Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked Pentagon Papers, defends WikiLeaks
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_17143344
By Troy Wolverton
[email protected]
Posted: 01/19/2011
Daniel Ellsberg, who famously leaked the Pentagon Papers -- the
secret history of the war in Vietnam -- challenged a room full of
Silicon Valley movers and shakers to stand up for similar acts of
transparency and defiance of the government.
In a discussion Wednesday of the whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks,
Ellsberg, legal and technology experts decried how the U.S.
government is cracking down on whistle-blowers both by prosecuting
them and by pressuring corporations to help shut them down. The panel
discussion, sponsored by the Churchill Club, was at the Santa Clara Marriott.
The Internet has become a powerful force for transparency, Ellsberg
and others said, but the government is attempting to use Silicon
Valley companies and technology to use the Internet to gain
unparalleled information on American citizens while at the same time
using similar techniques to keep its own activities opaque.
"You are on the spot," Ellsberg said. "You are facing a challenge
with profound implications for our democracy."
On the one side of the equation, WikiLeaks has illustrated how
government secrets can be distributed widely to the public through
means that are outside of the government's direct control, the
panelists noted. But the government's actions to take down WikiLeaks
point out the degree to which the ability to expose such secrets --
or to publish any information -- is dependent on a relatively small
number of corporations subject to government pressure.
Thousands of secret government documents, including some 250,000
State Department cables, were leaked to the group.
After it began publishing the cables recently, American government
officials including Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., stepped up their
rhetorical war against the site. At Lieberman's urging, Amazon.com,
which was hosting the WikiLeaks site, ceased doing so. Other
companies, including PayPal, followed suit.
The government colluded with telephone companies such as AT&T to spy
on Americans' telephone conversations and e-mail exchanges without
warrants in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, Ellsberg said.
In trying to come up with evidence with which it could prosecute
WikiLeaks, the federal Department of Justice has subpoenaed Twitter,
trying to get records on Twitter accounts. It's not a big stretch to
think that the government would want access to the vast databases of
user behavior and information held by companies such as Facebook and
Google, Ellsberg said.
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Contact Troy Wolverton at 408-920-5021.
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