Stuff You May Have Missed in the Egypt Protests; In Other News, Egyptians Still Incredible.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Arab version of the Berlin Wall is falling.

And you, me, and everyone else with half an eye on the news, is watching.

I've been watching the Al Jazeera liveblog, refreshing every few nanoseconds. My love of AJE is the stuff of epic poetry, but it seems for once everyone else is watching it too, recognizing what good journalism looks like, and noting the sizeable difference between it and CNN. The President was watching it, and they barely even allow it on US cable.
I've also been following a fairly decent Guardian liveblog, which gives a slightly geopolitically-broader look at the whole crazy-inspirational Egyptian revolution story.

And it has been inspirational.

In case some of you have been under a rock waiting for me to sass about this, here's the extreme-Coles-notes-version: after Tunisia's regular folks overthrew their authoritarian government a few weeks ago, 30 years of regime under Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak is falling apart. There have been approximately 7 days of protests in major cities all over Egypt, with women, children, lawyers, judges, teachers, tradespeople and youth demanding free and fair elections and the removal of Mubarak. They've been withstanding police brutality, country-wide internet and SMS shutoff, increasingly early military curfews, and the stubborn refusal of their leadership to listen to their demands. They've decided that they're not budging until they get what they're entitled to as human beings.

Tahrir Square, in Cairo, on the 28th

Considering the coverage of this issue has been practically omnipresent on most major news networks, I get the rare opportunity to report on some stuff I've read that maybe isn't on the CBC basic breakdown at 6.

-You may have noticed footage of burning buildings in Cairo, and riots in Suez and Alexandria played over and over. What you might not have noticed is the community-led vigilante groups setting up roadblocks in Cairo suburbs, to prevent looting. Or the protesters stopping to pick up garbage, and distributing food during the marches. Clearly, these are dangerous anarchists.

in front of the Antiquities Museum.
Note the business attire. Incredible.

-What about the human chain of protesters preventing looters from getting into the National Antiquities Museum, where a few thousand years of human history lives?

-Or the sleepover of a few thousand people in Tahrir Square tonight with a "feeling of community", despite the fact that they had to defy curfew, step over barbed wire and avoid tanks and military helicopters to get there?

-Or the recent statement from the Egyptian military verbalizing their admirable practice thus far, saying that they will not attempt to harm protesters?

-Or the reports of soldiers defecting to join the protest?


Mubarak's first address to his country a few days ago paid the usual lipservice to freedom, democracy and the protesters, and hammered home that even though he's been identified as the problem, he wasn't going anywhere. But even though governments all over the world are cautiously, diplomatically issuing statements, it's become abundantly clear--it doesn't matter how much he shuffles his cabinet, the guy simply can't stay in office.

Today, the Egyptian government tried to shut down Al Jazeera, storming the office, temporarily arresting reporters, and taking all their gear. Because nothing says "We totally take your request for democracy seriously" like hobbling the most effective and visible agents of the free press with police goons. Sends just the right message.
The small amount of Egyptian government face that wasn't already covered with proverbial egg is now thoroughly smeared, with news organizations and international governments from all over the place making statements of support. Even Anonymous has sent out an open letter of support to Al Jazeera and to the Egyptian population in general. And they signed it with a "We love you", which might be the most genuine display of affection ever recorded from those cheeky trolls.

In the meantime, in the face of the continued internet shutdown, the folks at Skyne--er, Google, have developed a speech-to-tweet function so that people can call in their social networking updates.

Make no mistake, things are far from rosy. Police stations, National Democratic Party and other government offices have been burned to the ground. The death toll is rising from 150 (which is an admirably small number, considering the thousands that have been in the streets for a week). There are many, many people missing in Egypt (and many attempts to organize to find them).
The Egyptian army has troops in the Sinai peninsula for the first time since their peace treaty with Israel, which is making them anxious and causing a great deal of talk about the Islamization of the Middle East (though my personal opinion is that fear's a mite bit self-absorbed at this point, isn't it?). And considering it tends to happen every time someone Arab sneezes or stubs his toe, the price of crude oil is going through the roof again.

But considering the scale and consequence of this revolution--and the fact that a huge protest is planned for tomorrow that may wind up being a crux point for the government--it's looking rather positive.

And with the whole world watching, too.

Big ol' Wikirecap: Assange, Manning, Legality, and Cableliciousness

Catchup time!

Wikileaks and Assange

-Because five media partners was not enough, rumours circulate that Assange and co. are looking for SIXTY for the release of the remaining 99% of the cablegate cable....gates. Which might be too much noise for me to keep up with, and sounds like a logistical nightmare, but whatevs. Assange is insisting on full name redaction, which wins points from me.
Also, he's got an extradition hearing on Feb 7th. Swedes, mark your calendars, and maybe rethink any internet transactions that day.

-NYT and other big news machines are considering setting up leaking infrastructure (which is funny to say), a la the Al Jazeera Transparency Unit. I temporarily overlook the hypocrisy of the New York Times in order to appreciate this little bit o' sense.

-CEO of google considered stopping the archiving of the cables, but kept on, because "it's legal". Another reason why I still like google, even though they're as close to Skynet as we're ever going to get.

-Those cheeky Anonymous guys are asking for help to take down the Egyptian government sites, presumably as punishment for being jerks and randomly beating people/press members.

-There's a new Wikileaks game app. You play a TSA agent. Ummm what.

-Apparently it's been impossible to find a direct, incriminating link between Assange and Manning that would get the former tossed into Quantico with the latter. Apparently, though, for many of the case's biggest adherents, that doesn't particularly matter.

Bradley Manning

-Yet more insanity surrounding Bradley Manning: approximately the same time that the FireDogLake folks showed up to drop off a petition in support of Manning, orders from on high barred any visitors from seeing him--even pre-approved guests, and his lawyer. Aforementioned guests and lawyer then got shaken up and threatened with arrest for showing up. Manning has been put on suicide watch, which is basically the only thing worse than what he's already been going through. Every time someone in the article mentions taking "appropriate action", a little part of me scoffs and a huge part of me dies inside.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International sends a letter to the chief of the Pentagon about the "breach of international standards" that their treament of Manning constitutes.


From the Cables:
-Cable naming names of corrupt Cuban officials on the take contains the amazing quote:

"Because most Cubans work for the state, the entire system -- from petty officials to Castro's closest advisors -- is rife with corrupt practices''

Which implies that work for the private sector is inherently less corrupt. Which caused me to spit tea through my nose remembering Enron.


Cuba (aka Raul Castro) claims to want "normal relations" with the States. In other news, there's still a standing committee of US politicians intent on meddling in Cubano affairs and "installing democracy" in the "outpost of tyranny" (two terms which still sound batshit to me).
No word on whether a similar Cubano group exists, intent on installing good cigars and cheap beach resorts to the US.


-Apparently there's a big ol' cache of nuclear waste just sitting around somewhere in Kazakhstan that the States is worried could be picked over by terrorists.
I feel like terrorists are a tertiary problem here, secondary to the problem of RANDOM NUCLEAR WASTE LYING AROUND. Jesus.

Clearly, this is a sub-optimal place
for a Walmart.

-Norway to Walmart et al: "Fuck you and your questionable ethics."

Walmart et al to no one in particular: "Uh oh."

-That British-trained Bangladeshi Extrajudicial Murder Brigade I covered in a previous wikirecap is at it again, and the Guardian is all over that shit.

-Mexico border issues and something to do with the US interviewing foreign aliens. I don't even know what's going on here, but here's the cable.

Wikirecap: because News is still happening

It is New Year's Eve tomorrow, which makes it ripe-for-scandal-o'clock on the wikifront.
As this blog is totally not about me (unless I'm somehow involved with important news), I won't explain why I'm so sluggish with updates. I WILL apologize, and warn thus: until the third week of January, this blog will be fairly quiet. And after the third of January, it will likely get very loud again.

Quick-and-dirty catch-up recap:

HUGE, huge fallout: Glenn Greenwald vs WIRED magazine over the Bradley Manning/Lamo chat logs. Apparently WIRED's editor Kevin Poulsen's been pals with Lamo for a long time, and a few opaque and important claims made by Lamo can't be confirmed with the sections of the chat logs they've already released. But Poulsen's pulling the (fairly legitimate in most cases, I think) journalistic card that says because the remainder of the chat logs don't have anything to do with wikileaks, it's in the interest of source privacy that they don't release them.
I'm fairly at odds about this myself, but I don't have much of a chance to sort it out on my head, because the whole thing fairly swiftly exploded into an all-out-internet-journalism-shit-slinging-bonanza, mostly over at WIRED. Thankfully, Rob Beschizza at boingboing begins to make sense of it all in a way that I love, and asks really excellent questions that manage to recalibrate it from a blood-and-pixels-feud back into a really important issue. Plus, some guy broke it down in one sentence. That deserves credit.


Aforementioned awesome-boingboing-Rob also notes that NPR loudly corrected the flurry of reporters still clinging to the "documents dump" myth:

"In recent weeks, NPR hosts, reporters and guests have incorrectly said or implied that WikiLeaks recently has disclosed or released roughly 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables. Although the website has vowed to publish "251,287 leaked United States embassy cables," as of Dec. 28, 2010, only 1,942 of the cables had been released."

Meanwhile, the press is suspiciously forgetting this whole wikileaks thing ever happened. The Guardian, formerly a bastion of awesomeness, is not reporting on them any more. The New York Times had been quiet on this front for a long time. Basically, it's internet-based journalism still following cablegate and its attendant nuttiness. Personally, this makes my brain go like crazy--if I was a pro journalist in a large publication, I'd be looking at the mounting legal proceedings against Assange for doing the same that that I pay bills by doing, and I'd put as much distance between my actions and him as possible.
Unless, y'know, I believed in the unavoidable responsibility of the 4th estate in a democratic society that makes something like the first amendment necessary. But whatevs.

Unsurprisingly, and on urging from Paypal, the FBI decided it was pertinent to look into Operation Payback, Anonymous and DDoS attacks in general. It confirms that they knocked down Paypal for at least a while. It also refers to 4chan as an "internet activist group", which made me spit coffee out of my nose. Apart from that, the affidavit linked up there makes good recap of the whole Operation Payback development. Interesting tidbits: Paypal gave the feds ISP addresses from people suspected of hosting IRC channels related to the Anonymous Ops, and one was in British Columbia. And by BC I mean California, as the RCMP figured out the ISP was only virtually based. And by California, I mean Dallas, Texas, where the FBI actually searched and seized server materials. Oh cyber"crime". You're so crazy.


Speaking of crazy, Assange told Al-Jazeera that the CIA have Arab officials that are basically American spies, and therefore BFFs. Then he allegedly showed them the documents he had to prove it. Which is interesting.


And probably the most overwhelming tick in the "crazy" box (that also earned a "wtf America" tag from this girl): The lawyer that won the Pentagon Papers case says Wikileaks is totally different.
And me, and hundreds of other, better-educated, more-familiar-with-the-case-and-US-law-in-general journalists and theorist wheeze "Whaaaaaaaaaaa???" and start looking into the possibility that the man's been body-snatched and replaced with a cyborg version designed to sell that tripe to the Washington Post. His argument makes that much sense.

Wikileaks Roundup V: Son of Roundup

Glenn Greenwald has a competitor for my free-speech reverence: Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, testified today during the first Congressional hearing that meeting Cablegate with greater security and overreaction is only going to screw things up. To great wit:

"The real danger of 'Wikimania' is that that we could revert to Cold War notions of secrecy, to the kind of stovepipes and compartments that left us blind before 9/11," Blanton said. He called on lawmakers to protect the First Amendment, rather than adopt  a "Chinese model of state control" of information. "Those voices who argue for a crackdown on leakers and publishers need to face the reality that their approach is fundamentally self-defeating because it will increase government secrecy, reduce our security, and actually encourage more leaks from the continued legitimacy crisis of the classification system," Blanton concluded.

More to come on that Congressional hearing tomorrow--I'm actually subjecting myself to almost four hours of CSPAN for you guys.

Time for News!

Assange's out, presumably at a manor, chilling for a moment. The Guardian was mildly obsessed with his mum today, which I secretly love.

The guy behind Anonymous' press release was arrested in Greece while I was at work. His website disappeared into the ether, as well. That's 3 arrests over the Anonymous DDoS attacks.

From the Cables proper: the Dalai Lama suggested to the US Ambassador to India that the freeing of Tibet could wait five years, because climate crisis had to be dealt with NOW.

India apparently routinely clobbers Kashmiri detainees in the worst of ways--officials were briefed by the Red Cross about systemic torture, electrocution and sexual humiliation for civillians (because they just kill militants). Looks like India is looking very, very sketchy after these Cables.

Doctors that gave casualty counts for the civil war in Sri Lanka last summer were substantially pressured by the government to misrepresent the figures, with a difference of many thousands of people turned into bodies.

I am still crying over Bradley Manning's story.

Assange: Bailed for Reals this time!

Heyyy, some GOOD news for free speech!

The Assange bail appeal hearing happened today in Westminster--and the court upheld the decision to grant Assange bail. So, off to the manor it is--for Assange and 3/4 of the British and international press, who have a couple acres to camp out on.

*tap tap*

Potential problem: One of the conditions of his bail is to check in with a police station in Suffolk every night at 6pm. Apparently the closest one is only open until 5pm, and closed for most of the Christmas holidays. British bureaucracy strikes again! They're tweaking the conditions now.

Twitter reporting, which was the only kind of press allowed in the last Assange hearing, has been banned now. How's that for transparency? Well, it's not surprising, actually; court proceedings have always been fairly opaque as a matter of course. People are still talking about it though.

200,000 British pounds in cash sat at that Westminster courthouse as surety in case they decided he actually got bail.
There are mutterings that the Swedish prosecutors' handling of this case might get Assange acquitted. Innnnteresting.

Extra news that happened in the brief moments I was sleeping:

Y'know who we haven't heard enough of? Anne Coulter.
False. I don't even know why I just linked to that, she already gets more press than raving lunatics like her deserve. My keyboard feels dirty.

Fascinating press release from Anonymous, sort of explaining what it is they're up about. As with everything else from Anonymous, they probably don't all agree on this either, but I think it sums up what most people involved in the "group" are functioning within.

Cheeky Pakistani maxi pad company cashes in on wikileaks by being generally absorbent. I love it.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation rounds up the Human Rights organizations that have taken hard stands against the censorship of wikileaks. The list includes the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Amnesty International, Human Rights First, and Reporters Without Borders--and the EFF themselves, who are completely rad.

Wikileaks: Roundup Harder

fruitycuties.com. Hilarious.

NATO beats the same dead horse trying to have it both ways: "Wikileaks is putting people in danger by releasing information that isn't at all important".

Glenn Greenwald continues his work on being my favourite person on the internet by twitter feed alone. Set 'em straight, Glenn Old Boy.

Anonymous rips a hole in Gawker for sassing about 4chan. I didn't need another reason to be wary of those folks, but hey, here it is. Also Amazon went down in Europe for a while...but they say it's a hardware issue. Merry Christmas, online shoppers!

The Nation's weekend liveblog made me laugh out loud in public. "Vatican responds to damaging cables carried by The Guardian. Calls them 'unreliable' of course.   Surprised they aren't just trying to transfer them to another parish." You win, sirs.

Assange has a barrister working for him that's got an interesting track record... his cases tend to change the world.

Donald Rumsfeld, the Skeletor of US Foreign Policy, is publishing 100 previously-classified US gov documents to support his new book (which I'm not linking, because it's going to be ridiculous). He is quick to point out on Facebook that it's not at all like wikileaks. Mostly because he's Donald Rumsfeld, his agenda is not going to go against state-secrecy interests, and the US government will declassify whatever he tells it to. Surprise!

Steve Yelvington writes a media blog that talks about Five Sad Reasons the American Press Isn't Outraged. Read it, it's good. If you need more coercing, read this:

"The network news organizations are hollow shells speaking to dying audiences, fearful of accelerating their own demise by taking a stand...It used to be that telling a lie about a person or a corporation could get you into trouble. Now governments and corporations can claim injury when someone states a fact, and, stunningly, act to enforce silence without any judicial oversight." 

Crazy world, folks.

Just in case you weren't sure if this was war...

from thedailybeast.com

In Web War III currently being fought between "patriotic internet hackers" against wikileaks vs Anonymous in defense of them...we've got the internet body count.

This page shows us site outages caused by the repeated and sustained DDoS attacks used as volleys in this war (a DDoS attack shuts down access and loadability to a site).

It's kind of like seeing a realtime map of where the bombs would be falling if we were all in TRON. The page refreshes every 15 minutes, and currently shows us two-thirds Anonymous targets, one-third wikileaks mirror sites.

Wikileaks Roundup Again!

from treehugger.com, and the fuckuppery of British Petroleum

Second Anonymous arrest in the Netherlands in connection with the vigilante DDoS attacks. Yet again another 16 year old kid. These arrests are expected to rise because the LOIC (Low-orbit ion cannon) voluntary botnet tool used to do them doesn't block out the IP addresses of the computers that host them (via boingboing).

Ariana Huffington weighs in during the Personal Democracy Forum Symposium: "It's not the job of the media to protect power from embarrassment."

Clay Shirkey speculates about what Wikileaks means for the future of the internet. It's intelligent and cautious. It's a good read.

And for an extra dose of holiday cheek, the Aussies give us the Twelve Leaks of Christmas.

And with that I'm getting off the computer and going to work.

Anonymous: Ash stops being sceptical for ONE SECOND, and puts foot in mouth on internet

So in my hope for a kinder, gentler, more effective, less illegal Anonymous I lost track of the fact that they're by definition a disorganized and giddy bunch of goons in classical Athenian democratic style.
Meaning the individual who wrote that poster I like so much is likely not "in charge".

http://www.fanpop.com/spots/the-mr-men-show/images/5331171/title/miss-whoops-wallpaper

I've yet to see reports of Anonymous bombing the internet with cable-sourced information (which isn't to say they aren't--smart tactics are infinitely less soundbite-worthy).

I DO, however, have reports that  PayPal's still getting walloped in a handful of countries, and there are rumblings of "infighting" among Anonymous (if you can really have intra-organizational conflict in a group with basically no organization) with some of them attacking a DNS server that's actually helping wikileaks. Which makes me sad, because it's counter-productive on twelve levels.

Meanwhile, reputable hacker magazine and cultural hub 2600 The Hacker Quarterly came out condemning Anonymous for a couple reasons that I think are sound--namely that the

"...inexcusable moral cowardice of Visa and Mastercard and PayPal, etc, do not justify the use of brute force. Additionally, 2600 says that DDoS attacks are tactically unsound, as they create sympathy for these companies, and are used as a pretense for more attacks on Internet freedom."

Also that they're giving hackers a bad name. Which is fair, I guess...but a little spurious, as the reputation of hackers is kind of like the reputation of the Pope, in reverse.

Anonymous stops trolling, begins being Excellent

Sean Bonner's BoingBoing post lays it out perfectly:

Anonymous stops dropping DDoS bombs, starts dropping Science.

This was posted rather publicly in the Anonymous Ops shadows and circles:

If this is true, it's not only awesome--it's also remarkably legit for people that have shown themselves to be mostly concerned with setting tiny internet fires to work mischief for the lulz etc.
It's an educational tactic, which is pleasingly....well, educated of them.
And where before I was mildly reeling with the illegality and risk Anonymous ran (both to wikileaks/net neutrality as a cause, and free speech as a concept), now I'm just happy about the new tactic change.

It's also almost pretty much what I've occasionally been doing with this blog.
Whoops.

Shit Goes Down: First Arrest of Anonymous Reported

Shit guys, it's going down.
A couple things are important in this crazy internet war currently falling out all over the proverbial tubes:

-DDoS attacks are being used currently as the equivalent of an internet sit-in.

-DDoS (Distributed denial of service) attacks are illegal. 


The first arrest for yesterday's DDoS attacks on Visa and Mastercard was made today in Germany. The arrestee was 16 years old.


Taken from the people being paid to liveblog this shit over at the Guardian (and doing a good job, if you ask me):


"In a statement, the national prosecutors' office said the youth – whose name was not released – is believed to have participated in attacks by WikiLeaks supporters on websites "including MasterCard and Paypal, among others." Talk inside the internet backchannels, where many of these activists are discussing targets, immediately turned to the possibility of attacking the Dutch police's website, according to a source." 


My first reaction is one of fear for Anonymous--because as anyone who's read Cory Doctorow's Little Brother can tell you, the internet does not make you anonymous.

A Crash Course in the Wrath of the Internet

...cuz Anonymous made everything crash....get it? Get it?

image from Guardian.co.uk

According to a lot of folks who write for newspapers, Web War III is happening right now. How's THAT for history?

You might have heard that some interesting, self-professed "Chaotic-Good" individuals loosely termed Anonymous Ops spent yesterday irritating Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, Sarah Palin's window-dressing website, and a Swedish bank, as "Operation Payback" mobilized against the sites throwing sand in wikileaks' eye.

A dude from the Economist manages to chat with a bunch of Anonymous, and the resulting article is a really interesting read. Especially when I woke up this morning to find that Anonymous is almost as big a story as the leaks themselves, or the Assange arrest.

If you've got no idea wtf is going on with wikileaks, leave a comment, and I'll fix it.

UPDATE: AnonymousOps just locked onto Amazon. Yesterday, it took less than half an hour from lock-on to crash. Things are happening!