Good question, and an obvious one, well laid out with direct clarity in this piece by Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone.

You may not like Julian Assange, but the campaign to silence WikiLeaks should appall you

Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine for a moment that the quarter of a million secret government cables from the State Department had been leaked, not to Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, but to Bill Keller, the executive editor of the New York Times.

First, let’s state the obvious: The Times would never have returned the confidential files to the Obama administration. Most likely, the newspaper would have attempted to engage with State to try to scrub life- and source- threatening details from the cables — as Assange and his lawyers did.

And if the administration had refused to participate in that effort — as it did with WikiLeaks? The Times would have done what any serious news organization has the imperative to do: It would have published, at a pacing of its own choosing, any cable it deemed to be in the public interest. In this digital age, it’s likely the Times would have even created a massive searchable database of the cables.

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How would you react if top American conservatives were today baying for Bill Keller’s blood? If Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had called on Keller to be prosecuted as a “high-tech terrorist”? If Sarah Palin were demanding that Keller be hunted down like a member of Al Qaeda? If Newt Gingrich were calling for the Times editor to be assassinated as an “enemy combatant.”

What if Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, had successfully pressured the Times’ web hosting company to boot the newspaper off its servers? What if Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal suddenly stopped processing subscriptions for the paper?

Imagine that students at Columbia University’s graduate school of international affairs had been warned not to Tweet about the New York Times if they had any hopes of ever working at the State Department.

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The behavior is outrageous on its face and totalitarian in its impulse.

Dickinson sums it up and gets to the overriding point here…

Listen: You don’t have to approve of Assange or his political views; you can even believe he’s a sex criminal. It doesn’t matter. What’s at stake here isn’t the right of one flouncy Australian expat to embarrass a superpower. It’s freedom of the press. And it’s a dark day for journalists everywhere when the imperatives of government secrecy begin to triumph over our First Amendment.

Read The Complete Article

Wired gets it right. Of course, this is the UK version. I wonder if the US version is willing to venture such challenging insights to the imperial powers-that-be? (not likely considering the connection of its editors to Adrian Lamo, the man alleged to have blown the whistle on alleged WikiLeaks source, Bradley Manning).

This is about as good as it gets for the United States of America. Backed by the righteous anger of lawmakers and commentators, hundreds — perhaps thousands — of the nation’s brightest brains are working toward the goal of making Julian Assange answer for his alleged crimes in a US court.

Those engaged in this effort should enjoy the thrill of the chase. If Assange is successfully extradited to the US, a sobering experience will follow. Prosecuting the founder of WikiLeaks could very easily turn into a nightmare. In formal terms, Julian Assange will be the man standing trial. But the participant with the most to lose will be the US government. Victory, if it arrives in any formal sense, will feel pyrrhic.

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The argument that only “established” media outlets can count on First Amendment protection is profoundly at odds with the reality of media production and consumption in the 21st century. Any prosecution on these grounds will provoke storms of criticism and ridicule.

Neither has Assange made this argument easy for prosecutors. WikiLeaks asked Washington for assistance with redacting the cables and met with a refusal. Yet when The New York Times asked the US government for advice on what to censor, it received suggestions. “The other news organizations supported these redactions,” New York Times editor Bill Keller recently wrote in an online discussion. “WikiLeaks has indicated that it intends to do likewise. And as a matter of news interest, we will watch their website to see what they do.”

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The US government could choose another route to court: it could prosecute WikiLeaks and the news organisations with which it collaborated. This option has been floated by Senator Joe Lieberman, the influential chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. It has also been described by Steve Vladeck, professor of law at American University, as “crossing a proverbial Rubicon that even the most secrecy-obsessed, First Amendment-indifferent administrations have consistently refused to attempt to bridge”. The results would include a full-blown constitutional crisis.

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Already, there are straws in the wind. Solicitors representing Assange in London have spoken of intimidating letters from the State Department and heavy-handed surveillance. In September, according to The New York Times, three laptops that Julian Assange checked into the hold of a nearly-empty flight from Stockholm to Berlin went missing. They have never been recovered.

Most of all, the courts will be interested in any evidence that the US government authorised denial of service attacks against WikiLeaks. US judges tend to take a dim view of extrajudicial attempts to restrain publication.

Sit back and add it all up: if the founder of WikiLeaks enters a US courtroom, his options will multiply. The government’s will diminish. This looks like a classic ju-jitsu moment in which an underpowered defendant can turn the sheer body weight of a prosecutor to his advantage.

Read The Full Article

An insightful and professionally-produced documentary from Swedish television on the rise of WikiLeaks and the groups at the forefront of what is the rights-based battle of the 21st Century - the one over information and communication rights.

Watch Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 of the documentary

WITNESS and Video Volunteers, two excellent organizations working in concert here.

The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI) is the next great step forward in the information and communication rights movement. A new communications “Bill of Rights” for the 21st Century. (Note that this initiative has since become law since the creation of this video).

Now this is a truly amazing and revolutionary development in making progress towards providing for true accountably amongst power, here and throughout the world.

On June 15th, Icelandic Parliamentarians unanimously approved a resolution that contains some of the strongest protection for freedom of speech and freedom of information in the world. The reforms will most likely take effect sometime in 2011, when a revision of the country’s relevant laws and regulations is expected to be completed and approved by Parliament.

The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative ( IMMI ), as the proposal is known, has been welcomed by most Icelanders, who are weary of institutional furtiveness; in April, a special Parliamentary report concluded that the country’s spectacular financial collapse of 2008 would not have been possible without a culture of secrecy that afforded bankers and politicians little oversight. By strengthening protections for whistleblowers and journalists’ sources, and by reforming the judicial system to minimize the abuse of libel law, those behind IMMI are hoping to foster a much more open society on the island.

Nor would we likely have had the clusterf**k of a war in Iraq if we had the same protections and provisions in our media back during the orchestrated run up to that crime back in 2002-03 in America, to name just one of numerous potential examples of power being checked by transparent accountability. Accountability made possible only through the protection of those who serve to provide needed information for informed, rational public discourse and debate.

More here, too, on the brazen hypocrisy and slavish service to empire that is Obama administration…

“If any nation should stand up for [IMMI], it is the US,” she said.

Jónsdóttir does, however, realize that getting the American government to warm to the initiative may be tricky. Despite President Obama’s campaign promises to protect whistleblowers , his administration has decided instead to slap them with criminal charges ; Bradley Manning, the alleged source of Collateral Murder , Shamai Leibovitz, an FBI translator, and Thomas Drake, an NSA contractor, are all examples of whistleblowers who may or may not feel like they’ve been backstabbed by the President ; Drake even faces trumped-up charges of Espionage. Not even George W. Bush threatened whistleblowers with prison throughout his Imperial Presidency.

But it isn’t just President Obama’s betrayal of his campaign promises and the clandestine ways of the US government that bothers Jónsdóttir; she sees the President’s vendetta against whistleblowers as a pointless exercise for a government that trumpets itself as a shining beacon of democracy.

Read The Complete Report

A must-read expose’ for anyone interested in the future of an open and democratically-viable internet. From Bruce Kushnick of the New Networks Institute, who is once-again spot-on (as he often is).

Google is not going to be a force that will protect the public interest from the controllers of the wires, who are now engaged in serious anti-trust games. Comcast, AT&T and Verizon are now lobbying, funding astroturf groups, (fake consumer groups), a horde of paid-off minority groups, not to mention corporate-funded think tanks, state and federal Congressmen and Senators — all to make sure that the wires are private property for their use, with walled-in ghettos of influence and control.

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Why is Net Neutrality not the issue? Because if there was serious competition, when someone was blocked, degraded or had other problems, the customer could simply take their business elsewhere. Instead, through consolidation and mergers (and more mergers to come, such as Comcast-GE-NBC), AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast’s money and power — working together — is creating a climate where the owners of the wires are now allowed to take over the entire wire for all services, including phone, broadband, Internet and cable, as if it was their own property for personal use.

So what if America paid for these wires and upgrades including wireline, cable and even wireless services. (told in an upcoming story). So what if the phone companies have stolen the utilities, the “Public Switched Telephone Networks”, or that the cable companies now forget there’s something called a ‘franchise’.

They will say “regulation blocks investment”. What planet are they on? Since the 1990’s deregulation has given AT&T and Verizon over $320 billion to do upgrades of the Public Switched Telephone Networks, the utilities. They took the money and ran. We’re 15th in the world in broadband, proving that point.

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And talk about anti-trust? If both wires are asking for the same thing, to be walled-in ghettos who control all services, and both collude through major price increases, blocking competition and controlling the deployment of broadband throughout the US —acting as essentially one lobbying group — isn’t that a cartel? The only connections into the home are controlled by one group of companies?

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And in terms of US economic growth, fueled by these mostly small companies delivering Internet service to new customers, America’s telecommunications had the largest growth in history — hypergrowth, to be exact, in the number of lines, minutes, revenues, and even profits. It was the small competitors, not now-AT&T, Verizon et al who brought America’s customers to in the Internet — a fact regulators seem to ignore.

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Since that time, the only competition in most of America has been a duopoly at best. The cable companies — the other wire into the home — only have 20% of the local phone residential market. The local telcos, Verizon et al, can still raise rates whenever they want because there is no competition to drive down prices. And cable competition? AT&T and Verizon have about 5 million upgraded-fiber-cable households out of over 120 million; there is no serious direct cable competition in most markets.

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Forget all the rhetoric, press releases, statements, etc. Google needs wires and doesn’t have them, so instead of confronting the network providers they will simply go to bed with them.

But here’s the problem: The Public Interest. Google was one of the few companies left standing who could be a counter-balance to the ‘force’. Since the wire companies are in cahoots and are now lobbying, campaign-financing, minority-co-opting, astroturfing together, who’s going to be the balance in the force?

But the most important — the corporate controls will be so overwhelming that the story will not be told on TV or other major media. That’s right. Today, Verizon and AT&T spend enormous sums of money on advertising. Do you think any station who receives the money will do a feature on the corporate controls, much less other indiscretions?

And when the Comcast and NBC merger goes through, it eliminates major networks, from NBC and CNBC to Telemundo, from doing investigative stories about the cable companies, much less their buddies who spend so much money on advertising.

So, Google and Verizon? This does not bode well dear reader.

Read the full report and pass it along to any friends and colleagues who are interested in the future of the internet.

TED (Ideas Worth Spreading) presents this excellent interview with Julian Assange of the increasingly famous organization WikiLeaks (or infamous, depending on what side of the disinformation wall you are standing on, and whether one is trying to scale that wall or garrison it). In it Assange discusses why their work is necessary in helping to provide the information that is important to the world. He elaborates on how information which organizations spend large amounts of time and money on keeping hidden gets out, and the hope that its exposure can do some good.

Making The Injustice Visible
By Andy Valeri

Communication is arguably the most important process involved in defining our humanity, the way in which we experience the fundamental value and meaning of our own lives and those whom we share them with. It is why its deprivation through such means as prolonged solitary confinement is often considered one of the worst forms of imprisonment and torturous abuse man can inflict upon his fellow beings. It is this essential role that communication plays in making us human that underlies its internationally-recognized status as a fundamental right in documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Community media advocates have long been active contributors towards the advancement of human rights, providing people of all socio-economic strata and cultural backgrounds the capabilities and opportunities to participate in the shared dialogue of their society using modern communication technologies. For if human rights are to be truly protected and to flourish, one must provide for a society which functions upon democratic principles and accountability, particularly in regards to those pertaining to the rights of free speech and a free press.

Such efforts to expand democratic access to effective means of communication serve as yet another step forward in what has been an ongoing evolutionary endeavor since the days of Protagoras, the rhetorician of Greek democracy who along with his fellow sophists, built a working democracy by teaching the common people how to speak in the agora as equals of the aristocrats. Two millennia later John Dewey, one of America’s most noted social and educational theorists, insisted that modern democracy had to be firmly grounded upon the twin pillars of communicated social knowledge and local, neighborly associations. For Dewey, it was through grassroots, participatory communication that publics could effectively organize themselves to generate meaningful social change.

This is what community-based media has been actively doing for decades now, whether those changes being generated entail confronting state violence in Oaxaca or citizens debating zoning ordinances in Massachusetts. It is one of the primary objectives for addressing this topic within the pages (and now web postings) of the CMR. In the face of the flood of daily tasks and seemingly never-ending policy struggles the access community is consistently challenged with, particularly in regards to the battles over video franchising legislation, we risk losing sight of the deeper purpose of our work and the larger frame that it exists within. This includes its importance not just for our own communities, but for those throughout the world (a point which is illuminated within the articles featured in this issue and by exploring additional resources made available online at ).

It was Gandhi who understood that the key to confronting injustice was not to attack it (and thus risk becoming complicit in it), but to expose it. His entire strategy was based upon the principle that the essential element of non-violent movements for equality and human rights was to “make the injustice visible.”

This is what media producers have been doing all over the world since the very advent of accessible modern communication technologies. The empowerment of every day citizens to document the conditions of political injustice and social inequalities in which they live, allow them to serve as meaningful participants in movements towards effectively responding to and transforming those conditions.

The work of groups such as WITNESS and the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem are just some of the examples of
citizen-produced media working on the front lines of the struggle for the protection of human rights. B’Tselem, through their “Shooting Back” program, helps defend the rights of Palestinians by arming them with cameras-not with guns and bombs-in order to document the injustices they experience. The Oscar-nominated film Burma VJ, about the courageous work of underground video journalists documenting the violent oppression by the Burmese military government, provides another moving example of the power that grassroots media production can have on political affairs. A similar role has been played by citizen media activists in Iran during the recent government crackdowns there.

Of course, working under the threat of physical danger is not a requirement for involvement in human rights-supporting media. The empowering work of Video Volunteers in the slums of India and Brazil and the Main Street Project’s efforts to ensure universal broadband access to all Americans are just two of the innumerably diverse initiatives currently under way which lay within the scope of human rights advocacy.

Additionally, understanding grassroots-generated media not just as a tool in the service of human rights, but as a specific expression of a fundamental human right in and of itself, has profound implications for how we approach the ongoing efforts to sustain and expand universal access to its use. For rights-based struggles are not so much about policies, but about principles.

Fighting for the right to do something, and not just the ability to do it, is a more far-reaching and transformative endeavor, whose results are much more permanently embedded into the social and political fabric of civic society. Those participating in the lunch counter sit-ins during the civil rights movement were doing so not because they wanted a sandwich, but rather to assert their very right to be there, and to have equal access to the same dignity and opportunity of all citizens. By the same token, do we in the community media movement see our efforts as directed towards providing people access to the means of communication, or to the right to such access? Understanding the distinction between the two frames has proven an essential factor in the success of the great rights-based movements throughout history.

I hope this issue of the CMR can help serve to expand our collective field of vision as to the deeper meaning and important real-world implications inherent in our work. As the community media movement continues the fight to “keep it local,” we know that the real strength of such localism is only derived when it keeps us connected through a civic globalism, one that binds us together through the mutual recognition of universally shared human values. It is our common efforts towards providing for access to communication for all that inalienably unites us together as central participants in the movement for the advancement of human rights.

Andy Valeri is a long-time veteran of community media, having worked in access television for well over two decades, producing hundreds of hours of programming of various genres, including the television series and online political forum UnCommon Sense TV Media. He has a lengthy involvement in media issues, including as an activist and local columnist. Having worked as a music producer and publisher operating his own record label, he also serves as an occasional guest host on a popular local public radio program. Valeri is currently engaged in an interdisciplinary graduate program at the University of Dayton in Media, Communications and Human Rights, which seeks to reframe our approach to media issues as one fundamentally of human rights. He serves on the editorial board of the Community Media Review, and can be contacted at andy@ustvmedia.org.

(This essay was originally published in an issue of the Community Media Review on Community Media and Human Rights, on the use of citizen-based media in support of human rights, as well as the recognition of the very process of communication as as a fundamental human right.)