i dont know what else to say. these guys coming out of the woodwork claiming wikileaks does nothing important, well, i am wondering why they dont more strongly defend Brad Manning and call for the dropping of Espionage charges against Jonisdottir, Assange, et al.
that doesnt mean they wont all go get one and help Goldman Sachs et al bring down the world economy, while all of the 'experts' who are highly educated, sophisitcated economists continue to say there is no housing bubble, mortgage backed bonds and securities are great, Bear Stearns is a good investment, etc etc etc blah blah blah.
for a more updated version, watch TV during mid day, count the number of for-profit colleges advertising, then go read 'Subprime goes to College' by Steve Eisman.
at some point, you have to have somebody come in and tell one group of people to stop victimizing another at a huge cost to society, and then claiming "not my problem, they should have known i was going to destroy their lives". we dont need any more bailouts.
but the more commonly told story about hemophiliacs and aids is that the non-profit blood centers refused to ban homosexual people from giving blood in the early stages of the epidemic because it would have been non-correct politically. the supply, relied on by hemophiliacs for basic survival, got infected and tens of thousands of hemophiliacs died. now, of course, they still ban homosexual people, even when it is no longer helpful nor wise to do so (when blood banks are complaining they are always short of blood, why are you banning an entire group of people who could have safe blood now that we understand the disease and have good tests for it?).
The three companies that made up 'Team Themis', the team planned to help Bank of America respond to a never-completed wikileaks dump of BoA data, by character-assassinating journalists and 'activists', were all govt contractors.
Berico Technologies - owned by ex-military, run by ex-military, major customer = us government.
Palantir Technologies - makes software to help aggregate data about people, us govt contractor
HB Gary - this is the one that Anonymous hacked and dumped the data on. they were a us govt contractor, and they routinely spied on all kinds of groups.
---
does that prove that the govt is paying companies to spy on citizens? no. its just that dozens of companies whose main purpose and expertise is to spy on people, and who are staffed by people who spent their entire military career spying on people, just so happen to be receiving billions and billions of dollars from the government to do various jobs that we are not allowed to know about, because of 'national security'.
now, then, of course, there is the long relationship between the US govt and private companies, and spying, going back to World War I, and then later on the ITT corporation, Western Union, and so forth. Then there was AT&T in more recent years, as well as the major phone network companies, who agreed to cooperate with NSA without caring about the law, except for QWest.
then there are the 'fusion centers'. should i go on?
google "apache gunship videos", tell me how many thousands of hits you get. now explain to me how Manning 'betrayed his country' by leaking a gunship video that is basically identical to the thousands of others being traded on the web by immature boys trying to explore the human condition.
"oh but thats not all he leaked..."
fine, then maybe they should DROP the charges against him that specifically are trying to put him in prison ten years for leaking a video that contains the same basic stuff that countless other 'brave troops' have leaked all over the internet.
'ok but he leaked sensitive info. people died'
like what? please name me one. find me one. just one memo. just one incident. im guessing there might be one, but the vast majority of the charges against him are completely ridiculous. the Reyjkavic 13 memo in particular is a complete joke - 10 years in prison for giving out details about icelandic bank fraud. the type of stuff you can read about every day in the wall street journal or Barron's.
There was a case in the 60s called the Irvin Scarbeck case, where a guy fell in love with a Polish lady and the communist police blackmailed him into giving them (somewhat) secret documents.
The government couldn't charge him under the Espionage Act, because he wasn't on US soil. Instead, they used some other law (the Subversive Activities Control Act). They got him, but that wasn't good enough for a certain obstinate congressman.
This congressman tried to expand the Espionage Act of 1917 to include crimes committed outside of US soil. I say 'obstinate' because he tried to pass the law several different times and it kept failing. Finally it got it through committees and up to a vote on the floor of the congress. Eventually it did pass.
I.e. It doesn't matter if he is on US soil. The Espionage Act still applies.
Now, what about he himself not transmitting the files?
First of all, they probably (from what i gather) aren't charging him with transmitting, they are charging him with conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act (the 'conspiracy' clause being part G of the act if i remember correctly). To prove conspiracy, they don't need to prove he actually moved the files. They just need to prove he helped someone else do it.
But beyond that, in theory, the 'movement' of files doesn't even matter - - - if he has possession of the files, that might also be a violation of the Espionage Act. This specific language of the Act hasn't been used much in court, the "posession" (they actually call it "withholding" IIRC). There are only a small number of cases that turn on that concept, like the Ford case about 7 years ago, and the Drake case last year. So, if you 'conspire' to help someone else 'withhold' the documents, in theory, you might be in violation. The language of the act is so vague that in the hands of a vigorous prosecutor, it could mean almost anything. William Welch even argued last year that Drake "should have known" a document was classified, even though it wasn't marked classified. You see, they decided to make some of the documents classified, only after they put him under indictment.
Of course the Espionage Act itself doesn't even use the word 'classified', it uses the phrase 'national defense information', which is a much narrower defition. These days everything under the sun is overclassified well beyond reason, and 'favored' reporters are given classified info all the time that ends up in the newspapers and books. A great example is the Osama Bin Ladin raid, a lot of the info that Obama's staff gave out on that was clearly far, far beyond the level of 'sensitive information', that is contained in Wikileaks, and yet those reporters will never face any kind of threat or discipline, nor will Obama's staff that leaked it.
Now, what about him not being a US citizen? I don't know about that, im not a legal expert.
im not sure how much credence i put in this story. big investment banks have always been huge customers of prostitutes, and hell the NYMEX even had traders who started out as prostitutes.
the big porn industry is not little guys fighting for free speech, its companies like Hughes Aircraft which owned certain satellite TV companies which made huge profits off of pornography. every cable provider makes big bucks off of pornography. they use ordinary banks just like everyone else. pay per view porn is big money. esp in hotels. the VISA system processes their payments like everyone else.
im not saying its impossible that they cold-shouldered paypal over this issue, im just saying i need alot more evidence to convince me that this is what happened.
its a good question and one that we have been struggling with since the dawn of human civilization. how do we know we are all not imaginary, or in a dream, or someone elses dream, or a computer like the Matrix?
but we do have a tool, 'science', which is based on evidence, and coming up with theories to fit the evidence. To badly paraphrase Carl Sagn in Cosmos --- science is not a perfect tool, but its the best one we have.
because, the Espionage Act specifically uses the phrase "National Defense Information", which means that the information has to be pretty damned seriously related to the military, not a bunch of 'rumor collections from various countries'.
i mean, if what he gave out was pointless information, then he can't be guilty under that law.
"How do journalists get sources or info? Right, either you pay them, or they volunteer for the promise of future payoffs."
actually a lot of journalists get info by asking questions of people who, for various reasons, want the truth to be out there. or, at least, their side of the story to be out there in the public. sometimes sources find the journalists, not the other way around. paying sources is generally frowned upon by the professional journalism industry.
im not saying you are wrong, but not every journalist is like drew pearson.
i didn't know that Goldman Sachs bought a board membership and that it basically saved stratfor from going out of business.
i didn't know that GS was trading on information from stratfor. it creates all kinds of possibilities for GS to manipulate markets even more than it already does. it would be like if GS had someone sitting on the New York Times board or the Bloomberg board. it doesn't look very good to have people who make billions of dollars off of news reports actively having an influencing over the editorial decisions of that publishing body. but thats exactly what GS has here with stratfor and 'stratcap'.
now, add on top that Stratfor is allegedly bribing people for information, or using threats and intimidation, or 'pscyhological, sexual control' of sources to get information. you basically have Goldman Sachs directly involved in this stuff, its just all kinds of weird stuff.
Goldman has a history of inserting itself into relationships with other companies, and then doing weird things that are hugely conflicted. A perfect example being the Paulson hedge fund and the ABACUS junk mortgage CDOs they did in the mid 2000s. Then there is what they did on Nymex - being on the board, and being a huge trader at the same time, manipulating the oil market (see The Asylum by Leah McGrath Goodman).
the value of the stock is the labor extracted from slaves in china. if they were payed proper wages, then they would be able to buy imports from the united states and everyones living standards would raise.
instead we send it all to the 1%, who spend it on cocaine and Dubai prostitutes. yay progress.
they want the most profit for their investment. if the company stops producing massive earnings based on its products/innovation/whatever, then they will gut it and sell it just like a used car. or just like HP.
sometimes they will skip that whole 'stops producing massive earnings' thing, and just go right to the gutting, because personally it can benefit a few people a great deal to throw a company down the toilet in order to pay out big bonuses and get rid of liabilities. see Kerr-McGee / Tronox or hundreds of other examples. (Blue Star airlines anyone?)
for Jobs, the profit was a means to an end, this vision of technology. for shareholders, the profit is the end. they simply do not care. and i can promise you that there are hedge funders invested in every company on this planet, but also they own bonds of the company.
the labor market in china is not a free market
on
Apple Has Too Much Money
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· Score: 5, Insightful
i dont understand why people who believe in the free market keep looking to China as some kind of model on a hill. China is run by the Communist Party, and the corporations over there are part owned by the same party.
There are no labor unions, there are no workers rights laws, there are no environmental laws. There are mines and factories that are run on prison labor - 'criminals' being people who speak things the government doesnt like. Criminals being people who mention forming a union. That is not a 'free market' upon which wages were decided. That is a captive market, not a free competitive market.
In case you have forgotten, slavery was what the Republican Party was founded to eliminate from the face of the Earth. Not to make a profit off of it by claiming it was 'fair'.
The idea that someone should not have to inhale N-Hexane on an assembly line to save 1% on the cost of a product has nothing to do with 'socialism'. It is about basic human decency, basic morality, basic common sense. It is about the difference between a civilized society and lawless barbarism.
making you work 80 hours a week, making you live in a tiny room with 20 other people, make you use dangerous chemicals that damage your brain, threaten you with prison for even talking about a union, etc?
congratulations, capitalism. after Jobs passed away, it took less than a month for the hedge funders to begin the pillaging of the organization for their own personal aggrandizement.
apple will soon become 'the next HP', a gutted wretch whose main business is screwing people out of toner ink. bravo.
mistreatment of workers is the entire purpose of outsourcing manufacturing to China in the first place. if you make Foxconn stop abusing people, you essentially put it out of business, because now the playing field is leveled so that other countries that are not brutal dictatorships will have a chance to enter manufacturing again.
the destruction of unions and the lowering of wages and the destruction of environmmental regulations was the very purposes of existence of companies like Foxconn, and their American enablers. you seem to think these people are just going to say 'oh woops sorry' and somehow reverse the last 30 years of history, including the huge profits they made for private equity firms, investment banks like Goldman Sachs, and hedge funds.
and a host of other horrific diseases that have killed millions of people are directly related to the fact that humans eat meat when it is, in fact, not necessary to sustain life.
what? hey, you might bring about the end of human civilization becasue 'you dont like tofu', or 'pork tastes great', but at least you arent a self righteous fucking moron
Slashdot Mirror
i dont know what else to say. these guys coming out of the woodwork claiming wikileaks does nothing important, well, i am wondering why they dont more strongly defend Brad Manning and call for the dropping of Espionage charges against Jonisdottir, Assange, et al.
that doesnt mean they wont all go get one and help Goldman Sachs et al bring down the world economy, while all of the 'experts' who are highly educated, sophisitcated economists continue to say there is no housing bubble, mortgage backed bonds and securities are great, Bear Stearns is a good investment, etc etc etc blah blah blah.
for a more updated version, watch TV during mid day, count the number of for-profit colleges advertising, then go read 'Subprime goes to College' by Steve Eisman.
at some point, you have to have somebody come in and tell one group of people to stop victimizing another at a huge cost to society, and then claiming "not my problem, they should have known i was going to destroy their lives". we dont need any more bailouts.
that is an interesting anecdote.
but the more commonly told story about hemophiliacs and aids is that the non-profit blood centers refused to ban homosexual people from giving blood in the early stages of the epidemic because it would have been non-correct politically. the supply, relied on by hemophiliacs for basic survival, got infected and tens of thousands of hemophiliacs died. now, of course, they still ban homosexual people, even when it is no longer helpful nor wise to do so (when blood banks are complaining they are always short of blood, why are you banning an entire group of people who could have safe blood now that we understand the disease and have good tests for it?).
because you can't have it both ways.
either wikileaks was innocuous and had no impact on anything, because its documents were pointless gibberish.
or bradley manning was a traitor to the country and endangered the lives of the troops because wikileaks had such sensitive important information.
only one of those can be true. not both.
The three companies that made up 'Team Themis', the team planned to help Bank of America respond to a never-completed wikileaks dump of BoA data, by character-assassinating journalists and 'activists', were all govt contractors.
Berico Technologies - owned by ex-military, run by ex-military, major customer = us government.
Palantir Technologies - makes software to help aggregate data about people, us govt contractor
HB Gary - this is the one that Anonymous hacked and dumped the data on. they were a us govt contractor, and they routinely spied on all kinds of groups.
---
does that prove that the govt is paying companies to spy on citizens? no. its just that dozens of companies whose main purpose and expertise is to spy on people, and who are staffed by people who spent their entire military career spying on people, just so happen to be receiving billions and billions of dollars from the government to do various jobs that we are not allowed to know about, because of 'national security'.
now, then, of course, there is the long relationship between the US govt and private companies, and spying, going back to World War I, and then later on the ITT corporation, Western Union, and so forth. Then there was AT&T in more recent years, as well as the major phone network companies, who agreed to cooperate with NSA without caring about the law, except for QWest.
then there are the 'fusion centers'. should i go on?
google "apache gunship videos", tell me how many thousands of hits you get. now explain to me how Manning 'betrayed his country' by leaking a gunship video that is basically identical to the thousands of others being traded on the web by immature boys trying to explore the human condition.
"oh but thats not all he leaked..."
fine, then maybe they should DROP the charges against him that specifically are trying to put him in prison ten years for leaking a video that contains the same basic stuff that countless other 'brave troops' have leaked all over the internet.
'ok but he leaked sensitive info. people died'
like what? please name me one. find me one. just one memo. just one incident. im guessing there might be one, but the vast majority of the charges against him are completely ridiculous. the Reyjkavic 13 memo in particular is a complete joke - 10 years in prison for giving out details about icelandic bank fraud. the type of stuff you can read about every day in the wall street journal or Barron's.
There was a case in the 60s called the Irvin Scarbeck case, where a guy fell in love with a Polish lady and the communist police blackmailed him into giving them (somewhat) secret documents.
The government couldn't charge him under the Espionage Act, because he wasn't on US soil. Instead, they used some other law (the Subversive Activities Control Act). They got him, but that wasn't good enough for a certain obstinate congressman.
This congressman tried to expand the Espionage Act of 1917 to include crimes committed outside of US soil. I say 'obstinate' because he tried to pass the law several different times and it kept failing. Finally it got it through committees and up to a vote on the floor of the congress. Eventually it did pass.
I.e. It doesn't matter if he is on US soil. The Espionage Act still applies.
Now, what about he himself not transmitting the files?
First of all, they probably (from what i gather) aren't charging him with transmitting, they are charging him with conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act (the 'conspiracy' clause being part G of the act if i remember correctly). To prove conspiracy, they don't need to prove he actually moved the files. They just need to prove he helped someone else do it.
But beyond that, in theory, the 'movement' of files doesn't even matter - - - if he has possession of the files, that might also be a violation of the Espionage Act. This specific language of the Act hasn't been used much in court, the "posession" (they actually call it "withholding" IIRC). There are only a small number of cases that turn on that concept, like the Ford case about 7 years ago, and the Drake case last year. So, if you 'conspire' to help someone else 'withhold' the documents, in theory, you might be in violation. The language of the act is so vague that in the hands of a vigorous prosecutor, it could mean almost anything. William Welch even argued last year that Drake "should have known" a document was classified, even though it wasn't marked classified. You see, they decided to make some of the documents classified, only after they put him under indictment.
Of course the Espionage Act itself doesn't even use the word 'classified', it uses the phrase 'national defense information', which is a much narrower defition. These days everything under the sun is overclassified well beyond reason, and 'favored' reporters are given classified info all the time that ends up in the newspapers and books. A great example is the Osama Bin Ladin raid, a lot of the info that Obama's staff gave out on that was clearly far, far beyond the level of 'sensitive information', that is contained in Wikileaks, and yet those reporters will never face any kind of threat or discipline, nor will Obama's staff that leaked it.
Now, what about him not being a US citizen? I don't know about that, im not a legal expert.
please tell me it does not involve Sir Mixalot
if the US executes it's own citizens, it's a moral conundrum that challenges the primacy of our constitutional system.
if the US executes an Australian citizen, it's an international incident that may cause war-crimes charges to be brought against President Obama.
im not sure how much credence i put in this story. big investment banks have always been huge customers of prostitutes, and hell the NYMEX even had traders who started out as prostitutes.
the big porn industry is not little guys fighting for free speech, its companies like Hughes Aircraft which owned certain satellite TV companies which made huge profits off of pornography. every cable provider makes big bucks off of pornography. they use ordinary banks just like everyone else. pay per view porn is big money. esp in hotels. the VISA system processes their payments like everyone else.
im not saying its impossible that they cold-shouldered paypal over this issue, im just saying i need alot more evidence to convince me that this is what happened.
and Mastercard. they are the ones that tell the banks how many chargebacks are acceptable, and the ones who set the cost of chargebacks.
their customer service is a little bit unusual, but i've had great success with
http://hostchopper.com/
its a good question and one that we have been struggling with since the dawn of human civilization. how do we know we are all not imaginary, or in a dream, or someone elses dream, or a computer like the Matrix?
but we do have a tool, 'science', which is based on evidence, and coming up with theories to fit the evidence. To badly paraphrase Carl Sagn in Cosmos --- science is not a perfect tool, but its the best one we have.
because, the Espionage Act specifically uses the phrase "National Defense Information", which means that the information has to be pretty damned seriously related to the military, not a bunch of 'rumor collections from various countries'.
i mean, if what he gave out was pointless information, then he can't be guilty under that law.
"How do journalists get sources or info? Right, either you pay them, or they volunteer for the promise of future payoffs."
actually a lot of journalists get info by asking questions of people who, for various reasons, want the truth to be out there. or, at least, their side of the story to be out there in the public. sometimes sources find the journalists, not the other way around. paying sources is generally frowned upon by the professional journalism industry.
im not saying you are wrong, but not every journalist is like drew pearson.
i didn't know that Goldman Sachs bought a board membership and that it basically saved stratfor from going out of business.
i didn't know that GS was trading on information from stratfor. it creates all kinds of possibilities for GS to manipulate markets even more than it already does. it would be like if GS had someone sitting on the New York Times board or the Bloomberg board. it doesn't look very good to have people who make billions of dollars off of news reports actively having an influencing over the editorial decisions of that publishing body. but thats exactly what GS has here with stratfor and 'stratcap'.
now, add on top that Stratfor is allegedly bribing people for information, or using threats and intimidation, or 'pscyhological, sexual control' of sources to get information. you basically have Goldman Sachs directly involved in this stuff, its just all kinds of weird stuff.
Goldman has a history of inserting itself into relationships with other companies, and then doing weird things that are hugely conflicted. A perfect example being the Paulson hedge fund and the ABACUS junk mortgage CDOs they did in the mid 2000s. Then there is what they did on Nymex - being on the board, and being a huge trader at the same time, manipulating the oil market (see The Asylum by Leah McGrath Goodman).
the value of the stock is the labor extracted from slaves in china. if they were payed proper wages, then they would be able to buy imports from the united states and everyones living standards would raise.
instead we send it all to the 1%, who spend it on cocaine and Dubai prostitutes. yay progress.
they want the most profit for their investment. if the company stops producing massive earnings based on its products/innovation/whatever, then they will gut it and sell it just like a used car. or just like HP.
sometimes they will skip that whole 'stops producing massive earnings' thing, and just go right to the gutting, because personally it can benefit a few people a great deal to throw a company down the toilet in order to pay out big bonuses and get rid of liabilities. see Kerr-McGee / Tronox or hundreds of other examples. (Blue Star airlines anyone?)
for Jobs, the profit was a means to an end, this vision of technology. for shareholders, the profit is the end. they simply do not care. and i can promise you that there are hedge funders invested in every company on this planet, but also they own bonds of the company.
i dont understand why people who believe in the free market keep looking to China as some kind of model on a hill. China is run by the Communist Party, and the corporations over there are part owned by the same party.
There are no labor unions, there are no workers rights laws, there are no environmental laws. There are mines and factories that are run on prison labor - 'criminals' being people who speak things the government doesnt like. Criminals being people who mention forming a union. That is not a 'free market' upon which wages were decided. That is a captive market, not a free competitive market.
In case you have forgotten, slavery was what the Republican Party was founded to eliminate from the face of the Earth. Not to make a profit off of it by claiming it was 'fair'.
The idea that someone should not have to inhale N-Hexane on an assembly line to save 1% on the cost of a product has nothing to do with 'socialism'. It is about basic human decency, basic morality, basic common sense. It is about the difference between a civilized society and lawless barbarism.
making you work 80 hours a week, making you live in a tiny room with 20 other people, make you use dangerous chemicals that damage your brain, threaten you with prison for even talking about a union, etc?
congratulations, capitalism. after Jobs passed away, it took less than a month for the hedge funders to begin the pillaging of the organization for their own personal aggrandizement.
apple will soon become 'the next HP', a gutted wretch whose main business is screwing people out of toner ink. bravo.
mistreatment of workers is the entire purpose of outsourcing manufacturing to China in the first place. if you make Foxconn stop abusing people, you essentially put it out of business, because now the playing field is leveled so that other countries that are not brutal dictatorships will have a chance to enter manufacturing again.
the destruction of unions and the lowering of wages and the destruction of environmmental regulations was the very purposes of existence of companies like Foxconn, and their American enablers. you seem to think these people are just going to say 'oh woops sorry' and somehow reverse the last 30 years of history, including the huge profits they made for private equity firms, investment banks like Goldman Sachs, and hedge funds.
got their heads beaten in back in 2010. i mean, if they had unions or labor laws, there's no telling how high hard drive prices might be.
oh by the way, fight sopa! its about freedom.
and a host of other horrific diseases that have killed millions of people are directly related to the fact that humans eat meat when it is, in fact, not necessary to sustain life.
what? hey, you might bring about the end of human civilization becasue 'you dont like tofu', or 'pork tastes great', but at least you arent a self righteous fucking moron