Julian Assange Responds to Increasing US Government Attacks on WikiLeaks
As Julian notes in his understated way, it’s rich for these crooks wading in blood, these militant career liars, to accuse Julian of exposing soldiers and Afghans to danger in exposing the truth of the corrupt and mismanaged war. Meanwhile, the documents themselves indicate that the military has killed over 20,000 Afghan civilians by accident and kept this secret; has circulated the names of Afghan sources; has endangered soldiers by perpetrating an ongoing war for 9 years they know is unwinnable, etc. Clearly these scum do not care about the lives about which they profess such concern.
One of the things mentioned is the connection to something called Project Vigilant:
Project Vigilant and the government/corporate destruction of privacy
According to Uber, one of Project Vigilant’s manifold methods for gathering intelligence includes collecting information from a dozen regional U.S. Internet service providers (ISPs). Uber declined to name those ISPs, but said that because the companies included a provision allowing them to share users’ Internet activities with third parties in their end user license agreements (EULAs), Vigilant was able to legally gather data from those Internet carriers and use it to craft reports for federal agencies. A Vigilant press release says that the organization tracks more than 250 million IP addresses a day and can “develop portfolios on any name, screen name or IP address.”
Glenn Greenwald offers an excellent summary:
Consider the rage that has been directed over the last week toward WikiLeaks. They are predictably accused of being America’s Enemy, in alliance with Al Qaeda, a Terrorist group, etc. etc. One of their volunteers — U.S. citizen Jacob Appelbaum — was detained for three hours at the airport yesterday when re-entering the country from a foreign trip, denied access to a lawyer, had his cellphones seized and his laptop searched, and was told he’d likely be subjected to this treatment every time he left the U.S. and tried to re-enter. Why has WikiLeaks provoked such animosity? Because they committed the gravest sin: they breached the Absolute Wall of Secrecy behind which our Government, and its private National Security and Surveillance State partners, operate. That’s why WikiLeaks is so despised, deemed such a threat: because they are undermining in very modest ways the absolute secrecy of these power factions, and many citizens have been trained to believe in the justifiability of that pervasive secrecy as well.
But while these factions demand total secrecy for their actions, they simultaneously demand that you have none for yours. They want to know everything about what you do — and are knowing all of that — while you know nothing about what they do. The loss of privacy is entirely one-way. Government and corporate authorities have destroyed most vestiges of privacy for you, while ensuring that they have more and more for themselves.
Wisdom Dancer 