for an answer. In an attempt to create a gotcha moment, he waved a copy of a newspaper bearing the headline “Inflation Worries Spread” at the Fed chairman. But the gotcha actually went the other way. As Mr. Bernanke immediately pointed out, the article was about inflation in China and other emerging markets, not in the United States. And the Fed chairman declared, correctly, that “inflation made here in the U.S. is very, very low.”
Advantage Bernanke. But the facts don’t matter, because conservative hard-money mania, the demand that the Fed stop trying to rescue the economy, isn’t really about inflation fears.
Mr. Ryan said as much in Wednesday’s hearing, in which he declared that our currency “should be guided by the rule of law, not the rule of men.” A few years ago, my response would have been, say what? After all, even Milton Friedman saw the conduct of monetary policy as a technical issue, not a matter of principle; his complaint about the Fed’s role in the Great Depression was that it didn’t print enough money, not that it printed too much.
But then Friedman, who believed that it sometimes makes sense to let your currency depreciate, who urged Japan’s central bank to adopt a policy very similar to what the Fed is doing now, was a leftist by the standards of today’s G.O.P.
Wednesday’s hearings aren’t likely to have any immediate effect on monetary policy. But they offer a revealing — and appalling — look at the mind-set of one of our two major political parties. We’ve always known that the modern G.O.P. wants to take America back to the way it was before the New Deal; but now it’s clear that the party wants to build a bridge to the 19th century, and maybe even to the antebellum era. Backward, march!


OUTRAGEOUS?

[c1ue]

Re: we learn more about wikileaks

Interesting that the presentation is a sales pitch by Palantir.

I put up a post about this startup last year:

http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthr...ing-technology

[Thailandnotes]

Re: we learn more about wikileaks

From Glenn Greenwald...

"Palantir has also contacted me by email to arrange for Dr. Karp to call me to personally convey the apology. My primary interest is in knowing whether Bank of America retained these firms to execute this proposal and if any steps were taken to do so; if Karp's apology is genuine, that information ought to be forthcoming (as I was finishing writing this, Karp called me, seemed sincere enough in his apology, vowed that any Palantir employees involved in this would be dealt with the way they dealt with HB Gary, and commendably committed to telling me by the end of the week whether Bank of America or Hunton & Williams actually retained these firms to carry out this proposal).

* * * * *

My initial reaction to all of this was to scoff at its absurdity. Not being familiar with the private-sector world of internet security, I hadn't heard of these firms before and, based on the quality of the proposal, assumed they were just some self-promoting, fly-by-night entities of little significance. Moreover, for the reasons I detailed in my interview with The Tech Herald -- and for reasons Digby elaborated on here -- the very notion that I could be forced to choose "professional preservation over cause" is ludicrous on multiple levels. Obviously, I wouldn't have spent the last year vehemently supporting WikiLeaks -- to say nothing of aggressively criticizing virtually every large media outlet and many of their leading stars, as well as the most beloved political leaders of both parties -- if I were willing to choose "career preservation over cause."

But after learning a lot more over the last couple of days, I now take this more seriously -- not in terms of my involvement but the broader implications this story highlights. For one thing, it turns out that the firms involved here are large, legitimate and serious, and do substantial amounts of work for both the U.S. Government and the nation's largest private corporations (as but one example, see this email from a Stanford computer science student about Palantir). Moreover, these kinds of smear campaigns are far from unusual; in other leaked HB Gary emails, ThinkProgress discovered that similar proposals were prepared for the Chamber of Commerce to attack progressive groups and other activists (including ThinkProgress). And perhaps most disturbing of all, Hunton & Williams was recommended to Bank of America's General Counsel by the Justice Department -- meaning the U.S. Government is aiding Bank of America in its defense against/attacks on WikiLeaks.

full column is an interesting read...

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/gl...2/11/campaigns

[Thailandnotes]

Re: we learn more about wikileaks

Actually sounds like Watergate to me...

http://www.salon.com/about/inside_sa...aks/index.html

A disturbing threat against one of our own
From the leaked report titled "The WikiLeaks Threat"

(Updated below)

We take threats against our own very seriously.

A bizarre plan for an attack on the whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks and journalists construed as sympathetic to it -- first reported by the Tech Herald -- clearly targets Salon's Glenn Greenwald, saying that his "level of support" for WikiLeaks "needs to be disrupted." The report (you can download the purported final draft here) is listed as an "overview by Palantir Technologies, HBGary Federal and Berico Technologies," and according to a string of e-mails also leaked, was developed following a request from Hunton and Williams, a law firm that represents, among others, Bank of America.

Bank of America is the presumed next target of WikiLeaks, and has reportedly been bracing for what's to come.

The leaked report singles out other journalists, as well, and suggests that "these are established professionals that have a liberal bent, but ultimately most of them if pushed will choose professional preservation over cause ..." And goes on: "Without the support of people like Glenn wikileaks would fold."

For a complete breakdown of what it all means, Glenn has a thorough, illuminating report. But what the authors of the report meant when they plotted how Glenn and the others could be "disrupted" or "pushed" is as unclear as it is ominous -- and has us deeply concerned. The report was exposed by Anonymous, the pro-WikiLeaks hackers who went after the companies that dropped services to the whistle-blowing organization last year. Anonymous was apparently acting in retaliation to HBGary, whose head of security services, Aaron Barr, had earlier claimed to have infiltrated the Anonymous network. HBGary has since responded, claiming that "information currently in the public domain" from the leak "is not reliable because the perpetrators of this offense, or people working closely with them, have intentionally falsified certain data."

But the security firm Palantir wasted little time severing all relations with HBGary, with Palantir CEO Alex Karp issuing a statement saying that "I want to publicly apologize to progressive organizations in general, and Mr. Greenwald in particular, for any involvement that we may have had in these matters." Karp also reached out and apologized directly to Glenn.

We have no reason not to take the report seriously. As a result, I've asked both Hunton and Williams and Bank of America to explain any role they played and address whether HB Gary (or any of the firms) were being paid, or promised payment, for its development. I'll update this post when we hear their responses.

As bumbling as this whole saga sounds -- Internet security firm can't keep its shadowy dirty tricks campaign from being hacked -- what's outlined in these sets of proposals, as Glenn points out, "quite possibly constitutes serious crimes."