tequila bomb

This is a strong indication that the company is ready and willing to cut sites off if the law should demand it. It also raises the prospect that MasterCard could cut sites off even without a legal requirement to do so. The company recently came under fire from Anonymous over its decision to cease processing payments for WikiLeaks, something it was under no legal obligation to do.

It is amazing that it’s taken the various interested parties so long to think of this. But when they saw how quick financial institutions were to react to edicts to shut down payments to Wikileaks they must have thought all of their Christmas’s had come at once. MasterCard, Visa and most banking institutions are all too happy to take money from any source, it seems, until some pressure is applied. But then it’s not such a huge surprise to any of us that these organisations have very few moral ethics in reality.

Increasingly the way to deal with anything that does not fit with the ideals of big business or government is to “Send them to Coventry” with varying degrees of severity. Unfortunately, this is how we fracture societies, breed resentment, and ultimately end up with fringe groups with nothing to lose.

Still, there are troubling questions. The decisions to bar the organization came after its founder, Julian Assange, said that next year it will release data revealing corruption in the financial industry. In 2009, Mr. Assange said that WikiLeaks had the hard drive of a Bank of America executive.

What’s more, we now have Bank of America who will face some embarrassing revelations in the New Year (courtesy of Wikileaks) unilaterally, and completely coincidentally of course, trying to nobble their cash flow.

What would happen if a clutch of big banks decided that a particularly irksome blogger or other organization was “too risky”? What if they decided — one by one — to shut down financial access to a newspaper that was about to reveal irksome truths about their operations? This decision should not be left solely up to business-as-usual among the banks.

• The US has welcomed the arrest of Assange. “That sounds like good news to me,” said Robert Gates US defence secretary. “The international manhunt for Julian Assange is over,” NBC television declared.

• The WikiLeaks crisis is holding back talks on Jewish settlements in the West Bank, according to the Israeli defence minister, Ehud Barak.

5.30pm: With perfect timing an email arrives from Philip Crowley at the state department:

The United States is pleased to announce that it will host Unesco’s World Press Freedom Day event in 2011, from 1-3 May in Washington, DC.

Ironic? Read the next paragraph from the press release:

The theme for next year’s commemoration will be 21st Century Media: New Frontiers, New Barriers. The United States places technology and innovation at the forefront of its diplomatic and development efforts. New media has empowered citizens around the world to report on their circumstances, express opinions on world events, and exchange information in environments sometimes hostile to such exercises of individuals’ right to freedom of expression. At the same time, we are concerned about the determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and to restrict the free flow of information. We mark events such as World Press Freedom Day in the context of our enduring commitment to support and expand press freedom and the free flow of information in this digital age.

Shameless. You really could not make it up.

The entire entry from The Guardian is a great timeline of yesterdays events related to Wikileaks and Julian Assange’s arrest.

Two articles you should read about Wikileaks…

The first is an Op-Ed by Assange himself for The Australian…

I have been accused of treason, even though I am an Australian, not a US, citizen. There have been dozens of serious calls in the US for me to be “taken out” by US special forces. Sarah Palin says I should be “hunted down like Osama bin Laden”, a Republican bill sits before the US Senate seeking to have me declared a “transnational threat” and disposed of accordingly. An adviser to the Canadian Prime Minister’s office has called on national television for me to be assassinated. An American blogger has called for my 20-year-old son, here in Australia, to be kidnapped and harmed for no other reason than to get at me.

US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates admitted in a letter to the US congress that no sensitive intelligence sources or methods had been compromised by the Afghan war logs disclosure. The Pentagon stated there was no evidence the WikiLeaks reports had led to anyone being harmed in Afghanistan. NATO in Kabul told CNN it couldn’t find a single person who needed protecting. The Australian Department of Defence said the same. No Australian troops or sources have been hurt by anything we have published.

In its landmark ruling in the Pentagon Papers case, the US Supreme Court said “only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government”. The swirling storm around WikiLeaks today reinforces the need to defend the right of all media to reveal the truth.

The second is from The Guardian…

On 21 January, secretary of state Hillary Clinton made a landmark speech about internet freedom, in Washington DC, which many people welcomed and most interpreted as a rebuke to China for its alleged cyberattack on Google. “Information has never been so free,” declared Clinton. “Even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.”

She went on to relate how, during his visit to China in November 2009, Barack Obama had “defended the right of people to freely access information, and said that the more freely information flows the stronger societies become. He spoke about how access to information helps citizens to hold their governments accountable, generates new ideas, and encourages creativity.” Given what we now know, that Clinton speech reads like a satirical masterpiece.

In many ways I now find Clinton far more distasteful than Palin.

And Obama, well he promised great things, and to date has only disappointed… the entire world.

Early this week, after hacker attacks on its site, Wikileaks moved its operation, including all those diplomatic cables, to the greener pastures of Amazon.com’s cloud servers. But today, it was down again and mid-afternoon we found out the reason: Amazon had axed Wikileaks from its servers.

The announcement came from Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. Lieberman said in a statement that Amazon’s “decision to cut off Wikileaks now is the right decision and should set the standard for other companies Wikileaks is using to distribute its illegally seized material.”

Thankfully other companies in other countries, which presumably understand the nuances of the law surrounding leaks and freedom of speech better than US Senator Lieberman, are willing to host wikileaks, despite Lieberman’s calls for them to follow suit with Amazon.

Amazon said the site had violated unspecified terms of use.

Shame on you Amazon.

For the record I have now cancelled any accounts I have with Amazon.

This patent is not about sexting it’s about political speech. Apple wants its phone in Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, and other parts of the world where political dissent is a crime. Over the years, it has become apparent that the mobile phone is a tool for revolutionaries.

Dvorak makes an interesting argument. You only have to look at what Apple have done with Facetime in many of the above countries.

But then he shoots himself in the foot…

And, of course, the sexting ruse is just that—a ruse. Let’s face it, American teens in particular can work around anything i[n] incredibly creative ways. So if kids want to send lewd and suggestive notes to each other, they will.

And revolutionaries are dumb? Does taking plans for nuclear bombs off the internet really stop people knowing how to make them?

Or perhaps the governments of countries who want this kind of control are dumb. And believe that this kind of censorship won’t be easily circumvented when people have the need. Surely it would be wiser to allow this kind of “revolutionary” chatter to go on, and then monitor it?

[L]et’s call it what it is.

An opportunity for a few more page views?

Oh, sorry he was talking about the sexting thing…

This is a sleazy censorship mechanism and nothing more.[..]

..that won’t work, and will keep idiots who want control thinking they are in control, so Apple can sell devices.

And don’t think that Microsoft or Google won’t do the same.

The programme, sold for just 1.79 pounds in the online Apple store, has now been labelled an ‘aid to terrorists’ by security experts and the US Department of Homeland Security is also examining how to protect airliners.

Good grief.

Tens of thousands of people in Chinese cities, who have procured iPhone 4 since it was launched on Saturday, will learn from the map function that the area that Indians know as Arunachal Pradesh is entirely Chinese territory.

…Geens, who blogs (at ogleearth.com) about how “neo-geographical tools” like Google Earth influence geopolitics, points out that India too plays similar cartographic games.

“On iPhones sold in India, the base map shows Jammu & Kashmir as wholly India, without acknowledging the Line of Control.” Or the fact that Aksai Chin is disputed territory under Chinese control.

Fun and games. One wonders what the point is, and why the people in government in these countries feel the need to delude themselves and their people in such a public and embarressing way. Our new wired world is just too small for this kind of censorship.

Google very obviously just wants to do business with everyone. But it is interesting that on the iPhone 4 China’s link to map data is hardwired, so that a Chinese iPhone 4 operating outside China will still show their unique world view.

Lawmakers introduced legislation Monday that would let the Justice Department seek US court orders against piracy websites anywhere in the world, and shut them down through their domain registration.

If passed, the Justice Department could ask a federal court to[sic] for an injunction that would order a domain registrar or registry to stop resolving an infringing site’s domain name, so that visitors to PirateBay.org, for example, would get a 404 error.

On the surface of it, the draft of the law as it currently stands is just for sites deemed to be involved in IP infringement activities.

But how long will it be before this is amended to cover sites like wikileaks?

And how will people outside of the US defend against infringement that they are accused of?

This is exactly why having any one country, or set of cultural values in charge of the internet is a very very bad idea.

The Australian government announced plans to impose classification fees on game apps in the iTunes marketplace, sparking notable resistance within the development community.

The government plans to require developers to submit their games to the Australian Classification Board before they hit the iTunes store, which would cost developers between $470 and $2040 per game.

Idiots!

What has happened to Australia?

Clinton described the situation as a “complex set of issues” and said that the US was working on a solution with several countries.

It’s only complex because the US is scrambling to try and find a way to justify them keeping their unfettered access to RIM’s customer’s data, whilst giving other countries as little access as possible.

“We are taking time to consult and analyze the full range of interests and issues at stake because we know that there is a legitimate security concern, but there’s also a legitimate right of free use and access,” she said. “So I think we will be pursuing both technical and expert discussions as we go forward.”

Give them the same access as the US and UK have to the data and they’ll shut up.

It’s simple. But I doubt a politician could ever see that.