Is WikiLeaks biased against the West and the US in particular? This news item would tend to indicate so.

According to Christian Science Monitor Moscow correspondent Fred Weir, Kremlin-funded media outlet Russia Today is set to hire WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, despite the fact that Assange remains under house arrest in Britain, awaiting a Supreme Court decision on his extradition to Sweden to face sexual assault allegations.

According to Weir [my emphasis]:

WikiLeaks founder and controversy magnet Julian Assange has been driven off the Internet, deprived of funding and placed under house arrest. Now he will get his chance to strike back, courtesy of the Kremlin.

Starting in March, Mr. Assange will host a 10-part series of interview programs with “key political players, thinkers and revolutionaries” on Russia Today (RT), a state-funded English-language satellite news network which claims to reach more than 85 million viewers in the US alone.

According to a statement on his website, the new Assange series will explore the “upheavals and revolutions” that are shaking the Middle East and expose how “the deterioration of the rule of law has demonstrated the bankruptcy of once leading political institutions and ideologies” in the West.

Assange said, in a statement published on his website:

Through this series I will explore the possibilities for our future in conversations with those who are shaping it… Are we heading towards utopia, or dystopia and how we can set our paths? This is an exciting opportunity to discuss the vision of my guests in a new style of show that examines their philosophies and struggles in a deeper and clearer way than has been done before.

(more…)

Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere were on fire yesterday, with the news that Homeland Security Is Monitoring The Drudge Report, The New York Times, and other various websites.  The headline sparked burning blog posts all across the web, some bordering on hysterics. Type “Homeland Security” and “Drudge” into Google and perform a search within the last twenty four hours, and you’ll find 56,700 results at this writing.

The story was borne out of an upcoming privacy compliance review from the Department of Homeland Security regarding one of the agency’s initiatives that entails monitoring “publicly available online forums, blogs, public websites, and message boards.”  There’s just one important detail missing here:  the program was actually implemented in January of 2010.

The Volokh Conspiracy, a well-known group blog of law professors, puts the hype in check:

Matt Drudge and The Atlantic are hyperventilating, and Mark Hosenball of Reuters is bragging, about what The Atlantic calls an “exclusive” report that DHS “routinely monitors dozens of popular websites, including Facebook, Twitter, Hulu, WikiLeaks and news and gossip sites including the Huffington Post and Drudge Report.”

There are just two problems with this exclusive news report.

It isn’t news and it isn’t exclusive.

Readers of this blog could have learned exactly the same thing in one of my posts from, uh, February of 2010.

Here’s what I said two years ago:

With his usual nudge-and-wink, Matt Drudge invites us to be dismayed that “BIG SIS” — his moniker for Janet Napolitano — is “Monitoring Web Sites for Terror and Disaster Info.” Drudge links to a story saying that DHS will be monitoring social media like Twitter, as well as websites like Drudge, to keep abreast of events during the Winter Olympics. The source of the story is a twelve-page “Privacy Impact Assessment” issued by DHS.

This isn’t the first Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) on DHS’s use of social media. A few weeks earlier, DHS wrote a similar assessment of using social media during Haitian rescue operations.

I am indeed dismayed, but not for Drudge’s reasons.  True, it’s disappointing that neither the Volokh Conspiracy nor www.skatingonstilts.com is deemed worthy of government monitoring.  But what’s really dismaying is that DHS and its Privacy Office felt obliged to labor over two separate and painfully obvious privacy assessments just to do things that you and I would do by simply firing up our browsers.

That’s it.  The story is that people at DHS are, gasp, browsing the Internet. As I said then, there’s no scandal, other than the electrons wasted by DHS agonizing over the privacy implications of browsing public Internet sources to find out what’s happening in the world.

The program is referred to as the Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative (pdf), and it was first implemented to monitor activity and news during events like those mentioned above.

Some seem especially concerned about the portion of the initiative that pertains to actually retaining personally identifiable information.

The DHS Privacy Office (PRIV) and OPS/NOC decided to further broaden the program’s capability to collect additional information, including limited instances of personally identifiable information (PII). As such, a Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) Update5 and new DHS/OPS-004 – Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative System of Records Notice (SORN)6 were issued on January 6, 2011 and February 1, 2011 respectively and are the basis for this Privacy Compliance Review (PCR).

But upon close inspection of “personally identifiable information,” the activity is really no different from what you or I might do to gather our own news interests.

(more…)

- Is Wikileaks fading?

But many others were wondering if it was one more indication that the WikiLeaks movement, which changed the face of journalism and the entire informational ecosystem, could be in doubt as well. Although stateless and seemingly beyond the reach of the law and its enemies, WikiLeaks was, from the beginning, subject to a number of internal frailties and external vulnerabilities. The fact that WikiLeaks came to be embodied in a single individual, especially one as mercurial as Mr. Assange, was chief among them. Internal battles led to the departure of a number of key programmers. Large, corporate enablers of online payments, including PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, Western Union and Bank of America, declined to process donations, all but cutting off the organization from its funding base.

- LOL files: Former Newsweek editor says they didn’t run the Clinton-Lewinsky affair because they were afraid it would hurt the publication’s reputation. Good to know they’ve since (d)evolved beyond that standard now.

Former Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker said Sunday he chose not to run the story that former President Bill Clinton had an affair with Monica Lewinsky because he and his staff didn’t feel they were on firm enough ground.

“If we had gotten that wrong,” Whitaker told CNN’s Howard Kurtz on Reliable Sources, it “could  have been a mortal blow to Newsweek’s reputation”

(more…)

- Media sure does love them some fake Republicans. CBS hosts Jon Huntsman. Wishful thinking?

"To the moon, Alice!"

It’s hard to overstate how poorly Huntsman is doing. Among Republican voters nationwide, the latest Fox News poll shows him running last with 1% support. The latest Quinnipiac poll shows him running last with 1% support. The latest CNN poll shows him running last with 1% support. The latest Gallup poll shows him running last with 1% support.

There seems to be a pattern here.

And yet, Huntsman has been booked for three Sunday shows in three weeks, and is all over the media.

- Wikileaks staffer: “Why I felt I had to leave Wikileaks.”

- Lancet should apologize for fraudulent reports used by MSM.

(more…)

-  Newsweek continues its victory lap around the toilet bowl.

- Female Mexican journalists killed because of their gender.

- You can’t call Ed Schultz’s ideology “extreme liberalism.” It’s an insult to classical liberalism. A “raging socialist on steroids” is more appropriate.

- Online video finally chipping away at broadcast TV:

A quarter of people in countries with access to high-speed broadband are streaming video to their TV, although more than 80 percent still watch broadcast television as well. But that’s slowly beginning to change: According to survey data from Ericsson, there’s been a slight decrease from 2010 to 2011 in the percentage of folks watching broadcast TV, while Internet-enabled options, such as long-form streaming sites like Netflix, short-form videos aggregators like YouTube and downloaded content are all on the rise.

(more…)

From Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid.

Al-Jazeera is spinning the newly released “Guantanamo files,” saying they show that dozens of enemy combatants detained at the U.S. facility at Guantanamo Bay were innocent. But that’s not what the previously secret documents say about one high-profile detainee, Sami al-Hajj, an Al-Jazeera journalist released from Guantanamo after legal intervention by his Soros-funded lawyer and protests from human rights and press freedom groups.

The controversial allegations against this former “enemy combatant,” as detailed in this document, are being denounced by al-Hajj’s lawyer as “false and discredited allegations.”

But they show that U.S. officials suspected high-level cooperation between Al-Jazeera and al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. The charges also raise serious questions about why officials of the Obama Administration are currently praising the channel and cooperating with it.

The document says about Sami Muheidine Mohamed al-Haj, known as Sami al-Hajj and Prisoner 345, “His involvement as a money courier, involvement in the transfer of weapons and leadership position within the Muslim Brotherhood, along with his numerous connections made through Al-Jazeera and his pro-jihadist propaganda activities, illustrates his intelligence value.”

The detailed Department of Defense document, posted by WikiLeaks, is designated, “SECRET / / NOFORN / / 20330404DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE HEADQUARTERS, JOINT TASK FORCE GUANTANAMO U.S. NAVAL STATION, GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA APO AE 09360” (more…)

Think Progress, a project of John Podesta’s Center for American Progress Action Fund, has been fiercely pushing a story about leaked emails that suggest the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was aware of espionage work being performed against American citizens by one of its private security firms.  The story first launched a few days ago as an exclusive on the progressive blog, when it reported that hacked emails obtained from the pro-WikiLeaks group “Anonymous” reveal that the US Chamber conspired to sabotage opposition progressive activist groups including ThinkProgress, Change to Win, SEIU, BradBlog and StopTheChamber, among others.  By this morning, the story was all over the lefty blogosphere, on sites such as AlterNet, Huffington Post, Raw Story, and in a press release from Kevin Zeese, our fan from IndictBreitbart.org.

But the reports are noticeably silent on one crucial component of the story.

The primary focus of the Chamber’s investigation was actually none other than the organization known as Velvet Revolution, and one of its co-founders, Brett Kimberlin.

Recognize that name?  That’s because we told you all about this convicted domestic terrorist, known as the Speedway Bomber, who in 1981 was finally convicted of a week-long bombing spree in Indianapolis, IN in which eight separate bombs caused extensive property damage, destroyed a police cruiser, and severely maimed a man, eventually leading to that man’s suicide.  In short, a community was terrorized for a week, and a potentially indirectly related murder remains unsolved today.  Indiana certainly remembers Brett Kimberlin.

As it turns out, despite the months of deafening silence on the left in response to questions about the ally they’ve so warmly embraced, some bigger characters apparently had taken notice.

(more…)

Well this is an interesting turn of events.

Journalists who have dealt with Assange describe him as a man who skips around like a child, doesn’t always wash and is sensitive and volatile.

Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, reveals that one reporter told him that Assange’s behaviour had been very strange.

‘He was alert but dishevelled, like a bag lady walking in off the street, wearing a dingy, light-coloured sport coat and cargo pants, dirty white shirt, beat-up sneakers and filthy white socks that collapsed around his ankles,’ he wrote.

(more…)

It’s ironic and a bit sad that Glenn Greenwald, who first gained notoriety out here in 2006 for being exposed as a sock puppet and a liar, would be ranting about Wired’s handling of the story of PFC Bradley Manning’s arrest.

Instapundit has linked my main page on the Greenwald sock-puppet/lying story, but most of the Greenwald stuff isn’t here. Here are the key links in this story:

But this kind of thing does seem to be Greenwald’s shtick in whatever corner of the Internet he occupies, one I generally choose to ignore given his bizarre and disingenuous nature. That he’s ranting about disclosure and transparency is laughable given his dubious history. But I guess that’s what passes as credible in the cesspool otherwise known as Salon.

(more…)

As I reported reported earlier, four “Swedes” and a “Dane” were arrested yesterday for planning a massive attack on the Jyllands-Posten building in Copenhagen as revenge for the Mohammed cartoons. They intended to make their operation a reprise of Mumbai, with as many innocent casualties as possible.

The plan was larger and more ambitious than previous Motoon revenge plots, but it was not different in kind. As Dymphna reported last year, the plot against Kurt Westergaard and Flemming Rose in October 2009 was designed as a mass attack on Jyllands-Posten’s offices. Last year’s version was part of a conspiracy that extended back to the Pakistani terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba, and involved terrorists in Canada and the United States, including David Headley. Yesterday’s plot may have similar connections; it’s too early to tell.

The terror plot in Denmark assumes a wider significance when juxtaposed with a leaked American diplomatic cable, which coincidentally was also reported yesterday at Islam in Europe. Readers should consult Esther’s entire post for the details on the WikiLeaks revelations, but the gist is this:

The United States government, through ambassador James P. Cain, pressured the Danish government to force Jyllands-Posten not to reprint the Motoons on the first anniversary of their publication. The Danish government responded by basically telling us to buzz off, that they were not in the business of telling their newspapers what to print or not print. So the ambassador contacted the newspaper directly, and spoke to its editor-in-chief.

(more…)

No, not this cameo,

the one on Rap News, wherein two white dudes, one English, rhyme the day’s news into lefty spin.

I don’t get why Assange makes a window-washing move twice in the video, like it’s his only move. Come on. If you’re going to act like a rockstar you need more moves than some rehashed Rose Royce routine.

(more…)

I can’t wait to see the Soros elves at MMfA scramble to spin this:

Remember Glenn Beck’s fuzzy math, which calculated that 10% of Muslims are actually terrorists? Well, according to one of those WikiLeaked diplomatic cables, the man may have been wildly underestimating. At least when it comes to British Muslim students, one-third of whom “believe killing in the name of religion is justified,” according to a survey reported in the Daily Mail.

(more…)

… thy name is Julian Assange:

He accused his media partners at The Guardian newspaper, which worked with him to make the embarrassing leaks public, of unfairly tarnishing him by revealing damaging details of the sex assault allegations he faces in Sweden.

[...]

Mr Assange said he had enough material ready to destroy the bosses of one of the world’s biggest banks.

Speaking from the English mansion where he is confined on bail, the 39-year-old Australian said that the decision to publish incriminating police files about him was “disgusting”.

[...]

Mr Assange claimed the newspaper received leaked documents from Swedish authorities or “other intelligence agencies” intent on jeopardising his defence.

(more…)

According press reports, Bradley Manning the  former US intelligence analyst who is believed to have supplied the confidential data Wikileaks may be loosing his cognitive abilities in prison. Manning, was arrested seven months ago and is being held at a military base in Virginia. He faces a court martial and up to 52 years in prison for his role in the WikiLeaks distribution, and probably extra time because he smuggled the data out via a Lady Gaga CD.

It started on his show with guest Michael Moore, who put up $20k in bond for Assange.

Later on Olbermann, on Twitter, reTweeted something from Bianca Jagger which included the accusers’ names (which have been all over the Internet, along with photos, for some time) and the frenzy began.

He even changed out his regular Keef photo to the default Twitter egg.

One website even created a Twitter campaign to shame Michael Moore into apologizing for donating $20,000 to bail out Assange.

I don’t recall ever seeing Olbermann hightail it out of a brawl so fast.

Let’s be frank: while I am no fan of the man, I thought the dramatic, solitary confinement incarceration of Julian Assange, prohibiting him any access to media or electronics, all on the suspicious accusation – not charges – of sexual molestation was a bit too much to justify. So he’s a self-infatuated whore, we know this. Forgive me if I’ve lingering questions about the two women who, according to news reports, threw themselves at him like groupies before realizing they’d both been had in the same week, especially as one of the women reportedly once blogged about using the court systems to get back at unfaithful lovers. We can all agree that some things present questions here, is all, and that people are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

(By the way, it cracks me up how the left predictably won’t defend chicks who accuse the object of their fangirldom of sexual abuse – think Clinton, Edwards, et al – but instead have concocted elaborate schemes wherein the accusers work with the CIA. Are they also writing the story lines for the daytime soaps now, too?)

All of these seem like nothing more than smoke and mirrors to avoid discussing the obvious: our government sucks at keeping secrets and Bradley Manning had a tantrum because he felt identity was more important than service, and he’s also a traitor.

Manning posted online about his unhappiness at having to fetch coffee for his superior officers. Because no other person working their way up the ladder has had to undertake such a humiliating and discriminatory gopher task ever in the history of the workplace or military, I can see how this would motivate him to steal classified information and leak it to a guy looking for a follow up hit to last summer’s “Is That An RPG Or Are You Just Happy to See Me?” </sarcasm>

(more…)

Apparently, there was trouble in paradise between Julian Assange and his number two, Daniel Domscheit-Berg.

A number of WikiLeaks defectors, including founder Julian Assange’s former right-hand man, plan to launch a rival site on Monday after accusing Mr Assange of behaving like “some kind of emperor or slave trader”.

Apparently, folks were mad over Assange’s rockstar status. It all seems to undermines Assange’s declaration that this is all for the “common good.” Openleaks’ structure:

Like WikiLeaks, it will allow whistleblowers to leak information to the public anonymously. However, Openleaks won’t host the documents itself, instead acting as an intermediary between whistleblowers and other groups including media organisations.

Several WikiLeaks members abandoned the site following perceived autocratic behaviour by Mr Assange. They said he failed to consult them on many decisions and put himself front and centre of everything WikiLeaks did.

Some members were also concerned that the Swedish rape allegations against Mr Assange were damaging the organisation’s reputation. Dagens Nyheter reported that insiders were sabotaging the site earlier this year in order to convince Mr Assange to step down.

The difference between Wikileaks and Openleaks?

From what can be gleaned about OpenLeaks, the  site does not intend to publish information solely for the public, opting instead to allow other organizations access to OpenLeaks and do with it what they will.  The information on the site will be produced and published by partnering organizations.

[...]

According to Forbes, the project will initially partnered with five newspapers worldwide, but soon expand to anyone who wants to participate.

As for Assange’s opinion of OpenLeaks, Forbes reports he downplayed the notion that OpenLeaks would compete with WikiLeaks, stating. “The supply of leaks is very large.  It’s helpful for us to have more people in this industry. It’s protective to us.”

**Link Fixed**

Washington Times – Off-the-record exchanges and thousands of confidential e-mails dating back almost four years reveal that high-profile journalists have been aiding and advising President Obama since he announced his candidacy in early 2007.

Provided by WikiLeaks to the Washington Times, the material was originally discovered by a cleaning lady at CNN.  Surfing on Wolf Blitzer’s computer during her 4:00 a.m. break, Emalina Ortiz inadvertently opened a window to “BO-WeServe”–a private forum for journalists supporting Obama’s campaign and, later, his administration’s agenda.

Shocked by what she read, Ortiz impulsively copied the archives to a flash drive and mailed it to WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, a man she had heard Blitzer describe in his broadcasts as “a hero, someone who is not afraid to shine a light into the sewer to see what’s floating around down there.”

Spokesmen from the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN blasted Assange for exposing communications that linked Obama’s rise and governance to support from and tutelage by some of the biggest names in journalism.

In a brief phone interview, Times Managing Editor Bill Keller railed: “The cheeky sumbitch actually asked me if I wanted to break the story.  Said I could run it with a ‘Who watches the watchers?’ angle.  What the hell’s the matter with Assange?  He knows the rules:  we’re leaked to, not on.  Only the Times destroys reputations with impunity and immunity.  He crossed a line coming after us.”

(more…)

It seems the activist old media is a lot older than originally thought – they’ve already forgotten one of their favorite stories during the George W. Bush Administration. Anybody remember Valerie Plame?

Ah – Valerie Plame and her hubby Joe Wilson. She was the super-secret covert CIA agent who was “outed” by somebody in the Bush administration. Certainly it had to be Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, or perhaps even Bush himself who must have been pouring over his enemies list and said, “Go get ‘er boys, take ‘er down!” This story had a solid 3-4 year life span and was the main theme at MSNBC during that time. Chris Matthews and that other guy would’ve had nothing else to talk about back then were it not for this horrific scandal that rocked the nation and threatened our safety, if not the very fabric of the Union (no, I am not exaggerating there). There were special reports, special “CIA Leak Investigations,” opens built, dramatic new music cast for the “scandal that rocked the White House.”

Whoops. Flameout.

(more…)