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Wikileaks Nails TPP, Other Trade Agreements for Surrendering National Sovereignty, More

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By Hazel Sheffield. Wikileaks has warned that governments negotiating a far-reaching global service agreement are ‘surrendering a large part of their global sovereignty’ and exacerbating the social inequality of poorer countries in the process.

The Trade in Services Agreement exposed in a 17 document dump by Wikileaks on Thursday relates to ongoing negotiations to lock market liberalisations into global law.

If a country like China wanted to join, it would have to scrap all discriminatory practices against foreign firms – so discrimination against a foreign firm opening a hospital in China would be banned, for example.

Under the agreement, retailers like Zara or Marks & Spencers would have the right to open stores in any of the signing countries and be treated like domestic companies. A nationalised service, such as the British telecoms industry in the eighties, would have to ensure it was not harming competition under these terms.

“Nothing it will do to extend the liberalisation but it locks in those rules in case of a coup d’etat,” Hosuk Lee-Makiyama, director of European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE) and a leading author on trade diplomacy, told The Independent. (Read more from “Wikileaks Just Exposed Trade Agreements Like TPP, TTIP for Surrendering National Sovereignty” HERE)

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Trade Supporters Bullish as Vote Nears

By Mike Lillis and Scott Wong. House GOP leaders are expressing a bold new confidence heading into the final stretch of the divisive fight over granting President Obama broad trade powers.

The vote, expected as soon as this week, is likely to be a nail-biter — scores of lawmakers in both parties remain publicly undecided, making the count on both sides difficult to pin down.

But both the White House and GOP leaders say their whipping efforts are paying dividends, with new supporters signing on by the day.

The White House won a victory last week when Reps. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), Don Beyer (Va.) and Derek Kilmer (D-Wash.) announced their support. And both Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Ways and Means Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said that, while they don’t have the votes yet, they expect to very soon.

“If we don’t get it done in June, I don’t know why you’d think we can get it done in July,” said Boehner, who’s been coordinating efforts with the White House and recently spoke with Obama. “We need to get this finished. We’re gonna get it done.” (Read more from this story HERE)

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WikiLeaks: Mass Recording of Afghan Telephone Calls By the NSA

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Photo Credit: Patrick Semansky / APBy Julian Assange.

The National Security Agency has been recording and storing nearly all the domestic (and international) phone calls from two or more target countries as of 2013. Both the Washington Post and The Intercept (based in the US and published by eBay chairman Pierre Omidyar) have censored the name of one of the victim states, which the latter publication refers to as country “X”.

Both the Washington Post and The Intercept stated that they had censored the name of the victim country at the request of the US government. Such censorship strips a nation of its right to self-determination on a matter which affects its whole population. An ongoing crime of mass espionage is being committed against the victim state and its population. By denying an entire population the knowledge of its own victimisation, this act of censorship denies each individual in that country the opportunity to seek an effective remedy, whether in international courts, or elsewhere. Pre-notification to the perpetrating authorities also permits the erasure of evidence which could be used in a successful criminal prosecution, civil claim, or other investigations.

We know from previous reporting that the National Security Agency’s mass interception system is a key component in the United States’ drone targeting program. The US drone targeting program has killed thousands of people and hundreds of women and children in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia in violation of international law. The censorship of a victim state’s identity directly assists the killing of innocent people.

Although, for reasons of source protection we cannot disclose how, WikiLeaks has confirmed that the identity of victim state is Afghanistan. This can also be independently verified through forensic scrutiny of imperfectly applied censorship on related documents released to date and correlations with other NSA programs (see https://freesnowden.is).

We do not believe it is the place of media to “aid and abet” a state in escaping detection and prosecution for a serious crime against a population.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: NBCEdward Snowden Gives Wide-Ranging Interview to Brian Williams

By Richard Esposito, Matthew Cole and Mark Schone.

Snowden, now 30, is a former systems administrator for the CIA who later went to work for the private intelligence contractor Dell inside a National Security Agency outpost in Japan. In early 2013, he went to work for Booz Allen Hamilton inside the NSA center in Hawaii.

While working for the contractors, Snowden downloaded secret documents related to U.S. intelligence activities and partnerships with foreign allies, including some that revealed the extent of data collection from U.S. telephone records and Internet activity.

On May 20, 2013, Snowden went to Hong Kong to meet with Greenwald and with filmmaker Laura Poitras. The first articles about his documents appeared in the Guardian and The Washington Post in early June, as did a taped interview with Snowden.

The U.S. government charged Snowden with espionage and revoked his passport. Snowden flew to Moscow on June 23, but was unable to continue en route to Latin America because he no longer had a passport.

After living in the airport transit area for more than a month, and applying for asylum in more than 21 countries, he was granted temporary asylum in Russia, where he has been living ever since.

Read more from this story HERE.

Manning Could Move To Civilian Prison For Hormone Therapy

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Photo Credit: U.S. Army handout / Reuters / Landov

Photo Credit: U.S. Army handout / Reuters / Landov

The Pentagon is working on a prison transfer for convicted WikiLeaks source Pvt. Chelsea Manning, who has requested hormone therapy. The plan would allow Manning to serve time in a civilian prison, where such therapy is available.

Manning’s first name was Bradley when the soldier made headlines for sending a trove of classified documents to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks.

Shortly after being sentenced by a military court, Manning said she wanted to live as a woman while in prison, citing an Army psychiatrist’s earlier diagnosis of gender identity disorder.

Read more from this story HERE.

SecureDrop Project Will Pay To Install WikiLeaks-Style Anonymous Submission Systems for the Media

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Photo Credit: Forbes In an age of pervasive surveillance that makes no exception for the media, the idea of a WikiLeaks-style secure submission system for anonymous whistleblowers may be more important than ever. Now one group believes in those leaking tools so strongly that it’s willing to pay for mainstream media to install them.

On Tuesday the non-profit Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) announced the launch of SecureDrop, a piece of open-source software designed to serve as an anonymous submission systems for media organizations. And to encourage news outlets to install it, the Foundation has offered to send one of SecureDrop’s creators, security consultant James Dolan, to willing news outlets to help install it, in some cases even paying for the necessary hardware.

“We want to take all the pain out of this process so that they have no excuse but to use this technology. The barrier has been cost and the technical ability,” says Trevor Timm, the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s executive director. ”So we’re actually going to physically fly [Dolan] around the country to major media organizations to install this.”

SecureDrop, which like WikiLeaks depends on the anonymity software Tor to hide leakers’ identities, was developed from the open-source software DeadDrop, initially created by the late coder and activist Aaron Swartz along with Dolan and Wired editor Kevin Poulsen. The system was initially created to serve as a leak submission system for Wired, but was dropped after a management shakeup at the magazine and adopted instead by fellow Conde Nast publication the New Yorker under the name Strongbox and launched in May. The code behind that system has remained free and open-source, allowing any other media outlet to adopt it.

Read more from this story HERE.

Bradley Manning to Request Pardon from Obama Over 35-Year Jail Sentence

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Bradley Manning will send a personal plea to Barack Obama next week for a presidential pardon after he was sentenced on Wednesday to 35 years in prison for passing hundreds of thousands of classified military documents to WikiLeaks.

The sentence was more severe than many observers expected, and is much longer than any punishment given to previous US government officials who have leaked information to the media.

Manning showed no emotion, neither when the sentence was delivered, nor after being escorted into a side room, where his lawyers and members of his family were waiting, some of them in tears.

“Everyone in his defence team was emotional, including myself,” his lawyer, David Coombs, told the Guardian. “The only person that wasn’t emotional was Brad. He looked to us and said: ‘It’s OK. I’m going to move forward and I’m going to be all right’.”

Coombs told a press conference that next week he will formally submit the request for a pardon, “or at the very least commute his sentence to time served”. That request will contain a personal appeal from Manning to Obama, which his lawyer read out.

Read more from this story HERE.

Manning Sentencing: Judge Rejects Claim Leaks had ‘Chilling Effect’ On US Foreign Relations

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Photo Credit: APThe judge at US soldier Bradley Manning’s sentencing hearing rejected some government evidence Wednesday that the classified information he disclosed through the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks had a “chilling effect” on US foreign relations.

The judge ruled that such testimony is admissible only if the effect came directly after the information was published.

She threw out State Department undersecretary Patrick Kennedy’s testimony that leaked information published more than two years ago continues to hurt US foreign relations and policymaking.

The judge also has rejected acting assistant secretary Michael Kozak’s testimony that the leaks had made some foreign citizens, including human rights activists, less willing to speak privately with US diplomats.

Read more:from this story HERE.

Bradley Manning Trial: Defense Counsel Ask How Passing Info to Journalist is “Aiding and Abetting the Enemy”?

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Photo Credit: APThe defence team representing Bradley Manning, the US soldier who leaked reams of state secrets to WikiLeaks, has made one last attempt to persuade the judge presiding over his court martial to dismiss the most serious charge against him: that he “aided the enemy”.

Manning’s civilian lawyer David Coombs said that to convict the army private of such a severe offence would set an “extremely bad precedent”. It would place US society on a “very slippery slope, of basically punishing people for getting information out to the press.”

Addressing the judge in a military court in Fort Meade, Coombs said that “no case has ever been prosecuted under this type of theory: that an individual, by the nature of giving information to a journalistic organisation, would then be subject to” a charge of “aiding the enemy”. Conviction of such an office would bring “a hammer down on any whistleblower or anybody who wants to put information out”.

The lawyer’s comments were recorded by the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which is employing court stenographers during the Manning trial as a way of overcoming the high level of official secrecy that surrounds the case.

The “aiding the enemy” charge has become the seminal battle in Manning’s prosecution, with the US government, in its determination to come down hard on official leakers, ranged against advocates of freedom of information. Under the terms of the charge, Manning is accused of having given valuable intelligence to Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida and its affiliate groups simply by dint of having leaked documents that were then posted by WikiLeaks on the internet.

Read more from this story HERE.

WikiLeaks Volunteer Was a Paid Informant for the FBI

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Photo Credit: Sigurdur Thordarson

Photo Credit: Sigurdur Thordarson

By Kevin Poulsen. On an August workday in 2011, a cherubic 18-year-old Icelandic man named Sigurdur “Siggi” Thordarson walked through the stately doors of the U.S. embassy in Reykjavík, his jacket pocket concealing his calling card: a crumpled photocopy of an Australian passport. The passport photo showed a man with a unruly shock of platinum blonde hair and the name Julian Paul Assange.

Thordarson was long time volunteer for WikiLeaks with direct access to Assange and a key position as an organizer in the group. With his cold war-style embassy walk-in, he became something else: the first known FBI informant inside WikiLeaks. For the next three months, Thordarson served two masters, working for the secret-spilling website and simultaneously spilling its secrets to the U.S. government in exchange, he says, for a total of about $5,000. The FBI flew him internationally four times for debriefings, including one trip to Washington D.C., and on the last meeting obtained from Thordarson eight hard drives packed with chat logs, video and other data from WikiLeaks.

The relationship provides a rare window into the U.S. law enforcement investigation into WikiLeaks, the transparency group newly thrust back into international prominence with its assistance to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Thordarson’s double-life illustrates the lengths to which the government was willing to go in its pursuit of Julian Assange, approaching WikiLeaks with the tactics honed during the FBI’s work against organized crime and computer hacking — or, more darkly, the bureau’s Hoover-era infiltration of civil rights groups.

“It’s a sign that the FBI views WikiLeaks as a suspected criminal organization rather than a news organization,” says Stephen Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy. “WikiLeaks was something new, so I think the FBI had to make a choice at some point as to how to evaluate it: Is this The New York Times, or is this something else? And they clearly decided it was something else.”

The FBI declined comment. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Flickr

Photo Credit: Flickr

Under Obama, NSA Collected Bulk Email, Internet Data of Americans

By Kim Zetter. The National Security Agency collected bulk data on the email traffic of Americans under the Obama administration, according to new documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The program involved email metadata — the “enveloped” information for email that reveals the sender address and recipient as well as IP addresses — as well as web sites visited until 2011 when it ended, according to the Guardian.

The collection, which did not include the content of email, was actually part of a decade-long surveillance program launched under the Bush administration in 2001 called Stellar Wind that was initially conducted without oversight from a court. The program was first exposed in 2004 by a former Justice Department attorney who leaked the information to the New York Times.

The collection involved “communications with at least one communicant outside the United States or for which no communicant was known to be a citizen of the United States,” according to an NSA inspector general’s report the newspaper obtained.

The NSA subsequently was granted authority to “analyze communications metadata associated with United States persons and persons believed to be in the United States.” The NSA didn’t just focus on targeted individuals, but also studied the data of people who communicated with people who communicated with targets. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Wikipedia

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

NSA Leak Vindicates AT&T Whistleblower

By David Kravets. Today’s revelations that the National Security Agency collected bulk data on the email traffic of millions of Americans provides startling evidence for the first time to support a whistleblower’s longstanding claims that AT&T was forwarding global internet traffic to the government from secret rooms inside its offices.

The collection program, which lasted from 2001 to 2011, involved email metadata — the “enveloped” information for email that reveals the sender’s address and recipient, as well as IP addresses and websites visited, the Guardian newspaper reported today.

Mark Klein, a retired AT&T communications technician, revealed in 2006 that his job duties included connecting internet circuits to a splitting cabinet that led to a secret room in AT&T’s San Francisco office. During the course of that work, he learned from a co-worker that similar cabins were being installed in other cities, including Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego, he said.

The split circuits included traffic from peering links connecting to other internet backbone providers, meaning that AT&T was also diverting traffic routed from its network to or from other domestic and international providers, Klein said.

That’s how the data was being vacuumed to the government, Klein said today.

Read more from this story HERE.

Reporter Michael Hastings Consulted With WikiLeaks Lawyer, Complained About FBI Surveillance, Prior to Deadly Fiery Crash (+videos)

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Hastings CrashBy CBSLA.com. Questions persist following the death of Michael Hastings Tuesday, after reports that the award-winning journalist told WikiLeaks the government was watching him.

WikiLeaks tweeted a message to their millions of followers Wednesday stating that the 33-year-old author and war correspondent had contacted the organization’s lawyer to say he was being watched by the FBI.

“Michael Hastings was a journalist who definitely gave the government trouble, the Pentagon trouble, so if they were surveilling him it wouldn’t be that surprising,” said friend and fellow journalist Cenk Uygur. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: wikileaks

Photo Credit: wikileaks

WikiLeaks says Michael Hastings contacted it just before his death. Are they implying he was murdered?

By Tim Stanley. WikiLeaks just threw some gasoline onto the conspiracy fire. On Wednesday night, they Tweeted: “Michael Hastings contacted WikiLeaks lawyer Jennifer Robinson just a few hours before he died, saying that the FBI was investigating him.”

What exactly are they trying to say?

Michael Hastings was a much admired freelance journalist who covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and helped to bring down General Stanley McChrystal. He was tragically killed this week in a car crash in Los Angeles, after his car hit a tree. Hastings is believed to have been alone in the vehicle. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: D Dipasupil/Getty Images

Photo Credit: D Dipasupil/Getty Images

Michael Hastings: my friend and his enemies

My friend Michael Hastings died in Los Angeles on Tuesday. His death leaves a journalistic void, and not just the one created by the loss of a fearless reporter. Michael’s untimely death at 33 deprives Washington journalists and national security professionals of one of their favorite people to sneer at, condescend to, and ignorantly deride.

It occurred to me last night, as I stared into the drink I drank to toast my friend’s memory, that I spent more time defending Michael to colleagues, military officers, bureaucrats, tweeps and random people than I did actually talking to him in person.

You might think Michael’s track record needs no defending. He wrote an immortal Rolling Stone article that exposed a caustic military contempt for the Obama administration and which led within days to the resignation of the Afghanistan war’s commanding general, Stanley McChrystal. The coterie of national security journalists around Washington began to fear that there would be a before- and after-Hastings period in journalistic-military relations. Yet, a bit more than a month after the piece, I was in Afghanistan on an embed with the US military, without any evident post-Hastings professional reprisal.

I heard a lot about Hastings while in Afghanistan. Very little of it was from the soldiers and air force personnel I was with. Nearly all of it was from fellow journalists, and none of it was positive. How could Hastings publish off-the-record jibes made by officers who were trying to be welcoming to him, the complaints went; what kind of arrogance led him to want to make a name for himself like this? What was his problem with McChrystal, anyway? Didn’t he know McChrystal was trying to rein in the war?

As Michael would spend the rest of his life explaining – I can’t believe I’m writing those words – he didn’t publish anything that was explicitly off-the-record; but neither did he stop observing the boorish behavior of McChrystal’s senior aides while the beers flowed. There’s a reasonable professional journalistic debate to be had about what to do with material uttered by sources when they’re drunk. But I found few people were interested in chewing over that question. They simply wanted to feel superior to Hastings. Read more from this story HERE.

Wikileaks Suspect Manning Named Honorary Grand Marshal of San Francisco Homosexual Pride Parade

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Photo Credit: DonkeyHoteyRainey Reitman, a member of the Bradley Manning Support Network, said Friday that her group was notified this week that a committee of former San Francisco Pride grand marshals had voted to select the imprisoned intelligence specialist for the distinction that each year recognizes about a dozen celebrities, politicians and community organizations for their contributions to the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender communities.

Manning is openly gay, and his lawyers have argued that his experience as a soldier before the repeal of the U.S. military’s ban on gay service played an important role in his decision to pass hundreds of thousands of sensitive items to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.

“As a longstanding Manning supporter, I’m thrilled to see our community publicly embrace his courage in disclosing classified truths about the war in Iraq and other facts, which empower the American public to promote smarter future policy,” Reitman said.

Read more from this story HERE.