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Wikileaks Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010
Anyone who hasn't heard of the new wikileaks release of the Afghan Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010 -- over 91,000 reports written by soldiers and intelligence officers covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010 -- must be living under a rock. It's been all over the international news and is being compared to the [w:Pentagon Papers] released in 1971 by [w:Daniel Ellsberg]. In particular, the NY Times, Guardian UK, and Der Spiegel newspapers have all published detailed analyses of the document dump. In addition, BoingBoing has a Q&A with wikileaks volunteer Jacob Appelbaum and NYU's Jay Rosen has written some interesting and thought-provoking thoughts over at PressThink. This is BIG folks!
Washington Post on “Top Secret America”
"The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work." So begins an investigation by the Washington Post.
"Top Secret America" is a project nearly two years in the making that describes the huge national security buildup in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.... The articles in this series and an online database at topsecretamerica.com depict the scope and complexity of the government's national security program through interactive maps and other graphics. Every data point on the Web site is substantiated by at least two public records.... The Top Secret America database was put together by compiling hundreds of thousands of public records of government organizations and private-sector companies.The chief reporters are Dana Priest, author of the 2003 book, The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace With America's Military, and William M. Arkin, author or co-authored more than a dozen books about the U.S. military and national security. Gary has a nice road map to the web site of information at Resource Shelf: Several New Databases From the Washington Post Investigative Series, "Top-Secret America". Continue reading
Leaked CIA document and the war on Wikileaks
Glenn Greenwald has just published a subtle article about a leaked CIA document and the increasingly aggressive war being waged on Wikileaks, the site that anonymously publishes leaked sensitive governmental, corporate, organizational, and religious documents. The first part of the article deals with the leaked document, entitled "CIA Red Cell Special Memorandum; Afghanistan: Sustaining West European Support for the NATO-led Mission. Why Counting on Apathy Might Not Be Enough. (PDF)" (and also uploaded to the Internet Archive for the IAdeposit project). This hubristic document announces "Public Apathy Enables Leaders to Ignore Voters" and describes PR strategies for shoring up public support for the continued war in Afghanistan. But the more interesting and disturbing part of Greenwald's story concerns Wikileaks. Greenwald interviewed Julian Assange, the Australian citizen who is WikiLeaks' Editor. The interview shed light on Wikileaks' work in exposing the secret activities of governments and corporations and also how the US and other governments are targeting Wikileaks as an enemy of the state and trying to destroy the organization -- for more see last week's NY Times article "Pentagon Sees a Threat From Online Muckrakers" and Wikileaks own editorial on the subject.
...In 2008, the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Center prepared a secret report -- obtained and posted by WikiLeaks -- devoted to this website and detailing, in a section entitled "Is it Free Speech or Illegal Speech?", ways it would seek to destroy the organization. It discusses the possibility that, for some governments, not merely contributing to WikiLeaks, but "even accessing the website itself is a crime," and outlines its proposal for WikiLeaks' destruction. Greenwald also points out the proposed law in Iceland which would provide meaningful whistle blower protection to groups like Wikileaks. As the Pentagon report put it: "the governments of China, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Vietnam and Zimbabwe" have all sought to block access to or otherwise impede the operations of WikiLeaks, and the U.S. Government now joins that illustrious list of transparency-loving countries in targeting them. ...The need for independent leaks and whistle-blowing exposures is particularly acute now because, at exactly the same time that investigative journalism has collapsed, public and private efforts to manipulate public opinion have proliferated. This is exemplified by the type of public opinion management campaign detailed by the above-referenced CIA Report, the Pentagon's TV propaganda program exposed in 2008, and the ways in which private interests covertly pay and control supposedly "independent political commentators" to participate in our public debates and shape public opinion.I highly recommend reading Greenwald's article. It's eye-opening on so many levels. The war on WikiLeaks and why it matters. Glenn Greenwald. Salon.com. March 27, 2010. [HT @JeremyScahill!] Continue reading
Obama issues executive order on classified national security information
Yesterday, President Obama issued an executive order on classified national security information that declared that “No information may remain classified indefinitely.” The order is “part of a sweeping overhaul of the executive branch’s system for protecting classified national security information,” which includes overturning Executive Order 13292 of March 25, 2003. That order, put in place by President George W. Bush, allowed the leader of the intelligence community to veto decisions by an interagency panel to declassify information. This order also establishes a new National Declassification Center at the National Archives (sec3.7) which, according to the AP is expected to speed the declassification of “more than 400 million pages of Cold War-era documents” that are currently backlogged. For more background on the process for putting together this executive order, check out the National Security Archive's Unredacted Blog (also love their Document Friday!) [Thanks Think Progress!] Continue reading
4th edition of “On their own terms” govt information lexicon published
Susan Maret, professor in the School of Library & Information Science at San José State University and co-author of Government Secrecy: Classic and Contemporary Readings, gave us a heads up that the 4th edition of On Their Terms govt information lexicon has just been published. She kindly sent a PDF of the lexicon which we've attached below. Check it out, it's amazing the breadth of govt information described in the lexicon which represents
..."a virtual seed catalog to federal informationally-driven procedures, policies, and practices involving among other matters, the information life cycle, record keeping, ownership over information, collection and analysis of intelligence information, security classification categories and markings, censorship, citizen right-to-know, deception, propaganda, secrecy, technology, surveillance, threat, national security, and forms of warfare."and the introduction is quite a good read too!! Thanks for the heads-up Susan! (btw, if you're reading this, we'd love to invite you to be a guest blogger sometime on FGI. you know where to find us if you're interested :-))
Since the first edition in 2005, On Their on Terms has reported language that reflects the scope of U.S. information policy. Now in its fourth edition, the Lexicon features new terms that further chronicle the federal narrative of information and its relationship to national security, intelligence operations, and freedom of information, privacy, technology, and surveillance as well as types of war, institutionalized secrecy, and censorship. This fourth edition of the Lexicon emphasizes the historical aspects of U.S. information policy and associated programs in that it is a testament to the information politics of the Bush-Cheney years; there is also a look back to historical agency recordkeeping practices such as the U.S. Army’s computerized personalities database , serendipitously discovered in a 1972 congressional hearing on military surveillance of civilians1 and the 1970s DoD program Project Camelot , which has parallels with Project Minerva efforts to recruit academics.2 Including these programs alongside contemporary federal information initiatives and public policy critiques furthers the “history of ‘govermentality,’ ” an inquiry put forth by Michel Foucault (1994,1978: 219-222) that examines the “ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses, and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power.” This latter thought suggests an active, genealogical role for FOIA researchers, archivists, historians, information professionals, and public interest groups in not only rescuing lost histories but integrating findings into existing understanding of federal information practices. Throughout the Lexicon , links have been verified and replaced. However, in certain instances, Web pages and documents have been removed by the issuing federal agency. Considering the historical and archival importance of this information, links to the original source at the Wayback Machine is included.Continue reading
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