READ THIS. 

[…] So: those spooky new “circular” dark globe cameras installed in your neighborhood park, town, or city—they aren’t just passively monitoring. They’re plugged into Trapwire and they are potentially monitoring every single person via facial recognition. 

[…] we have a widespread network of surveillance cameras across America monitoring us and reporting suspicious activity back to a centralized analysis center, mixed in with the ability to imprison people via military force on the basis of suspicious activity alone.

Full article

Since the Occupy Wall Street protest began on September 17, New York security consultant Thomas Ryan has been waging a campaign to infiltrate and discredit the movement. Ryan says he’s done contract work for the U.S. Army and he brags on his blog that he leads “a team called Black Cell, a team of the most-highly trained and capable physical, threat and cyber security professionals in the world.” But over the past few weeks, he and his computer security buddies have been spending time covertly attending Occupy Wall Street meetings, monitoring organizers’ social media accounts, and hanging out with protesters in Lower Manhattan.

As part of their intelligence-gathering operation, the group gained access to a listserv used by Occupy Wall Street organizers called September17discuss. On September17discuss, organizers hash out tactics and plan events, conduct post-mortems of media appearances, and trade the latest protest gossip. On Friday, Ryan leaked thousands of September17discuss emails to conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, who is now using them to try to smear Occupy Wall Street as an anarchist conspiracy to disrupt global markets.

What may much more alarming to Occupy Wall Street organizers is that while Ryan was monitoring September17discuss, he was forwarding interesting email threads to contacts at the NYPD and FBI, including special agent Jordan T. Loyd, a member of the FBI’s New York-based cyber security team

Hold the fuck up.

Why are you people getting angry that he snitched, but you love Julian Assange? You all love a website dedicated to the act of globally posting whistle-blowing secrets about international companies, so how is this any different?

“Well Peter, these are people who are just rallying against a cause, they’re not doing any harm.”

2 problems with that argument:

1) If you’re going to compare an international company to the people trying to run Occupy Wallstreet, then they’re both being snitched on for something, by someone else, for someone else’s goal. The argument “if the companies have nothing to hide, why are the hiding it?” runs true for the Occupy movement. “If the people running Occupy have nothing illegal to hide, why are they hiding it?”

2) You can’t say that without knowing the context. Why is it you chose to believe the secrets WikiLeaks posts without knowing the context? You’re willing to shit yourselves over Collateral Murder, not knowing the complete back story behind it? What if they had reason to believe those two Reuters employees were major terrorists? What if they thought those were the two people they’ve been hunting for months? -Yet you hate it when people work against you in the exact same way - posting information without context for others to read.

This is absolutely and completely hypocritical.

(Source: sarahlee310)

tmaction:

The ‘getting’ of Assange and the smearing of a revolution

By Jonathan Pilger 6 October 2011

The High Court in London will soon to decide whether Julian Assange is to be extradited to Sweden to face allegations of sexual misconduct. At the appeal hearing in July, Ben Emmerson QC, counsel for the defence, described the whole saga as “crazy”. Sweden’s chief prosecutor had dismissed the original arrest warrant, saying there was no case for Assange to answer. Both the women involved said they had consented to have sex. On the facts alleged, no crime would have been committed in Britain. 

However, it is not the Swedish judicial system that presents a “grave danger” to Assange, say his lawyers, but a legal device known as a Temporary Surrender, under which he can be sent on from Sweden to the United States secretly and quickly. The founder and editor of WikiLeaks, who published the greatest leak of official documents in history, providing a unique insight into rapacious wars and the lies told by governments, is likely to find himself in a hell hole not dissimilar to the “torturous” dungeon that held Private Bradley Manning, the alleged whistleblower. Manning has not been tried, let alone convicted, yet on 21 April, President Barack Obama declared him guilty with a dismissive “He broke the law”.

This Kafka-style justice awaits Assange whether or not Sweden decides to prosecute him. Last December, the Independent disclosed that the US and Sweden had already started talks on Assange’s extradition. At the same time, a secret grand jury - a relic of the 18th century long abandoned in this country - has convened just across the river from Washington, in a corner of Virginia that is home to the CIA and most of America’s national security establishment. The grand jury is a “fix”, a leading legal expert told me: reminiscent of the all-white juries in the South that convicted blacks by rote. A sealed indictment is believed to exist.

Continue reading

s4mmich:

Julian Assange Splendour Forum Address 2011 

Poster for my one-act play, Leak, based on the story of the creation of Wikileaks.

Drawn by the MAGNIFICENT Julie Lundy.

Christ, my play is getting so good, I’m so pumped to present it.

Loaded Interviews and 42 Minutes 

Don’t take what I’m about to say as pretentious or smart-ass-y, frankly, that’s not what I’m trying to come across as, but I just might. If I do, sorry.

Holy shit, CBS News’ primetime news show 60-Minutes is loaded/biased out the ass. Hooooly shit.

If you read my short post last night, I said I was making a one-act play on Wikileaks and Julian Assange, partially based off the truth. To make sure I really do him and his character justice, I’ve been watching as many interviews with him as possible to try to get into his head, and I’ve kinda built a mental rapport with the interviewers. In general, you can always see what side the interviewer is on with the interviewee, or their thoughts on he/she.

There was a 24 minute interview with Julian on TED, in which the questions weren’t loaded, but the interviewer seemed very interested in the inner workings of Wikileaks, and supported the concept of it. A behind-the-scenes, hour-long interview Frontline  was very on the fence. From the looks of things, PBS’ Martin Smith wasn’t against Assange, but he wasn’t with him either.

Then there’s the CBS interview with 60 Minute’s Steve Kroft. And by Steve Kroft, I mean Andy Rooney-lite. In short, I give mad props to Julian - the man kept a remarkable composure when faced with both subtle and obviously loaded and biased statements;

“I was considered by Joe Biden to be a high-tech terrorist. Sarah Palin calling to our organisation to be dealt with like the Taliban and be hunted down. There have been calls either for my assassination or the assassination of my staff, or for us to be kidnapped and renditioned back to the United States to be executed.

To which my good friend Steve replies with:

“Well, as you know we have a 1st Amendment, which states that anyone can say anything they’d like, politicians included. I don’t think anyone in the United States took seriously to the idea that you were a terrorist.”

You’re kiddin’ me, right? He just said “eh, politicians can say as they please,” just like anyone else, when the entire reason we vote for the people we do is because they talk, act, and are not supposed to be anyone else.

My favourite loaded statement has to be:

“You know that most people in America hates you.”

To which Julian quickly responds with.

“Well that’s not true.”

I still dunno my stance on Wikileaks, but I respect how this guy handles interviews.

Leak 

So my main ISU/FSE project for my drama course this year is to write an Ibsen play - a 1-act play “based on a news report.” Other than that, free reign.

I couldn’t help but to pick Wikileaks as my topic, and I’m actually having some fun researching this, trying to get in the head of Julian Assange and make him a character you hate to love or love to hate, then make a fictional story based on his crazy life and corporation.

WikiLeaks is actually intense as fuck, and hopefully the play will do it justice.