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Archive for the ‘Wikileaks’ Category

Wikileaks suspends ops to launch pledge drive: “(The Register)
Wikileaks has temporarily suspended operations while it launches a pledge drive. The whistle blowing site is taking time out to ask for support in many forms, not just donations. Wikileaks is appealing for help from volunteer coders, offers of free legal assistance and hosting support as well as cash donations. The site has promised not to accept corporate or government finance in order to protect its integrity. As an incentive to potential supporters Wikileaks said it is sitting on ‘hundreds of thousands of pages from corrupt banks, the US detainee system, the Iraq war, China, the UN and many others that we do not currently have the resources to release’.

(Via QuickLinks Update.)

9/11 pager messages published online:

Whistleblowing website publishes ‘intercepted’ texts in order officials and witnesses sent them

The unfolding secret story of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon is being told today when more than 500,000 intercepted pager messages, many from US officials, are published online in the order in which they were sent.

The mass live leak began at 8am GMT and will continue for 24 hours until all of the messages are seen as they were sent on September 11.

The experiment by whistleblowing website Wikileaks includes pager messages sent on the day by officials in the Pentagon, the New York police and witnesses to the collapse of the twin towers.

Wikileaks said the messages would show a ‘completely objective record of the defining moment of our time‘.

It added: ‘We hope that its entry into the historical record will lead to a more nuanced understanding of how this tragedy and its aftermath may have been prevented.’

The post said the release of the messages at times corresponding to when they were sent would help ‘foster a deeper understanding’.

A preview of some of the messages to be leaked suggests they show how panic and rumour began to spread on the day, and are likely to fuel conspiracy theories about the attacks.

One message from a New York City official sent just minutes after the first attack said: ‘WTC has been hit by an airplane and a bomb.’ Another says: ‘It’s reported that a US military helicopter circled the building then crashed into or next to the Pentagon.’ Later in the day, a message presciently says: ‘We are bombing Afghanistan.’

One message from a witness reads: ‘Still in my apt, nowhere to go … This is the end of the world as we know it.’

Wikileaks would not reveal the source for the leak, but hinted: ‘It is clear that the information comes from an organisation which has been intercepting and archiving US national telecommunciations since prior to 9/11.

Wikileaks has a good track record in releasing authentic official documents, but its website tends to get overloaded at busy times. It is encouraging readers to follow the leaks on Twitter.

(Via Latest news, sport, business, comment and reviews from the Guardian | guardian.co.uk.)

Wikileaks Says It Has Half-a-Million 9/11 Pager Messages: “The document-leaking site Wikileaks says it’s preparing to release 500,000 intercepted wireless pager messages from a 24-hour period encompassing the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

(Via Wired News.)

Hidden High Court Injuctions: “

The Twitter vs Trafigura case continues though it really is the Guardian newspaper and Wikileaks who have been driving this amazing story that illustrates the total lack of freedom of expression granted to the citizens of Britain.

For those who haven’t been following the case: The Guardian was attempting to report on Trafigura, a multi-national oil and commodity trader, but received legal threats from Carter-Ruck. This led to an injunction stopping them from publishing their findings. Yet not only were they prevented from publishing their article but the injunction also prevented them from reporting about the injunction!

These ’superinjunctions’ are an incredibly draconian power and in a strong democracy they would only be used as a last resort in the most limited of circumstances – and when used this would be public knowledge. However, it now transpires that not only are these injunctions granted by judges with seemingly not a second thought for open justice, but there is no record of the judge’s actions either.

The Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, Bridget Prentice said yesterday, in answer to a written Parliamentary question that the information is not currently available and the High Court has no intention to collate such data:

Paul Farrelly MP: To ask the Secretary of State for Justice if he will (a) collect and (b) publish statistics on the number of non-reportable injunctions issued by the High Court in each of the last five years. [293012]

Bridget Prentice: The information requested is not available. The High Court collects figures on applications, however injunctions are not separately identifiable, and there are currently no plans to amend databases to do so.

I agree with wikileaks: ‘Time for UK journalists grow some balls and start violating censorship injunctions’

It is bad enough that superinjunctions exist at all, but it is absolutely appalling that there are not even records kept of how often they are used. Pressure needs to be put on the High Court to record these occasions, and make the details public as a matter of urgency.

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(Via Your Right To Know.)

Minton report: Trafigura toxic dumping along the Ivory Coast broke EU regulations, 14 Sep 2006 – Wikileaks

From Wikileaks: Released September 13, 2009

Summary

Updated October 15, 2009: The ‘Minton report’ exposes a toxic waste dumping incident, which affected upto 108,000 people, according to a September 2009 United Nations report. The UK media has been suppressed from mention the report or its contents since a secret gag order was issued against the Guardian newspaper on September 11, 2009. The report was commissioned through Waterson & Hicks, a UK law firm, possibly to claim client-attorney privilege should it leak. The company concerned, Trafigura, is a giant multi-national oil and commodity trader. The Minton report assesses an incident involving Trafigura and the Ivory Coast town of Abidjan—possibly most culpable mass contamination incident since Bhopal.

The UK media is currently unable to mention the URL ‘http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Minton’ or anything else that would direct people towards the report.

An attempt by a member of parliament to subvert the gag order, by mentioning ‘Minton report’, the date of the secret gag, and ‘Trafigura’ in the House of Commons, lead to a major uproar on October 12 and 13, following an attempt by Trafigura to apply the gag order to parliamentary reporting (see this front page article in the Guardian newspaper).

The parliamentary quote concerned:

Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme) – To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.[1]

The UK press gag remains in effect. Incredibly, Trafigura’s lawyers, Carter Ruck, are now attempting again to prevent parliamentary debate over the gag, this time by claiming sub-judice.

Readers can help the victims and the press undermine this unconscionable gag order, by spreading the URL ‘http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Minton’.

Wikileaks publishes BNP ‘member list’ (again): “

Haters’ data

Updated The BNP’s ‘membership list’ has been leaked for the second time in a year, it’s claimed today.…

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(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

Iran blocks Wikileaks: “

Site condemns their ‘Berlin Wall moment’

Iran has blocked access to whistleblowers’ site WikiLeaks, ahead of today’s expected protests.…

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(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

Italian secret internet censorship list, 287 site subset, 21 Jun 2009 – Wikileaks

From Wikileaks
June 20, 2009
Summary

This list presents 287 internet sites currently censored by Italy. This quasi-voluntary system, which was introduced under the banner of fighting “child pornography” relies on a secret, unaccountable list of site names. Because of this lack of transparency, and the power of the censorship system, the blacklist is of intense interest.

Secret “child pornography” censorship blacklists in other countries, such as China, Thailand, Australia, Finland and Denmark have all been shown by WikiLeaks to have been corrupted into censoring non-child pornographic content, including political content (all but Denmark). It seems to be a law of human affairs that when such powerful, unaccountable, systems are introduced, they soon stray from their stated purpose.

The majority of sites on the Italian list seem to be unrelated to child pornography. While some do appear to relate to the images of teenagers, the vast majority of sites are related to what appears to be legal young-adult pornography. Some sites are unrelated to any type of pornography.

These include businesses or institutes outside of Italy, and discussion forums, used by tens of thousands for all purposes. While it is possible these sites had an unauthorized user briefly upload an underage image or link to such an image, the continued presence of the sites on this list likely reflects the lack of any censorship notification or appeal mechanism.

The Australian government admitted during a Senate estimates hearing that fewer than one third of its May 2009 blacklist was related to images of those under the age of 18.

During 2008, the government of Thailand added over 1100 pages to its censorship blacklist for “lese majeste” (criticizing the royal family).

Both the Australian and Thai blacklists have been going for a longer than the Italian system and are possibly substantially more corrupt as a result.

We checked the Italian censorship system against the top 1,000,000 most popular Internet domains (as measured by Alexa.com in November, 2008), together with selected blacklists from other countries to discover a portion of those sites censored by Italy. Botique sites and sites only recently popular do not appear in our list due to limitations in our methodology. That said, our list represents an accurate, current subset of the full list.

In Italy, blocking of content is done through DNS servers – when request for blocked site is made, user is redirected to IP 212.48.170.80 instead of original address. Two nameservers involved in the blocking are 212.48.160.5 and 212.48.160.6.

The list can be reproduced by using the Unix “dig” utility, using a command such as “dig @212.48.160.6 -f list +noall +answer” where “list” is a file containing list of domains to be checked (one per line). We then search for results which lead to IP 212.48.170.80, the site which displays the “censorship page”. This is a universal method, which can be applied to all DNS based blocking systems.

A hyperlinked version of the list follows for easy assessment.

Germany not a hard-line censor after all: “

Wikileaks.de suffers chronic lack of teutonic efficiency

Rumours of state censorship in Germany may turn out to have been just a little exaggerated. However, plans for putting their child abuse blocklist on a legal footing may yet have far-reaching consequences for internet users in that country.…

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(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

In Britain, Web Leaves Courts Playing Catch-Up – Wikileaks

From Wikileaks, March 29, 2009

By Noam Cohen (New York Times)[1]

On March 17, hours after publishing leaked documents on its Web site showing the lengths Barclays had gone to in order to reduce the taxes it paid in Britain, The Guardian newspaper was ordered by a judge to take the material down. His reasoning was that the bank had a right to confidentiality.

In the ruling, the judge in London, Nicholas Blake, also added a peculiar twist: The Guardian must not tell readers how easy it is to locate the documents at Web sites outside of Britain. It was only the latest example of British courts trying to preserve what it saw as litigants’ rights even in the face of an onslaught of information on the Internet. To some, this may be a final, futile effort.

In November, a court order prevented British newspapers from printing a leaked list of members of the far-right British National Party. Unfortunately for the court, that material was available at, among other sites, wikileaks.org, which also hosts the Barclays documents.

In that earlier case, British newspapers, including The Guardian, took great pleasure in (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) directing its online audience to the list they had been forbidden to publish. The height of absurdity came when those papers published blog posts from reporters describing the experience of reading the list at wikileaks.

‘The Internet is throwing sharp relief to the illogical nature of our system,’ said Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian. ‘Technology is way ahead of the law, and the law is limping along trying to make sense of it.’

The effect of the Internet on judges’ rulings is not a uniquely British problem, said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law professor who taught at Oxford. There is at least one example, he said, of an American court ordering a Web site not to link to content it had been ordered to take down. But he added that ‘British courts may be a little more confident of their own power, and be less willing to cave in to practicalities.’

The Barclays case pits two interests against each other, said James Edelman, a law professor at Oxford who argues media law cases. Since 1988, Professor Edelman said, British law has given great protection to the right of confidentiality, applying it to third parties like The Guardian, which received the documents from someone else. Yet, the ‘public interest’ in learning about what is contained in those documents, he said, can often outweigh confidentiality considerations.

Finally, there is a basic factual question: is the material already in the public domain? And this is where the Internet throws a wrench into the proceedings.

The courts recognize, Professor Edelman said, that there is no point in banning the publication of something already widely disseminated. In the Barclays case, the court met in secret to determine if the material had crossed that threshold.

Mr. Rusbridger, who said he, too, was awakened in the wee hours to receive the order to take the material down, characterized the scene: ‘We were pretending that by discussing this in secrecy in a court in London that no one was discussing it elsewhere.’

The entire situation, he said, puts newspapers ‘in a uniquely disadvantaged position where we cannot discuss what is being discussed elsewhere.’ There was a silver lining, Mr. Rusbridger said. For the hearing, he wrote a witness statement, which included summaries of what was contained in the memos and the analysis of a tax expert retained by The Guardian, to explain to the judge why it was in the public interest to publish the memos. That material was unaffected by the order.

Mr. Rusbridger’s summaries later appeared in The Guardian.

The leaked memos come from Barclays’ structured capital markets division and were given to a member of Parliament. They explain complex arrangements — given names like Project Berry and Project Knight — involving, say, transactions between an Isle of Man subsidiary and the Luxembourg branch of a German bank. Collectively, The Guardian wrote, they show that the division ‘has for years been engaged in engineering numerous inventive schemes to avoid very large sums of tax.’

In a statement, the chief executive of Barclays, John Varley, responded: ‘Barclays complies with taxation laws in the U.K. and in all the countries where we do business.’ He wrote that his company placed great emphasis on meeting its obligations to the British tax agency, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. ‘From our perspective, this has enabled H.M.R.C. to carry out detailed and robust assessments of our tax affairs with an emphasis on our structured capital market transactions. We provide them with further explanations and documentation as required.’

He concluded: ‘We are confident that the leaked papers do not highlight any deficiency in our disclosures and explanations to H.M.R.C.’

Nonetheless, Barclays was quoted by Reuters as saying the publication of the documents would damage its business.

Professor Edelman of Oxford said that Judge Blake’s order could represent a last example of British courts ignoring the changed reality of by the Internet.

‘What is significant about the ruling,’ he said, ‘is that it will open people’s eyes that even if you can get an injunction to preserve information that is able to be obtained over the Internet, I suspect that the injunction won’t last.’ The publicity over the injunction creates more interest in the material, leading other sites to publish it. The Guardian will be able to return to court, he said, and argue the injunction no longer serves any purpose.

Mr. Rusbridger said that the newspaper still had not decided whether to do that. The cost for being wrong, he said, could be as much $300,000 in legal fees.

Seeming to prove Professor Edelman’s larger point, however, when Wikileaks became overloaded by the traffic about a week ago, another site, techcrunch.org, published the seven memos under the heading ‘How Barclays Ensured That Everyone Would See Their Confidential Tax Documents.’

First appeared in the New York Times. Thanks to Noam Cohen and the New York Times for covering this leak. Copyright remains with the aforementioned.”

(Via .)