RANDOM TEXT FROM JULIAN ASSANGE:

The Bourbaki were an anonymous group of French mathematicians who published a series of mathematics books over a period of about 20 years under the collective allonym Nicolas Bourbaki. They kept their individual identities anonymous, and their books are still regarded as some of the finest math books ever published in French. In 2006, I saw that WikiLeaks needed to be, if not completely anonymous, then pseudo-anonymous—ideally publishing under a collective allonym such as Bourbaki. First of all, as a young organization publishing very controversial material, we didn’t want to be more of a target than we needed to be. While I was publicly a member of the advisory board, that is different than being the editor in chief or one of the principal writers. I also wanted to remove ego as much as possible from what we were doing, to make sure people were writing and conducting their work for reasons other than ego. Also, as an organization that did not yet have a reputation, we needed a personalized voice to quickly get a reputation. If we pulled our collective efforts into a name like Jack Bourbaki, or another collective allonym, our personality would quickly gain a reputation because of the relatively high level of our output.
But within a month of our coming to the public stage there was a leak of one of our internal mailing lists by a New York architect named John Young, who had been involved in his own primitive, but aggressive publishing project. John saw from the press publicity that WikiLeaks would become significant in the field and might threaten his own project. But it was quite a revelation to have our own leak very early on. And I thought to myself, well, this is very interesting—now we get to taste our own medicine. And actually, this medicine tasted quite nice, in that what I saw was a group of very committed, idealistic people whose internal dialogue was even stronger than their external dialogue. So, there was no hypocrisy in what we were doing, precisely the opposite—we were even more principled and idealistic internally than we were externally.
Early on, I already had an existing reputation, and I spent that reputational capital to get volunteer labor from good people. But when the press started sniffing around, very curious as to who some of the principle people in this project were, some of my friends, rather unfortunately, said, well, it’s Julian, and he deserves all the credit. I could’ve shot them! And then I saw that, by trying to engineer a position in which I was not seen as an authority figure for the organization, we ended up with people who were not involved in the organization at all claiming to represent it. And so we started suffering from reputational opportunism, which we had to stamp out. We also grew more politically powerful with many supporters all over the world. So we no longer needed anonymity for ourselves in quite the same way—I still needed locational anonymity for security reasons, but my name being known was not so important anyhow, given that the information was already floating around for anyone who really cared to look.

We say we believe in transparency, merely because this word is a rather convenient and accepted description for something more complex. I am personally not so fond of that description. Rather, I believe that if we are to build a robust civilization, we need to know what is happening, not necessarily at the very instant it happens, but we need a sophisticated and somewhat comprehensive intellectual record of everything that humanity is about. This is not a matter of simple transparency, but a matter of building up our common intellectual record. And what goes into the intellectual record should actually be everything, unless there is a very good reason for it to not be there, because everything in the world eventually, in one way or another, affects everything else. We need to see power from every angle if we are to understand and shape it. It is the right to know that draws forth the right to speak. And, taken together, we can call these two rights the right to communicate knowledge. There is no need to be too theoretical to show how all this is helpful in practice.

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I do have a political position, and my political position is that all political philosophies are bankrupt, because they’re not created with a full understanding of how human institutions actually behave. A better question would be: Do I have a political temperament? And I do have a political temperament, which is a combination of libertarianism and the importance of understanding. And what emerges from this temperament is holding power to account through action driven by understanding. So, if you have a libertarian temperament, then you’re temperamentally opposed to authoritarian power. And if you have a temperament that is inclined to understanding, then you want to know what power is about. These two things combined drive forth a position, an intellectual and political position that is about understanding power to such a degree that power is not able to express its most abusive aspects. And I guess my other political positions are not political positions per se, but positions of understanding that most of the world is splitting into just two big power systems. The first is the free markets, which can be very big and powerful when you get to financial markets but can also be distorted by some economic interactions. The other is patronage, and patronage networks—these are really what accounts for, splits, promotes or encourages, and distributes all forms of non-market power. This is not a traditional political position as much as it is a view of the world. Similarly, I’ve independently arrived at a view that is a more modern political concept, which concerns shadow states, which you can see more clearly in newer states in Eastern Europe, such as Bulgaria, where there’s a pantomime at the surface about being a modern EU democracy—not that there really are that many, since the more modern EU democracies also engage in this pantomime. It is simply clearer in states like Bulgaria. Underneath, there is a patronage network that actually controls who gets justice and the distribution of power and wealth within a country. I see that tendency growing in the United States also. In the United States now, there are two rival systems that control the distribution of power. There is the modern form of what we used to call the military-industrial complex or the intelligence complex, and there is Wall Street. These two rival groups are vying to be the central dispensers of power in the United States. I think they are actually loosely coupled to Hillary on the shadow state side, and Obama on the Wall Street side. Actually, it’s quite interesting in the cases against us in the United States to see this rivalry being expressed in the various actions against us.

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Earlier on, I was very annoyed by the interest among journalists and the public in the person representing this organization. It was my view that they should just stop writing about us. But actually, we’ve always had this problem of the press writing much more about us than about the material that we release. Now they finally write more about material we release than they do about us. With this, I came to understand that the public is right to want to see individual human beings taking responsibility for the actions of an organization, because if the organization fails in some manner, there is someone to blame for its failures. Our memories are good at coupling actions with individuals, and more complex systems with particular individuals that are responsible for those systems. Those cognitive simplifiers are actually necessary for people to remember and understand and predict the behavior of an organization.

Metahaven: Our final question: Can art play a role in advancing the cause of WikiLeaks?
JA: Of course. I wouldn’t be doing this interview if I didn’t think that art could play a role in supporting us. At the moment, the ideological front line has been drawn, and we’re now engaged in bitter trench warfare, insofar as the mainstream press is concerned. We have a large number of people on the outside, there are a large number of opponents, and this front line takes a lot of energy to move. The press has an influence on the bulk of the population, but actually there are places where there are no front lines, yet. The art world has a way of coming through in a more indirect manner, pulling on people’s emotions in a way they weren’t expecting. Similarly, just in terms of practical connections, the art world is able to reach powerful people through the back door, through their sons and daughters, through their wives, through their grandmothers, and through moments when they’re least expecting it. In this way, I believe that if the art world is able to distill some of the important values of what we’re doing, and the lessons to be learned from the opposition to what we’re doing, and present it in such a way that it calls on the better values of these people, or the values that they aspire to, then this is a psychological inroad into particular sections of the culture that are connected to people who oppose us and who would support us, but who do not yet.

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I’m very fond of Russian children’s cartoons from the 1970s and 80s. These cartoons embody the highest representation of childhood and beauty and innocence and curiosity—all together. This is terribly underappreciated in Western society in this particular period. For something that I find beautiful, this is what comes to mind instantly.

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If you sit down with a friend, and there’s a pitcher of water on the table, and there are two glasses, then you pour the other person’s water before your own. This is a very simple ritual. But, this is better than the obvious step, which is to pour your own water before the other person’s. If we can see a few steps ahead, the water ritual is a more intelligent way to distribute water at a table. That’s what I mean by civilization—we gradually build up all these processes and understandings so we don’t need to make bad moves with each other or the natural world. So with regard to all this suppressed information, we’ve never had a proper understanding of it because it has never entered our intellectual record, and if we can find out about how complex human institutions actually behave, then we have a chance to build civilized behavior on top of it. This is why I say that all existing political theories are bankrupt, because you cannot build a meaningful theory without knowledge of the world that you’re building the theory about. Until we have an understanding of how the world actually works, no political theory can actually be complete enough to demand a course of action.

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There have been heroic acts that I have appreciated, or some systems of thought, but I think it’s better to say that there are some people I had an intellectual rapport with, such as Heisenberg and Bohr. That comes when you’re doing mathematics. The mathematics of Heisenberg and Bohr is a branch of natural philosophy. They developed a system or epistemology for understanding quantum mechanics, but encoded within this intellecutual tradition are methods to think clearly about cause and effect. When reading mathematics you must take your mind through each intellectual step. In this case, the steps of Heisenberg or Bohr. Because good proofs are very creative, it takes the full energies of your mind to reach through one step to another. Your whole mind must be engaged in a particular state of thought, and you realizes that this mental arrangement is the same as the author’s at the moment of writing, so the feeling of mental similarity and rapport become strong. Quantum mechanics and its modern evolution left me with a theory of change and how to properly understand how one thing causes another. My interest was then in reversing this thought process and adapting it to another realm. We have an end state that we want, and I looked at all the changes that are needed to get to this end state from where we are now. I developed this analogy to explain how information flows around the world to cause particular actions. If the desired end state is a world that is more just, then the question is: What type of actions produce a world that is more just? And what sort of information flows lead to those actions? And then, where do these information flows originate? Once you understand this, you can see it is not just starting somewhere and ending elsewhere, but rather that cause and effect is a loop; here we are today, and we want to create an end state as a result of action. We act and by doing so bring the world into a new state of affairs, which we can consider our new starting point, and so this process of observe, think, act continues.

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[Article not by Assange but cool blast from the past]

Chinese dissidents, with the help of powerful encryption software, say they will launch a site designed to let whistleblowers in authoritarian countries post sensitive documents on the Internet without being traced.
"Our primary interests are oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the West who wish to reveal unethical behaviour in their own governments and corporations," says the site WikiLeaks (www.wikileaks.org).
An official for WikiLeaks in Washington, identifying himself as Julian Assange, told AFP on Wednesday that the group hoped to go online from March but had been "discovered" before its launch and was not fully prepared for the publicity it was now receiving.
WikiLeaks is "an international collaboration, primarily of mathematicians... of various backgrounds, some Chinese," said Assange, who said he was a cryptographer and member of the advisory board.
The Chinese were not people living in China but expatriates, he added.
The site says it has already received "over 1.1 million documents so far from dissident communities and anonymous sources."
Contributions will be posted on the site to provide information, transparency and debate. "WikiLeaks will provide a forum for the entire global community to examine any document for credibility, plausibility, veracity and falsifiability," according to the site.
It maintains its software will ensure that whistleblowers and journalists will not be thrown into jail for emailing sensitive documents.
Chinese journalist Shi Tao was sentenced to a 10-year jail term in 2005 after publicising an email from Chinese officials about the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.
Emails or documents posted to a website can be traced back to the source because they are made up of data packets — and each data packet carries the address of the last Internet service provider through which it passed.
The British weekly New Scientist, in a report in next Saturday's issue, says that WikiLeaks will exploit "an anonymising protocol" called The Onion Router, or Tor.
Tor routes data through a network of servers that use cryptography to hide the path used by the data packets.
"In the past, determined cryptographers have breached Tor's security, and though each breach has led to improvements to Tor, there is always a risk others will be discovered," New Scientist cautions.
WikiLeaks' website says the organisation was founded by "Chinese dissidents, mathematicians and startup company technologists, from the United States, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa."
"Our advisory board, which is still forming, includes representatives from expatriate Russian and Tibetan refugee communities, reporters, a former U.S. intelligence analyst and cryptographers," it says.
There are no formal links to the successful online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, but "both share the same radically democratic philosophy that allowing anyone to be an author or editor leads to a vast and accurate collective intelligence and knowledge."
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A Cat may look at a King, and a swaynes eye hath as high a reach as a Lords looke.
„

—  Robert Greene, Never too Late (1590)
This common saying, dating back at least to 1590, encapsulates one of the most basic notions of equality: anyone may, at least, look at anyone else, even a King.
But not at Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay as of March 1, 2004.
On December 3, 2007 Wikileaks released the secret 2004 manual for the base, together with a detailed list of changes over its 2003 predecessor.
Between March 2003 and 2004,the SOP Manual added a new paragraph in section 11-5.
“Upon the approach of any Distinguished Visitor (DV), an escort team moving a detainee will stop movement and face the detainee away from the passing DV. Once the DV or DV party has passed, the escort team will resume movement of the detainee.”
This provision, while extreme, is in keeping with the spirit of the 2004 SOP Manual. In addition to prohibiting detainees from seeing high-ranking officials, the procedures reveal great efforts to keep detainees isolated, not just from each other, but from current events, the English language, and even basic general knowledge. Moreover, the 2004 manual goes to even greater extremes than the 2003 manual.
Section 15-9 of the manual prohibits detainees from reading books on certain topics. As in the 2003 manual, the 2004 manual prohibits English instruction materials.
In addition, both manuals prohibit reading of books on “extremism”, “anti-Semitism”, and “anti-Americanism”. With a broad interpretation, such stipulations could conceivably cover most books on US foreign policy.
But the 2004 manual adds new prohibitions — on current periodicals, ,“Language Instruction”, “Technology/Medical Updates”, “Geography” and “Dictionaries”.
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Remember the furor earlier this year surrounding the CIA's destruction of its interrogation videos? Wikileaks has discovered that the US Marine Corps probably also has interrogation videos and may be about to destroy them. On September 9, 2008, the Marines issued the following restricted Marine Corps Administrative order, or MRCADMIN:
*SUBJ/RETENTION OF INTERROGATION VIDEOS AND OTHER INTERROGATION-RELATED RECORDS*
Date Signed: 9/9/2008                                                                                                                           MARADMIN Number: 498/08

Evidence of a restricted Marine Corps administrative order

You can find reference to the order buried in a Marine Corps online database at marines.mil.
The order, "MRCADMIN 498/08", unlike the vast majority of MRCADMIN orders[1], has been given a For Official Use Only, or "FOUO" dissemination control.
FOUO markings are only meant to be applied to documents containing information exempt from release under the Freedom of Information Act, although in practice the marking has been routinely abused to keep politically, but not militarily, sensitive information away from journalists.
There are two likely scenarios behind the order:
	1.	The order tasks the Marines to speed up or continue with previous destruction arrangements for interrogation related videos and records. This would be a politically controversial decision that would motivate, but of course not justify, a FOUO marking. Such a decision might follow the rationale of the CIA, which destroyed its own interrogation videos, claiming that were they to leak, international outrage towards the United States and CIA interrogators might result. However it has been widely speculated that the CIA wanted to hide evidence that could be used in a prosecution or other legal action against its personnel.
	2.	The order tasks the Marines to slow down, or stop the destruction of interrogation related videos and records. By no means a controversial decision — so why the FOUO marking restricting it from the public?

Both scenarios suggest the Marine Corps is currently holding interrogation videos. Although the order seems aimed at videos endemic to the Marine Corps, it is possible that some are from the other services or organizations such as the CIA or DIA. The Marine Corps has its own intelligence division known as the MCIA, or "Marine Corps Intelligence Activity"[2], which often shares information with the rest of the US intelligence community.
Wikileaks applied for the MRCADMIN document under the Freedom of Information Act on Friday. By statute the Marine Corps has 20 days to respond, however the Act is widely flouted and in practice such requests typically take months or years. Perhaps a sympathetic marine would like to send it our way?
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Everyday we here at Sunshine Press thank intelligence agencies for labeling documents with classification markings. Without such markings, we'd have a hard time sorting the wheat from the chaff.

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The spy who billed me twice
From Guantanámo to your doorstep: the intelligence industry's revolving cash door
There has been extensive political debate in the United States on how safe it would be to move Guantanámo's detainees to US soil—but what about their interrogators?
A confidential 1525 page file of correspondence released to the public by WikiLeaks provides insights into the privatization of intelligence operations in the United States and the movement of such individuals into domestic intelligence "fusion" centers.
One intelligence officer, Kia Grapham, is hawked by her contracting company to the Washington State Patrol. Grapham's confidential resume boasts of assisting in over 100 interrogations of "high value human intelligence targets" at Guantanámo. She goes on, saying how she is trained and certified to employ Restricted Interrogation Technique: Separation as specified by FM 2-22.3 Appendix M.
FM 2-22.3 is the US Army's Human Intelligence Collector Operations manual, a "fit for public consumption" guide introduced in September, 2006 and still formal US military doctrine. Appendix M, "separation", contains instructions on how to isolate and interrogate detainees 20 hours a day. Four hours a day sleep is permitted. "Suggested Approach Combinations" it says, are, "Futility. Incentive. Fear Up."
Others, like, Neoma Syke, managed to repeatedly flip between the military and contractor intelligence work—without even leaving the building.
The file details the placement of six intelligence contractors inside the Washington Joint Analytical Center (WAJAC) on behalf of the Washington State Patrol at a cost of around $110,000 per year each.
Such intelligence "fusion" centers, which combine the military, the FBI, state police, and others, have been internally promoted by the US Army as means to avoid restrictions preventing the military from spying on the domestic population.
Neoma Syke's intelligence resume starts on page 351. From September 2001 to October 2003, she served as member of the Army at a military base in Hawaii.
In October 2003, she left the military, and managed to get herself employed by intelligence contractor SAIC, within the same month, at the same military base, and served as a contractor there from until November 2004. During 2003-2004, she was "working for SAIC" as a force protection analyst with "SAIC's" 205th Military Intelligence Battalion. And while she was "a contractor for SAIC", specifically, "SAIC's" 205th Military Intelligence Battalion, apparently she served as Counterintelligence Watch Officer at USARPAC's Crisis Action Center.
She then transfers to another military base as an employee of another contracting company, "The Sytex Group" for a period from December 2004 to April 2005, and then just as transparently as she started, she re-enters the military and assumes an actual military position again, as a Counterintelligence Agent.
Finally, in November 2008, apparently without resigning from the military, Operational Applications Inc. attempts to contract her to the Washington State Patrol for placement in the WAJAC at around $105,000 a year over three years.
We can see what is in it for the contractors, but why are military and police commanders encouraging this mercenary behavior?
Is it simply corruption? Sweet deals for contractors and an off-books method of boosting the salaries of favored personnel?
Or are some of these placements designed to evade a raft of hard won oversight laws which apply to the military and the police but not to contractors? Is it to keep selected personnel out of the Inspector General's eye?
Whatever the original cause for such bizarre placements, the ability to avoid formal oversight mechanisms can not have gone unnoticed.
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Wednesday October 14, 2009
WIKILEAKS EDITORIAL
Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.
Over the last 24 hours, a lot of self-congratulating hyperbole has appeared on and off line about how the popular short message service Twitter saved free speech in the UK. Twitter did not save free speech — and free speech has not been saved.
The twitter "back-patting storm" follows an agreement not to use an existing High Court gag order to block the Guardian's reporting of a single sentence made in parliament by Paul Farrelly MP. Farrelly's question related to press freedoms and in particular, a leaked WikiLeaks report, the so-called "Minton report", which exposed a toxic dumping disaster inflicted on the Ivory Coast by oil trading giant Trafigura, which saw 108,000 people seek medical attention.
However, the secret gag order against the report, granted on September 11, remains in effect, and entirely prevents the reporting of the report's contents in the UK. It is not the only one. Last month, the Guardian revealed that it had been served with 10 secret gag orders—so-called "super-injunctions"— since January. In 2008, the paper was served with six. In 2007, five. Haven't heard of these? Of course not, these are secret gag orders; the UK press has given up counting regular injunctions.
To understand the crucial events in this case, we need to go back to September when commodities giant Trafigura obtained its "super injunction" preventing discussion of the leaked Minton report into the Ivory Coast disaster.
During September and the preceding months, investigative reporters from the Guardian, Norway's NRK TV, the Independent, the BBC's Newsnight, the Dutch press, Greenpeace and lawyers for the victims were collaborating to show Trafigura's culpability.
Trafigura knew the investigation teams had a copy of the Minton report, because journalists had asked the company to respond to the report's findings. Instead of providing a countering opinion, the company went to the High Court and obtained a secret injunction preventing journalists from telling the public anything at all about the document.
Although the Minton report is a merely a short engineering and legal assessment of the Ivory Coast disaster, no-doubt one among many, instead of commissioning it directly, the company "laundered" the report through its lawyers, Waterson & Hicks. This permitted Trafigura to claim legal privilege on the document should it leak; which is precisely what the company did, when it did.
An undisclosed UK High Court judge, who we can reveal to be Justice Maddison, accepted this parlour trick, and on September 11, issued a broad gag order with secrecy provisions that prevented even the existence of the gag order from being reported.
On September 14, WikiLeaks released the full Minton report in an attempt to undermine the injunction. The UK press was then left in the Kafkaesque position where neither the Minton report, nor the injunction against it could be mentioned, despite the report appearing on the front page of WikiLeaks.
A few days later, in private correspondence with Norwegian journalists Synnøve Bakke and Kjersti Knudssøn from the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, another legal firm representing Trafigura shed some light on the injunction:
Your questions of today do also reveal the fact that you are in possession of a draft, preliminary expert opinion produced by Minton Treharne & Davies Ltd, and that you appear to be ready to disclose information from this report. Trafigura looks very seriously upon this, as disclosing any information from this report would be a clear breach of confidentiality and privilege. The report is clearly privileged and confidential and was obtained unlawfully by whoever is responsible for it coming into your possession. Please be aware that on Friday of last week, our clients sought and obtained an injunction in relation to this document and information contained in it against the Guardian newspaper and Persons Unknown, pending a further hearing.
A few days after the investigative stories appeared on September 17, Trafigura entered into a settlement with over 31,000 Ivorian class-action claimants—while continuing to deny any responsibility for the disaster.
Since direct reports of parliamentary proceedings are largely exempt from libel laws in the UK (most recently under the 1996 Defamation Act), it is not uncommon for MPs to mention censored facts, so that newspapers will be able to safely take the facts from their parliamentary speeches. This same approach was used by Paul Farrelly MP, to expose the Minton report gag.
Farrelly, a former Observer section editor, tabled the following question notice in the House of Commons, and in the process, exposed two secret gag orders, including the gag against the Minton report:
Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme): To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.[1]
Trafigura's lawyers, Carter Ruck, no doubt recognizing an attempt to use parliament as a venue to not only subvert the September 11 gag, but as a way to attack their suppression business, told the Guardian that they would consider reporting Farrell's question a contempt of the September 11 gag order.
The Guardian decided to make the gag a national issue. David Leigh, lead author on the Trafigura story, wrote a carefully worded article designed to inflame, and the Guardian gave it substantial prominance on October 12 and 13:
The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.
These and other subtle clues, which included a specific mention of the law firm "Carter Ruck", were enough for a number of professional blogs, such a the parliamentary watch blog Order-Order, and WikiLeaks, to soon find the question notice on the House of Commons' website transcript (Hansard).
Twitter then promoted the visibility of the Guardian article, the WikiLeaks copy of the gagged Minton report and the articles about the Commons' question. However there are only a few players who affected this case's inevitable legal conclusion.
	1.	The investigative team of the traditional media, Greenpeace, the victims and their respective legal teams.
	2.	WikiLeaks, who released, and kept up, the report at the center of the injunction as well as the gag order.
The lesson for Carter Ruck and other lawyers: be careful what you wish for.
Had Twitter not existed, we would have seen the same legal outcome, for such an affront to the UK political classes could never have survived the attentions of a national newspaper like the Guardian. However, the September 11 gag, which threatens only the interests of the press and the people, continues, as do a vast number of other injunctions, acquired by those with unequal access to justice and something to hide.
Under pressure from legal costs, UK papers have silently removed some of the original September 17 dumping investigations. For example, the Independent's "Toxic Shame: Thousands injured in African city" no-longer "exists" except at WikiLeaks.
Now is not the time to be distracted from this reality, or to see the unravelling of a grotesque attack on parliamentary reporting as step forward; it is a return to last week. We are back at the UK censorship status quo, which may be described, without irony, as privatized feudalism.
So take your hands from each other's backs, sharpen your (s)words—and get to work. The battle isn't over, however it just may, be beginning.