On June 13th, a fifty-four-year-old former government employee named Thomas Drake is scheduled to appear in a courtroom in Baltimore, where he will face some of the gravest charges that can be brought against an American citizen. A former senior executive at the National Security Agency, the government’s electronic-espionage service, he is accused, in essence, of being an enemy of the state. According to a ten-count indictment delivered against him in April, 2010, Drake violated the Espionage Act—the 1917 statute that was used to convict Aldrich Ames, the C.I.A. officer who, in the eighties and nineties, sold U.S. intelligence to the K.G.B., enabling the Kremlin to assassinate informants. In 2007, the indictment says, Drake willfully retained top-secret defense documents that he had sworn an oath to protect, sneaking them out of the intelligence agency’s headquarters, at Fort Meade, Maryland, and taking them home, for the purpose of “unauthorized disclosure.” The aim of this scheme, the indictment says, was to leak government secrets to an unnamed newspaper reporter, who is identifiable as Siobhan Gorman, of the Baltimore Sun. Gorman wrote a prize-winning series of articles for the Sun about financial waste, bureaucratic dysfunction, and dubious legal practices in N.S.A. counterterrorism programs. Drake is also charged with obstructing justice and lying to federal law-enforcement agents. If he is convicted on all counts, he could receive a prison term of thirty-five years.
The government argues that Drake recklessly endangered the lives of American servicemen. “This is not an issue of benign documents,” William M. Welch II, the senior litigation counsel who is prosecuting the case, argued at a hearing in March, 2010. The N.S.A., he went on, collects “intelligence for the soldier in the field. So when individuals go out and they harm that ability, our intelligence goes dark and our soldier in the field gets harmed.”
Top officials at the Justice Department describe such leak prosecutions as almost obligatory. Lanny Breuer, the Assistant Attorney General who supervises the department’s criminal division, told me, “You don’t get to break the law and disclose classified information just because you want to.” He added, “Politics should play no role in it whatsoever.”
When President Barack Obama took office, in 2009, he championed the cause of government transparency, and spoke admiringly of whistle-blowers, whom he described as “often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government.” But the Obama Administration has pursued leak prosecutions with a surprising relentlessness. Including the Drake case, it has been using the Espionage Act to press criminal charges in five alleged instances of national-security leaks—more such prosecutions than have occurred in all previous Administrations combined. The Drake case is one of two that Obama’s Justice Department has carried over from the Bush years...

Continue reading

Jane Mayer @'The New Yorker'

If looks could kill...

HA!

Secret Service Blasts Fox News 'Blathering' In Rogue Tweet

Rare colour photographs of the Great Depression

A young boy in Cinncinnati, Ohio, in 1942 or 1943

Jack Whinery, homesteader, and his family in Pie Town, New Mexico, October 1940

Women workers employed as wipers in the roundhouse having lunch in their rest room at the Chicago and Northwest Railway Company in Clinton, Iowa, April 1943

Sex, Justice, and the American Way

Re-Touching McLuhan – The Medium Is The Massage (Marshall McLuhan Centennial Weekend, Berlin)

Friday May 27 – Sunday May 29, 2011

Conference | Screening | Installation | Performance
Embassy of Canada / Marshall McLuhan Salon
Leipziger Platz 17. 10117 Berlin
http://mcluhan2011.eu/berlin

transmediale in collaboration with the Embassy of Canada and Marshall McLuhan Salon invite you to a key event celebrating the 100th anniversary of famed Canadian media philosopher Herbert Marshall McLuhan's birth. Having coined expressions such as the global village and the medium is the message in the early days of TV and electronic culture, the Re-Touching McLuhan events explore the many interpretations of McLuhan's play on language and media that shape today's networked society.
The international conference Re-Touching McLuhan: The Medium is the Massage chaired by Dieter Daniels and moderated by Christopher Salter, sees leading international media and digital culture researchers Richard Cavell, Dieter Daniels, Martina Leeker, Claus Pias, Katja Kwastek, Liz Kotz, Janine Marchessault, Graham Larkin and Lorenz Engell explore McLuhan’s unique take on tactile and multi-sensory media expressed by the media philosopher's unintentionally published blurring of the words message and massage.
The opening of the Centennial Weekend features the worldwide (re-)launch of McLuhan's 1968 audio art classic The Medium is the Massage, digitally remastered for the first time, produced and presented by hip-hop musician and conceptual artist Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky.
Legendary McLuhanist Derrick de Kerckhove and Berlin-based McLuhan scholar Steffi Winkler elaborate on rare material from the McLuhan archives in the first session of the McLuminations screening and discussion series, produced by Baruch Gottlieb.
The Centennial Weekend will feature the European première of Through the Vanishing Point, a major new multi-media installation by leading Canadian digital artists David Rokeby and Lewis Kaye, as well as Play_McLuhan, an exhibition by media art students from the Hochschule Darmstadt under the direction of Sabine Breitsameter will be presented.
PROGRAMME HIGHLIGHTS
Friday May 27, 18.00
Re-Touching McLuhan Centennial Weekend
Opening and Reception featuring Richard Cavell and Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky
Saturday May 28, 10.00 – 18.00
Re-Touching McLuhan: The Medium is the Massage
Conference chaired by Dieter Daniels
Sunday May 29, 14.30
McLuminations #1
Screening & Discussion featuring Derrick de Kerckhove and Steffi Winkler
Sunday May 29, 17.00
Through The Vanishing Point
Installation by David Rokeby and Lewis Kaye - Vernissage

Full event schedule: http://mcluhan2011.eu/schedule

Download the flier : http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8734628/McLuhan%20Leporello.pdf

SPECIAL PRE-EVENTS
Friday, May 27, 12.00 – 17.00
Global Village: Calamity or Chance? 2nd German-Canadian Professionals Conference feat. keynotes by Brian Lee Crowley, Linus Neumann and Gundolf S. Freyermuth, moderated by Ariane de Hoog, Deutsche Welle.
http://gcp-conference.de/2011
Friday, May 27th, 17.00
PLAY_McLUHAN Exhibition presentation by Sabine Breitsameter and students of the Hochschule Darmstadt

FURTHER INFORMATION
All events are free and open to the public but spaces are limited so please RSVP at rsvp@mcluhan2011.eu, and arrive early to ensure enough time for embassy security.

All RE-TOUCHING McLUHAN conference presentations will also be streamed live at http://mcluhan2011.eu/berlin and there will be opportunities to participate in a moderated online forum. To register interest in our streaming programme, please contact Lalitha Rajan on lr@mcluhan2011.eu.
Address:
Embassy of Canada / Marshall McLuhan Salon
Leipziger Platz 17. 10117 Berlin
U-Bahn / S-Bahn Potsdamer Platz
(Please arrive early to alow time for Embassy Security)

http://mcluhan2011.eu
http://facebook.com/mcluhan2011eu
http://twitter.com/mcluhan2011eu
#mcluhan2011eu
Contact: Michelle O'Brien +49 30 24749 762

mo@mcluhan2011.eu

McLUHAN IN EUROPE 2011
The RE-TOUCHING McLUHAN Berlin Centennial Weekend is a project of the McLuhan in Europe 2011 network, initiated and directed by Stephen Kovats in collaboration with Michelle Kasprzak, celebrating the centenary of visionary Canadian media philosopher Herbert Marshall McLuhan, and his impact on European art and media culture.

The event is supported by the Government of Canada, the Deutsch-Kanadische Gesellschaft, RIM / Blackberry and serve-u.

Through The Vanishing Point was commissioned in 2010 by the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival (Bonnie Rubenstein, curator) and the Faculty of Information McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology (Dominique Scheffel-Dunand, director) University of Toronto, Canada.

(Thanx Lalitha)

IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn Resigns

Press Release No. 11/187
May 18, 2011
Mr. Dominique Strauss-Kahn today informed the Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) of his intention to resign as Managing Director with immediate effect. Mr. Strauss-Kahn made the following statement in a formal letter of resignation to the Board:
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Board:
It is with infinite sadness that I feel compelled today to present to the Executive Board my resignation from my post of Managing Director of the IMF.
I think at this time first of my wife—whom I love more than anything—of my children, of my family, of my friends.
I think also of my colleagues at the Fund; together we have accomplished such great things over the last three years and more.
To all, I want to say that I deny with the greatest possible firmness all of the allegations that have been made against me.
I want to protect this institution which I have served with honor and devotion, and especially—especially—I want to devote all my strength, all my time, and all my energy to proving my innocence.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn
The Fund will communicate in the near future on the Executive Board’s process of selecting a new Managing Director. Meanwhile, Mr. John Lipsky remains Acting Managing Director
@'International Motherfuckers'