Jeffrey Evans: The Apple of Big Brother's Eye (Or, They Now Have a Camera in My Bedroom) "Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations." - Apple CEO Steve Jobs as quoted in the book, The Journey is the Reward. Steve, you made a mistake... a big one! For those of you who don't spend your time combing US Patent Office filings, Apple recently filed a patent for "Systems and Methods for Identifying Unauthorized Users of an Electronic Device." (" That may sound mind-numbingly dull but what it means is that Apple wants to patent a method of determining who is using one of their products. Let's recap--Apple wants to take a picture of you without you knowing about it and without it making a sound on the phone wherever the phone may be. Let's give Apple the benefit of the doubt that this technology will not be used to to spy on us and collect incredibly valuable marketing information. And that is about the nicest possible use for this technology.
Wikileaks Calls for Sarah Palin's Arrest The official Twitter account for Wikileaks has posted a press release this evening drawing a comparison between the controversial rhetoric from public figures that some believe contributed to the attempted assassination on Saturday of Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the even more explicit calls from public officials for violence against Wikileaks spokesperson Julien Assange and others. The organization called for public figures making such calls to violence to be arrested and charged with crimes. Assange is attributed the following quote in the release: "No organisation anywhere in the world is a more devoted advocate of free speech than Wikileaks but when senior politicians and attention seeking media commentators call for specific individuals or groups of people to be killed they should be charged with incitement -- to murder. Those who call for an act of murder deserve as significant share of the guilt as those raising a gun to pull the trigger." From the release:
The Wikileaks News & Views Blog, Special Weekend Edition! Share As I've done for more than five weeks, I will be updating news and views on all things WikiLeaks all day, with new items added at the top. All times are ET. For more follow me on Twitter. UPDATE Check out Monday's edition of this blog here. 10:55 Paris Match interview with Assange, translated. 9:15 ACLU on chilling effect of DOJ move on Twitter: "These government requests for detailed information about individuals' Internet communications raise serious First Amendment concerns and will have a chilling effect on people's willingness to engage in lawful communications over the Internet. 7:55 Several Hillary Clinton statements on Wikileaks today, reported by Wash Post, on visit to UAE, including: "I think I will be answering concerns about WikiLeaks for the rest of my life, not just the rest of my tenure as secretary of State." 3:25 Nancy Youssef, veteran correspondent at McClatchy: In WIkiLeaks fight, US Journos Take the Fifth. 11:30 Does Twitter have rights to resist DOJ?
Why Twitter Was the Only Company to Challenge the Secret WikiLeaks Subpoena Alexander Macgillivray" />Secret subpoenas* information requests of the kind the Department of Justice sent Twitter are apparently not unusual. In fact, other tech companies may also have received similar WikiLeaks-related requests. But what is unusual in this story is that Twitter resisted. Which raises an interesting question: Assuming that Twitter was not the only company to have been served a secret subpoena order, why was it the only company that fought back? Twitter’s general counsel comes out of Harvard’s prestigious Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the cyber law powerhouse that has churned out some of the leading Internet legal thinkers. After Harvard, Macgillivray worked as a litigator for Silicon Valley super-firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati before moving to Google, where he first spearheaded legal issues for products like Search and Gmail. Twitter wooed Macgillivray away from Google in the summer of 2009, and he now heads a 25-person legal team.
Wikileaks volunteer hires lawyers in Twitter fight | Privacy Inc. An ex-WikiLeaks volunteer has hired American lawyers to oppose the U.S. government's efforts to obtain the contents of her Twitter account, CNET has learned. Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a member of the Icelandic parliament who helped with WikiLeaks' release of a classified U.S. military video, is being represented by the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation. "We're looking at options and various things we can do to help our client," EFF legal director Cindy Cohn said yesterday. "She's disturbed that her information is being sought." On Friday, Twitter notified Jónsdóttir and a handful of other subscribers that the U.S. Cohn said the EFF was representing only Jónsdóttir and not any of the other targets of the order (PDF), which was signed by U.S. The U.S. government began a criminal investigation of WikiLeaks and Assange last July after the Web site began releasing what would become a deluge of confidential military and State Department files. The U.S.
This Is The Wikileak That Sparked The Tunisian Crisis Video: The Time Julian Assange Hacked the Pentagon | Threat Level The nearly 500,000 U.S. Army documents published by WikiLeaks this year didn’t mark the first time founder Julian Assange thumbed his nose at the Pentagon. A new documentary about the secret-spilling site captures Assange in a rare moment of reminiscence as he reflects on his hacking of a Defense Department network in the 1990s, where he evidently kept a backdoor in place for some two years. The documentary WikiRebels, produced by Sveriges Television in Sweden, was recently posted on the web in four parts. It provides an overview of Assange and WikiLeaks from the time the site published a classified Army video last April showing an Apache gunship attack in Iraq, to the latest release of U.S. It also includes interviews with several current and former WikiLeaks activists, including former spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg and Icelandic volunteer Herbert Snorrason, who discuss the internal conflict at WikiLeaks that led them to resign. See also:
Secrecy is the problem, not leakers - Opinion Ukrainian activists cover their mouths with US flags during a rally in support of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in front of the Swedish embassy to Ukraine in Kiev on December 22 2010. WikiLeaks is now at the centre of a global battle between media and those in power but what's new about what Julian Assange is doing? WikiLeaks is much more than just another journalistic scandal, it is a challenge to the way that power and news media operate in the Internet Age. In some ways WikiLeaks is a traditional investigative news operation. It also disseminates data on such a vast scale and directly to the public so it is posting a different threat to those in authority used to being able to influence if not control the media. Oxford University Internet analyst John Naughton says that what WikiLeaks is really exposing is the extent to which the western democratic system has been hollowed out. It is also a challenge to mainstream media.
BLOGGING WIKILEAKS NEWS & VIEWS: Special Weekend Edition! Share As I've done for the previous weeks, I will be updating news & views on all things WikiLeaks all day. All times added at top are ET. For more follow me at Twitter. Read about my latest book here. 10:45 NBC Nightly News tonight visits Bradley Manning's hometown. 8:15 Great Guardian piece on cables depicting global effort to keep nuclear genie in the bottle and combat smugglers etc. 7:25 Useful Foreign Policy summary of what cables have shown beyond big name countries and allies—the various "failed states" and those off the radar. 7:15 Claim by attorney at Huff Post that the man behind Sweden going after Assange is ....Karl Rove. 5:35 Shocking cables from this past January on Yemeni security of nuclear stockpile—guard missing, security camera broken. 5:15 Cables show US pressured Australia to take admit one of Saddam's biological weapons scientists—Aussies refused. 3:10 NYT tech column warning about US going after WikiLeaks—there would be "collateral damage," and on US side.
Dear Government of Sweden ... December 16th, 2010 9:17 PM By Michael Moore Dear Swedish Government: Hi there -- or as you all say, Hallå! You know, all of us here in the U.S. love your country. There's just one thing that bothers me -- why has Amnesty International, in a special report (described in detail here by Naomi Wolf), declared that Sweden refuses to deal with the very real tragedy of rape? ** Sweden has the HIGHEST per capita number of reported rapes in Europe. ** This number of rapes has quadrupled in the last 20 years. ** The conviction rates? Axelsson says: "On April 23rd of this year, Carina Hägg and Nalin Pekgul (respectively MP and chairwoman of Social Democratic Women in Sweden) wrote in the Göteborgs [newspaper] that 'up to 90% of all reported rapes [in Sweden] never get to court.'" Let me say that again: nine out of ten times, when women report they have been raped, you never even bother to start legal proceedings. Message to rapists? What anti-rape crusaders you've become, Swedish government! I agree.
Bank of America Also Refuses to Handle WikiLeaks Payments Financial giant Bank of America has added its name to the list of institutions dropping support for WikiLeaks, announcing that it has stopped handling any payments to or from the whistle-blowing website. The bank said in a statement to the Charlotte Observer, "This decision is based upon our reasonable belief that WikiLeaks may be engaged in activities that are, among other things, inconsistent with our internal policies for processing payments." As the huge American financial institution confidently declared Saturday that it was standing against the website headed by controversial figure Julian Assange, his WikiLeaks organization fired back a Twitter post urging consumers to stop doing business with Bank of America. "We ask that all people who love freedom close out their accounts at Bank of America," pleaded the WikiLeaks tweet. Bank of America's action is certain to tempt hackers who've named themselves "Operation Payback."