Headline, October17, 2013

''' !!! THE JULIAN ASSANGE SHOW !!! '''

This is Julian Assange : a moral Ideologue, a champion of openness, and a control freak. But fearless to the core:

As a teenage hacker in Melbourne his voice pitch helped him impersonate IT staff to trick companies' employees into revealing their passwords over the phone.

''These megaleaks........they are an important phenomenon. And they are only going to increase.'' He'll see to that.  Assange claims that his most recent megaleak, of a quarter million U.S. diplomatic cables, is a part of the series that will have the greatest impact of any WikiLeaks release yet.

Assange calls the shots; choosing the media outlets that splash his exposes, holding them to a strict embargo, running the leaks simultaneously on his site. Past megaleaks from his information insurgency over the last year have included:

76,000 secret Afghan war documents and another trove of 392,000 files from the Iraq war. Those data explosions, the largest classified military security breaches in History, have roused antiwar activists and enraged the Pentagon. They have changed the world forever!

The idea might have gone nowhere if not for Birgitta Jonsdottir. Assange's message captivated the 45-year-old poet and self-styled ''realist-anarchist''.

She wasn't just another idealistic protester with a goth wardrobe and hipster haircut. In the chaotic political environment that followed the national financial crisis, Jonsdottir had been elected to Iceland's parliament, the Althingi, in April 2009.

Working with the country's transparency activists, she pulled together the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, or Immi. The initiative would bring to Iceland all the source-protection, freedom of information and transparency laws from around the world.

And even set up a Nobel-style international award for work in the field of free expression. Jonsdottir pushed through a unanimous resolution to create a series of bills to implement Immi. They would also  make Iceland the most friendly legal base for whistleblowers on Earth.

Velkomin, as Icelanders would say, to Leakistan.

''The more the companies resist, the more information will get out about them,'' says Jonsdottir. ''They can't hide anymore. The war is over. They lost.'' In Jonsdottir vision Iceland will attract both mainstream media and WikiLeaks-like organisations to move their data to Iceland, enjoying legal protection, just as another firm might incorporate in a tax-sheltering in the Caribbean.

She may be getting ahead of herself. Immi has yet to become a law, though it has backing from powerful figures, including both Iceland's minister of justice an the head of its progressive party. Even if it does, Immi likely wouldn't offer much legal protection whose assets and staff aren't physically in the country, they could still be sued anywhere else in the world, given that their digital and print publications could appear globally.

Immi could also face resistance from the U.S. and the EU  -particularly when it comes to military matters. As Marc Thiessen, a conservative pundit, wrote on the blog of the American Enterprise Institute,'' Immi calls into question Iceland's seriousness as a NATO ally, and Iceland needs to realize there will be consequences for its actions.''

There could be a backlash for exposing corporate secrets, too. Alistair Mills, professor of law East Anglia University in Britain, says. ''It's possible that Iceland will become the defamation capital of the world.''

Jonsdottir and fellow Immi creator Smari McCarthy are pushing ahead anyway. Immi, they say, doesn't fashion new laws; it cherry-picks existing statues from around the world :

Source shields from Sweden, libel protection from New York Sate, protected communications with journalists from Belgium among them.

''We are basing our legislation on laws that have already withstood attacks,'' says Jonsdottir.

Defamation and other concerns like child pornography and copyright violations, she argues, would still be illegal in Iceland and wouldn't be sheltered.

Nor is the idea to protect WikiLeaks itself, Jonsdottir points out. The site doesn't need help:

Its data and submission processes are carefully encrypted, and its infrastructure is spread over enough countries  -including some servers in a bombproof, underground bunker in Sweden -

That taking it offline is already nearly impossible.

The honour Post continues:

With respectful dedication to the Corporate World. See ya all on the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:

!!! The Ethical Practices !!!

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless