Posted on 12/08/2010 7:13:01 PM PST by RummyChick
Some sites have received federal court orders to cease any further online documentation of the attacks, which targeted Visa, Mastercard and other financial companies who froze Wikileaks accounts, a source close to the situation tells us.
(Excerpt) Read more at gawker.com ...
Rumor going around that credit card numbers are getting hacked, too, by some Russians.
That's nothing new.
unless the leaks include obamanation’s birth records, I am not interested.
If this guy REALLY can get secrets, he should have that!
Remarkable...Welcome to the 21st century.
It is just another step on the road to internet shut down.
Here is another leak about pimping children.
http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairballs/2010/12/wikileaks_texas_company_helped.php
“But according to the leaked document, Atmar, the Afghani interior minister, was terrified this story would catch a reporter’s ear.
He urged the US State Department to shut down a reporter he heard was snooping around, and was horrified that a rumored videotape of the party might surface.:
English Socialite offers bail money
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8187586/Julian-Assange-Jemima-Khan-comes-to-aid-of-Wikileaks-founder-in-Swedish-extradition-fight.html
Talking about it in the abstract? No. Talking about it to further coordinate future attacks? Yep, that's illegal - prosecutors use words like "conspiracy" and "incitement".
Documenting the attack is not coordinating future attacks.
What’s the line between first amendment and incitement????
I guess we would have to know what was on Encyclopedia Dramatica.
It is interesting to me how this has suddenly come to a head after Assange said he would leak documents related to a major bank..or did he actually name Bank of America.
Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969), the landmark case in this regard, said that the speech had to directly incite the "imminent lawless act" (violence in the statute that was at bar), and it had to have a likelihood that it would actually incite the criminal act, and it had to have some immediacy of inciting the criminal act.
I'm not commenting with respect to the merits of the Government's actions in this particular case - the source is Gawker after all, so who knows what the real story is - I'm just trying to describe the conditions where speech stops being free. Those are some of the conditions in the relevant case law.
If the government can demonstrate that people were using the shuttered site to actually plan specific hacks, then the law is on their side.
Oh, I should add that an enterprising prosecutor might be able to make such a case. In this instance, potential hackers might be discussing "best practices" with respect to what hacking techniques worked and which didn't. While that conversation alone wouldn't necessarily be criminal, it could go to demonstrating planning, which of course is part of a conspiracy charge.
Again, I have no idea if that actually happened in this particular case, I'm just trying to explain the possibilities.
Anarchists/socialists cause problem with help from govt, govt steps in to quash freedom in the name of saving us from A/s. This is a “false flag” leak, designed to give govts the need to save us from too much info.
Hacking is illegal. Is talking about the hack now illegal?????
By next week it will be illegl to talk about the illegality of talking about the hacking.
What about all of those sites that the jihadists go to in order to discuss their jihad???
Are they shut down?
What about the funding sources?
I wonder how many jihadists donated to Obama in his donor scam where the credit cards weren’t even verified.
I don’t have a problem with the Feds taking down a discussion between people who are actually committing a crime.
But I see this as a possible slippery slope if websites and/or posters can’t even discuss that the event has happened.
I still can’t see what the gripe is against wikileaks. They are posting documents that embarrass the wealthy, the corrupt, the powerful. So what. Saying we now can’t discuss the hacking is authoritarian.
Khan first gained notice in the United Kingdom as a young heiress, the daughter of Lady Annabel and James Goldsmith. She converted to Islam and married the retired Pakistani cricketer Imran Khan in 1995, with whom she had two sons,
the real info is passed around by IRC on private servers. If I was on the Wiki-leaks team, I would go to full-cypto mode and assume that all commo was being monitored. I don’t think you can be too careful when you are being monitored by the FBI and NSA.
Vigilante is a person who takes the law into their own hands. Vigilantism cannot happen in a civilized society. The hackers are just as much a criminal as anyone else.
Plus many lawyers are saying it would be very difficult to charge Assange with espionage. The documents he’s leaking were GIVEN to him. They landed in his lap. He had no responsibility to keep them secret. He has broken no law. Just like when the NYT published the Abu Ghraib photos and possibly cost lives of some of our soldiers and damaged American reputation. The NYT did not have a responsibility to keep those photos secret.
We do have a freedom of the press in the United States.
‘We do have a freedom of the press in the United States.’
Yes, and if Assange was a journalist, rather than an anarchist attempting to overthrow the US government, that would protect him. But he is an illegal combatant.
Do you need a special badge and license to be a real journalist? Last I checked, the 1st Amendment didn't make a person's pre-existing political beliefs a determining factor in press freedom.
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