lix blog

The same day when Julian Assange was arrested, the U.S. Department of State announced the “UNESCO World Press Freedom Day 2011“.

It reads like a sarcastic joke by the Department of Irony.

The United States is pleased to announce that it will host UNESCO’s World Press Freedom Day event in 2011, from May 1 – May 3 in Washington, D.C. UNESCO is the only UN agency with the mandate to promote freedom of expression and its corollary, freedom of the press…

The United States places technology and innovation at the forefront of its diplomatic and development efforts. New media has empowered citizens around the world to report on their circumstances, express opinions on world events, and exchange information in environments sometimes hostile to such exercises of individuals’ right to freedom of expression. At the same time, we are concerned about the determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and to restrict the free flow of information.

… perfect timing!

Julian Assange has been arrested.
Now the American Government is looking for a Judas that has to be found to licitly crucify Julian.

Turns out that the international banking system acts in assignment of the US administration.

Wikileaks began on Sunday November 28th publishing 251,287 leaked United States embassy cables, the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain. The documents will give people around the world an unprecedented insight into US Government foreign activities.

The cables, which date from 1966 up until the end of February this year, contain confidential communications between 274 embassies in countries throughout the world and the State Department in Washington DC. 15,652 of the cables are classified Secret.

The embassy cables will be released in stages over the next few months. The subject matter of these cables is of such importance, and the geographical spread so broad, that to do otherwise would not do this material justice.

The cables show the extent of US spying on its allies and the UN; turning a blind eye to corruption and human rights abuse in “client states”; backroom deals with supposedly neutral countries; lobbying for US corporations; and the measures US diplomats take to advance those who have access to them.

This document release reveals the contradictions between the US’s public persona and what it says behind closed doors – and shows that if citizens in a democracy want their governments to reflect their wishes, they should ask to see what’s going on behind the scenes.

Every American schoolchild is taught that George Washington – the country’s first President – could not tell a lie. If the administrations of his successors lived up to the same principle, today’s document flood would be a mere embarrassment. Instead, the US Government has been warning governments — even the most corrupt — around the world about the coming leaks and is bracing itself for the exposures.

The full set consists of 251,287 documents, comprising 261,276,536 words (seven times the size of “The Iraq War Logs”, the world’s previously largest classified information release).

The cables cover from 28th December 1966 to 28th February 2010 and originate from 274 embassies, consulates and diplomatic missions.

Here’s a snapshot: cablegate.wikileaks.org.zip for download.

“The red liquid thrust out of his arteries to interfuse with the pureness of the unwritten.

Meanwhile the knocking lessened slowly and finally extracted into a ray to emit the stellar dust of love.”

[Update on P0rno-Scanner]
TSA searches menstruating woman:

“These new scans are so horrible that if you are wearing something unusual (like a piece of cloth on your panties) then you will be subjected to a search where a woman repeatedly has to check your “groin” while another woman watches on (two in my case – they were training in a new girl – awesome). So please, please, tell the ladies not to wear their liners at the airport (I didn’t even have an insert in). I’m a strong, confident woman; I’m an Army vet (which is why those camo liners crack me up), I work full-time and go to graduate school full-time, I have a wonderful husband, and I don’t take any nonsense from anyone. I don’t dramatize, and I don’t exaggerate. I’m trying to give you a sense of who I am so you won’t think that this is a plea for attention, or a jumping on the bandwagon about the recent TSA proposed boycott. I just don’t want another woman to have to go through the “patting down” because she didn’t know that her glad-rag would be a matter of national security.”

Link: Gladrags Gab Blog

“Escaped out of the marble mold suddenly the rain drops fell like gravel from his eyes. But still. He got a glimpse of the rays that leaked from the lemon fruit.

Whereafter he decided to kill the kid that has never been born.”

“The young boy stared into the lemontree where the white sparkling flowers outpoured their tears and turned into yellow fruits filled of angels.

The boy was about to turn into marble when a lovely voice liberated his soul.”

… they did it again. As mentioned in my blog beginning of August, TSA continues to illegally store pictures of scanned people.
See: Gizmodo.

Another example on what ridiculous forms the “war on terror” gains. Meanwhile the “Nackscanner” or “nude scanner” has been renamed into “Porno scanner”. To prepare your kids for the upcoming age of naked citizenship, get this guide:

What will we see next? Pregnant women that try to hide it from their husband, being disclosed by a TSA agent while passing through the security check? Detained fakirs and Sikhs because of the nails in their stomach and dagger in the turban?

Compete by finding your 0wn way to opt-out (e.g. with a creased shirt?) – Haha! Or maybe a “wet t-shirt contest flashmob” at your airport?

… get yourself a shirt and stay tuned! 😉

Marcus Boon: “I am uploading my new book onto the internet. Yes, I am. The book is not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of commodification … OK, I’m copying again, from the introductory lines of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “Unpacking My Library”, which media theorist Julian Dibbell riffed on in his dawn of the downloading age essay “Unpacking My Record Collection”. Those two excellent essays were concerned with the figure of the collector. But what concerns me here is, to use the title of another of Benjamin’s essays, “the author as producer”, and the act of donating a book, “my book”, to a library, if library is the right word for the place where my text is being deposited.

While I was finishing In Praise of Copying, I became interested in the circulation of texts. I wondered whether it was hypocritical to write a book that celebrates copying, while still slapping a copyright notice to the front of the book. There are easy ways out of this: I could say that what I’m doing is presenting a critique of contemporary society but that obviously I have to work pragmatically within existing economic conditions, even though I disapprove of them. There’s some truth to that. In fact, the copyright notice to many academic books is in the name of the publisher, not the author. When I talked to people at Harvard, they pointed out to me that in signing a book contract, I had already signed away most of the rights to the book, and that it was therefore more honest for the publisher to claim and look after the copyright. I could have requested that I retain the copyright, as I did with my first HUP published book, but I thought there was something persuasive about their argument. And that I don’t need to own the copyright in order to feel some sense of agency in relation to what I’d written.

But I still wanted to explicitly allow people to make copies of my book about copying. I asked Harvard whether this was possible and they said yes. As of October 1, 2010, the book has been available from Harvard’s website as a pdf, free to download, but with a creative commons license that restricts the uses of the copy. I wrote the following text to accompany the web page:

“Given the topic and stance of In Praise of Copying, I wanted the text to participate openly in the circulation of copies that we see flourishing all around us. I approached Harvard to discuss options and they agreed to make the book available as a PDF online. The PDF is freely available to anyone who wants to download it, but it does come with a creative commons license that sets some intelligent restrictions on what you can do with it. Although generosity is a wonderful thing, this isn’t especially intended as a utopian gesture towards a world in which everything is free. It’s recognition of the way in which copies of texts circulate today, a circulation in which the physical object known as the book that is for sale in the marketplace has an important but hardly exclusive role. A PDF of a book is not an illegitimate copy of a legitimate original but participates in other kinds of circulation that have long flourished around the book-commodity: the library book; the photocopy or hand-written copy; the book browsed, borrowed or shared. We all know these modes of circulation exist, as they continue to do today with online text archives.

Perhaps these online archives just make visible and more “at hand” something that was happening invisibly, more distantly, but continuously before. At the same time, something new is going on. The physical book today is one copy, one iteration of a text among others. What that means for publishers, writers, readers and other interested parties is something that we are working out – on this webpage and elsewhere.”

Harvard University Press Catalog

(2010 by lx CC BY-SA 3.0)