t byfield on Fri, 24 Dec 2010 09:10:07 +0100 (CET)


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<nettime> goofy leftists sniping at WiReD 2.0: WL and timelines


Newer nettimers can see this thread on the Well for the arcane context of 
the subject line: <http://www.fundacion.telefonica.com/es/at/well.html>. 

I'm forwarding the excerpt below from the Firedog Lake blog not to endorse it
but, rather, to provide a practical example of an alternative to bogus debates
about whether or not WL achieves the success criterion of being Authentically
Deleuzian[TM] or whatever flavor one happens to like. It seems like those kinds
of pseudo-debates are symptomatic of a scene (in the tawdriest Freudian sense)
that's plainly obvious -- namely, WL as some sort of emotional litmus test.

Only yesterday or so, Bank of America registered 435 exec-naming *sucks and
*blows domains under .com, .net, and .org (but not .info or .co). We knew they
did, but I take this mass-registration as a quantitative sign that *they either
know or don't know* what WL might 'know.' That uncertainty is much more pointed
than banging on about whether JA is "Deleuzian": the professionalization of
precarity.

First, came the chorus chanting "we knew all this already, there's nothing to
see here, move along": they bear a certain family resemblance to, say, the sort
of premature microfascists who leap out into intersections and start directing
traffic at the first sign of a blackout. Then came the reaction of zombie
institutions stirred to pseudo-life -- the USG, Paypal, Mastercard, Visa, and
not least B of A -- hell-bent on crushing anything that smelled like it might
be leaking. Then came the leakalikes busily setting up localized copycat sites
(Brussels, Balkans, Indo, etc.): they could be legit, for all anyone knows, but
they seem a tad too eager to usher in a near-future metaghetto of
disinformation and honeypots. Then came the above-mentioned "IS!!!" vs "IS
NOT!!!" crowd. (Disclosure: I side with the former, if only because they tend
to gesture in the direction of potential, whereas the latter naysayers seem
like a bunch of toxico-scholastic trolls.) And last but not least come the
writers... In one corner, we have bruces, who's graced us with almost 6,000
words showing-not-telling that he's totally ambivalent but, in the absence of
any actual thesis, is nevertheless willing to crib his zero-knowledge of the
Cypherpunks list from an early WiReD article; but, in the other corner there's
no one, because who'd be so rash to disagree with bruces himself? (It's not
like you could condemn anyone at all for having better things to do -- say,
alphabetizing their spices -- than wade through the mayhem of the Cypherpunks
archives, if there even is an archive at this point.) The point -- which Felix
put so well -- is that we don't know where this is going. 

As flawed as the Firedog Lake chronology below may or may not be -- and I
honestly don't know -- it at least aims to go ever so slightly beyond a first
draft of punditry. And, further, to begin to speculate on something much more
concrete than where it's going: instead, where it's been. This is important,
because the International Man of Mystery cult that the media has built up
around JA is rubbish. He can't break wind without a dozen intelligence agencies
knowing about it -- and that's been true for a while. One needn't attribute a
monolithic agenda to the "governments" displeased with WL to trust that
somewhere, someone was watching him. And that was before he made the template
into an international headline. Now that he's done so, *leaks will be a very,
very messy business. But it isn't quite right to say this is nothing new;
instead, it's more accurate to say that this is something very, very old. For a
while now, it's felt like we were drifting vaguely in the direction of a new
'Middle Ages'; now that feels much more palpable. On a certain level, it's not
that complicated: it's a world where we know that we don't know.

The non-chronology above omits a few ~actors for various reasons. First, the
singular, seminal figure of John Young, because he's spent as much time as
anyone plumbing these abysmal depths: hassling him about his take would feel a
bit like pointing out that there's a smudge on his face right there, no, there
-- in a wilderness of mirrors. And, second, Anonymous, because, like them or
not, you gotta respect them for being the FIRST!!! chthonic net.deity. It was
an identity waiting to happen in a Vingean sort of way -- just like WL.

Cheers,
T
-

<http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2010/12/23/bradley-manning-and-the-convenient-memories-of-adrian-lamo/>

[29]Bradley Manning and the Convenient Memories of Adrian Lamo

   By: [30]Jane Hamsher Thursday December 23, 2010 9:48 am

   So far every known piece of evidence against Bradley Manning comes from
   one source, Adrian Lamo, a hacker who was institutionalized by the
   police three weeks before he alleges Manning contacted him and
   confessed to turning over materials to Wikileaks.  There are many
   inconsistencies in Lamo's many stories, as Marcy Wheeler has
   documented, yet the normally excellent Charlie Savage lets Lamo serve
   as sole source for a highly dubious story in the pages of [35]the New
   York Times:

   Wired magazine has published [36]excerpts from logs of online chats
   between Mr. Lamo and Private Manning. But the sections in which Private
   Manning is said to detail contacts with Mr. Assange are not among them.
   Mr. Lamo described them from memory in an interview with The Times, but
   he said he could not provide the full chat transcript because the
   [37]F.B.I. had taken his hard drive, on which it was saved.

   FDL has constructed a [38]timeline of the events surrounding Bradley
   Manning, Julian Assange and Adrian Lamo.  To say that Lamo's story does
   not hold water would be an understatement:

   [39]From the FDL Bradley Manning/Wikileaks Timeline:

   April 28
     * Adrian Lamo [40]involuntarily committed to mental facility by the
       police

   May 7
     * Adrian Lamo discharged from mental hospital

   May 20
     * Wired Magazine reports on [41]Adrian Lamo's involuntary psychiatric
       hold

   May 26
     * Bradley Manning is taken into custody, per Wired Magazine

   May 27
     * Adrian Lamo turns over his entire chat log with Manning to Wired

   May 29
     * Bradley Manning actually taken into custody, per his [42]official
       charge document

   June 6

     * Wired Magazine [43]reports the arrest of Manning

   June 9
     * [44]John Cook of Yahoo News asks Lamo to provide a portion of their
       chats; Lamo says he will have to check with his lawyer

   June 10
     * Wired [45]posts the heavily redacted version of the chats
     * Washington Post's Ellen Nakashima reports Lamo also turned over
       entire chat log to them, and [46]also publishes excerpts

   June 11
     * Wired [47]reports that Wikileaks is hiring a lawyer for Manning,
       and that Julian Assange has asked Lamo for a copy of the chats to
       assist in his defense.  Lamo responds that "Private Manning's
       attorney can get them by discovery like everyone else."

   June 13
     * Comment appears in [48]Xeni Jardin Boing Boing article, alleging
       that Wired Magazine reporter and Lamo "worked their target, Bradley
       Manning, for days -- in co-operation with the FBI and US Army
       CID,"  classic "COINTELPRO tactics."
     * Wired tells CJR they did not even find out Manning's name until May
       27, [49]after he had already been arrested on May 26, therefore
       there could have been no collusion.

   June 18
     * Wired[50] tells Glenn Greenwald that they published all of the
       chats that Lamo turned over to them, with the exception of "Manning
       discussing personal matters that aren't clearly related to his
       arrest, or apparently sensitive government information."
     * Greenwald [51]compares Wired's published chats with the Washington
       Post's, and finds there are things that are neither "personal
       matters" nor "sensitive government information," which Wired
       nonetheless withheld.

   June 19
     * [52]Boing-Boing receives an allegedly more complete version of the
       alleged Lamo/Manning chats, which were allegedly given from Lamo to
       Assange when he had a change of heart.

   July 6
     * Wired [53]reports that Lamo says he turned Manning in because he
       was concerned over the 260,000 cables.  But as Marcy Wheeler points
       out, the passage they quote-and its context-doesn't appear in the
       [54]IM logs Wired originally reproduced.
     * The quote conveniently appears in [55]the subsequent Boing Boing
       chat log
     * Bradley Manning charged.  Documents say he was taken into custody
       on May 29 and not May 26 as Wired reported

   December 15
     * Lamo [56]tells Charlie Savage of references to Julian Assange in
       his chats with Manning, which don't appear in the Wired excerpts,
       either.  Lamo says he no longer has access to chats because the FBI
       seized his hard drive.
     * Instead of asking Lamo to go back to Wired or the Washington Post
       and get copies, Savage prints the allegations without question.

   For more on the inconsistencies on Lamo's stories, see Marcy Wheeler's
   posts [57]here and [58]here.

   Suffice to say that it is very convenient that at a time when the
   government is trying desperately to make a case against Julian Assange
   and prove he induced Bradley Manning to turn over the documents to
   Wikileaks, Adrian Lamo suddenly "remembers" that his chats with Manning
   contain details of a physical hand-off of a disk.

   And instead of asking Lamo to go back to Wired, or the Washington Post,
   and get copies of the chat transcripts he gave them, the New York Times
   says "no problem, we'll just publish this convenient new information
   based on the recollections of someone who was in a mental institution
   two weeks before all this happened."

   Charlie Savage's article says that Manning is being detained in very
   difficult conditions which are designed  to get him to implicate Julian
   Assange.  Meanwhile, all the known evidence against Manning comes from
   Lamo's chat logs, which both Wired AND the Washington Post refuse to
   publish.

   Heaven knows when Lamo will need to "remember" something else, I
   suppose.

<...>

  29. http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2010/12/23/bradley-manning-and-the-convenient-memories-of-adrian-lamo/
  30. http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/author/Jane-2/
<...>
  35. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/16/world/16wiki.html?_r=1&ref=charliesavage
  36. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/wikileaks-chat/
  37. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/f/federal_bureau_of_investigation/index.html?inline=nyt-org
  38. http://firedoglake.com/bradley-manning-wikileaks-timeline/
  39. http://firedoglake.com/bradley-manning-wikileaks-timeline/
  40. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/05/lamo/
  41. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/05/lamo/
  42. http://www.bradleymanning.org/3163/charge-sheet-html/
  43. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/leak/
  44. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/20100609/ts_ynews/ynews_ts2492
  45. http://firedoglake.com/bradley-manning-wikileaks-timeline/Includes%20heavily%20redacted%20version%20of%20alleged%20Manning/Lamo%20chats
  46. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/09/AR2010060906170.html
  47. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/wikileaks-to-lamo/
  48. http://www.boingboing.net/2010/06/13/video-wikileaks-foun.html#comment-809677
  49. http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/wikileaks_alleges_collusion.php?page=1
  50. http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/06/18/wikileaks
  51. http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/06/18/wikileaks
  52. http://www.boingboing.net/2010/06/19/wikileaks-a-somewhat.html
  53. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/manning-charges/
  54. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/wikileaks-chat/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired27b+%28Blog+-+27B+Stroke+6+%28Threat+Level%29%29
  55. http://www.boingboing.net/2010/06/19/wikileaks-a-somewhat.html
  56. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/16/world/16wiki.html?_r=1&ref=charliesavage
  57. http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2010/07/07/did-adrian-lamo-have-two-days-worth-of-ims-with-bradley-manning-on-may-25/
  58. http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2010/07/06/wikileaks-leaker-bradley-manning-finally-charged/


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