Looks like our favorite nutball Senator is at it again. After being involved with the Amazon take down of the Wikileaks site jolting Joe must have decided that he was on a run so he kept right on going.
His Target 2 was a small software company - Tableau.
The Lede has learned that a Seattle-based software company, Tableau, which provides a free Web platform for interactive graphics, removed charts linked to by WikiLeaks in response to Sen. Joe Lieberman's public statement that companies should stop helping the whistle-blowers.
His Target 3 - well you judge as we look at what the so called Shield Act will do:
making it a crime to publish information "concerning the identity of a classified source or informant of an element of the intelligence community of the United States," or "concerning the human intelligence activities of the United States or any foreign government" if such publication is prejudicial to U.S. interests.
Yeah I know, another Wikileaks diary. But ... hey these cables are actually quite interesting, if not always surprising. The day by day media unveiling has now become part of my daily reading ritual. There are great places to read the daily reports. I personally like the Guardian reports.
A few points for today
- First up we have Joe Lieberman threatening a small Seattle based company, Tableau, with hosting a chart with no classified information on it.
Wednesday afternoon, Tableau Software removed data visualizations published by WikiLeaks to Tableau Public. We understand this is a sensitive issue and want to assure the public and our users that this was not an easy decision, nor one that we took lightly. . . .
Our decision to remove the data from our servers came in response to a public request by Senator Joe Lieberman, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, when he called for organizations hosting WikiLeaks to terminate their relationship with the website.
As Glenn Greenwald comments there is so much wrong with this it is hard to know where to start.
Those are the benign, purely legal documents that have now been removed from the Internet in response to Joe Lieberman's demands and implied threats. He's on some kind of warped mission where he's literally running around single-handedly dictating what political content can and cannot be on the Internet, issuing broad-based threats to "all companies" that -- by design -- are causing suppression of political information. I understand Tableau's behavior here; imagine if you were a small company and Joe Lieberman basically announced: I am Homeland Security and you are to cease being involved with this organization which many say is a Terrorist group and Enemy Combatant. What Lieberman is doing is a severe abuse of power, and even for our anemic, power-revering media, it ought to be a major scandal (though it's not because, as Digby says, all our media stars can process is that "Julian Assange is icky").
Oh ... and here is the chart in question, and this one too - notice how dangerous they are to national security.
- Lieberman and a couple of his pals introduced the Shield Act yesterday. The so named act looks to be a piece of work in overreach. I'm still looking for a copy of the text, but according to one commentator it apparently wants to make the following a crime - "For an American to write about human intelligence activities of ANY COUNTRY IN THE WORLD is a national security crime. Page 2, line 15/16".
- Julian Assange has taken a pretty rough beating in the US media so I thought it would be useful for people who have only read about him to actually listen to him talk about what he does. I know I found this interview to be quite interesting. Here is the link as I have not been able to get the embed to work - LINK
- Let's remember here what Wikileaks has done. They have provided a conduit for data that has been leaked to reach a wider audience. They did NOT steal the information themselves. There was nothing to stop the leaker from him/herself leaking the information to a wider audience by themselves (via say a .torrent file). Also note that it is major world newspapers that are covering this (NYT, Guardian. Der Spiegel ...). The newspapers are effectively doing exactly what Wikileaks is doing (providing widespread access), with the additional input of providing analysis and context. Assange has even noted that with this volume of work it is far better to put it in the hands of journalists than to give it to bloggers. And by giving it to multiple outlets he imparts a level of competition that helps ensure pieces are not covered up. So if you want to prosecute Assange (for what I'm not sure, but if you do), then you have to look at prosecuting the newspapers as well.
- Guardian Interview with Assange ongoing.
6.Wikileaks again knocked on line temporarily
The US was today accused of opening up a dramatic new front against WikiLeaks, effectively "killing" its web address just days after Amazon pulled the site from its servers following political pressure.
The whistleblowers' website went offline for the third time in a week this morning, in the biggest threat to its online presence yet.
Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate's committee on homeland security, earlier this week called for any organisation helping sustain WikiLeaks to "immediately terminate" its relationship with them.
On Friday morning, WikiLeaks and the cache of secret diplomatic documents that have proved to be a scourge for governments around the world were only accessible through a string of digits known as a DNS address. The site later re-emerged with a Swiss domain, WikiLeaks.ch.
Finally lets remember that in today's electronic world to think that it is possible to keep electronic secrets secret forever is mindblowingly naive.