Saturday, 5 February 2011
WikiLeaks has created a new media landscape
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange: an early and brilliant executor of what is being revealed as a more general pattern. Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images
WikiLeaks affects one of the key tensions in democracies: the government needs to be able to keep secrets, but citizens need to know what is being done in our name. These requirements are fundamental and incompatible; like the trade-offs between privacy and security, or liberty and equality, different countries in different eras find different ways to negotiate those competing needs.
In the case of state secrets v citizen oversight, however, there is one constant risk: since deciding what is a secret is itself a secret, there is always a risk that the government will simply hide an increasing amount of material of public concern. One response to this risk is the leaker, someone who believes that key elements of political life are being wrongly kept from public view, and who circulates that material on his or her own.
Because this tension between governments and leakers is so important, and because WikiLeaks so dramatically helps leakers, it isn't just a new entrant in the existing media landscape. Its arrival creates a new landscape.
This transformation is under-appreciated. The press often covers WikiLeaks as a series of unfortunate events, one crisis or scandal after another. And Julian Assange, of course, is catnip – brilliant, opinionated, a monocle and a Persian cat away from looking like a Bond villain. The press has covered him as dutifully as any movie star, while paying too little attention to what his invention means about the wider world.
To understand the system WikiLeaks is disrupting, it helps to focus on a key moment of its formation. In 1946, the English-speaking Allies – the UK, US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand – decided that the pooling of their intelligence efforts set up during the conflict was too useful to end, even though the war had. The result, the blandly named UKUSA Agreement, was in the main a way for those governments to share foreign intelligence with each other.
The pact, however, did have one important domestic effect. It was illegal for those governments to spy on their own citizens. It was not, however, illegal for them to spy on each others' citizens. The agreement provided means for sharing the resulting observations without violating domestic laws.
For half a century, from 1946 to 2005, this use of transnational networks to get around national controls was asymmetric: governments could use this technique to surveil citizens, but not vice-versa. In 2006, WikiLeaks launched, holding out the possibility of evening up the odds, however slightly, in favour of the citizens. For the first three years of its existence, this change was more potential than actual, but in 2010, with the release of the Collateral Murder video, the Afghan war logs, and, most significantly, the US embassy cables, increased oversight of the state by citizens became real.
Limits on such leaking aren't just about threats to the leaker. There are also threats to the publishers. Sometimes the threats are formal; the UK has an Official Secrets Act. Sometimes they are informal; the US press is held in partial check by their need for long-term co-operation with the government. So long as a leak had to appear in one country's press to affect that country's politics, the relationship between the state and the press was contained by national borders.
Until WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks, as my colleague Jay Rosen points out, is a truly transnational media organisation. We have many international media organisations, of course, Havas and the BBC and al-Jazeera, but all of those are still headquartered in one country. WikiLeaks is headquartered on the web; there is no one set of national laws that can be brought to bear on it, nor is there any one national regime that can shut it down.
WikiLeaks allows leakers transnational escape from national controls. Now, and from now on, a leaker with domestic secrets has no need of the domestic press, and indeed will avoid leaking directly to them if possible, to escape national pressure on national publishers to keep national secrets.
WikiLeaks has not been a series of unfortunate events, and Assange is not a magician – he is simply an early and brilliant executor of what is being revealed as a much more general pattern, now spreading. Al-Jazeera and the Guardian created a transnational network to release the Palestine papers, without using WikiLeaks as an intermediary, and Daniel Domscheit-Berg is in the process of launching OpenLeaks, which will bring WikiLeaks-like capability to any publisher that wants it. It is possible to imagine that secrets from Moscow, Rome or Johannesburg will be routed through Iceland, Costa Rica, or even a transnational network of servers volunteered by private citizens.
The state will fight back, of course. They will improve their controls on secrets, raise surveillance and punishment of possible leakers, try to negotiate multilateral media controls. But even then, the net change is likely to be advantageous to the leakers – less free than today, perhaps, but more free than prior to 2006. Assange has claimed, when the history of statecraft of the era is written, that it will be divided into pre- and post-WikiLeaks periods. This claim is grandiose and premature; it is not, however, obviously wrong.
Clay Shirky @'The Guardian'
The Power Of Nightmares
The Power Of Nightmares
Part one of the series explains the origins of Islamism and Neo-Conservatism. It shows Egyptian civil servant Sayyid Qutb, depicted as the founder of modern Islamist thought, visiting America to learn about the education system, but becoming disgusted with what he saw as a corruption of morals and virtues in western society through individualism. When he returns to Egypt, he is disturbed by westernisation under Gamal Abdel Nasser and becomes convinced that in order to save society it must be completely restructured along the lines of Islamic law while still using western technology. He also becomes convinced that this can only be accomplished through the use of an elite "vanguard" to lead a revolution against the established order. Qutb becomes a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and, after being tortured in one of Nasser's jails, comes to believe that western-influenced leaders can justly be killed for the sake of removing their corruption. Qutb is executed in 1966, but he influences the future mentor of Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to start his own secret Islamist group. Inspired by the 1979 Iranian revolution, Zawahiri and his allies assassinate Egyptian president Anwar Al Sadat, in 1981, in hopes of starting their own revolution. The revolution does not materialise, and Zawahiri comes to believe that the majority of Muslims have been corrupted not only by their western-inspired leaders, but Muslims themselves have been affected by jahilliyah and thus both may be legitimate targets of violence if they do not join him. They continued to have the belief that a vanguard was necessary to rise up and overthrow the corrupt regime and replace with a pure Islamist state.
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GregMitch Greg Mitchell
Okay, bookstore activists, time to get busy again and place the new Rumsfeld memoir in the "True Crime" section.
Ex-Taliban base commander collapses in Guantánamo shower, dies
The dead man, Awal Gul, had been in U.S. custody since Christmas 2001 and at the prison camps in southeast Cuba for more than eight years. He was designated by the Obama administration as one of 48 ``indefinite detainees,'' meaning the U.S. would neither repatriate him nor put him on trial.
Gul was working out Tuesday night in a collective cellblock at the cement penitentiary-style building called Camp 6, said Navy Cmdr. Tamsen Reese, a prison camps spokeswoman.
``He went to go take a shower and apparently collapsed in the shower,'' Reese said. ``Detainees on the cellblock then assisted him in getting to the guard station.''
From there he was taken to a prison camp clinic, then to the Navy base hospital, some miles away, but could not be saved despite what the commander called ``extensive life saving measures.''
Gul is the seventh war-on-terror detainee to die during the nine years the Pentagon has confined some 800 men and boys to the prisons at Guantánamo.
Gul had never been charged with a crime during his more-than-eight-year detention as a suspected base commander for the Taliban...
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Carol Rosenberg @'Miami Herald'
Read the comments & weep!
Friday, 4 February 2011
'The Shirt That Hurts'
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evgenymorozov Evgeny Morozov
As long as so much of the crucial infrastructure for digital activism is provided by corporations, its full potential will not be realized
Arcade Fire 'not good people'
Filmmaker Vincent Moon spent time with the Canadian group, fronted by Win Butler, while working on their behind-the-scenes movie Miroir Noir, which documented the making of their 2007 album Neon Bible and a tour, and he has now spoken out about his experiences on set.
Moon has criticized the musicians and the way they conduct their business, and he reserves particularly harsh words for the band's representatives.
He tells Eye Weekly, "They're not good people, that's it. And I don't mean the whole band - I mean the leaders of the band and their management.
"What I hate about the band now is that people call them an indie band and they're not an indie band, they are a mainstream band... The way they deal with their business is really disgusting for me. The way they deal with things is awful.
"Their management are awful, awful people, and I know what I'm talking about. I have some really terrible stories with them."
@'Toronto Sun'
19 Year Old Teenager Makes Homemade Solar Death Ray
Concentrated solar power has the potential to generate immense amounts of energy — but it can also be amazingly destructive. American student Eric Jacqmain has assembled over 5,800 mirrors into his own parabolic ‘solar Death Ray’, which can reportedly melt through metal and concrete.
@'Inhabitat'
Manic Street Preachers - Miners' Institute, Blackwood, Wales, 27th January 2011
01 Motorcycle Emptiness
02 Your Love Alone is Not Enough
03 Slash 'n' Burn
04 (It's Not War) Just the End of Love
05 Suicide Alley
06 My Little Empire
07 Faster
08 You Stole the Sun From My Heart
09 Postcards From a Young Man
10 If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next
11 You Love Us
12 Some Kind of Nothingness
13 Motown Junk
14 A Design For Life
15 Suicide is Painless
16 Enola Alone
17 Masses Against the Classes
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@'Big Box of Tapes'
Faust - Something Dirty (Albumstream)
1. Tell the Bitch to Go Home
2. Herbststimmung
3. Thoughts of the Dead
4. Lost the Signal
5. Je Bouffe
6. Whet
7. Invisible Mending
8. Dampfauslass I
9. Dampfauslass II
10. Pythagoras
11. Save the Last One
12. La Sole Dorée
The saga continues on 2011's Something Dirty, the fourth offering from the Jean-Hervé Péron and Zappi Diermaier version of Faust. (The other group using the name contains original member Hans Joachim Irmler.) As is typical of this unit, there are lineup changes. 2009's C'es Com ... Com ... Compliqué -- recorded in 2007 -- contained Amaury Cambuzat (a member since 1999) who left shortly thereafter. This new lineup features guitarist James Johnston, founder of the brutish British blues-rockers Gallon Drunk, and the English painter, filmmaker, author, and musician Geraldine Swayne on keyboards. Following the footsteps of C'es Com ... Com ... Compliqué, Something Dirty underscores Faust's reputation as a never-say-die band of avant-rock provocateurs. The sounds are basic, often repetitive, anchored by Diermaier's primitive, tribalistic drumming (heavy with tom-toms and kick drums), and Péron's single- and double-note bassing in the rhythm section; Johnston and Swayne are left to color the sound texturally with everything from noise and feedback to full-on chordal riffs to open, ringing drones: check the opener "Tell the Bitch to Go Home" (with a bassline straight from Joy Division's "Shadowplay") and the title track for ample evidence. Things get more abstract on the beautiful, haunted "Herbstimmung," with shimmering racket and distorted slide guitar. They move toward pure art terrorism on the tense, skeletal ambience that decorates the poetry of Péron and Swayne on "Thoughts of the Dead," and the subdued, elegiac darkness in the set's longest number "Lost the Signal," sung airily by Swayne: comparisons to the Velvet Underground with Nico are inevitable. The two-part "Dampfauslass," feels utterly improvised but its atmospherics are tempered by the raucous, primitive rock on "Pythagoras." The album closes with "La Sole Dorée." It commences as a sparsely decorated ballad but gains in tempo, density, and intensity with Swayne doing her best Patti Smith spoken word on the lyric. It shifts into high gear becoming a primal tidal wave of hypnotic rockist squall and stops suddenly, leaving the listener in stunned silence. Something Dirty is a powerful recording; let's hope this version of Faust remains together awhile: their collective focus is sharp and their execution nearly flawless even at their most delightfully excessive. (Thom Jurek - allmusic; 4/5)
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Thursday, 3 February 2011
H.P. Lovecraft - Fear of the Unknown (Documentary)
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is Fear of the Unknown.
“H.P. Lovecraft was the forefather of modern horror fiction having inspired such writers as Stephen King, Robert Bloch and Neil Gaiman. The influence of his Cthulhu mythos can be seen in film (Re-animator, Hellboy, and Alien), games (The Call of Cthulhu role playing enterprise), music (Metallica, Iron Maiden) and pop culture in general.
But what led an Old World, xenophobic gentleman to create one of literature’s most far-reaching mythologies? What attracts even the minds of the 21st century to these stories of unspeakable abominations and cosmic gods?
LOVECRAFT: FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN is a chronicle of the life, work and mind that created these weird tales as told by many of today’s luminaries of dark fantasy including John Carpenter (The Thing), Guillermo Del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth), Neil Gaiman (Coraline), Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator), Caitlin Kiernan (“Daughter of Hounds”) and Peter Straub (“Ghost Story”).”
Watch more free documentaries
direct link for the entire film
via
“H.P. Lovecraft was the forefather of modern horror fiction having inspired such writers as Stephen King, Robert Bloch and Neil Gaiman. The influence of his Cthulhu mythos can be seen in film (Re-animator, Hellboy, and Alien), games (The Call of Cthulhu role playing enterprise), music (Metallica, Iron Maiden) and pop culture in general.
But what led an Old World, xenophobic gentleman to create one of literature’s most far-reaching mythologies? What attracts even the minds of the 21st century to these stories of unspeakable abominations and cosmic gods?
LOVECRAFT: FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN is a chronicle of the life, work and mind that created these weird tales as told by many of today’s luminaries of dark fantasy including John Carpenter (The Thing), Guillermo Del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth), Neil Gaiman (Coraline), Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator), Caitlin Kiernan (“Daughter of Hounds”) and Peter Straub (“Ghost Story”).”
Watch more free documentaries
direct link for the entire film
via
blakehounshell Blake Hounshell
NileTV ticker: "Obama hails Mubarak's speech to the nation... Obama praises Egypt's youth and army... EU praises Mubarak...
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