wrythings

THE TIME, it is to be hoped, is gone by, when any defence would be necessary of the “liberty of the press” as one of the securities against corrupt or tyrannical government. No argument, we may suppose, can now be needed, against permitting a legislature or an executive, not identified in interest with the people, to prescribe opinions to them, and determine what doctrines or what arguments they shall be allowed to hear.

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873). On Liberty. 1869.

The State is neither the sole nor the principle threat to the Liberty of Thought and Discussion.

Is it unlikely that corporate media, focused on profit, often owned by or in ownership of conflicting economic interests will serve this function? What must change? The media must serve a public duty untainted by impulse to self-censor when truth must be spoken. Report. Let the people judge.

The people must show some spine if we are to be free.

Susan Crawford, founder of One Web Day made a strong pitch to those assembled in Minneapolis last weekend for the National Conference for Media Reform… June 14th marks the beginning of a 100 day countdown to One Web Day 2008. One Web Day is a celebration of the Web - conceived as an analogue of Earth Day - and held annually on September 22. The web has changed our lives and continues to do so as more and more get connected. It’s worth celebrating.

Susan’s mission is to make visible something we may tend to take for granted, so that we can be clear about it’s value and more likely to defend what makes it special. I’m proud to be an Ambassador of One Web Day, here in Chicago.

Chicagoans are familiar with One Web Day and are getting geared up for September 22. At this week’s recent Chicago NetTuesday gathering at the Illinois Information Technology Association we began discussion of things we might do. Video interviews, cross-blogging, community wireless deployments, who knows what else?

The Chicago NetTuesday crowd mixes technologists, non-profit people and others interested in the social good that can be promoted with the web. We’re eager to mashup technologies, organizations and people for the greater good.

One Web Day is an exercise in positive media… there’s much to celebrate on the web, even if there will always be necessity for caution and prudence.

One Web Day is what we make of it … we everywhere… we using any device or application… we creating and sharing content and responsibility.

We’re just at the beginning of deciding the thing’s we’ll be doing here in Chicago for OWD.

I’ll be presenting the idea to several groups over the coming months, inviting discussion and creative action, and at our NetTuesday meetings we hope to generate more content and ideas for OWD 2008.

Today (Thursday) the Knight Center of Digital Excellence was launched in Akron, Ohio. I am deeply invested in the vision and language of Digital Excellence, and I hope the Center lives up to it’s name. Some words of wisdom for those undertaking this mission:

The path towards excellence starts with purpose, and not with technology. Be clear in your purpose, be strong in resolve, be prepared to fall and rise again. Digital is a word that often gets in the way: Strive first and always for human excellence and towards our higher individual and collective purposes. Excellence is a matter of character.

The Chicago Digital Access Alliance put this vision before our City, a vision of great ambition. We echo the historic Chicago mantra: Make no small plans. Has Chicago missed an opportunity? No. We have not. Not if we yet take up the challenge and establish what has been called for: A Digital Excellence Trust.

The wind left our sails when the Chicago wireless plans were put on hold. It was fortuitous that the vendor-driven segmented-technology model fell through, but the call for Digital Excellence didn’t have to stop there. We’re the windy city and our model was never tied to wireless technology. We have Olympic aspirations and Greenest-city-in-the-world goals. We know that these are deeply tied to a vision of excellence.

Excellence is our noble human calling. We’re not one of the Knight communities. How will we rise here and now to the challenge of digital excellence? Will we stir the soul of the city? Will we stir the soul of the nation?

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

I composed a short list of some essential readings that reflect a world-view appropriate to the Internet Era, I shared it with friends studying Community Informatics and Civic Entrepreurship, two domains seeking a better world. Since I recently catalogued (part of) my personal library using LibraryThing, it makes sense to share these here as well (as they are part of my virtual library).

These writings provide a conceptual matrix for an interesting breed of Civic Entrepreneur- (it’s a partial list) … really a new model of Citizenship and Society/Polity. They aren’t new to a lot of you - and if you have other works that you think really need to be on the list, please let me know.

Movement as Network, by Gideon Rosenblatt, also: The three pillars of social source

David Isenberg’s Rise of the Stupid Network

Pushing Power to the Edges (pdf) by Jillaine Smith, Martin Kearns, Allison Fine

The Cluetrain Manifesto (Doc Searles, et al.)

Cory Doctorow’s Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom

Coase’s Penguin: (by Yochai Benkler … his book The Wealth of Networks is also recommended. There’s a wiki inviting discussion of his ideas.)

The list doesn’t represent any hierarchic ordering.

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.