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WikiLeaks Continues To Fund Itself Via Flattr
novenator writes "Since the corporations MasterCard, PayPal, and Visa have been trying to shut down the cash flow to the Wikileaks project, those who wish to donate have been having trouble finding a way to help out. The social media/micropayment site Flattr (run from Sweden) continues to leave the channels open."
Can we stop posting every bit wikileaks minutiae and get back to real news for nerds?
wikileaks almost has nothing to do with tech anyways, and this tidbit is almost certainly not stuff that matters.
Can we report on more ways to help Wikileaks please? It is arguably the most influence technology, hacking and open-source thinking has had this year, and for a while, and I'd like to see it gather much more support.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
As opposed to posting a link to another board that has am IMAGE of the url; (madness!!)
here ya go:
https://flattr.com/profile/wikileaks
Really editors, was that so hard? My new-years resolution? Find a site that is as good as Slashdot used to be.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Since we're bandying unfounded speculative rumour about - I heard you were a paedophile ... uh ... and a terrorist. And you hate puppies.
How is it funding itself? Do they have $20 and continually re-donate it to their organization?
Let's deny you all credit cards, bank accounts, airline flights, all major store purchases, all corporate relations, because, well, just because the government said so, no arguments given, and see if you still call that a right any company has, and not a restriction of your freedoms, based on discrimination of some sort. Nobody has yet even accuse wikileaks of breaking any law. The data they publish was not acquired by them, and could have been published anywhere, in zillions of methods, including leaflets on street light poles, involving no computer or network of any kind.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Can we report on more ways to help Wikileaks please?
What I'd like to see is an open, international credit card system that's not at the mercy of two semi-monopolists. It's practically impossible to do reliable payments online without the approval of MasterCard and Visa, and clearly they don't always approve. That's a problem, and it needs to be fixed. We've become too dependent on these two companies, and it turns out they're not the neutral infrastructure that we expected them to be.
We need neutral payment infrastructure. Preferably one where the recipient doesn't need a separate contract with every single credit card company, but only with a single bank. And then everybody with a credit card can automatically pay money to that bank. You can have multiple banks, multiple credit cards, etc, all on the same universal, open system. And if a single bank decides not to do business with you, then you can simply switch to another. If your credit card provider decides not to let you send money to someone, you can just get a different credit card that's on the same system. It's the only good way of handling this, I think.
Now only to get some international banks and credit cards on board with this idea.
Understand that Wikileaks hasn't leaked anything. They just published what was already leaked and which is what the New York Times and others have published in part so I wonder why MasterCard et al aren't doing the same thing to all the other media outlets that publish leaked info.
Maybe they all got a call from Lieberman's office or something.
I think the more interesting point here, is that governments can strong-arm credit card companies to cut the funding for a Website that they don't like.
What happens if an influential large software company decides that it doesn't like an open source software site?
This is indeed news for nerds, and stuff that matters.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Big news for nerds in Spain today has got Spanish "internautas"riled: The US pressured all major political parties to change Spanish laws regarding P2P downloads.
Specifically: these two cables (248887 and 213345) are revealing the backroom pressure to ignore the wishes of the Spanish people and slip the laws in without any debate. Even going as far as to tell elected representatives not to meet with the internet community to debate the issue.
This, right on the heels of a votation without public debate going on right now in congress to force through new laws giving the Spanish Gov the right to shutdown websites at will without so much as a court order...
Oh , and ssshhh! We won't mention Assanges mind bogglingly hypocritical whinge about his case details being leaked...
Oh look, another idiot that can't understand the difference between a government's inherent right to privacy & an individual's inherent right to privacy.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Isn't that what the various inter-bank electronic transfer systems do? I can transfer money to any UK account for free, and any account worldwide for a fee. The fee (£10 or so) is so high I've never used it though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWIFT
Of course, these aren't anonymous, and as I understand it most banks charge for transactions in a different currency and/or country.
Using the online form linked from here ("Online Transfer via selected European and UK banks") should use this system, but doesn't work with either of my accounts -- I think because they're both in £ but the destination account is in €.
The Assange Defence Fund is held in a UK £ account (details at the top of the Support page), so I can donate to that easily (the same way I pay my rent, etc). But I'd rather donate to Wikileaks.
Based on http://wikileaks.nl/support.html it is still possible to transfer money directly to two bank accounts (to fund Wikileaks itself, there is also information there if you want to fund Assange's defense):
Bank Transfer - Option 1: via Sunshine Press Productions ehf:
Skulagötu 19, 101 Reykjavik, Iceland
Landsbanki Islands Account number 0111-26-611010
BANK/SWIFT:NBIIISRE
ACCOUNT/IBAN:IS97 0111 2661 1010 6110 1002 80
Bank Transfer - Option 2: via the not-for-profit Wau Holland Stiftung Foundation:
This support is tax deductible in Germany
Bank Account: 2772812-04
IBAN: DE46 5204 0021 0277 2812 04
BIC Code: COBADEFF520
Bank: Commerzbank Kassel
German BLZ: 52040021
Subject: WIKILEAKS / WHS Projekt 04
The page also states that some European banks can transfer directly to Datacell, the collection agent for Wikileaks:
Using:
See URLs http://www.datacell.com/news.php and https://payments.datacell.com/ for more info about that last option
So can you point us at your submission on the subject then?
Get your own free personal location tracker
i seem to remember the US keeps track of swift "for terrorism" reasons
who is to say i won't get flagged if i use swift to help wikileaks?...
if the goal is oppression by fear, then it's working.
Naive as I sometimes am I used to believe that major credit card companies like Visa or Mastercard are obliged to process transactions, unless there is no well-defined court ruling against it, and cannot just refuse to deliver their services whenever they feel like it or are under political pressure. Personally, I don't give a damn about the cables and don't understand why the US government makes such a fuzz about them -- most of what they contain is known by everyone, and besides, personal assessments by diplomats are not facts anyway.
But it is astonishing and came as quite a surprise to me that essential economic services like money transfers and payment processing sites are apparently allowed to be operated by private companies in an arbitrary and unreliable way and can easily be influenced by governments to their will without legal consequences. I'd say there is an urgent need for neutrality rules in the form of laws and binding international treaties.
Nope, a document is either Classified or it is not.
There are different levels inside Classified, such as 2, 3, NATO, ATOMAL, etc, but that's not terribly important. The vast, vast, vast majority of documents are Unclassified. That's because it is a FUCKING PAIN IN THE ASS to get your hands on anything Classified. You can't copy it, you can't email it, you have to use secure networks, work in pairs, etc. You'd be surprised at how much stuff is Unclassified. For example, the layouts of warships are Unclassified so the contractors can work on them. Only the tiny little bits that are really important (like the [REDACTED] or the [REDACTED]) are Classified. You can go about your day, working on military equipment, without ever having to use your security clearance. That's a good thing because you also have to go through a lengthy debriefing once you've worked on the drawings. Careless talk like "Oh yeah, I had to order part XYZ a year ago. A good vendor is ABC." Who-oops! Part XYZ, being of dimensions X, Y, and Z, now gives out a starting point for some first principles work, and then presto, the same info that's in a Classified spec.
You have to have three things to read a Classified document:
1. The appropriate clearance level. That's where the levels above come into play.
2. The need-to-know. If you have a clearance it doesn't mean you can just look up any document you feel like. You have to have a reason.
3. The appropriate environment. Computers and networks are assumed to be non-secure and you can't make copies.
So the interesting thing about this is the guy who leaked the documents isn't entirely responsible for what happened. Where was his supervisor? How did he breach security? I can't just walk into a secure room and download [REDACTED] on a thumb drive.
If you mark something as Classified when it's not supposed to be then it's a violation of those same Acts. There's a completely separate classification system for things that are personally embarrassing and can cause damage to a person. Classified is only for things that are damaging to the country. Damaging, NOT EMBARRASSING!
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Actually, after actually reading the cables, it appears that it wasn't the US pressuring anybody.