Slashdot Mirror
WikiLeaks In New Legal Battle
geegel writes "The US Justice Department is now fighting in court demands from three WikiLeaks associates to disclose the names of several electronic service platforms that received requests to hand over user information. This comes after Twitter obtained a court order to unseal the demands in order to notify the three persons. The current legal row has seen both the ACLU and the EFF provide legal assistance to the WikiLeaks associates."
If you want to post, you might get through using the https page:
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/06/04/1650250/WikiLeaks-In-New-Legal-Battle
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
The 503s are winning.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I posted a story to slashdot about the 503's. I doubt it will get posted. But since yesterday site been slow, unresponsive and the magic 503 error LOL. I feel censored.
I believe in the EFF. I wish they never defended wikileaks. What they did was illegal. You can't post classified and / or stolen information. Pretty simple.
Have you turned over any records to the Feds concerning Wikileaks members (or any records, period)? If you can't comment on that, then perhaps you could outline what Slashdot's policy is for turning over records to law enforcement when not accompanied by a Federal warrant or National Security letter.
Years ago someone posted the "top secret" scientology documents into the comments and they were deleted. I can't recall if it was court ordered or merely a scare letter from an attorney.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
What they did was illegal. You can't post classified and / or stolen information.
Tell it to the New York Times, asshole posting as AC.
Or listen to the laughter if you tell it to any reputable news publication.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Why would the justice dept want to hide who it is asking records from.
If they are in the right.. well.. why hide it.
While at it, why not fix the RSS feed? XML doesn't understand HTML tags in the titles (e.g. ), nor most of the entities (like ). It's quite a joke if an IT site can't even get something that simple right, right?
I have no sympathy for Wikileaks when it comes to National Defense secrets. There is a whole magnitude of difference from corporate malfeasance in these leaks.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Cause if it is the law, then it is automatically moral and right, pure and simple, /sarcasm
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
did you know there is.... a slashdot japan?
clearly, they are in with the 'globalist banksters'
because you can't.
there is no law banning the 'leaking' of classified information.
there are several different laws that ban specific types of information, some of it classified, in certain situations, by certain people.
the truth is that the vast majority of the documents that Manning released do not fall under any law simply becasue they are classified.
read his charge sheet, then look up the actual laws and read them. the civilian laws that he broke do not use the word 'classified'. at all. the Espionage Act (he has about 5 or so charges on this) is regarding 'national defense information'.
please tell me how information about Gadhafi's "hot nurses" are information vital to the national defense.
congress has been unwilling or unable to pass any law making a blanket ban on passing classified information.
or the Collateral Murder video. how does that rise to the level of the Espionage Act?
why is there no blanket anti-classified leaking law? because congress itself leaks classified information all the time, in order to fight political battles in the media. thats where all the 'senior officials who did not wish to be named' comments come from in news stories.
you can read about Ollie North's experience in the 80s, the whitehouse leaked, congress leaked, everyone leaked. it was part of their media strategy.
There is a great paper from the 1973 Columbia Law Journal by Schmidt and Edgar about this, you can read it online at
http://www.fas.org/sgp/library/index.html
Essentially, the American nation has put more faith in open debate and discussion than in government secrecy and its associated blatant lying and corruption (see Reynolds v. United States for a classic example).
this principle is slowly being chipped away by various underhanded tactics over the years, but the spirit of openness is like an unquenchable flame or some kind of endemic weed... the human condition is to ask questions and demand accounability from authority.
sir, with all due respect, don't you have better things to do than post on slashdot?
i had a 'remote viewing' session once of the slashdot data center, with a guru in the sonorran desert after smoking a secret weed that only blooms once in a hundred years.
inside, we saw the slashdot servers. we were able to 'latch on' to the data packets and follow them through the cables, slowing down time by 186,00,00,00,00 times so that we could see what was happening. Actually we didn't so much slow down time, as speed up our brains, but that's another post for another time.
We came, eventually to a little box. It was marked "NSA: Super Secret Spy Device" in Palatino Linotype. I thought this was strange, because I always figured them for more of an Arial or something conservative and stolid. Anyways. There were two cables out. One was marked "The Internet". The other was marked "Super Secret NSA Spy Program". Also the tag said "This tag not to be removed by penalty of law."
This really threw me, I started thinking about mattresses. Specifically, the 'mattress planet' from Douglas Adam's books. I couldn't hold my state of suspended animation any longer, and my guru and I fell off the time plane, back towards the Earth. Our minds were slowing down too fast - we were at risk of a sort of mental breakdown, similar to what happens to divers when they return too quickly to the surface after an extended period underwater.
Fortunately my guru friend had loaded his entire trailer with golf balls salvaged from a nearby lake. Apparently there is something about the shape of golf balls that channels psychic energy into a hyperbolic manifold. Since the soul paths do not intersect on the plane surface, this allows you to slowly bring your speed down without actually having to learn the complicated mechanics of astral dynamics.
After that we had a few bears and ate some vegetarian vienna sausages. We knew nobody would believe us. We hardly believed it ourselves. But when Hepting leaked those AT&T papers were like 'yeah man! yeah!'.
have you been reading about it?
doesn't that make you a criminal too, technically, since you are 'retaining national defense information', which is covered by 18 USC 793 subparagraph (e) ?
WikiLeaks has proven the old school saying about 'being cleared for Ridiculous'.
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
These kinds of takedown orders make me wonder why we don't see a LOT MORE of the "Streisand Effect" happening in those scenarios?
when something is classified it means it becomes a state secret because there is a need for secrecy. unfortunately, this has become a way to get around oversight. yes, there are absolutely a need for some documents to be classified but having millions upon millions of documents be classified is a just an all out abuse. dont want to let anyone know you fucked something up? CLASSIFY IT! dont want people to know how much of our resources you are wasting? CLASSIFY IT! then there is shit that is just ridiculous to classify. classifying a report for a run of the mill day is just STUPID. if they didnt classify EVERYTHING but instead just the truly important stuff then the people might actually regard it as something of significant importance.
being an asshole on record does not mean you get to keep it a secret because it makes you look bad.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Wow. What a story. Got any bears left? I haven't had a bear steak in ages. Don't ruin those good bears with gay little vienna sausages though - I'll pass on them!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
even if you look at the military charges...
they are things like 'moving information from a classified system to an unclassified system', or 'using a computer for its non-intended purpose'. it doesnt have anything about 'passing classified information to wikileaks'. it might say a lot of things, but thats one thing it doesnt say.
you have also mentioned 'stolen' information. this i find very hard to understand. all US government work is uncopyrightable, it is in the public domain. where does the 'value' then derive? that is the langauge of 18 USC 641, 'theft of government property'. how can you steal something that is free? is the information only valuable because nobody knows it? if so, then how can passing it to wikileaks be considered stealing, since it has lost all of its 'scarcity' by being posted on the internet? the last Espionage case that involved Theft of Government property that i know of (the Amerasia case) resulted in a slap on the wrist of the defendants for 641 violations.. they had ver batim put classified government reports into a magazine.
As for 'aiding the enemy', this UCMJ law doesn't mention the word 'classified', at all. yes it is a potentially capital crime, but the prosecution has indicated they will not pursue this.
this brings me to another question - why hasn't he been charged with the UCMJ Espionage law? Why did they use the much less harsh civilian Espionage law, and subparagraph (e) to boot? That paragraph is usually reserved for people like the AIPAC case, the Pentagon Papers case, guys who take home boxes of stuff (Ford), the Morison case, etc. If Manning truly 'aided the enemy' why dont they charge him with the full gamut of UCMJ violations?
He is not charged with Treason either. Why not? Could it be that the 'worst leaker in US military history' didnt leak anything all that important? Could it be that the state department over-classifies most of its material for political reasons?
Could it be the 'collateral murder' video is merely embarassing, and not vital national defense information?
If you chop away at the 34 counts against him, you will find there are only a handful of charges actually related to battlefield information. The rest of it is... what? If he gets convicted on every last count, then it sets a precedent that makes a large percentage of current war reporting basically illegal and punishable by felonies. it also makes communicating with reporters a crime. is that really what we want our future to be?
18 USC 793 (Espionage Act)
subparagraph (e) Whoever having unauthorized possession of, access to, or
control over any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch,
photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model,
instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or
information relating to the national defense which information the
possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the
United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully
communicates, delivers, transmits or causes to be communicated,
delivered, or transmitted, or attempts to communicate, deliver,
transmit or cause to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted the
same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully retains
the same and fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the
United States entitled to receive it;
i.e. if you have 'national defense' information on your computer, that you downloaded with your web browser, you are 'retaining' it.
You can also look at 18 USC 1030(a)(1), the "Computer Espionage" act, which broadens the language even further.
The recent Jane Mayer story on the Thomas Drake case flat out says that his 5 espionage charges, if successfully prosecuted by the government, would set a precedent that makes a lot of reporting a criminal activity, because reporters have to take notes about sensitive information and keep it on their persons to write their stories.
How does Mayer know? She wrote the book (The Dark Side) on the government's torture program - where it came from, how it made it's way from the Korean war to the Navy Seal survivial training (SERE), and from there to a couple of psychologists, and directly into Bybee's torture memos ... which directly influenced activities at Guantanamo, Abu Grahib, and in the 'black prisons' across the world.
she discovered all this by asking a lot of government officials a lot of questions and taking a lot of notes. notes that she wont be able to if the current spate of 6 non-spying Espionage Act prosecutions set precedent
Wow. You are upset they are trying him for crimes he likely committed, rather than crimes he likely did not?
Properly cooked, bear makes excellent hot beef style sandwiches.
He is not charged with Treason either. Why not? Could it be that the 'worst leaker in US military history' didnt leak anything all that important? Could it be that the state department over-classifies most of its material for political reasons?
No, it's because Treason is a crime specifically defined in the US Constitution. Manning's circumstances don't meet the Constitutional test for treason.
As far as I recall or know, only one person has been charged with treason since WW2.
$1 million for arrest of American al Qaeda charged with treason
But think about it, he is charged with aiding the enemy. That is treason by any common understanding of the word, and would constitutie treason in most countries, it just does not meet the US Constitutional meaning.
The State Department has been relocating diplomats and warning activists and sources around the world after Wikileaks outed them. This has been very disruptive.
WikiLeaks sparks worldwide diplomatic crisis
WikiLeaks cables prompt US to move diplomatic sources
Wikileaks: US will have to reshuffle diplomats following revelations
You might want to go back and look at some of those issues in your post using different sources, you're heading in the wrong direction in many cases.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
because the media has painted him as the 'worst leaker in history' when the charges do not justify this portrayal
because the anger against wikileaks and Manning, stoked by illogical and incorrect assertions regarding his actions and the legality or illegality of them, will result in bad legal precedent, if he is convicted on all counts
because that precedent will then be used to target many, many other people for things like leaking embarassing videos.
If Manning's precedent stands on the Collateral Murder video for example, then the Abu Grahib photo leaks would be prosecutable under the Espionage Act.
The first article you linked to discusses a lot of allegations in the wikileaks info - it doesnt go into much detail about the disruption caused.
The second article you linked to says this: "The repercussions for US diplomats, some of whom have written colourful descriptions of their host countries and leaders, have so far been relatively minor."
"It said officials believed the disclosure of the cables had affected contacts in some countries between US diplomats and human rights activists, who were now wary lest their names and views emerge in the future."
The third article says this:"We're going to have to pull out some of our best people – the diplomats who best represented the United States and were the most thoughtful in their analysis – because they dared to report back the truth about the nations in which they serve."
As for the first article - a lot of that was known before wikileaks dumped it, by old fashioned reporting.
As for the second article - that is troubling. however after reading "Dirty Diplomacy" by Craig Murray, i do not automatically assume that US ambassadors care about human rights or report the truth back home. Especially after allying with people like Karamov of Uzbekistan, who has somehow managed to make life more repressive than it was during Soviet times but got US support because of the airbase at K2 for a number of years. (we no longer are so friendly with him)
As for the third article ... diplomats are shuffled around all the time. In fact every time there is a new president, a bunch of his campaign contributors and cronies are posted as diplomatic staff. It is the 'spoils system' in the modern era, is it not?
Maybe it is more 'disruptive' than, say, the Iraq War, which outraged almost the entire world against us. But 'disruption' is not a crime is it?
Which one is the verb, “is fighting” or “demands”?
i would say the vast majority do not understand or care about what you are talking about. if the police come asking for stuff, their first instinct is to be helpful and get rid of the 'bad people'.
libraries are top down bureaucracies that make corporate life seem like a montessori school. independent thought is not allowed, especially regarding "the computers", control of which many library administrators cling to as some kind of ailment for middle age.