From: "Razer" <[email protected] Sent: Sunday, December 05, 2010 4:22 PM Subject: [R-G] Juan Cole checks in on the legality of harassing WikiLeaks
Among other things... "Wikileaks continues to be under political pressure (I say political rather than legal because as far as I can tell, the organization has not been indicted or formally charged with wrongdoing), and I found it impossible to get through to their new Swiss site this morning. But there are now lots of mirror sites up all over Europe. The documents are also being made available via torrents that can be picked up through peer to peer (p2p) networks. Presumably the more important cables are in the “insurance” file available at the various wikileaks mirror sites and also via torrents, and which founder Julian Assange says has been downloaded 100,000 times. An encryption key will be disseminated if anything happens to the organization. The mirror sites were made necessary when Amazon.com removed Wikileaks from its servers, and when Wikileaks’ domain name system provider, Everydns, stopped servicing their registered web address. The reason given was that the site was the object of concerted denial of service attacks by hackers, which was inconveniencing the other customers of the service. (Hackers can set up internet robots to bombard a site with so many hits per minute that it overloads the servers and makes the site inaccessible to others trying to reach it). But if that is the reasoning, then the victim is being punished, since denial of service attacks are illegal in the US. And they are, to boot, a form of thuggery and bullying. It surely is just wrong for Everydns to have dumped a customer simply because that customer had been targeted. The reasons for which Amazon.com gave for booting Wikileaks off their servers, likewise, do not hold water. Amazon wrote: ‘ for example, our terms of service state that “you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content… that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity.” It’s clear that WikiLeaks doesn’t own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content.’ But the US Government does not hold copyright in government-generated documents. They are paid for by the public and are in the public domain. The US government has the right to withhold the documents it generates from the public, according to US law and court decisions. But once a document has become public, no matter how, the government cannot sue for copyright infringement or demand its return on those grounds, at least in the United States. It could demand the documents’ return on grounds that they are classified, but it is not in fact clear that it is illegal to be in possession of classified US government documents, assuming the possessor was not the one who absconded with them in the first place." In Full: http://www.juancole.com/2010/12/wikileaks-and-the-new-mccarthyism-maybe-we-just-need-a-more-open-government.html? _______________________________________________ Rad-Green mailing list [email protected] *** From: "Portside Moderator" <[email protected]> http://www.foei.org/en/blog/commodifying-nature-in-an-age-of-climate-change Commodifying Nature in an Age of Climate Change By Nnimmo Bassey Friends of the Earth: November 29, 2010 A few days before the UN climate negotiations in Cancun, Mexico, Nnimmo Bassey, Chair of Friends of the Earth International, writes about the carbon speculators who will be there hyping the utility of the carbon market as a means of fighting climate change through offsetting rather than taking real drastic action. We will be there to drown out the hype with the message of climate justice. For about two weeks, starting from next Monday, the world will be locked into another session of negotiations on how to tackle climate change. The conference, to be held in Cancun, Mexico, has drawn less excitement than its predecessor held in Copenhagen, Denmark, a year ago. The excitement of Copenhagen was partly driven by the false information that circulated that the Kyoto Protocol was ending at that meeting. Though there were serious, but failed efforts, made at that conference to lay the protocol to rest, its first period actually ends in 2012, while a second commitment period will be entered into as soon as the first period elapses. But why would anyone want to kill the protocol and why should it be sustained? The Kyoto Protocol is seen by some as the only legally binding instrument to which the industrialised and highly polluting nations can be made to commit to cutting emissions at source. From this perspective, when countries fight to abolish the protocol, they are simply trying to avoid making any real commitment to tackling climate change. One problem with the workings of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the ongoing negotiations is that it bases a chunk of its reasoning and framings on the market logic. This follows the path created by the mindset that has built a vicious paradigm of disaster capitalism, in which tragedy is seen as opportunity for profit. What do we mean by this? Rather than take steps to curtail emissions of greenhouse gases responsible for global warming, some people are busy devising ways of making every item of nature a commodity placed at the altar of the market. Through this, everything is being assigned a value and many others are privatised in addition. What makes this offensive is firstly that you cannot place a price on nature, on life. Secondly, speculators are hyping the utility of the carbon market as a means of fighting climate change. Some of the ways this manifests is through the carbon offsetting projects by which polluters in the industrialised countries continue to pollute, on the calculation that their emissions are being compensated for elsewhere. As Friends of the Earth International stated in a recent media advisory, “Carbon trading does not lead to real emissions reductions. It is a dangerous distraction from real action to address the structural causes of climate change, such as over-consumption. Developed countries should radically cut their carbon emissions through real change at home, not by buying offsets from other countries. Carbon offsetting has no benefits for the climate or for developing countries - it only benefits developed countries, private investors, and major polluters who want to continue business as usual.” Cancun will obviously be crawling with carbon speculators and traders, as was the case in Copenhagen. And they have good reasons to be there. They will be there because policy makers on both sides of the divide see benefits in the schemes, even though the so-called benefits are pecuniary and are actually harmful to Mother Earth. But as far as the money enters the pockets of some poor countries, the rich countries can go on polluting, having paid their "penance." The world appears deaf to the need for real actions to curb climate change, and the focus remains on money. In fact, while many of the items of the Cancun agenda have stalled, with regard to reduction of carbon emissions in the industralised nations, there is no shortage of proposals on how carbon markets can be brought in to give appearance of action. Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) is one of such schemes in the scheme. Quick progress is being made on REDD and already, talks are advancing on other variants of the scheme. Indigenous and forest community people are opposed to REDD and object to its implementation, as attention is being focused on forests merely as carbon stocks for mercantile purposes. Significantly, many see REDD as not seeking to stop deforestation, but merely to reduce it. It is also argued that that any reduced deforestation may not be sustained, as deforesters may just shift to another forest or zone to continue with their activities. In other words, REDD is a pretty fiction that may pump money into the pockets of some countries and corporations, but will marginalise forest peoples and will not help to fight climate change. The attraction, as critics have said, is that if this mechanism is linked to the carbon market, it will allow developed countries pay money to REDD-projects that preserve forests in developing countries, and in return receive carbon credits - buying the right to pollute. There will also be strident rejection of any role at all for the World Bank in the climate finance architecture that may be devised in Cancun. The atmosphere is set for a somber, winding series of negotiations. However, social movements and other civil society groups are set to push up the voices of the people, as already broadly articulated in the Peoples Agreement, reached at the World Peoples Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth held in April 2010 at Cochabamba, Bolivia. The environmental justice movement that took first serious steps in Copenhagen is sure to take firmer steps on the streets of Cancun and in thousands of Cancuns being planned for a multitude of locations around the world. The message in Cancun, if we must expect motions towards real actions to tackle climate change, is that governments must pay attention to what the people are saying, to the real challenges faced by vulnerable peoples around the world, and not lend their ears to carbon speculators. Find out more about what we're calling for in Cancun Document Actions (click on the url at the top, then on 'Find out...") ------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[email protected]?subject=laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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