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Soundtrack Saturday
1 hour ago
Wednesday, 16 March 2011
Interview: David Johansen
What wasn’t inevitable was how good the comeback was. While not on par with the raunchy snarl of the Dolls’ pair of classic studio albums from the early ’70s, the new disc, One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This, was a respectable addition to the catalog of a band that always prided itself on disrespectability. Johansen and Sylvain reconnected with Todd Rundgren, the producer of the Dolls’ 1973 debut, for 2007’s Cause I Sez So, another raw batch of retro-rock that was hastily written, quickly recorded, and sounds like it—in other words, it’s an exhibition of the kind of trashy urgency that made the Dolls so revolutionary in the first place.
But with the group’s third post-reunion album—and fifth overall—Dancing Backward In High Heels, Johansen takes a different direction. With the help of Jason Hill (former frontman of Louis XIV and best known for his production work for The Killers), Dancing Backward is a shimmery, reverb-soaked album that evokes just about every era of Johansen’s career—not to mention ’60s girl groups and a reworked version of the disco-ish “Funky But Chic,” originally released on his self-titled 1978 solo debut. But as Johansen tells The A.V. Club, looking to the past is something that’s as painful as it is inescapable—not to mention occasionally funny...
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Jason Heller @'A.V. Club'
Benkler argues against prosecution of WikiLeaks, detailing government and news media "overreaction"
Benkler, the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center, argues that WikiLeaks’ freedom of expression is protected by the First Amendment and should not be treated differently from that of traditional news media. A working draft of his article, which will be published in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, can be found here.
Below, Benkler answers questions from June Wu for the publication Harvard Law Today.
Q: What did you set out to investigate?
A: The article essentially does two things. The first is to explain why WikiLeaks is essentially the Pentagon Papers case of the 21st century: a core journalistic release of material coming under attack. As a matter of First Amendment limitations, you can’t distinguish Wikileaks from the New York Times along any dimension that is constitutionally relevant. The second is to offer a case study of the difficult but important relationship between the new, networked media and traditional media that is coming to characterize the new media environment.
Q: How would you describe government and media response to WikiLeaks?
A: I think once you actually look at the facts carefully, the government and media vastly overreacted and overstated dramatically the extent of the actual threat of WikiLeaks. One of the things I did was an analysis of all the news stories at the time of the embassy cables release. About two-thirds of news reports in the U.S. in the first two weeks explicitly misstated what WikiLeaks had released and claimed that hundreds of thousands of cables had been dumped online at a time that only a few hundred cables had been released, in redacted form, and only after they were already published by one of the traditional newspaper partners in the endeavor. The pattern of misreporting in the news media fit the pattern of overstatement by government actors, both administration officials and senators.
Q: What is your primary criticism of the government and media overreaction?
A: It fed into a description of WikiLeaks as though it was some terrorist organization as opposed to what it is, which is, in fact, a journalistic enterprise. Joe Biden responded to the release of the embassy cables by stating that WikiLeaders founder Julian Assange is “more like a high-tech terrorist than the Pentagon Papers.” That captured the overstated, overheated, irresponsible nature of the public and political response to what was fundamentally a moment of journalistic disclosure. They responded as if it were a security threat, in a way that was simply inconsistent with a democratic American administration. This, in turn, set the background for the denial of service attacks by the commercial providers of services to Wikileaks: Amazon, EveryDNS, Mastercard, Visa, etc.
Q: What are the main implications of your findings?
A: The direct implication is the U.S. should take a look at this investigation and declare that the Constitution’s First Amendment simply does not permit prosecution of WikiLeaks. It is not, as a matter of law, sustainable to treat WikiLeaks or Assange any differently than the New York Times and its reporters.
The second implication is that we need a reformed legal regime, which is what I start to look at in the paper. A system that depends on privately-owned critical communications systems and privately-run payment systems owned by companies eager to avoid public controversy is an easy target for government trying to shut it down. We need to develop much more robust legal responsibility for private operators of critical infrastructures so they will have a backbone when the government or negative public opinion says you have to shut it down. We need to create a framework in which they instead have to say, we have a legal responsibility to not discriminate against users based on fact that they are unpopular speakers. We have a lot of work to do in this area.
The third piece is more about the future of journalism. Already, we are seeing today a much more global, much more diverse media environment that includes a wide range of actors. If we want to understand the future of journalism, we need to look at the whole integrated system. We can’t keep looking at it through a prism of traditional American media.
Q. How is WikiLeaks a journalistic organization?
A: There are multiple functions that go into journalism: identify sources, review material, preserve anonymity of sources at some points, and choreograph the release of information. WikiLeaks is not a traditional media organization, but essentially over course of the year, WikiLeaks was learning how to participate in a joint venture with a number of other traditional news organizations in order to achieve exactly that—finding sources, getting information, structuring it in a way that is usable, and integrating with other organizations to achieve release. That’s journalism.
@'Harvard Law School'
Julian Assange tells students that the web is the greatest spying machine ever
Assange acknowledged that the web could allow greater government transparency and better co-operation between activists, but said it gave authorities their best ever opportunity to monitor and catch dissidents.
"While the internet has in some ways an ability to let us know to an unprecedented level what government is doing, and to let us co-operate with each other to hold repressive governments and repressive corporations to account, it is also the greatest spying machine the world has ever seen," he told students at Cambridge University. Hundreds queued for hours to attend.
He continued: "It [the web] is not a technology that favours freedom of speech. It is not a technology that favours human rights. It is not a technology that favours civil life. Rather it is a technology that can be used to set up a totalitarian spying regime, the likes of which we have never seen. Or, on the other hand, taken by us, taken by activists, and taken by all those who want a different trajectory for the technological world, it can be something we all hope for."
Assange also suggested that Facebook and Twitter played less of a role in the unrest in the Middle East than has previously been argued by social media commentators and politicians.
He said: "Yes [Twitter and Facebook] did play a part, although not nearly as large a part as al-Jazeera. But the guide produced by Egyptian revolutionaries … says on the first page, 'Do not use Facebook and Twitter', and says on the last page, 'Do not use Facebook and Twitter'.
"There is a reason for that. There was actually a Facebook revolt in Cairo three or four years ago. It was very small … after it, Facebook was used to round-up all the principal participants. They were then beaten, interrogated and incarcerated."
Assange said that cables released by WikiLeaks played a key role in both fomenting unrest in the Middle East and forcing the US government not to back former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.
Assange said diplomatic cables concerning US attitudes to the former Tunisian regime had given strength to revolutionary forces across the region.
"The Tunisian cables showed clearly that if it came down to it, the US, if it came down to a fight between the military on the one hand, and Ben Ali's political regime on the other, the US would probably support the military."
He continued: "That is something that must have also caused neighbouring countries to Tunisia some thought: that is that if they militarily intervened, they may not be on the same side as the United States."
Assange, who is appealing against his extradition to Sweden on alleged sex charges, said the WikiLeaks releases had also forced the US to drop their tacit support of Mubarak.
"As a result of releasing cables about Suleiman [the vice-president of Egypt under Mubarak], the US and Israel's preferred option for regime takeover in Egypt, as a result of releasing cables about Mubarak's approval of Suleiman's torture methods, it was not possible for Joseph Biden to [repeat his earlier claim that Mubarak was not a dictator]. It was not possible for Hillary Clinton to publicly come out and support Mubarak's regime."
Responding to a question about Bradley Manning, the US soldier incarcerated for allegedly leaking classified information, Assange said: "We have no idea whether he is one of our sources. All our technology is geared up to make sure we have no idea."
He expressed sympathy for Manning. "He is in a terrible situation. And if he is not connected to us, [then] he is there as an innocent … and if he is in some manner connected to our publications, then of course we have some responsibility. That said, there is no allegation that he was arrested as the result of anything to do with us. The allegation is that he was arrested as a result of him speaking to Wired magazine in the United States."
Assange also criticised the New York Times, which he claimed had suppressed stories about secret American military activity in Afghanistan.
Patrick Kingsley @'The Guardian'
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