Wikileak’s Julian Assange cancels IRE appearance amid manhunt; Did he lie on Twitter?

(Updates:

– As it turns out, Assange did not appear at the IRE showcase panel in any form, except as mugshot image on the Daily Beast story on a projector screen. He and Wikileaks did dominate the discussion, with most of the panelists agreeing that Wikileaks was, in theory, a good idea, but not comfortable with the vetting process and agenda of the operation. Valerie Plame said, to the laughter of the reporters in attendance, that sometimes secrecy is good.

With respect to the esteemed members of the panel who did show up (James Risen of the NYT also was a no-show on the advice of his lawyer), I think everyone was a little letdown with Assange’s absence. I don’t think there was any new ground covered in terms of the “risks and rewards” of anonymous sources…but hearing reps. from the traditional media debate Assange over Wikileaks’ motives and methods would’ve been very illuminating.

I misspelled Horvit’s name because I trusted but didn’t verify Daily Beast’s spelling. Also, maybe the tweet was not a flat-out lie. Just a very sly truth. Still, having to second guess what really is the “truth” still undermines Wikileaks’ ideal for transparency. Also, I think that if Assange’s arrest is an inevitability…there would’ve been no better place to get it over with than at a conference full of the most righteous journalists)

Bummer…I can’t be the only one who thought that despite the other luminaries on IRE’s showcase panel on anonymous sources, most of the interest would be the super-secretive Wikileaks founder.

According to the Daily Beast, IRE executive director Mark Horvik Horvit said Assange canceled “within the last several days as a result of unspecificed ‘security concerns.'” The Beast also points out that last week, at a New York panel, Assange only appeared via Skype from Australia, citing his lawyer’s recommendation that he not go back to the U.S.

So did Assange ever intend to show up at IRE? When did IRE know, and if they knew beforehand and were asked about it, were they obliged to tell the truth as soon as they knew it or feign ignorance for Assange (it’s possible this is old news for the other IRE attendees, but I hadn’t heard it until reading it on the Daily Beast)?

Apparently, the Twitter Wikileaks account, on the morning of Assange’s scheduled IRE appearance, tweeted “Super panel tonight in Vegas with Julian Assange, Valerie Plame & Scott Risen | IRE10“. So, if Horvit is to be believed, the wikileaks account is either not connected to Assange at all, or is being used as tool for deliberate misinformation.

I understand Assange’s need to cover his tracks, but it strikes me as very bad precedent for Wikileaks, which purports itself to be the brave dispenser of unfiltered truth, to use its official channel of communication to tell a flat-out lie (on second thought, maybe it’s not a lie. It’s still a “super panel”, and maybe Assange will show up via skype?). Many governments tell lies based on such justifications of self-preservation.

And besides, what’s the point of sullying your reputation, even if only in a tweet? Does he really think the military manhunters would be so easily thrown off the trail, as if their only investigative tools were looking at someone’s twitter account? Oh wait, this is the same military that let a 22-year-old download hundreds of thousands of top-secret files because he bypassed their security measures by lip-syncing to Lady Gaga.

(*piteous cry*)

Wired had an interesting folo today, about suspect Bradley Manning’s crisis of conscience. According to his chat logs with ex-hacker Adrian Lamo, Manning claimed that Assange offered him a position at Wikileaks…which would go against several tweets and statements by Wikileaks and Assange.

But Wired’s lead reporter on this case, felon ex-hacker Kevin Poulsen, should not be trusted, according to Wikileaks. But Wikileaks, as far as we know at this point, is not always telling the (whole) truth in its tweets…

  

Marina Abramović’s Top 50 Time Hogs; (Women sit around a lot)

OK, now it’s time to arrange the participants in the MOMA’s “Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present” Flickr set by number of minutes each person stared at Abramovic. The Paco dude who went about a dozen times is the only person, apparently, to have stayed the whole day. It’s interesting to read the comments on the portraits of the long-suffering sitters; some people are understandably pissed to have been behind them.

Surprisingly, women made up the vast majority of the top 50 sitters; 37 by my quick visual count. Just a statistical fluke? Does the MOMA have a higher base of female visitors? Did females identify more with the female artist?

(One of Marina’s photos is mistakenly labeled, which is why my script placed her in this list…too lazy to fix right now)

See my list of the top 200 most popular portraits from Marina’s exhibit.

Photos by Marco Anelli. © 2010 Marina Abramović

  

Lady Gaga Beats DoD: re Bradley Manning, the Alleged Wikileaks/Collateral-Murder Leaker

Wired’s Threat Level blog blows open the door on the Wikileaks/Collateral Murder mystery by naming a suspect: SPC Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Md., who apparently had top-secret access and was arrested two weeks ago:

Manning was turned in late last month by a former computer hacker with whom he spoke online. In the course of their chats, Manning took credit for leaking a headline-making video of a helicopter attack that Wikileaks posted online in April. The video showed a deadly 2007 U.S. helicopter air strike in Baghdad that claimed the lives of several innocent civilians.

He said he also leaked three other items to Wikileaks: a separate video showing the notorious 2009 Garani air strike in Afghanistan that Wikileaks has previously acknowledged is in its possession; a classified Army document evaluating Wikileaks as a security threat, which the site posted in March; and a previously unreported breach consisting of 260,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables that Manning described as exposing “almost criminal political back dealings.”

Wired.com could not confirm whether Wikileaks received the supposed 260,000 classified embassy dispatches.

OK, if the charges are true, then this is the most alarming part of the story. Someone, who at the time of the alleged crime was barely old enough to legally drink, was able to copy volumes of top secret files because the military has an IT policy weaker than your Starbucks’ does. The famed air-gap – having servers completely disconnected from the Internet – was overcome by a kid who copied files onto a CD labeled “something like ‘Lady Gaga’”:

Manning had access to two classified networks from two separate secured laptops: SIPRNET, the Secret-level network used by the Department of Defense and the State Department, and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System which serves both agencies at the Top Secret/SCI level.

The networks, he said, were both “air gapped” from unclassified networks, but the environment at the base made it easy to smuggle data out.

“I would come in with music on a CD-RW labeled with something like ‘Lady Gaga’, erase the music then write a compressed split file,” he wrote. “No one suspected a thing and, odds are, they never will.”

“[I] listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’ while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history,” he added later. ”Weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis… a perfect storm.”

Even worse, he did this undetected until he was foolish enough, reportedly, to talk to an FBI informant, ex-hacker Adrian Lamo (who Wired profiled last month).

And hey, what about that time when WikiLeaks released footage of U.S. gunships gunning down civilians and the military said they couldn’t confirm it as totally real because they had lost their own copy? According to Wired’s account, Manning tells Lamo specifically where he got the video…why don’t we see if it’s still there?

“At first glance it was just a bunch of guys getting shot up by a helicopter,” Manning wrote of the video. “No big deal … about two dozen more where that came from, right? But something struck me as odd with the van thing, and also the fact it was being stored in a JAG officer’s directory. So I looked into it.”

Read More http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/leak/#ixzz0qB1oYOCN

One last point. The Wired article is pretty amazing in its detail; it’s pretty obvious that Lamo divulged the case to Wired in such a way that they felt comfortable working on it for a couple weeks before breaking the story. But, as @Wikileaks insinuates, how come no mention in the article of the relationship between the Wired author, ex-black-hat Kevin Lee Poulsen and Lamo…if any? Is this photo of Poulson and Lamo just a random-pose-with-a-celeb-hacker-on-the-street?

More from the NYT Lede.

  

The Most Viewed Portraits: Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present, the MOMA

Thought it’d be fun to see the 200 most viewed portraits on the MOMA’s “Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present” Flickr set. So I wrote a scraper to collect each portrait’s stats, including page views. A number of celebrities participated in the marathon performance art exhibit, including Sharon Stone, Rufus Wainright, and Bjork. Other top people include the guy who showed up a dozen times. And children and pretty females.

Photos by Marco Anelli. © 2010 Marina Abramović


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NYT: U.S. Funding Both the Afghan Government, and an Afghan Warlord Who Undermines It

An illuminating front-page story today by the Times’ Dexter Filkins, on how the U.S./NATO strategy to mesh Special Forces with the locals has led to a situation in which millions of dollars – monthly – is given to a Matiullah Khan, a warlord who fights the Taliban, yet threatens the official government that the U.S. hopes will bring stability to the region.

Khan is billed as a “lesser of two evils” and is providing security through a Taliban-thick region. But how will this strategy differ in its end-game than the short-term-gain, long-term-loss strategies we’ve used in the past to stabilize Afghanistan?

In little more than two years, Mr. Matiullah, an illiterate former highway patrol commander, has grown stronger than the government of Oruzgan Province, not only supplanting its role in providing security but usurping its other functions, his rivals say, like appointing public employees and doling out government largess. His fighters run missions with American Special Forces officers, and when Afghan officials have confronted him, he has either rebuffed them or had them removed.

“Oruzgan used to be the worst place in Afghanistan, and now it’s the safest,” Mr. Matiullah said in an interview in his compound here, where supplicants gather each day to pay homage and seek money and help. “What should we do? The officials are cowards and thieves.”

Deeper into the story, Filkins reports suspicions that Matiullah and the other U.S. backed-warlords are suspected of protecting the opium trade, and even worse, secretly boosting the Taliban so that the chaos – and thus the need for Matiullah’s services – continues:

A former senior official in the Kandahar government, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution by Mr. Matiullah and the Karzais, said he believed that Mr. Matiullah was facilitating the movement of drugs along the highway to Kandahar.

“I was never able to look inside those trucks, but if I had, I am fairly certain what I would have found,” he said.

Despite his relationship to the Special Forces, Mr. Matiullah has been suspected of playing a double game with the Taliban. Asked about Mr. Matiullah earlier this year, an American military officer in Kabul admitted that Mr. Matiullah was believed to have a relationship with insurgents. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing intelligence matters.

Hopefully, this is just a phase, with the happy ending being that the shadow government set up by Matiullah is gently, but doggedly nudged with American carrots and sticks to merge with the official, legitimate one as Afghanistan stabilizes. Because we’ve learned from the last time we backed a charismatic insurgent in Afghanistan, right? Right?

  

Ron Paul and his family

For as interested I was in Ron Paul during his plucky, unsuccessful 2008 presidential bid, I’ve been far less up-to-speed on his son Rand Paul, who stands a greater chance of winning and impacting American politics from a Kentucky Senate position.

That said, I loved reading about the family dynamics in this New York Times profile, and it reminded me why I respected Ron Paul even if I could never be confident that his policies would work at all on a national scale:

In keeping with their position as the First Family of Libertarianism, the Pauls of Lake Jackson, Tex., did not have many rules around their home.

“Behave yourself and be polite” is how Representative Ron Paul describes his regulatory philosophy about rearing five children. Mr. Paul, a Republican, and his wife of 53 years, Carol, never believed in assigned chores or mandates.

They did not give out allowances, which they viewed as a parental version of a government handout. They did not believe in strict curfews; Mr. Paul says that unintended consequences — like speeding home to beat the clock — can result from excessive meddling from a central authority.

I’m not a parent, but it’s hard to imagine any parent being strongly against the ideals of the Paulian parenting philosophy, in principle. So the implications of how the Pauls ran their family is a microcosm, perhaps, of how their policies might and might not work for the country as a whole: what works well in middle-class Texas (the NYT describes the neighborhood they’ve lived in, since 1968, as “where the streets are named for trees, flowers and fauna (the Pauls live on Blossom)“) may not be practical in Chicago or Fresno or New York City.

Still, I admire how Ron Paul strongly practiced what he preached: a conservative Christian who not only hasn’t been caught in sexual scandal, a military man who wants to cut the military-industrial complex, and a principled man who allows his intellectual principles overrule his personal moral proclivities. Does any other exist in our current political system?

This clip of him debating the War on Drugs on the Morton Downey Jr. show, a talk show that looks like how Jerry Springer would run the Newshour, is what piqued my interest in Ron Paul. If you watched it on mute, you’d think the smug, squarely-dressed elderly man was lecturing the crowd of angry, pot-smoking college kids on the dangers of drugs.

Quite the opposite:

The full segment of the show is just a wondrous thing to watch, entertaining, thought-provoking, and awesome overall 80’ness. Can you think of any contemporary U.S. politician being told, by the host, that he deserves to be puked on, and then called a white, elitist potatohead, and then respond by not only NOT walking out in anger, but in complete sentences with multi-syllabic words? (Chuck Rangel makes a cameo, but only by phone)

I don’t know enough about Rand Paul, or his opponent, to know who would be better for the Kentucky Senate seat (my first guess is that he doesn’t have the intellectual rigor and commitment and wisdom, yet, of his father)…but the thoughful, side-burns-styled Ron Paul of the 80s (who doesn’t seem to have changed much in policies since then) couldn’t be the worst thing this country’s had in its esteemed Senate.

  

“Bruce Nauman: Days,” a Sound Sculpture at the MOMA; I don’t get it

Bruce Nauman: Days at the MOMA

How does the Museum of Modern Art follow up on the success of the incredibly popular (I found it a little bland, but it was sold out almost every day I went) Tim Burton exhibit (the 3rd highest attendance among MOMA exhibits of all time)? By putting what I’m betting will be the least attended of recent MOMA exhibits: Bruce Nauman’s Days, a “sound scuplture” that consists of recorded voices saying the days of the week.

The above picture is not of the incomplete installation of the exhibit. That is the exhibit. I took some video to save everyone else a trip to the MOMA’s third floor:

I don’t claim to be much of an connoisseur, but this strikes me as an exhibit that could’ve been done with headphones. Or maybe the third floor bathrooms while people defecate. I think most people can get their fill of disconnected voices repeating the menial at their average airport.

Luckily, the guards get to wear ear plugs. Or else the MOMA might have had a rash of workplace violence incidents on their hands:
Bruce Nauman: Days at the MOMA

From the MOMA webpage:

A recent addition to the Museum’s collection, Bruce Nauman’s Days (2009) was created for, and debuted at, the 2009 Venice Biennale, where the artist represented the United States with the solo exhibition Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens. Days is a “sound sculpture” consisting of a continuous stream of seven voices reciting the days of the week in random order. Fourteen suspended speakers are installed in two rows with one voice emanating from each pair of speakers as the visitor passes between them. There are men’s voices and women’s voices, old and young. Some speak swiftly, others with pause, each with his or her own cadence. The collection of distinctive voices produces a chorus—at times cacophonous, at others, resonant—and creates a sonic cocoon that envelops the visitor. The work invokes both the banality and the profundity of the passing of each day, and invites reflection on how we measure, differentiate, and commemorate time.

The stereo box was the most interesting and aesthetically pleasant feature of the exhibit:
Bruce Nauman: Days - Sound Sculpture at the MOMA

Bruce Nauman: Days - Sound Sculpture at the MOMA