Friday, 17 December 2010

♪♫ Skintologists - On The Off Chance

(Thanx Fritz!)

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Google explores the human body with HTML5

"History shows we end up doing more damage from the overreaction than from the original leak"

National Security Archive Director Tom Blanton decries "Wikimania"

Michael Moore: Dear Government of Sweden ...

Dear Swedish Government:
Hi there -- or as you all say, Hallå! You know, all of us here in the U.S. love your country. Your Volvos, your meatballs, your hard-to-put-together furniture -- we can't get enough!
There's just one thing that bothers me -- why has Amnesty International, in a special report, declared that Sweden refuses to deal with the very real tragedy of rape? In fact, they say that all over Scandinavia, including in your country, rapists "enjoy impunity." And the United Nations, the EU and Swedish human rights groups have come to the same conclusion: Sweden just doesn't take sexual assault against women seriously. How else do you explain these statistics from Katrin Axelsson of Women Against Rape:
** Sweden has the HIGHEST per capita number of reported rapes in Europe.
** This number of rapes has quadrupled in the last 20 years.
** The conviction rates? They have steadily DECREASED.
Axelsson says: "On April 23rd of this year, Carina Hägg and Nalin Pekgul (respectively MP and chairwoman of Social Democratic Women in Sweden) wrote in the Göteborgs [newspaper] that 'up to 90% of all reported rapes [in Sweden] never get to court.'"
Let me say that again: nine out of ten times, when women report they have been raped, you never even bother to start legal proceedings. No wonder that, according to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, it is now statistically more likely that someone in Sweden will be sexually assaulted than that they will be robbed.
Message to rapists? Sweden loves you!
So imagine our surprise when all of a sudden you decided to go after one Julian Assange on sexual assault charges. Well, sort of: first you charged him. Then after investigating it, you dropped the most serious charges and rescinded the arrest warrant.
Then a conservative MP put pressure on you and, lo and behold, you did a 180 and reopened the Assange investigation. Except you still didn't charge him with anything. You just wanted him for "questioning." So you -- you who have sat by and let thousands of Swedish women be raped while letting their rapists go scott-free -- you decided it was now time to crack down on one man -- the one man the American government wants arrested, jailed or (depending on which politician or pundit you listen to) executed. You just happened to go after him, on one possible "count of unlawful coercion, two counts of sexual molestation and one count of rape (third degree)." And while thousands of Swedish rapists roam free, you instigated a huge international manhunt on Interpol for this Julian Assange!
What anti-rape crusaders you've become, Swedish government! Women in Sweden must suddenly feel safer?
Well, not really. Actually, many see right through you. They know what these "non-charge charges" are really about. And they know that you are cynically and disgustingly using the real and everyday threat that exists against women everywhere to help further the American government's interest in silencing the work of WikiLeaks.
I don't pretend to know what happened between Mr. Assange and the two women complainants (all I know is what I've heard in the media, so I'm as confused as the next person). And I'm sorry if I've jumped to any unnecessary or wrong-headed conclusions in my efforts to state a very core American value: All people are absolutely innocent until proven otherwise beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. I strongly believe every accusation of sexual assault must be investigated vigorously. There is nothing wrong with your police wanting to question Mr. Assange about these allegations, and while I understand why he seemed to go into hiding (people tend to do that when threatened with assassination), he nonetheless should answer the police’s questions. He should also submit to the STD testing the alleged victims have requested. I believe Sweden and the UK have a treaty and a means for you to send your investigators to London so they can question Mr. Assange where he is under house arrest while out on bail.
But that really wouldn't be like you would it, to go all the way to another country to pursue a suspect for sexual assault when you can't even bring yourselves to make it down to the street to your own courthouse to go after the scores of reported rapists in your country. That you, Sweden, have chosen to rarely do that in the past, is why this whole thing stinks to the high heavens.
And let's not forget this one final point from Women Against Rape's Katrin Axelsson:
"There is a long tradition of the use of rape and sexual assault for political agendas that have nothing to do with women's safety. In the south of the US, the lynching of black men was often justified on grounds that they had raped or even looked at a white woman. Women don't take kindly to our demand for safety being misused, while rape continues to be neglected at best or protected at worst."
This tactic of using a rape charge to go after minorities or troublemakers, guilty or innocent -- while turning a blind eye to clear crimes of rape the rest of the time — is what I fear is happening here. I want to make sure that good people not remain silent and that you, Sweden, will not succeed if in fact you are in cahoots with corrupt governments such as ours.
Last week Naomi Klein wrote: "Rape is being used in the Assange prosecution in the same way that 'women's freedom' was used to invade Afghanistan. Wake up!"
I agree.
Unless you have the evidence (and it seems if you did you would have issued an arrest warrant by now), drop the extradition attempt and get to work doing the job you've so far refused to do: Protecting the women of Sweden.

Yours,
Michael Moore

A message from Anonymous:

FREE THINKING CITIZENS OF THE WORLD,

In the middle of this mass uprising amongst humanity over the censorship of Wikileaks, Anonymous has made its voice heard among the cries for justice and freedom. Many people think they understand Anonymous, but as an amorphous, opt-in entity, Anonymous is, if we might understate ourselves, fractitious at best and anything but unanimous.

Individuals within Anonymous believe many often contradictory things, even within that same individual. Such is humanity. Humans argue, disagree, fight, bicker, and often say hurtful things specifically to hurt one another. As a group of humans (at least to our knowledge - there may be a few dogs on the internet these days) Anonymous holds many of these human qualities.

It may then seem odd to try to characterize or explain Anonymous at all. Among this buzzing hive of thoughts, ideas, and dreams, the only common characteristics that one might perceive are only the ideas that hold the most traction among humans at large.

Many people will follow certain battle standards in the fight for greater justice. Some will fight those who prey upon children. Others will fight empires and kingdoms who do wanton violence against their own people.

The battle standard that Anonymous follows, however, is the freedom of information.

Without information, one cannot fight for any other cause. Children will remain abused if their plight remains unknown. Nations will rage wars against their own people if cloaked in secrecy. Crimes will go unpunished, victims will go uncomforted, and walls will remain undefended.

As Thomas Jefferson put it, "Information is the currency of democracy." But we would go further and say that information is the life-blood of society. Humanity as a great mass of people is constantly transmitting and receiving a treasure-trove of information: sights and sounds, textures and tastes. We love, we hate, we laud, we lament - sometimes to only ourselves but often to others, and we take great comfort in the mere act of communication.

As humanity has pushed the boundaries of technology, we realize now that this act of sharing information acts as a kind of collective processing - fashions, conventional wisdom, and even the scientific method itself are all the product not of a single genius but of countless humans laboring together.

A trillion times a trillion programs are running simultaneously in our little organic computers that are our brains, networking together through text, through speech, and through pixels. Not all these programs have immediate applications to the tasks we face every single day, but when it does pertain we are grateful that thousands of man-hours have been applied to refine great works of art and thought itself.

As beautiful as the collective dreaming of mankind may be, there are nevertheless those who wish to stifle the free exchange of information. The reasons for this are numerous: expression of political dissent is often repressed in autocratic regimes, and those offended by certain types of communication seek to have the offending material removed.

Indeed, not all information is beautiful or inspiring. Words of hurt and words of hate can and often do damage relationships, families, and individuals. But the crime committed, if any at all, is not the fault of communication itself. We can no more blame the act of speech for harming another as we can fault one's beating heart for spreading a cancer.

Instead, we affirm in the strongest possible sense that the solution to bad speech is more speech, not less. The indiscriminate use of censorship damages the human collective response to bad speech and makes it less capable of responding effectively when bad speech actually does occur.

When information is hidden from view for any reason, its sudden and inevitable revelation is necessarily shocking and cause for alarm. Without a precedent to relate to it and without open dialogue to communally process it, the information becomes harmful due to the censorship itself.

Furthermore, we warn free peoples everywhere of the dangers of private censorship on behalf of government. Government is necessarily slow of action as it reacts to the free expression of men and women. It is thus sad to note that the only effective method of pre-emptive censorship known to man is when the gatekeepers of information censor on behalf of governments.

If information channels are to be useful as methods of collective processing, then they must be agnostic to the message sent. Information is necessarily an enabler of crime, but it also an enabler of comfort. We warn that the hand used to censor must be watched at all times and questioned without ceasing, lest it be abused to cover the crimes of the censor.

We challenge the citizens of democracies everywhere to hold their governments accountable to the people. As the past century has progressed, we have seen governments expected to do more for their people, including the provision of public pensions and the pursuit of national interests abroad through military interventions. Insofar as the public is aware of what is being done in their name, then we leave it to the institutions of law and the ballot-box to decide what is best for these nations.

Insofar as the people are kept in ignorance about what is done in their name, though, we object in no uncertain terms to elected officials covering up crimes to avoid scrutiny. Knowledge of one's own government's dealings are the responsibility of the people, and with great power in the state must come great scrutiny. We thus work for a radical transparency in governments everywhere, to hold them accountable for crimes committed in the state's name.

We call also for a public and open debate over the issues of copyrights and patents. For too long, we have watched private companies abuse these legal channels as a form of litigational capital. Software copyright firms, for example, exist for the primary purpose of buying copyright claims to harass others. Pharmaceutical firms spend a significant quantity of their monopoly profits not on research and development but on defending their patents.

Indeed, Kiss bassist Gene Simmons is on record as having said, "Make sure your brand is protected... Make sure there are no incursions. Be litigious. Sue everybody. Take their homes, their cars. Don't let anybody cross that line." We have come to a sad impasse as a society where the law is a battlefield of giants where the mere threat of legal action can cause financial crisis.

We thus cannot in any way support any business models which rely on the slavery of information for its own sustenance. If the freedom of information requires that the laws be changed, then we work towards those ends in a peaceful and reasoned manner. We will not stand idly as the law is used to protect the strong and to persecute the weak.

We understand that money is required to promote the arts and sciences, but we cannot allow the law to be used to enforce an empire of tyranny, harassment, and abuse. If the people decide to promote the arts and sciences, then we call for governments everywhere to promote them directly rather than through the creation of enforced monopolies.

If the law does not adapt to the new realities brought by new technologies and the Internet, then the march of technology will rob them of the ability to uphold the law. We thus call for governments everywhere to promote freedom of information whatever, wherever, and however it may arise. Governments which refuse to change with the changing world risk being left behind by it.

WE ARE ANONYMOUS

WE ARE FREE

AND WE WISH YOU WOULD BE TOO

PDF-version : http://www.anonops.webs.com/ANONYMOUS_PRESS_RELEASE_16-112-2010.pdf

WikiLeaks: Anonymous hierarchy emerges

blakehounshell State Department announces new barn-door stabilization initiative http://bit.ly/eIPCWY (via @nytjim) 6 minutes ago via Twitterrific

@'thehighdefinite'

Troops back armoured underwear dubbed 'combat codpiece'

The latest piece of high-tech kit due to be issued to all British forces deploying to Helmand already has a nickname. It is known by the troops who have tested it as the "combat codpiece".

The name may be irreverent, but the intention behind the new piece of body armour is deadly serious: to protect soldiers' most important piece of personal kit from blast injuries to the pelvic area caused by the Taliban's roadside bombs.

All those deploying to Helmand are already being issued with four pairs of special anti-blast underpants.

They look like black cycling shorts, but are made from special ballistic material crafted from silk and synthetics, which is ultra-lightweight but can stop or mitigate the effects of most small pieces of shrapnel and dirt travelling at high velocity after a blast.

Although no figures are available, many soldiers wounded by roadside bombs in Afghanistan have suffered severe injuries to the pelvic area, mainly thanks to the increased use of "victim-operated" roadside bombs, when the weight of a soldier or a vehicle triggers the explosion.

That means that much of the destructive force of the blast is aimed upwards, directly towards the groin and top of the legs.

The protective underpants are known as "tier 1" of the protective system, with the second layer, or "combat codpiece", simply known as "tier 2" by the MoD's equipment boffins...

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Caroline Wyatt @'BBC'

Battling Wikileaks And The Art Of War

How the US could charge Assange

MARK COVIN: The Australian founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange remains in jail in London, and in the United States government lawyers are using the time to try to work out what to charge him with. The New York Times reports that they're looking for evidence of any collusion in his early contacts with an army intelligence analyst suspected of leaking the information. John Bellinger was Legal Adviser of the Department of State during the Bush administration and now a partner with Arnold and Porter in Washington, DC. I asked him what Assange might eventually be charged with.

JOHN BELLINGER: I think our Justice Department is considering a variety of different criminal statutes under which Mr Assange could be charged, including the Espionage Act of 1917 which makes it a crime for a person of unauthorised access to information relating to the national defence to disclose it to persons not entitled to receive it. I think they're also looking at possible charges under the Theft of Government Property Act and under statutes prohibiting unauthorised access to government computers.

MARK COLVIN: The one thing I know about the Espionage Act is that the poet ee. cummings was locked up for 3.5 months for saying in 1917 that he didn't hate the Germans. It's a pretty broad Act isn't it?

JOHN BELLINGER: It's a broad act and all of these statutes but particularly the Espionage Act can be technically very difficult to bring prosecutions under. I think that's probably one reason why we have not seen charges brought yet, at least publicly.

MARK COLVIN: But in the 20s they locked up a lot of people, mostly socialists, I think and unionists for quite long periods of time under the Espionage Act.

JOHN BELLINGER: Well I think what Mr Assange has done is probably orders of magnitude different from some of those cases. After all he's alleged to have accessed 250,000 classified cables and I think amongst those the government can find probably quite a large number of them that would show serious damage to the national security.

MARK COLVIN: But you say he's accessed them, we've all accessed a lot of them now. How will the United States be able to prove that he conspired to get them rather than just being given them?
JOHN BELLINGER: Well, as I understand it, that's what the government is looking at right now is to see whether he could be charged with conspiracy to gain access to these classified documents in addition to holding them and failing to return them to the government. Now my successor as the legal adviser to the State Department wrote a very stern letter to Mr Assange and his lawyers about 10 days ago.

MARK COLVIN: I've got a copy of that. Was that sent with a particular purpose in mind? In other words, is having sent the letter something which would strengthen the United States' case if it comes to court?

JOHN BELLINGER: Yes, absolutely. What it does is it, one put Mr Assange on notice that disclosure of the information would be expected to cause injury to the United States as well as to individual human rights activists, bloggers, even journalists and, in addition, to ask him to return the information and Mr Assange's failure to return the stolen property, even after receiving a request from US government could be potentially an additional element of an offence under various criminal statutes.

MARK COLVIN: Richard Nixon didn't manage to jail Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers, why would the United States be more likely to succeed in the case of Julian Assange?

JOHN BELLINGER: Well these cases can be quite difficult to bring, leaked cases and unauthorised disclosure cases are admittedly quite difficult and I can expect that there would be a substantial legal battle both in a prosecution and also with respect to any extradition. I do think that the major difference here is just the absolute magnitude of the information that Mr Assange has received and is making public and the damage caused by many of the cables. So in some of these prior cases there was less information or harder to show damage but again, these cases can be difficult to bring but this one does seem to have more serious consequences than the past cases.

MARK COLVIN: WikiLeaks seems to be some sort of collective; why prosecute its founder rather than everybody in it?

JOHN BELLINGER: These are difficult questions. I think certainly the US government is trying to avoid as best it can questions under our first amendment protecting freedom of the press.

MARK COLVIN: Which could arise if Mr Assange claims to be a journalist, as he does, and a publisher, as he does.

JOHN BELLINGER: He will no doubt raise those as a defence and certainly those issues would have to be litigated if he were brought back to the United States.

MARK COLVIN: And the first amendment which protects freedom of speech would come into play there?

JOHN BELLINGER: In cases like this in the past, although there has not been one of this magnitude in the past, certainly individuals have raised their first amendment rights and with Mr Assange, in particular, who has said that he is a journalist engaged in news gathering, I think we can certainly expect that he would raise those issue as a defence.

MARK COLVIN: We've discussed possible charges, what about the possibilities of extradition, either from Sweden or the UK?

JOHN BELLINGER: Well that may be potentially even harder. The government, US government is not yet brought charges or at least publicly but when, if and when they do perhaps the even harder battle would be the battle over his extradition from either Britain or Sweden. The United States has well functioning extradition agreements with both Britain and Sweden. There's a relatively new Extradition Treaty between the US and the UK. On the other hand both of those treaties have got exception for political offences and I think we can certainly expect that Mr Assange's lawyers would argue that at least charges under the Espionage Act count as political offences. And certainly in the UK with respect to extraditions in recent years, we have seen the British bar kick up huge legal battles.

MARK COLVIN: There's a British hacker who was arrested in 2002, Gary McKinnon, for hacking into US military computers. He was arrested in 2002 as I say and he's still in Britain despite the US's best efforts to extradite him.

JOHN BELLINGER: Yes I'm very familiar with that case.

MARK COLVIN: Could that happen to Julian Assange?

JOHN BELLINGER: I think that could potentially take a very long time to litigate his extradition. Obviously in this case Mr Assange has got a number of individuals who are supporting his case as an example of freedom of expression.

On the other hand, the British government and governments around the world I think are likely to have little sympathy for what he's done because they see that if people like Mr Assange are allowed to act with impunity then soon we will be seeing the leaks of diplomatic cables from governments all around the world.

MARK COLVIN: Sure but these are two countries, Sweden and the UK, which have completely independent legal systems, it does sound as though it's going to be quite a long time before the United States can really get their hands on Julian Assange.

JOHN BELLINGER: I'm expecting that we would see a lengthy extradition battle in either country, assuming that the United States were to actually seek his extradition. As you point out, these past cases have resulted in legal battles that have gone on for years.

MARK COLVIN: John Bellinger who was the legal adviser of the US State Department during the Bush administration.

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Bite Me: An evolutionary case for cannibalism

While strolling last month through one of the dimly lit backrooms in a wing of the National Galleries of Scotland, my inner eye still tingling with thousands of Impressionistic afterimages, pudgy Rubensian cherubs, and gothic quadrangles, one irreverent painting leapt out at me in a very contemporary sort of way. It was part of an early-16^th-century triptych showing what appeared to be a solemn, middle-aged clergyman in gilded ecclesiastical robes commanding three naked adolescent boys before him in a bathtub.

Now, I must say, my first thought on seeing this salacious image was that the Catholic Church has been a hebephilic haven for far longer than anyone realized. But my uneasiness was put to rest once I leaned in to read the caption, which stated that the Dutch artist Gerard David, a prolific religious iconographer based in Bruges, Belgium, was merely painting a scene of starvation cannibalism. Phew! What a relief it was only an innocent case of anthropophagy (the eating of human flesh by humans) and nothing more sinister than that. The boys had been killed by a butcher, you see, and their carcasses were salting in a makeshift vat awaiting ingestion by famished townspeople. Fortunately, that most notorious child-lover himself, St. Nicholas, just happened to be passing through town when he caught wind of the boy-eating scandal and resurrected the lads in the tub...