wrythings

Comment:  Now is the moment for the Internet to shine as a Global Copy Machine.

In solidarity - share this Press Release widely.

Wikileaks Press Release from: 
http://wikileaks.be/wiki/Wikileaks.org_under_injunction

WIKILEAKS.ORG DOWN AFTER EX-PARTE LEGAL ATTACK BY CAYMAN ISLANDS BANK

http://wikileaks.be/wiki/Wikileaks.org_under_injunction

Contacts: http://wikileaks.be/wiki/Contact

Mon Feb 18 00:00:00 GMT 2008

The following release has not been proofed due to time constraints.

Transparency group Wikileaks forcibly censored at ex-parte Californian hearing — ordered to print blank pages — ‘wikileaks.org’ name forcibly deleted from Californian domain registrar — the best justice Cayman Islands money launderers can buy?

When the transparency group Wikileaks was censored in China last year, no-one was too surprised. After all, the Chinese government also censors the Paris based Reporters Sans Frontiers and New York
Based Human Rights Watch. And when Wikileaks published the secret censorship lists of Thailand’s military Junta, no-one was too surprised when people in that country had to go to extra lengths
to read the site. But on Friday the 15th, February 2008, in the home of the free and the land of the brave, and a constitution which states “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of
speech, or of the press”, the Wikileaks.org press was shutdown:

                    BANK JULIUS BAER & CO. LTD, a
                    Swiss entity; and JULIUS BAER BANK
                    AND TRUST CO. LTD, a Cayman Island                 ORDER GRANTING
                    entity,                                            PERMANENT INJUNCTION

                    WIKILEAKS, an entity of unknown form;
                    WIKILEAKS.ORG, an entity of unknown
                    form; DYNADOT, LLC, a California
                    limited liability company; and DOES 1
                    through 10, inclusive,

[..]

                             IT IS HEREBY ORDERED:

[..]

       Dynadot shall immediately clear and remove all DNS hosting
       records for the wikileaks.org domain name and prevent the
       domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or
       any other website or server other than a blank park page,
       until further order of this Court.

The Cayman Islands is located between Cuba and Honduras. In July 2000, the United States Department of the Treasure Financial Crimes Enforcement Network issued an advisory states stating that there
were “serious deficiencies in the counter-money laundering systems of the Cayman Islands”, “Cayman Islands law makes it impossible for the supervisory and regulatory authority to obtain information held by financial institutions regarding their client’s identity”, “Failure of financial institutions in the Cayman Islands to report suspicious transactions is not subject to penalty” and that “These deficiencies, among others, have caused the Cayman Islands to be identified by the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering (The ‘FATF’) as non-cooperative in the fight against money laundering”. As of 2006 the U.S. State Department listed the Cayman Islands in its money laundering “Countries of Primary Concern”.

The Cayman’s case is not the first time Wikileaks has tackled bad banks. In the second half of last year Wikileaks exposed over $4,500,000,000’s worth of money laundering including by the former president of Kenya, Daniel Arap Moi (see http://wikileaks.be/wiki/The_looting_of_Kenya_under_President_moi which became the Guardian’s front page story in September 2007 and swung the Kenyan vote by 10% leading into the December 2007 election and http://wikileaks.be/wiki/A_Charter_House_of_horrors reported in the Nairobi paper The Standard and now the subject of a High Court Case in Kenya).

To find an injunction similar to the Cayman’s case, we need to go back to Monday June 15, 1971 when the New York Times published excepts of of Daniel Ellsberg’s leaked “Pentagon Papers” and found itself enjoined the following day. The Wikileaks injunction is the equivalent of forcing the Times’ printers to print blank pages and its power company to turn off press power. The supreme court found the Times censorship injunction unconstitutional in a 6-3 decision.

The Wikileaks.org injunction is ex-parte, engages in prior restraint and is clearly unconstitutional. It was granted on Thursday afternoon by California district court judge White, Bush appointee and former prosecutor.

The order was written by Cayman Island’s Bank Julius Baer lawyers and was accepted by judge White without amendment, or representations by Wikileaks or amicus. The case is over several Wikileaks articles, public commentary and documents dating prior to 2003. The documents allegedly reveal secret Julius Baer trust structures used for asset hiding, money laundering and tax evasion.
The bank alleges the documents were disclosed to Wikileaks by offshore banking whistleblower and former Vice President the Cayman Island’s operation, Rudolf Elmer. Unable to lawfully attack Wikileaks servers which are based in several countries, the order was served on the intermediary Wikileaks purchased the ‘Wikileaks.org’ name through — California registrar Dynadot, who then used its access to the internet website name registration system to delete the records for ‘Wikileaks.org’.
The order also enjoins every person who has heard about the order from from even linking to the documents.

In order to deal with Chinese censorship, Wikileaks has many backup sites such as wikileaks.be (Belgium) and wikileaks.de (Germany) which remain active. Wikileaks never expected to be using the alternative servers to deal with censorship attacks, from, of all places, the United States.

The order is clearly unconstitutional and exceeds its jurisdiction.

Wikileaks will keep on publishing, in-fact, given the level of suppression involved in this case, Wikileaks will step up publication of documents pertaining to illegal or unethical banking practices.

Wikileaks has six pro-bono attorney’s in S.F on roster to deal with a legal assault, however Wikileaks was given only hours notice “by email” prior to the hearing. Wikileaks was NOT represented. Wikileaks pre-litigation California council Julie Turner attended the start of hearing in a personal capacity but was then asked to leave the court room.

White signed the order, drafted by the Cayman Islands bank’s lawyers without a single amendment.

The injunction claims to be permanent, although the case is only preliminary.

Wikileaks remains available publishing from non-US, non-Chinese jurisdictions including http://wikileaks.cx/ and http://wikileaks.be/.

See http://wikileaks.cx/wiki/Wikileaks:Cover_Names for more.

http://wikileaks.cx/wiki/Bank_Julius_Baer_vs._Wikileaks

http://wikileaks.cx/wiki/images/Dynadot-injunction.pdf

http://wikileaks.cx/wiki/Die_Akten_des_Hurricane_Man

http://wikileaks.cx/wiki/Clouds_on_the_Cayman_tax_heaven

Billy & Marnie explain the MashUp Challenge concept. Challenge Deadline: March 14, 5 PM - Pacific.

Robin Chase (ZipCar, GoLoCo) is great! In this 2007 TED talk Robin addresses Carbon Emissions and the Digital Divide.

(The video was only just released.)

Free and Open Source Software Rules, and so do Free and Open Networks.

(Let’s not neglect open-hardware nor open-standards!)

With commodity tech running Free & Open Source Operating Systems and Software, priced at $300 $200, new (do I hear $100 per new system yet?) and with plenty or older hardware available for re-purposing, not to mention a proliferation of new networking and communication devices … we might take a moment to think of the potential ready to be unleashed, and to view how far we have come an achievement worthy of note.

What is next? Take our cheap hardware running software we’re free to modify and improve and interconnect, and let’s start interconnecting on our own terms.

We can and must move civil society communications infrastructure to the next level.

The International Summit for Community Wireless Networks is on the horizon… these are the folks who have been leading the way. We have the power to create the networks we want and need. If you were outraged at efforts to sink Net Neutrality or by the lack of a National Broadband Policy worthy of the name, if you are shocked by aspirations to filter, block and spy on content and services over the ‘Net, now is the time for us to (re)build our own.

A year ago, I had just returned from Memphis where the National Conference for Media Reform had convened. The timing and location of the NCMR gatherings has always been well considered. I rushed back in the wee small hours of the morning to be among friends at the annual i. c. stars gathering, marking the day we honor the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Memphis the location of the “Mountaintop” speech and where assassins bullets made a great man a martyr the following day.)

Dr. King shall always hold a place of honor in the American Pantheon. Democracy Now has done great service today in honoring his memory by playing parts of several speeches.

I was especially struck by the importance of history, and the idea that the thugs that enforce order do not know history and while they might know physics, they do not know trans-physics. Human History is more than an unfolding of physics. Physics (here) is force, and those who govern with only guns, batons, and dogs, and water-cannons and fear and threat and not with understanding of history and appreciation of social progress (and the potential to slip) are but shallow “leaders”.

Dr. King’s lessons are important for us today, not just as record of where the nation has come from, but how far we still have to go.

The “Beyond Vietnam” speech, offered a year to the day before his murder forces a reflection on our nation’s presence on the world stage. Dr. King’s message was evolving. Social and economic justice are deeply entwined.

Having grown up post-Dr. King, after the many victories of the civil rights movement, I often reflected upon the meaning of injustice in the present day. Surely racism and other categories of injustice still exist, and we live with the effects of prior unjust policies, but when injustice no longer has sanction of government the strategy for addressing it must change. The injustice of person over person along categorical lines sanctioned by the state seems fairly distant from our (my) day-to-day life. It doesn’t mean it isn’t occurring. Indeed, on the world stage we are deeply enmeshed in this sort of thing, we’re just fairly insulated from most of it.

Here we are in 2008. What is injustice today?

How we choose to live together, how we conduct ourselves in our homes and neighborhoods, and our nation’s conduct upon the world stage, these demand reflection.

Are we on the right side of history? How can we know unless we know history? Our methods demonstrate we are not on the right side of history. We accept the necessity of force, the exigency of torture; we suspend due process.

If we justify these methods out of fear of failure, we have failed. We as a people will be so much stronger if we stand by our principles.

Dr. King concluded his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” with an indictment of the lovers of order over justice. The stumbling block and frustrating impediment to human social progress is the

moderate, more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is an absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice…

Dr. King’s wisdom is grounded in the ecology of community. There is an ecology to the history of peoples and nations, an ecology of human knowledge and right conduct, and a general ecology of human practices on this Earth. Our economic and social bonds, the practices by which we perpetuate an unsavory and unhealthy order must give way. We can choose health, but it must be an active choice.

The Prisoner - a British series circa 1968 - described as Kafkaesque. I saw a few episodes in reruns on PBS (I believe) when I was a teenager. The socio-psychological political parable appealed greatly to me (as it continues to) and I’ve wanted to have the opportunity to run through the full 17 episodes some time.

The lead character, Number 6 (played by Patrick McGoohan - who was born where I grew up!), a former agent of high rank in the field of intelligence/espionage resigned his post with no explanation who has found himself prisoner in a resort town known as “the village”. The village is an orderly place where people once entrusted with secrets of state or otherwise engaged in intelligence work are kept.

I won’t give a full background of the series, but I think episode 4 (entitled Free for All) topical in this primary season.

This episode opens for us questions around our fears, doubts, suspicion and paranoia regarding elections and the governance system. I’ll touch lightly on a few points, and perhaps return to the topic at a later date.

Our protagonist (Number 6) perpetually contends with the Order and conformity of the Village, his attention reasonably centered upon the incumbent of Number 2, a position with high turn-over. the visible and active figure-head.

Number 2 implies a Number One. Hierarchy is important to the image of order promulgated by the Village and the powers behind it. It’s more than hierarchy… it’s the idea of a class that is out of reach (whether single or a class of many). Number One is buffered, inaccessible, never seen. Only Number Two is seen to interact with Number One.

Number 2 is “democratically elected”, or so he asserts. But the people are so much in favor of the incumbency and the order, no one stands against him in election. That is an unsatisfactory situation. We need the ritual of the election. Dare we say, we need the distraction? The myth of election and democratic process. I’m putting forward these ideas as an expression of the ideology of hierarchic power imposed in the village as made evident by Number 2

Number 6 is recruited to stand for election… and there are many aspects of the episode we could delve into: why Number 6 goes along with the charade, why he proceeds in demogogic manner, the ambivalence of the order, it’s hierarchic concentration of power and the complacency of the many.

What is real power? What is power in our society? Are we more wed to the symbolic aspects of the democratic process than to the substance? What percent voter turn-out do the “free” nations have? Do we have faith in the mechanisms we have in place: voting machines, election certification, electoral college, campaign finance? Are we concerned with a true and wide (fair) enfranchisement of the populace? (Of all peoples?) What do we think of the rights, judgment and behavior of our fellows? Will we make the changes that make sense? Will we (and the media) be attentive to what merits attention? What aspects of social control do we enforce, actively and passively, to the detriment of our interests or values?

Be seeing you.