So I sing a song of love for Julian

PayPal Cuts WikiLeaks from Money Flow [They didn't just cut the account, they confiscated the money. Fuck PayPal/eBay.]

Calls from Joe Lieberman help force Amazon and EveryDNS to dump Wikileaks [Fuck Amazon/EveryDNS & Joe LIEberman.
My cyber shopping list is getting shorter by the minute.]

Swiss bank freezes WikiLeaks founder's legal defense fund [Oh sure, they'll help American scofflaws evade taxes, and help Nazi's confiscate Jews' money, but here they draw the line.]

Federal employees warned away from Wikileaks

Students warned: Read WikiLeaks and you're out of a government job [And it's the Universities that are telling them this. In the latest new, the US also claims to have a method of removing pee from a swimming pool.]

Assange an ‘enemy combatant’ but fault is Obama’s [sez newt Gingrich, that moral paragon.]

"Why was [Assange] not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders?" - Sarah Falin [Umm, where IS OBL?]

GOP leader Mitch McConnell calls WikiLeaks founder ‘a high-tech terrorist’ [Really!? He doesn't scare me as much as you folks do.]

Julian Assange's lawyers say they are being watched WikiLeaks founder's lawyers also accuse US state department of inappropriate behaviour in not respecting attorney-client protocol [This isn't news, the Feds have been listening in on bedrooms, lawyers and clients, cell phones and all other communications for years, with out any warrants. And that's just the U.S.]

WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange says militant supporters of the US military have made death threats against his family in Australia.

Assange threatens to release ‘poison pill’ if arrested or killed [Can you blame him?]

Folks, what we're seeing here is the first shot heard 'round the world of a cyber-war. Black hats and white hats, (I spend way too much time doing cyber-security), are targeting a man and his family.

It's not that simple. You can't stop Al Keda [sic] by killing Osama Bin Ladin. You can't stop WikiLeaks by killing Julian Assange. I've mirrored the site, I've downloaded the insurance file and uploaded it to other sites. I have multiple copies on media. And I'm not the only one.

What you can do is ensure everyone on the globe gets an even break AKA freedom. No starving, no imprisonment without a fair trial, (no inhumane conditions even then), health care for all.

This is the exact opposite from libertarians; they think they're special and they should get to do what ever they want. But since they rode the short bus to school, and philosophy, and economics, I'm just going to ignore them as a parent does to a child having a tantrum.

It's easy if you try.

Now for my musical selections:

It smells like victory

Bump and update: Bush appointee Judge White has done a 180 and now acknowledges he might have been just a bit hasty in shutting down a whole website because a money-laundering Swiss Bank operating in the Cayman Islands objected to being outed.

The bad news is Judge White still insists he has jurisdiction, even tho Wikileaks, the JB Bank, and The Caymans are not in the US.

The good news is Wikileaks is back online!

Original post:
VIA Talking Points Memo we learn that a US court shut down a whole website with a permanent injunction. Here's Wired's article about it:

Cayman Islands Bank Gets Wikileaks Taken Offline in U.S.

Wikileaks, the whistleblower site that recently leaked documents related to prisons in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, was taken offline last week by its U.S. host after posting documents that implicate a Cayman Islands bank in money laundering and tax evasion activities.

In a pretty extraordinary ex-parte move, the Julius Baer Bank and Trust got Dynadot, the U.S. hosting company for Wikileaks, to agree not only to take down the Wikileaks site but also to "lock the wikileaks.org domain name to prevent transfer of the domain name to a different domain registrar." A judge in the U.S. District Court for Northern California signed off on the stipulation between the two parties last week without giving Wikileaks a chance to address the issue in court.

Why would a US judge, (Jeffrey Steven White) rule for a Swiss company operating in the Caymans and order a US ISP to scrub their Domain Name Server(s) of the existence of this website?

And the judge, (Jeffrey Steven White), didn't rule that only the offending documents should be removed, he didn't say it was TRO while he resolved the litigation, he told the ISP to scrub their entire DNS as if the site had never existed.

Yeah Judge, good luck with that. Maybe next you can rule that the pee be taken out of a swimming pool.

But the scariest part is that Judge Jeffrey Steven White ordered the site to maintain records of anyone who had ever accessed the site.

You can still access the site thru their IP# and they also have mirrors worldwide.

Not to mention the 3rd party sites that have mirrored the Wikileaks site.

Here are some lowlights of the court's ruling.

The whole ruling can be viewed here (warning PDF.)

BTW, guess who appointed Judge Jeffrey S. White to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California?

Yep, that would be Bush.



Cross posted at VidiotSpeak

Welcome to the evening news, I thank you all for tuning in

Freedom of the press may be as obsolete as that stamp in the United States. Reporters without Borders announces their annual Freedom Of The Press rankings:

Eritrea has replaced North Korea in last place in an index measuring the level of press freedom in 169 countries throughout the world that is published today by Reporters Without Borders for the sixth year running.

“There is nothing surprising about this,” Reporters Without Borders said. “Even if we are not aware of all the press freedom violations in North Korea and Turkmenistan, which are second and third from last, Eritrea deserves to be at the bottom. The privately-owned press has been banished by the authoritarian President Issaias Afeworki and the few journalists who dare to criticise the regime are thrown in prison. We know that four of them have died in detention and we have every reason to fear that others will suffer the same fate.”

There's more:

After falling steadily in the index for the past three years, the G8 members have recovered a few places. France (31st), for example, has climbed six places in the past year. French journalists were spared the violence that affected them at the end of 2005 in a labour conflict in Corsica and during the demonstrations in the city suburbs. But many concerns remain about repeated censorship, searches of news organisations, and a lack of guarantees for the confidentiality of journalists’ sources.

There were slightly fewer press freedom violations in the United States (48th) and blogger Josh Wolf was freed after 224 days in prison. But the detention of Al-Jazeera’s Sudanese cameraman, Sami Al-Haj, since 13 June 2002 at the military base of Guantanamo and the murder of Chauncey Bailey in Oakland in August mean the United States is still unable to join the lead group.

Makes me proud to be an American.