Criminal Justice And Human Rights Law Blog

The Associated Press: Malaysia police slammed for cattle-branding women

2011-06-04T20:40:00.001-04:00

The Associated Press: Malaysia police slammed for cattle-branding women

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) — Malaysian lawyers, politicians and activists lambasted the police Saturday, accusing them of abusing their power in chaining up and marking the bodies of 30 foreign women detained for alleged prostitution.

Police raided a high-end nightclub in northern Penang state late Thursday and arrested 29 women from China and one from Vietnam, along with eight Malaysian men. Local media reported police officers went undercover at the club for a week before the raid.

It triggered an outcry after local newspapers carried photos of the women bound up with a long chain and marked with either a tick or an X on their chest and forehead.

"The police branded the detained women as though they are cattle," opposition lawmaker Teresa Kok said in a statement. "It is sickening that the police would employ such dehumanizing tactics as a show of power and moral superiority over their detainees."

Women's rights group Tenaganita said the detainees had been victimized and called for an investigation into the police conduct.

Another rights group, Lawyers for Liberty, said the police action was "very unusual and inhumane" as the women were merely suspects and not convicted of any crime.

Police have defended their action, saying the markings served as a way to identify the women.

Penang police chief Ayub Yaakob told the New Straits Times that the situation was chaotic, with the suspects trying to escape. He said police were forced to mark the women after some donned new clothes to try and blend in with other female patrons of the club.

He also said the women had wrecked many marriages and that police had received numerous complaints from wives of men who sought their services.

Obama breaks promise on Guantanamo - Rachel Maddow notes that by settling on military tribunals for Guantanamo prisoners, the Obama administration has broken the first promise it made in office.

2011-04-05T09:17:00.000-04:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Fixing the Mistake With Young Offenders - NYTimes.com

2011-04-04T16:55:00.001-04:00

Fixing the Mistake With Young Offenders - NYTimes.com

There is new evidence that state governments are finally understanding what a tragic mistake they made during the 1990s when they began trying ever larger numbers of children as adults instead of sending them to the juvenile justice system.

Prosecutors argued that harsh sentencing would protect the public from violent, youthful predators. But it has since turned out that most young people who spend time in jails and prisons are charged with nonviolent offenses. As many as half are never convicted of anything at all. In addition, research has shown that these young people are vulnerable to battery and rape at the hands of adult inmates and more likely to become violent, lifelong criminals than those who are held in juvenile custody.

A new study by the Campaign for Youth Justice, a Washington advocacy group, shows that state legislatures across the country are getting the message. In the last five years, the authors say, 15 states have passed nearly 30 pieces of legislation aimed at reversing policies that funnel a quarter of a million children into the adult justice system each year.

Ten states, including Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana and Nevada, have cut the number of offenses that get youthful offenders automatically transferred to adult courts. Three states have expanded the jurisdiction of the juvenile courts, so that children under 18 are no long automatically prosecuted as adults. And several states have limited the circumstances under which young people can be housed in adult lock-ups before or after conviction.

Momentum is building for similar reforms all across the country. For example, Nebraska is considering a bill that would give people sentenced as juveniles to life without parole an opportunity to petition for reductions.

Far too many children are still being sentenced by adult courts and confined to adult prisons. But this study shows that the tide has begun to turn.

Fox underestimates crisis in Japan

2011-03-18T09:06:00.003-04:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

A bleak future for boys in China, India and South Korea

2011-03-18T07:41:00.001-04:00

A bleak future for boys in China, India and South Korea

Just backing up a post by Marcus Roberts the other day, the Canadian Medical Association Journal has just published an article which claims that it will be decades before the natural sex-ratio is restored in parts of India, China and South Korea because of sex-selective abortion and a tradition of son preference:

In the next 20 years in large parts of China and India, there will be a 10% to 20% excess of young men because of sex selection and this imbalance will have societal repercussions, states an analysis in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

A preference for sons in China, India and South Korea combined with easy access to sex-selective abortions has led to a significant imbalance between the number of males and females born in these countries. The sex ratio at birth (SRB) – the number of boys born to every 100 girls – is consistent in human populations in which about 105 males are born to every 100 females. However, with the advent of ultrasounds that enable sex-selection, the sex ratio at birth in some cities in South Korea climbed to 125 by 1992 and is over 130 in several Chinese provinces from Henan in the north to Hainan in the south.

In 2005 in China, "it was estimated that 1.1 million excess males were born across the country and that the number of males under the age of 20 years exceeded the number of females by around 32 million," writes Professor Therese Hesketh, UCL Centre for International Health and Development, London, United Kingdom with coauthors.

In India, similar disparities exist, with sex ratios as high as 125 in Punjab, Delhi and Gujarat in the north but normal sex ratios of 105 in the southern and eastern states of Kerala and Andhra Pradesh.

"A consistent pattern in all three countries is the marked trend related to birth order and the influence of the sex of the preceding child," state the authors. If the first or second born are girls, couples will often sex select to ensure the second or third child is a boy.

The societal implications mean that a significant percentage of the male population will not be able to marry or have children because of a scarcity of women. In China, 94% of unmarried people aged 28 to 49 are male, 97% of whom have not completed high school, and there are worries the inability to marry will result in psychological issues and possibly increased violence and crime.

Policy makers in China, India and South Korea have taken some steps to address the issue, such as instituting laws forbidding fetal sex determination and selective abortion, but more can be done.

"To successfully address the underlying issue of son preference is hugely challenging and requires a multifaceted approach," state the authors.

The relaxation of China's one-child policy, especially in rural areas, could have some impact on sex ratios. But more important is to change underlying and long-standing attitudes towards son preference. Public awareness campaigns have had an impact. In South Korea and China, awareness campaigns have helped reduce the sex ratio at birth (for example, 118 in 1990 in South Korea to 109 in 2004).

"However, these incipient declines will not filter through to the reproductive age group for another two decades, and the SRBs in these countries remain high. It is likely to be several decades before the SRB in countries like India and China are within normal limits," conclude the authors.

Assange case in turmoil as accuser linked to police

2011-03-11T23:33:00.001-05:00

Image via WikipediaAssange case in turmoil as accuser linked to police

STOCKHOLM: A Swedish police officer involved in the investigation against Julian Assange over sexual assault charges knew one of the two plaintiffs in the case against the WikiLeaks founder, police have confirmed.

The admission comes after a newspaper reported that an unnamed female officer in charge of questioning the two alleged victims, who have accused Mr Assange of rape and molestation, had internet contact with one of them more than a year before the accusations surfaced last August.

Mr Assange's Swedish defence lawyer, Bjoern Hurtig, has said the revelation raises very serious concerns and described the officer's role in the investigation as ''highly inappropriate''.

Advertisement: Story continues below

The policewoman became friends with the woman referred to in court as Miss A through Sweden's Social Democratic party, the daily paper Expressen reported.

Mr Hurtig added that if it was proven that Mr Assange's first interrogation was not objective, ''then there was really no grounds for the investigation to begin with, and perhaps the whole probe needs to start over''.

The pair corresponded on the internet 16 months before the allegations were made against Mr Assange, Miss A commented on a Facebook update on the police officer's page as recently as February 10 and Miss A links to the officer's private blog from her personal page.

The woman officer is also alleged to have posted negative comments on Facebook about Mr Assange, and had voiced support for the lawyer representing the two women.

''Go Claes Borgstroem!'' she wrote in one posting last month after the women's lawyer had discussed the case on Swedish public radio, while describing Mr Assange in another post as ''the bubble that is ready to burst''.

However, the lawyer representing the alleged victims, Claes Borgstroem, said there were ''numerous faulty facts'' in the newspaper article.

''This is a minor matter. It has no impact on the case and lacks any interest for the continuation of the case,'' he said.

It previously emerged that neither of the victims wanted to press charges against Mr Assange but had instead gone to the police to find out if they could force him to undergo an HIV test after he had unprotected sex with them, despite their explicit request he use a condom.

According to reports, it was one of the officers involved in the interrogations who deemed what they had been through amounted to rape in one case and sexual molestation in another and took the matter to a prosecutor. It is unclear if the friend of the alleged victim was the police officer who reported the matter to the prosecutor.

Mr Assange, the 39-year-old Australian former hacker, is awaiting a British appeal hearing on whether he can be extradited over the allegations after a London court ruled he could be sent to Sweden.

During those proceedings, Mr Assange's lawyers blasted the Swedish judiciary and claimed the allegations were motivated by anger at WikiLeaks' publication of hundreds of thousands of secret US military and diplomatic documents. A police spokesman confirmed that the officer knew one of the plaintiffs but claims she did not interview her on August 20 last year.

Agence France-Presse

and agencies

'Jonathan voted four times in 2007'

2011-03-07T20:21:00.001-05:00

Image via Wikipedia'Jonathan voted four times in 2007'

He was only a candidate for vice president then but in 2007, Goodluck Jonathan took matters into his own hands — literally. According to US diplomatic cables leaked to the whistleblower site Wikileaks, and which were made exclusively available to us, Mr. Jonathan helped himself gain the vice presidency four years ago by voting illegally four times. The astonishing accusation against Mr. Jonathan, now a president seeking validation at the polls next month, came from Edo governor Adams Oshiomhole, in a December 2008 briefing with US diplomats.

According to Mr. Oshiomhole, as reported in the US diplomatic cables, the court ruling voiding the supposed election of the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) candidate for Edo governor and declaring Mr. Oshiomhole the legitimate winner would not have been possible without documentary evidence that, Mr. Jonathan, among others, personally rigged the election.

“Oshiomhole told poloffs (‘political officers’ at the US embassy) that it proved impossible to use forensic evidence because of the poor quality of thumbprints and that claims of intimidation also proved difficult to prove in a court of law, but documentary evidence, such as proof that the ‘vice president’ had voted four times, for example, proved decisive in the courts,” the cables revealed.

The content of the cables received an angry reaction from Aso Villa. Ima Niboro, the president's spokesperson, dismissed the claims as "stupid" and challenged anyone to come forward with evidence that linked President Jonathan with electoral malpractice. "Why should the president vote four times? Go and ask Adams Oshiomhole to come out and tell Nigerians. I can't respond to WikiLeaks," he said.

Several calls were made to Mr.Oshiomhole but both his phone numbers were unreachable. Further calls and text messages were made to Peter Okhiria, his spokesperson, but were also unreturned.

Little birds

These particular cables from US diplomats stationed in Nigeria and reporting to the State Department in Washington are among a massive trove of documents made available to NEXT in a worldwide exclusive. The documents cover a whole range of people and events in our country from as early as 2003 to the last months of the poorly President Umaru Yar’Adua, whose death in office a year ago ended a constitutional crisis and resulted in the ascent of Mr. Jonathan to the highest office in the land. The cables provide an unusually unvarnished insight into the dysfunctional and ineffectual nature of our government at all levels, the various forces pushing and pulling at the country, and the vileness and rapacity of those we have allowed to govern us. Two unnamed political officers, or “poloffs,” in US diplomatic jargon, visited the governor on Dec. 17, 2008 shortly after his legal victory. It was during that meeting that Mr. Oshiomhole made his explosive claim, as dutifully recorded by his visitors. Their cable originated from the Lagos consulate. In the cable, dated Dec. 29, 2008, Mr. Jonathan, who was vice president at the time, is said to have violated the Electoral Act by voting more than once. The law stipulates a maximum fine of N1 million or 12 months’ imprisonment for violators. At a campaign rally on Thursday, President Jonathan repeated his recent declaration that neither he nor his party had any desire to rig the coming elections. He added that he would advocate transparent elections even at the cost of losing the election.

“I am assuring Nigerians that though I am contesting, nobody must manipulate votes in my favour. Our vote is very important,” he said.

Not so secret

The vote-rigging allegations against the president are known to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), according to a highly-placed source at the Commission. The source, who did not want to be named for fear of a reprisal, revealed that a petition had been filed at INEC since 2007 in which references were made to the fact that the former vice president and other public figures voted several times. The source said that the petition did not single out President Jonathan but used him as a high profile example of the rife multiple registrations that took place in Bayelsa, Mr. Jonathan’s home state, where he had served as governor, and other states in the broader Delta region.

“There was a petition which I was aware of dated November 2007 or so,” the source told NEXT. “It was filed by a pressure group in the South-South who named several people as being complicit in multiple voting. Jonathan was one of the people mentioned.

“We get hundreds of such petitions and most of them are without merit. Also, the truth is we just don’t have the time to look into all of them.”

Local and international observers condemned the 2007 election for being heavily rigged in favour of the PDP, with some classifying it as our worst ever. Even President Yar’Adua, in his inaugural address, acknowledged as much, promising to clean things up by 2011. Several cases are still pending in court over the four-year-old election, with successful upturns recorded in Ondo, Ekiti, Edo and Osun states. Mr. Oshiomhole, who is himself a beneficiary of a successful legal challenge in Edo state, is described in the diplomatic cable as a “refreshing reminder that Nigeria possesses competent and honest leaders”.

During the visit by the US officials, the Edo State governor said that approximately 2,000 volunteers in 120 different polling stations had gone through ballots, result sheets and voter registration records to identify documentary evidence of fraud.

Double registration

A day before President Jonathan announced that “nobody must manipulate votes in my favour”, Attahiru Jega, the electoral commission chairman, revealed that several high profile individuals registered more than once in the recently completed voter registration exercise. Mr. Jega refused to divulge the names of the “high profile double registrants” but said that they could all face prosecution.

Several parties have responded angrily to Mr. Jega’s stark admission that influential Nigerians were planning to rig the forthcoming elections. Ibrahim Modibbo, a spokesperson for the Nuhu Ribadu presidential campaign, said that although the INEC chairman did not mention any names, almost all of the offenders were in the PDP.

“I don’t believe you will find ACN members in this act because we are disciplined people,” he said.

The party’s secretary, Lai Mohammed, denounced Mr. Jega’s decision to withhold the name of the culprits and demanded he publish them.

“If he has the names as he claims, what is he waiting for? He should publish their names and prosecute them,” he said.

The spokesperson for the All Nigeria People’s Party (ANPP), Emma Eneukwu, said the offenders should be taken to court,

“It is a criminal offence,” he said. “If the penalty attached to these offences are handed to the offenders, it will serve as deterrent. There is no sacred cow.

“The issue of multiple registration has been a problem in the country and until somebody is punished we cannot have transparent polls.”

The Conference of Nigeria Political Parties(CNPP) spokesman, Osita Okechukwu, challenged the electoral commission boss to publish the names.

“We challenge Jega to publish forthwith the names of those involved and prosecute them in accordance with the provisions of the Electoral Act,” he said. “He should immediately ask all the RECs (Resident Electoral Commissioners) to audit the Authentic Finger Identification System (AFIS) so that they can separate the junk and the underaged.”

PressTV - Georgia considers anti-immigrant bill

2011-03-06T17:03:00.000-05:00

PressTV - Georgia considers anti-immigrant bill

The state of Georgia's House of Representatives has passed an immigration bill known as the “Arizona copycat law,” which envisages extreme measures to be taken against undocumented immigrants.

The legislation, known as House Bill 87, cleared the House by a vote of 113-56 on Thursday, The Newnan Times-Herald reported.

The bill, sponsored by the Republican Representative Matt Ramsey, would require employers to verify workers' legal status using a federal database system called “E-Verify.”

Human rights and labor groups have described the bill, which also includes a measure allowing police to detain people they suspect of being undocumented immigrants, as racially motivated.

Amnesty International, Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights and Teamsters Local 728, along with others, helped to organize a protest outside the Capitol building on Thursday, to urge Governor Nathan Deal to veto the legislation if passed by the state Senate.

“This bill is an embarrassment to the people of Georgia. While everyday Georgians struggle to keep their homes and jobs, the legislature spends its time scapegoating hard working immigrants who contribute to Georgia's economy and culture. We can't afford to be passing racially biased laws that embarrass us in the eyes of the country and the world," Director of the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials Jerry Gonzalez stated.

Atlanta's Mexican Consulate has expressed concern over the “potentially grave effects” the law would have on Mexican nationals.

“As many local human rights organizations have already expressed, the consulate shares the view that measures focused on criminalizing migrants open possibilities for undue law enforcement practices and racial profiling,” the consulate said in a statement.

In response to the criticism made by the Mexican government, Ramsey stated, "I find it incredibly arrogant and audacious that the Mexican government would inject itself into the Georgia Legislature's debate on this pressing state issue."

Shield law now goes beyond the media to cover everyone | The Australian

2011-03-06T10:15:00.001-05:00

Shield law now goes beyond the media to cover everyone | The Australian

THE scope of the planned federal shield law for journalists' sources has been dramatically widened by the Greens, who have persuaded the government to extend the scheme beyond the traditional news media.

The federal shield law will still create a rebuttable presumption that journalists' confidential sources will be legally protected, but the government has made changes to ensure it is "technology neutral".

Anyone "engaged and active" in the publication of news in any medium will be considered to be a journalist and will be able to claim protection for their sources.

The changes, which were approved by the Senate on Thursday, triggered a warning from opposition legal affairs spokesman George Brandis.

While endorsing the need to protect journalists' sources, Senator Brandis said the changes supported by the government and the Greens had given the term "journalist" a meaning that was too broad.

"It says to every person in society that, whether they are journalists or not, if they are seeking to publish or bring to public awareness a fact which they assert to be a newsworthy fact, they should have a presumptive privilege," Senator Brandis told the Senate.

He said this was not the protection of journalists' sources, but the protection of communication between people that resulted in one of them publishing news. Any form of privilege meant withholding information from courts and should therefore be done as conservatively and narrowly as possible, he said.

Justin Quill of legal firm Kelly Hazell Quill said the changes would make no practical difference to journalists working for mainstream media.

The great benefit of the scheme for the mainstream media was that the shield law would shift the onus of proof so those seeking disclosure of a source would need to prove their case.

Mr Quill believed the changes could make it possible for bloggers and people such as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to claim protection for their sources but each case would need to be examined by a court.

Media lawyer Veronica Scott of Minter Ellison said the scheme that had been passed by the Senate was quite different to the original, more limited shield law bill drawn up by independents Nick Xenophon and Andrew Wilkie and endorsed by the government.

"It now extends the protection of sources to anybody who sends news by the internet and I query what news means in terms of this broadened definition of journalist," Ms Scott said.

She said the expanded definition meant anyone who published information that had been disclosed to them could be protected from not having to disclose the identity of their source.

Ms Scott believed the practical effect of the Greens' changes would be to encourage judges to apply another part of the shield law more rigorously when deciding whether the presumption in favour of protecting sources should be overturned.

"You will have a court opening up a much broader line of inquiry in relation to what is the public interest and the competing considerations as to whether that source's identity should be disclosed, potentially developing case law that could broaden the attack on your traditional journalists' sources," Ms Scott said.

She accepted that there were arguments in favour of protecting confidences, but she believed the shield law might not be the appropriate mechanism.

Many "citizen journalists" seeking to claim its protection could fail because they may not have extended a promise of confidentiality.

"If there is no promise, there is no shield," Ms Scott said.

Egyptian Activists Expose Torture Tools and Files, Tied to US Renditions | Firedoglake

2011-03-05T20:36:00.001-05:00

Egyptian Activists Expose Torture Tools and Files, Tied to US Renditions | Firedoglake

Twitter has been the site of an amazing narrative today as Egyptian activists, following the lead of their brothers and sisters in Alexandria yesterday, broke into the AmrDawla security police center and uncovered the secret files and torture devices. As Wikileaks has been mentioning on twitter, these same torture chambers have been used for prisoners transferred in the US rendition programs as well as on Egyptian dissidents.

Zeinobia writes:

During the Mubarak era the state security HQ in Nasr city had this infamous reputation not only inside the country but also outside it. Its international infamousness was recognized when it turned out that the Bush administration used its secret cells and also the expertise of its infamous officers to interrogate its illegal detainees during its unholy war on terrorism.

The Egyptians called that big building in Nasr city district “The capital of hell” and you can imagine why Egyptians called it like that. A scary building any taxi driver will tell you horror stories about it and about the secret underground prison cells and torture rooms.

Tonight Egyptian protesters managed not to only to encircle the fearful building by thousands but they have also entered it for the first time not as detainees blindfolded but actually as victorious revolutionaries who had enough from that castle of terrorists.

Bradley Manning Forced to Strip Naked… Again | FDL Action

2011-03-04T20:11:00.001-05:00

Bradley Manning Forced to Strip Naked… Again | FDL Action

For the second night in a row, Pfc. Bradley Manning has been forced to strip naked in his cell and spent the night in humiliation in his cell at Quantico. Manning’s lawyer writes on his blog that Quantico’s new brig commander, CWO-2 Denise Barnes, directly made the decision to strip Manning without consulting the brig’s mental health specialists.

PFC Manning was forced to strip naked in his cell again last night. As with the previous evening, Quantico Brig guards required him to surrender all of his clothing. PFC Manning then walked back to his bed, and spent the next seven hours in humiliation.

The decision to require him to be stripped of all clothing was made by the Brig commander, Chief Warrant Officer-2 Denise Barnes. According to First Lieutenant Brian Villard, a Marine spokesman, the decision was “not punitive” and done in accordance with Brig rules. There can be no conceivable justification for requiring a soldier to surrender all his clothing, remain naked in his cell for seven hours, and then stand at attention the subsequent morning. This treatment is even more degrading considering that PFC Manning is being monitored — both by direct observation and by video — at all times. The defense was informed by Brig officials that the decision to strip PFC Manning of all his clothing was made without consulting any of the Brig’s mental health providers.

Last month Barnes replaced Quantico Brig Commander James Averhart after Averhart improperly put Manning on a punitive suicide watch against the recommendations of Quantico’s mental health staff. Like Averhart, Barnes is also ignoring the mental health staff’s recommendations to remove Pfc. Manning from the highly restrictive Prevention of Injury order, and is not consulting the mental health providers on the inconceivable decision to strip Manning at night.

This was all just as promised; Coombs noted yesterday that Manning was informed he would continue to be stripped of his clothes and humliated before he goes to bed. Jeff Kaye, a psychologist specializing in torture victims, wrote last night:

Alert commenter Mad Dog noticed this important part of David Coombs’ article, chilling in its open avowal of continuing abuse. Referring to the imposition of forced nakedness, Coombs reports that “PFC Manning has been told that the same thing will happen to him again tonight.” Meanwhile, Trudy B. has sent me a link to a Kate Zernike and David Rohde’s June 2004 piece in the New York Times, on the “pervasive pattern” of forced nakedness at Abu Ghraib, at Guantanamo and elsewhere.

It got so bad at Abu Ghraib that in October 2003, Zernike and Rohde wrote that “Red Cross monitors were so alarmed by the number of nude detainees that they halted their visit and demanded an immediate explanation. ‘The military intelligence officer in charge of the interrogation explained that this practice was “part of the process,”‘ the Red Cross wrote in a report in February.”

I guess that’s the case now at Quantico. “Part of the process” is what torture has now come down to, embraced on U.S. soil against an American citizen.

Harvard Law Reviews WikiLeaks Censorship | GroundReport

2011-03-04T16:37:00.001-05:00

Image via WikipediaHarvard Law Reviews WikiLeaks Censorship | GroundReport

Harvard Law Professor Yochai Benkler is about to release a comprehensive study on the U.S. government and media’s role in censoring WikiLeaks. The forthcoming report , to appear in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, titled “A Free Irresponsible Press: WikiLeaks and the Batter over the Soul of the Networked Fourth Estate.” In the report, Benkler dissects the mechanisms that have censored WikiLeaks.

A working draft of the report has been made available online. The draft exposes how the U.S. government, mainstream media, and the emerging corporatocracy have been working together to infringe on the First Amendment Rights of the “networked fourth estate” sites, like WikiLeaks. Essentially, the government has been tripping over its feet to find ways to stop Wikileaks from expressing speech which Benkler argues is clearly protected by the U.S. Constitution and solidly supported by Supreme Court precedent.

In the 66 page document, Benkler suggests the U.S. government has attempted to falsely frame the WikiLeaks revelations in a way to discredit WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. The false framing begins with what Benkler calls the “hurt America” argument. The report points to a string of statements made by Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Senator Joe Libermann, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. For example, the report quotes Biden’s claim that WikiLeaks is “more like high tech terrorist than the Pentagon Papers.” In addition, Clinton’s comment, “Let's be clear: This disclosure is not just an attack on America's foreign policy interests. It is an attack on the international community - the alliances and partnerships, the conversations and negotiations, that safeguard global security and advance economic prosperity.”

Immediately after top U.S. officials falsely framed WikiLeaks as a terrorist organization engaged in an attack on America, the main stream media picked up on the false framing and ran with it. Benkler shows commentator after commentator, on all the main stream media outlets, began echoing the “WikiLeaks hurts America” theme. On top of the White House’s calls, Senator Lieberman, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, suggested the possible criminality of WikiLeaks actions, “I call on any other company or organization that is hosting WikiLeaks to immediately terminate its relationship with them. WikiLeaks' illegal, outrageous, and reckless acts have compromised our national security and put lives at risk around the world. No responsible company - whether American or foreign - should assist WikiLeaks in its efforts to disseminate these stolen materials.”

The problem with all this is that what WikiLeaks has done was nothing different than what The New York Times and The Washington Post has done. And besides that, the U.S. government’s own reviews have found that WikiLeaks has actually done little to nothing to compromise our national security. As Department of Defense Robert Gates has repeatedly said under oath, “Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest.” Gates followed up in a separate hearing saying, “The review to date has not revealed any sensitive intelligence sources and methods compromised by this disclosure.”

Benkler explains, “The political attack on WikiLeaks as an organization and on Julian Assange as its public face was launched almost immediately upon release of the cables. Their defining feature was to frame the event not as journalism, irresponsible or otherwise, but as a dangerous, anarchic attack on the model of the super-empowered networks of terrorism out to attack the U.S.”

With false statements coming from the State Department, key Senators, and the White House, major credit cards, Pay Pal, and host of other sites like Amazon cut off ties with WikiLeaks. Benkler points out that legally, the U.S. government did not have the right to shut down WikiLeaks. However, by a series of “extra-legal” means, the government was able to temporarily shut down the site and its revenue stream. Essentially, all the major corporate controls of the Internet, have now blocked WikiLeaks, as a result of a relentless government propaganda campaign to censor the organization.

Benkler makes clear, that WikiLeaks has done nothing different than dozens of other mainstream media sources throughout our nation’s history. Benkler illustrates that WikiLeaks has published the very same material The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegle has published.

Yesterday, the U.S. Army charged the alleged “source” of the leaked government documents, Private Bradley Manning, with 22 additional charges including “aiding the enemy.” Constitutional law scholar and best-selling author, Glenn Greenwald has been following the media and government’s attempt to censor WikiLeaks from the beginning. Writing in the online magazine Solon, Greenwald has published numerous articles documenting the attacks on whistle-blowers and journalists involved in exposing government corruption. Greenwald has documented the Obama administration’s escalating assault on protected speech.

In his most recent article, Greenwald explains the new charges and asks the very important question, who is the enemy Manning is charged with aiding? According to Greenwald, under Article 104(b) “a person is guilty if he “gives intelligence to or communicates or corresponds with or holds any intercourse with the enemy, either directly or indirectly” If found guilty of aiding the enemy, the court could sentence Manning to death.

Greenwald goes on to ask who is the alleged enemy? He points out that whether the government labels WikiLeaks or Al Qaeda as the enemy, the prosecution’s theory turns acts of whistle-blowing into a “hanging-offense”. In addition, Greenwald argues that if Manning aided the enemy, than so did The New York Times and The Guardian. To further support his argument, Greenwald quotes a Professor Heller:

“If Manning has aided the enemy, so has any media organization that published the information he allegedly stole. Nothing in Article 104 requires proof that the defendant illegally acquired the information that aided the enemy. As a result, if the mere act of ensuring that harmful information is published on the internet qualifies either as indirectly "giving intelligence to the enemy" (if the military can prove an enemy actually accessed the information) or as indirectly "communicating with the enemy" (because any reasonable person knows that enemies can access information on the internet), there is no relevant factual difference between Manning and a media organization that published the relevant information.”

Greenwald and Heller note that while newspapers and Wikileaks can’t be charged under the UCMJ, “there is still something profoundly disturbing about the prospect of convicting Manning and sentencing him to life imprisonment [GG: or the death penalty] for doing exactly what media organizations did, as well."

Greenwald concludes by stating, “It's true that members of the military have legal duties that others do not have -- including the duty not to leak classified information -- but this incredibly expansive interpretation of what it means to "aid the enemy" dangerously encompasses all sorts of legitimate press and speech activities, especially when combined with the Obama administration's escalating war on whistle-blowing and the journalists who expose government secrets. This is yet another step in infecting the law with doctrines of Endless War and its accompanying mentality.”

Greenwald, Heller, and Benkler put their fingers on a deeply disturbing development in America. While attacks on whistle-blowers and journalist that expose corruptions is nothing new, the intensity and veracity of the Obama Administration’s propaganda campaign and assault on WikiLeaks, along with the inhuman treatment of Private Manning, should sound off serious warning bells to proponents of the First Amendment. Let us not forget, amongst other things, the WikiLeaks documents have shown a widespread American cover-up of torture in Iraq. Manning first attempted, to no avail, to use the chain of command to expose and bring to an end crimes against humanity. Since commanding officers did little to nothing about the criminality going on around them, under both the UCMJ and international law, Manning had a legal obligation to disobey orders. According to Greenwald, this issue was settled during the Nuremberg trials.

Whether we want to admit it or not, our government’s attempt to crack down on whistle-blowers and protected, free-speech is dangerous. This is a series and complicated issue. Most people would rather simply go on believing our leaders when the make public statements about our national security. However, just because Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton said it is so, doesn’t automatically make it is so. Remember, the legendary journalist I.F. Stone once famously said, “All Governments Lie.” Why should the Obama Administration be any different?

Click here for the report.

Beijing to Track People's Movements via Their Mobile Phones - PCWorld

2011-03-04T08:38:00.001-05:00

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeBeijing to Track People's Movements via Their Mobile Phones - PCWorld

China plans on tracking the movements of people in Beijing using their mobile phones, a measure that while aimed at relieving traffic congestion, could set off concerns over misuse.

China announced the plans in an article posted on a government website earlier this week. The system would work by tracking the movements of the 17 million users in Beijing currently signed on with the telecommunications carrier China Mobile. Once the users turned on their phone, the system could pinpoint their location and what direction they were heading.

The plan would tackle Beijing's growing traffic problem, which has resulted in highway jams that have lasted as long as nine days. But China has also gained a reputation for using technology to squelch dissent. The government has allegedly hacked the email accounts of human rights activists and launched cyberattacks against websites carrying online protest calls.

The new system would use mobile phone information to monitor traffic flows in different areas of the city, and see how residents are using the subway and bus systems. The article did not say when or exactly how the system will be implemented, only that it has passed expert review.

Users will be able to sign up and receive data from the system, the notice said. But it's unclear whether or not residents of Beijing can voluntarily bow out of the system to protect their privacy. The Beijing Science & Technology Commission behind the project could not be reached for comment.

Although the Chinese government intends to use the data for traffic purposes, "anytime data like this is collected, there is a potential for misuse," said Mark Natkin, managing director for Beijing-based Marbridge Consulting.

China has also made previous efforts to collect data on mobile phone users. Last year, the government began requiring people to use their real identities when setting up mobile phone accounts. China has more than 850 million mobile phone users, many of whom bought their numbers without using their actual ID.

Experts have said these past moves could be a part of a larger agenda by the Chinese government to reduce anonymity among the populace. In the case of China's plan for a tracking system in Beijing, it could potentially monitor an individual's movement, Natkin added.

"By U.S. standards, European standards, that would be considered a violation of a person's privacy, but not necessarily here (in China)," he said.

Not everyone sees a problem with the planned tracking system.

"The project seems like it will look at the data on a large scale. The data they are dealing with is so big, I don't think it will result with any privacy problems," said Zhao Wei, CEO of Chinese security company Knownsec. "I think it could actually be effective in solving traffic problems."

The Law Office of David E. Coombs: PFC Manning Forced to Strip Naked

2011-03-03T20:23:00.001-05:00

The Law Office of David E. Coombs: PFC Manning Forced to Strip Naked:

Last night, PFC Manning was inexplicably stripped of all clothing by the Quantico Brig. He remained in his cell, naked, for the next seven hours. At 5:00 a.m., the Brig sounded the wake-up call for the detainees. At this point, PFC Manning was forced to stand naked at the front of his cell.

The Duty Brig Supervisor (DBS) arrived shortly after 5:00 a.m. When he arrived, PFC Manning was called to attention. The DBS walked through the facility to conduct his detainee count. Afterwards, PFC Manning was told to sit on his bed. About ten minutes later, a guard came to his cell to return his clothing.

This type of degrading treatment is inexcusable and without justification. It is an embarrassment to our military justice system and should not be tolerated. PFC Manning has been told that the same thing will happen to him again tonight. No other detainee at the Brig is forced to endure this type of isolation and humiliation.

Justices Rule for Protesters at Military Funerals - NYTimes.com

2011-03-02T13:09:00.000-05:00

Justices Rule for Protesters at Military Funerals - NYTimes.com

Image via WikipediaJustices Rule for Protesters at Military Funerals - NYTimes.com

By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — The First Amendment protects hateful protests at military funerals, the Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday in an 8-1 decision.

“Speech is powerful,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority. “It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and — as it did here — inflict great pain.”

But under the First Amendment, he went on, “we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker.” Instead, the national commitment to free speech, he said, requires protection of “even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.”

The case arose from a protest at the funeral of a Marine who had died in Iraq, Lance Cpl. Matthew A. Snyder. As they had at hundreds of other funerals, members of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., appeared with signs bearing messages like “America is Doomed” and “God Hates Fags.”

The church contends that God is punishing the United States for its tolerance of homosexuality.

The father of the fallen Marine, Albert Snyder, sued the protesters for, among other things, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and won a substantial jury award that was later overturned by an appeals court.

Chief Justice Roberts wrote in the ruling that three factors required a ruling in favor of the church group. First, he said, its speech was on matters of public concern. While the messages on the signs carried by its members “may fall short of refined commentary,” the chief justice wrote, “the issues they highlight — the political and moral conduct of the United States and its citizens, the fate of our nation, homosexuality in the military and scandals involving the Catholic clergy — are matters of public import.”

Second, he wrote, the relationship between the church and the Snyders was not a private grudge.

Third, the members of the church “had the right to be where they were.” They were picketing on a public street 1,000 feet from the site of the funeral, they complied with the law and with instructions from the police, and they protested quietly and without violence.

Chief Justice Roberts suggested that the proper response to hurtful protests are general laws creating buffer zones around funerals and the like, rather than empowering of juries to punish unpopular speech.

The opinion acknowledged that “Westboro’s choice added to Mr. Snyder’s already incalculable grief” and emphasized that the ruling was narrow and limited to the kinds of protests staged by the church.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer joined the majority opinion but wrote separately to say that other sorts of speech, including television broadcasts and Internet postings, might warrant different treatment.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and 21 news organizations, including The New York Times Company, filed a brief supporting the church.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. dissented in the case, Snyder v. Phelps, No. 09-751. He likened the protest to fighting words, which are not protected by the First Amendment.

“In order to have a society in which public issues can be openly and vigorously debated,” he wrote, “it is not necessary to allow the brutalization of innocent victims.”

____________________________________

I could not see how the Supreme Court could have ruled otherwise.

John H. Armwood

Supreme Court Back in Session; Nine Cases to Watch Legality of Military Funeral Protests, Other High Profile Cases on Docket

2011-02-22T08:24:00.002-05:00

Monroe Price: Clinton's "Long Game" Advancing Internet Freedom

2011-02-20T21:42:00.001-05:00

Image via WikipediaMonroe Price: Clinton's "Long Game" Advancing Internet Freedom

While Bahrain careens and Egypt moves toward a new stasis, the debate over the shape and role of the Internet intensifies in different register and in different levels of abstraction.

An important forum for this global discussion is the Department of State and its vision for the Internet. There's now an incipient tradition: an annual Clinton Internet-celebrating speech given in the winter months. Secretary Clinton's George Washington University speech, given February 15, can best be understood by comparing it to the Internet speech she delivered, with great flourish and fanfare, a little more than one year earlier.

There was a big geopolitical difference. The 2010 speech was given, primarily, with an eye on China. This 2011 speech was set in the wake of Tunisia and Egypt and the roiling Middle East.

The 2011 speech sought -- nobly and romantically -- to emphasize the human aspects, not the mere technological ones, of great public actions that could alter history. This was a speech nominally about the Internet, but Secretary Clinton again and again talked about the power of people massing and demonstrating, not because of technology but merely aided by it. Brave individuals "stood and marched and chanted and the authorities tracked and blocked and arrested them. The Internet did not do any of these things; people did" (emphasis added).

There was a modesty to the speech that refined the most extensive global claims of its 2010 predecessor. The 2010 speech was called "Remarks on Internet Freedom." The 2011 speech put this freedom in context: it was on "Internet Rights and Wrongs: Choices and Challenges in Networked World." Things were and should be stated in a more complicated way.

The 2010 talk spoke about "one Internet" as a challenge to notions of state sovereignty. That formulation was a specific challenge to China with its emphasis on national sovereignty. The idea of "one Internet" was not so marked in the 2011 presentation. In the 2011 speech the Secretary put the United States on the "side of openness" in fighting for an Internet that would aid in fulfilling human rights. It was -- as it was last year -- a complicated balancing act to draw the boundaries of openness, especially during a time of WikiLeaks. This speech -- more rounded, more circumspect -- was only slightly defensive, still prescriptive and committed. The choice of the words "on the side of" openness seems accurate rather than hyperbolic.

At the end, consistent with a pragmatic theme, the Secretary moved to the practical and instrumental: "We realize that in order to be meaningful, online freedoms must carry over into real world activism."

A key paragraph:

While the rights we seek to protect and support are clear, the various ways that these rights are violated are increasingly complex. I know some have criticized us for not pouring funding into a signle technology. But we believe there is not a silver bullet in the struggle against internet repression. There is no app for that. Start working those of you out there. And accordingly, we are taking a comprehensive and innovative approach, one that matches our diplomacy with technology, secure distribution networks for tools, and direct support for those on the front lines.

Subtly, or maybe not so subtly, this paragraph alludes to an intense Beltway and beyond debate about how to split up $30 million appropriated by Congress to facilitate access to the Internet in repressive contexts with an emphasis on circumvention technologies. Here, implicit is defining the proper role of the United States in furthering an open Internet, in furthering the "right to connect" as Secretary Clinton tries to define it. The State Department seems to be working to find this spot -- what combination of strenuous activities advances Internet freedom. Implicit is that some interventions can be counterproductive.

Of course, it's an appealing idea to say that opening up the sluices of information will swiftly bring down dictators, and that's a plausible and welcome reading of events. But these events in Egypt and Bahrain, Libya and elsewhere are the result of many, many activities, inputs, efforts, discussions. Bullets, silver or otherwise, come by and large from the side of tyrants.

Mobilization, demonstration, action -- these, Secretary Clinton seems to conclude -- are the consequence of a system of approaches, not the easy pulling of an off/on switch.

The effort at State involves the sometimes exciting, sometimes duller work of attempting a myriad of activities, "supporting multiple tools," as Clinton put it. She mentioned connecting NGOs and advocates with technology and training, playing a role as "venture capitalist" for new technologies of freedom. What mix is the right one, what judgments help produce the great human acts of bravery and the shift to democratic realization -- that remains subject to the hard realities of day to day executive judgment.

Towards the end of her speech the secretary asserted -- at this time of toppled regimes, sudden changes, mercurial reputations and overnight transformations -- that "we are playing for the long game... progress [in Internet use] will be measured in years, not seconds. The course we chart today will determine whether those who follow us will get the chance to experience the freedom, security and prosperity of an open internet."

The long game is on, and the scores are already coming in.

Protests continue across Middle East

2011-02-17T08:31:00.001-05:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The ‘Italian Job’ and Other Highlights From U.S.’s Rendition Program With Egypt - ProPublica

2011-02-01T15:21:00.001-05:00

The ‘Italian Job’ and Other Highlights From U.S.’s Rendition Program With Egypt - ProPublica

Among the many aspects of the U.S.-Egypt relationship, few have been as controversial as the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, where the agency frequently handed over suspected terrorists to foreign governments with histories of torture and illegal detention.

According to Human Rights Watch, Egypt welcomed more CIA detainees than any other country from the 1990s through 2005. And while renditions happen only with the assurance that a foreign partner will not torture the prisoner, as one CIA officer once told Congress, the assurances “weren’t worth a bucket of warm spit.” (Want to know more about rendition? Here’s a good backgrounder.)

In the case of Egypt, the assurances were given by Omar Suleiman, former head of the country’s intelligence service, and the man President Hosni Mubarak picked as his vice president a few days ago.

Perhaps the most notorious case is that of Ibn al-Shaikh al-Libi, a Libyan national captured by Pakistani authorities in the months after the September 11, 2001 attacks. According to a 2006 Senate Intelligence Committee report, [PDF] al-Libi was turned over to American authorities and eventually sent to Egypt, where his fabricated testimony, given under torture, became a key piece of “evidence” falsely linking al-Qaeda to Saddam Hussein.

According to the Senate report, al-Libi said he began to feed his captors false intelligence once American interrogators threatened to send him to a foreign government. He started talking, he said, but was sent to Egypt anyway. He later told the CIA that his Egyptian captors placed him in a box less than 2 feet square for 17 hours.

Then, “when he was let out of the box, al-Libi claims that he was given a last opportunity to ‘tell the truth.’ ” He was struck down, he said, and finally “was punched for 15 minutes.” In another episode, he says he was beaten in a way that wouldn’t leave any marks.

As The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer and others have detailed, the “intelligence” he provided made its way into the 2003 speech that Secretary of State Colin Powell gave to the United Nations, laying out the evidence to justify war with Iraq. Years later, after no weapons of mass destruction were found, al-Libi recanted.

“When the F.B.I. later asked him why he had lied, he blamed the brutality of the Egyptian intelligence service,” Mayer writes. “Libi explained, ‘They were killing me,’ and that, ‘I had to tell them something.’ ”

Another famous case is that of Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr, an Egyptian cleric who disappeared for a year after he was snatched off the streets of Milan in 2003 and taken to Egypt. Known in the agency as “The Italian Job,” the operation was exposed when Italian prosecutors were able to reconstruct the kidnapping after Nasr was released. In 2009, an Italian court convicted 23 Americans in absentia for the kidnapping.

A 2005 report from Human Rights Watch documented 63 cases of people being rendered to and from Egypt, though the report also estimated that the total number of cases was much higher, with as many as 200 people sent away since 2001. The United States was involved in most but not all of those cases, according to the report.

Muhammad al-Zawahiri, the brother of high-ranking al-Qaeda member Ayman, was reportedly kidnapped in the United Arab Emirates in 1999. He was presumed dead for years until the Arab press picked up on his detention.

“For more than five years, the Egyptian government refused to answer a single question about al-Zawahiri’s whereabouts, and allowed his family to believe that he had died rather than disclose his continued incarceration,” the HRW report said. His brother Hussain was also abducted in 1999, reportedly with help of the CIA in Malaysia, according to the report.

Days after taking office, President Obama signed an executive order restricting renditions but also keeping them as an option. "Obviously you need to preserve some tools – you still have to go after the bad guys," an administration official told the Los Angeles Times.

In September, a federal appeals court ruled that detainees cannot sue the CIA over allegations of torture at the hands of foreign governments.

Waseem Wagdi, Egyptian Protester. Egyptian Embassy, London. 29.1.11

2011-01-30T09:33:00.000-05:00

Egypt Leaves the Internet - Renesys Blog

2011-01-28T09:14:00.001-05:00

Image via WikipediaEgypt Leaves the Internet - Renesys Blog

Confirming what a few have reported this evening: in an action unprecedented in Internet history, the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet. Critical European-Asian fiber-optic routes through Egypt appear to be unaffected for now. But every Egyptian provider, every business, bank, Internet cafe, website, school, embassy, and government office that relied on the big four Egyptian ISPs for their Internet connectivity is now cut off from the rest of the world. Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, Etisalat Misr, and all their customers and partners are, for the moment, off the air.

At 22:34 UTC (00:34am local time), Renesys observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet's global routing table. Approximately 3,500 individual BGP routes were withdrawn, leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could continue to exchange Internet traffic with Egypt's service providers. Virtually all of Egypt's Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide.

This is a completely different situation from the modest Internet manipulation that took place in Tunisia, where specific routes were blocked, or Iran, where the Internet stayed up in a rate-limited form designed to make Internet connectivity painfully slow. The Egyptian government's actions tonight have essentially wiped their country from the global map.

What happens when you disconnect a modern economy and 80,000,000 people from the Internet? What will happen tomorrow, on the streets and in the credit markets? This has never happened before, and the unknowns are piling up. We will continue to dig into the event, and will update this story as we learn more. As Friday dawns in Cairo under this unprecedented communications blackout, keep the Egyptian people in your thoughts.

Update (3:06 UTC)

One of the very few exceptions to this block has been Noor Group (AS20928), which still has 83 out of 83 live routes to its Egyptian customers, with inbound transit from Telecom Italia as usual. Why was Noor Group apparently unaffected by the countrywide takedown order? Unknown at this point, but we observe that the Egyptian Stock Exchange (www.egyptse.com) is still alive at a Noor address.

Its DNS A records indicate that it's normally reachable at 4 different IP addresses, only one of which belongs to Noor. Internet transit path diversity is a sign of good planning by the Stock Exchange IT staff, and it appears to have paid off in this case. Did the Egyptian government leave Noor standing so that the markets could open next week?

Protests in Egypt follow Tunisian uprising - Rachel Maddow reports on popular uprisings in the Middle East, especially Egypt where protests against the government are expected to intensify with Friday's planned "Day of Rage."

2011-01-28T01:14:00.001-05:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Bachmann: The actual face of the Tea Party? - Tea Party coordinator Phillip Dennis and Jonathan Capehart of the Washington Post join Hardball’s Chris Matthews to discuss the lawmaker’s response to the State of the Union and recent remark that the Founding Fathers “worked tirelessly” to get rid of slavery.

2011-01-26T23:07:00.001-05:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The Times's Dealings With Julian Assange - NYTimes.com

2011-01-26T22:28:00.001-05:00

Image via WikipediaThe Times's Dealings With Julian Assange - NYTimes.com

This past June, Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian, phoned me and asked, mysteriously, whether I had any idea how to arrange a secure communication. Not really, I confessed. The Times doesn’t have encrypted phone lines, or a Cone of Silence. Well then, he said, he would try to speak circumspectly. In a roundabout way, he laid out an unusual proposition: an organization called WikiLeaks, a secretive cadre of antisecrecy vigilantes, had come into possession of a substantial amount of classified United States government communications. WikiLeaks’s leader, Julian Assange, an eccentric former computer hacker of Australian birth and no fixed residence, offered The Guardian half a million military dispatches from the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq. There might be more after that, including an immense bundle of confidential diplomatic cables. The Guardian suggested — to increase the impact as well as to share the labor of handling such a trove — that The New York Times be invited to share this exclusive bounty. The source agreed. Was I interested?

I was interested.

The adventure that ensued over the next six months combined the cloak-and-dagger intrigue of handling a vast secret archive with the more mundane feat of sorting, searching and understanding a mountain of data. As if that were not complicated enough, the project also entailed a source who was elusive, manipulative and volatile (and ultimately openly hostile to The Times and The Guardian); an international cast of journalists; company lawyers committed to keeping us within the bounds of the law; and an array of government officials who sometimes seemed as if they couldn’t decide whether they wanted to engage us or arrest us. By the end of the year, the story of this wholesale security breach had outgrown the story of the actual contents of the secret documents and generated much breathless speculation that something — journalism, diplomacy, life as we know it — had profoundly changed forever.

Soon after Rusbridger’s call, we sent Eric Schmitt, from our Washington bureau, to London. Schmitt has covered military affairs expertly for years, has read his share of classified military dispatches and has excellent judgment and an unflappable demeanor. His main assignment was to get a sense of the material. Was it genuine? Was it of public interest? He would also report back on the proposed mechanics of our collaboration with The Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel, which Assange invited as a third guest to his secret smorgasbord. Schmitt would also meet the WikiLeaks leader, who was known to a few Guardian journalists but not to us.

Schmitt’s first call back to The Times was encouraging. There was no question in his mind that the Afghanistan dispatches were genuine. They were fascinating — a diary of a troubled war from the ground up. And there were intimations of more to come, especially classified cables from the entire constellation of American diplomatic outposts. WikiLeaks was holding those back for now, presumably to see how this venture with the establishment media worked out. Over the next few days, Schmitt huddled in a discreet office at The Guardian, sampling the trove of war dispatches and discussing the complexities of this project: how to organize and study such a voluminous cache of information; how to securely transport, store and share it; how journalists from three very different publications would work together without compromising their independence; and how we would all assure an appropriate distance from Julian Assange. We regarded Assange throughout as a source, not as a partner or collaborator, but he was a man who clearly had his own agenda.

By the time of the meetings in London, WikiLeaks had already acquired a measure of international fame or, depending on your point of view, notoriety. Shortly before I got the call from The Guardian, The New Yorker published a rich and colorful profile of Assange, by Raffi Khatchadourian, who had embedded with the group. WikiLeaks’s biggest coup to that point was the release, last April, of video footage taken from one of two U.S. helicopters involved in firing down on a crowd and a building in Baghdad in 2007, killing at least 18 people. While some of the people in the video were armed, others gave no indication of menace; two were in fact journalists for the news agency Reuters. The video, with its soundtrack of callous banter, was horrifying to watch and was an embarrassment to the U.S. military. But in its zeal to make the video a work of antiwar propaganda, WikiLeaks also released a version that didn’t call attention to an Iraqi who was toting a rocket-propelled grenade and packaged the manipulated version under the tendentious rubric “Collateral Murder.” (See the edited and non-edited videos here.)

Throughout our dealings, Assange was coy about where he obtained his secret cache. But the suspected source of the video, as well as the military dispatches and the diplomatic cables to come, was a disillusioned U.S. Army private first class named Bradley Manning, who had been arrested and was being kept in solitary confinement.

On the fourth day of the London meeting, Assange slouched into The Guardian office, a day late. Schmitt took his first measure of the man who would be a large presence in our lives. “He’s tall — probably 6-foot-2 or 6-3 — and lanky, with pale skin, gray eyes and a shock of white hair that seizes your attention,” Schmitt wrote to me later. “He was alert but disheveled, like a bag lady walking in off the street, wearing a dingy, light-colored sport coat and cargo pants, dirty white shirt, beat-up sneakers and filthy white socks that collapsed around his ankles. He smelled as if he hadn’t bathed in days.”

Assange shrugged a huge backpack off his shoulders and pulled out a stockpile of laptops, cords, cellphones, thumb drives and memory sticks that held the WikiLeaks secrets.

The reporters had begun preliminary work on the Afghanistan field reports, using a large Excel spreadsheet to organize the material, then plugging in search terms and combing the documents for newsworthy content. They had run into a puzzling incongruity: Assange said the data included dispatches from the beginning of 2004 through the end of 2009, but the material on the spreadsheet ended abruptly in April 2009. A considerable amount of material was missing. Assange, slipping naturally into the role of office geek, explained that they had hit the limits of Excel. Open a second spreadsheet, he instructed. They did, and the rest of the data materialized — a total of 92,000 reports from the battlefields of Afghanistan.

The reporters came to think of Assange as smart and well educated, extremely adept technologically but arrogant, thin-skinned, conspiratorial and oddly credulous. At lunch one day in The Guardian’s cafeteria, Assange recounted with an air of great conviction a story about the archive in Germany that contains the files of the former Communist secret police, the Stasi. This office, Assange asserted, was thoroughly infiltrated by former Stasi agents who were quietly destroying the documents they were entrusted with protecting. The Der Spiegel reporter in the group, John Goetz, who has reported extensively on the Stasi, listened in amazement. That’s utter nonsense, he said. Some former Stasi personnel were hired as security guards in the office, but the records were well protected.

Assange was openly contemptuous of the American government and certain that he was a hunted man. He told the reporters that he had prepared a kind of doomsday option. He had, he said, distributed highly encrypted copies of his entire secret archive to a multitude of supporters, and if WikiLeaks was shut down, or if he was arrested, he would disseminate the key to make the information public.

Schmitt told me that for all Assange’s bombast and dark conspiracy theories, he had a bit of Peter Pan in him. One night, when they were all walking down the street after dinner, Assange suddenly started skipping ahead of the group. Schmitt and Goetz stared, speechless. Then, just as suddenly, Assange stopped, got back in step with them and returned to the conversation he had interrupted.

For the rest of the week Schmitt worked with David Leigh, The Guardian’s investigations editor; Nick Davies, an investigative reporter for the paper; and Goetz, of Der Spiegel, to organize and sort the material. With help from two of The Times’s best computer minds — Andrew Lehren and Aron Pilhofer — they figured out how to assemble the material into a conveniently searchable and secure database.

Journalists are characteristically competitive, but the group worked well together. They brainstormed topics to explore and exchanged search results. Der Spiegel offered to check the logs against incident reports submitted by the German Army to its Parliament — partly as story research, partly as an additional check on authenticity.

Assange provided us the data on the condition that we not write about it before specific dates that WikiLeaks planned on posting the documents on a publicly accessible Web site. The Afghanistan documents would go first, after we had a few weeks to search the material and write our articles. The larger cache of Iraq-related documents would go later. Such embargoes — agreements not to publish information before a set date — are commonplace in journalism. Everything from studies in medical journals to the annual United States budget is released with embargoes. They are a constraint with benefits, the principal one being the chance to actually read and reflect on the material before publishing it into public view. As Assange surely knew, embargoes also tend to build suspense and amplify a story, especially when multiple news outlets broadcast it at once. The embargo was the only condition WikiLeaks would try to impose on us; what we wrote about the material was entirely up to us. Much later, some American news outlets reported that they were offered last-minute access to WikiLeaks documents if they signed contracts with financial penalties for early disclosure. The Times was never asked to sign anything or to pay anything. For WikiLeaks, at least in this first big venture, exposure was its own reward.

Back in New York we assembled a team of reporters, data experts and editors and quartered them in an out-of-the-way office. Andrew Lehren, of our computer-assisted-reporting unit, did the first cut, searching terms on his own or those suggested by other reporters, compiling batches of relevant documents and summarizing the contents. We assigned reporters to specific areas in which they had expertise and gave them password access to rummage in the data. This became the routine we would follow with subsequent archives.

An air of intrigue verging on paranoia permeated the project, perhaps understandably, given that we were dealing with a mass of classified material and a source who acted like a fugitive, changing crash pads, e-mail addresses and cellphones frequently. We used encrypted Web sites. Reporters exchanged notes via Skype, believing it to be somewhat less vulnerable to eavesdropping. On conference calls, we spoke in amateurish code. Assange was always “the source.” The latest data drop was “the package.” When I left New York for two weeks to visit bureaus in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where we assume that communications may be monitored, I was not to be copied on message traffic about the project. I never imagined that any of this would defeat a curious snoop from the National Security Agency or Pakistani intelligence. And I was never entirely sure whether that prospect made me more nervous than the cyberwiles of WikiLeaks itself. At a point when relations between the news organizations and WikiLeaks were rocky, at least three people associated with this project had inexplicable activity in their e-mail that suggested someone was hacking into their accounts.

From consultations with our lawyers, we were confident that reporting on the secret documents could be done within the law, but we speculated about what the government — or some other government — might do to impede our work or exact recriminations. And, the law aside, we felt an enormous moral and ethical obligation to use the material responsibly. While we assumed we had little or no ability to influence what WikiLeaks did, let alone what would happen once this material was loosed in the echo chamber of the blogosphere, that did not free us from the need to exercise care in our own journalism. From the beginning, we agreed that in our articles and in any documents we published from the secret archive, we would excise material that could put lives at risk.

Guided by reporters with extensive experience in the field, we redacted the names of ordinary citizens, local officials, activists, academics and others who had spoken to American soldiers or diplomats. We edited out any details that might reveal ongoing intelligence-gathering operations, military tactics or locations of material that could be used to fashion terrorist weapons. Three reporters with considerable experience of handling military secrets — Eric Schmitt, Michael Gordon and C. J. Chivers — went over the documents we considered posting. Chivers, an ex-Marine who has reported for us from several battlefields, brought a practiced eye and cautious judgment to the business of redaction. If a dispatch noted that Aircraft A left Location B at a certain time and arrived at Location C at a certain time, Chivers edited it out on the off chance that this could teach enemy forces something useful about the capabilities of that aircraft.

The ﬁrst articles in the project, which we called the War Logs, were scheduled to go up on the Web sites of The Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel on Sunday, July 25. We approached the White House days before that to get its reaction to the huge breach of secrecy as well as to specific articles we planned to write — including a major one about Pakistan’s ambiguous role as an American ally. On July 24, the day before the War Logs went live, I attended a farewell party for Roger Cohen, a columnist for The Times and The International Herald Tribune, that was given by Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. A voracious consumer of inside information, Holbrooke had a decent idea of what was coming, and he pulled me away from the crowd to show me the fusillade of cabinet-level e-mail ricocheting through his BlackBerry, thus demonstrating both the frantic anxiety in the administration and, not incidentally, the fact that he was very much in the loop. The Pakistan article, in particular, would complicate his life. But one of Holbrooke’s many gifts was his ability to make pretty good lemonade out of the bitterest lemons; he was already spinning the reports of Pakistani duplicity as leverage he could use to pull the Pakistanis back into closer alignment with American interests. Five months later, when Holbrooke — just 69, and seemingly indestructible — died of a torn aorta, I remembered that evening. And what I remembered best was that he was as excited to be on the cusp of a big story as I was.

We posted the articles on NYTimes.com the next day at 5 p.m. — a time picked to reconcile the different publishing schedules of the three publications. I was proud of what a crew of great journalists had done to fashion coherent and instructive reporting from a jumble of raw field reports, mostly composed in a clunky patois of military jargon and acronyms. The reporters supplied context, nuance and skepticism. There was much in that first round of articles worth reading, but my favorite single piece was one of the simplest. Chivers gathered all of the dispatches related to a single, remote, beleaguered American military outpost and stitched them together into a heartbreaking narrative. The dispatches from this outpost represent in miniature the audacious ambitions, gradual disillusionment and ultimate disappointment that Afghanistan has dealt to occupiers over the centuries.

If anyone doubted that the three publications operated independently, the articles we posted that day made it clear that we followed our separate muses. The Guardian, which is an openly left-leaning newspaper, used the first War Logs to emphasize civilian casualties in Afghanistan, claiming the documents disclosed that coalition forces killed “hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents,” underscoring the cost of what the paper called a “failing war.” Our reporters studied the same material but determined that all the major episodes of civilian deaths we found in the War Logs had been reported in The Times, many of them on the front page. (In fact, two of our journalists, Stephen Farrell and Sultan Munadi, were kidnapped by the Taliban while investigating one major episode near Kunduz. Munadi was killed during an ensuing rescue by British paratroopers.) The civilian deaths that had not been previously reported came in ones and twos and did not add up to anywhere near “hundreds.” Moreover, since several were either duplicated or missing from the reports, we concluded that an overall tally would be little better than a guess.

Another example: The Times gave prominence to the dispatches reflecting American suspicions that Pakistani intelligence was playing a double game in Afghanistan — nodding to American interests while abetting the Taliban. We buttressed the interesting anecdotal material of Pakistani double-dealing with additional reporting. The Guardian was unimpressed by those dispatches and treated them more dismissively.

Three months later, with the French daily Le Monde added to the group, we published Round 2, the Iraq War Logs, including articles on how the United States turned a blind eye to the torture of prisoners by Iraqi forces working with the U.S., how Iraq spawned an extraordinary American military reliance on private contractors and how extensively Iran had meddled in the conflict.

By this time, The Times’s relationship with our source had gone from wary to hostile. I talked to Assange by phone a few times and heard out his complaints. He was angry that we declined to link our online coverage of the War Logs to the WikiLeaks Web site, a decision we made because we feared — rightly, as it turned out — that its trove would contain the names of low-level informants and make them Taliban targets. “Where’s the respect?” he demanded. “Where’s the respect?” Another time he called to tell me how much he disliked our profile of Bradley Manning, the Army private suspected of being the source of WikiLeaks’s most startling revelations. The article traced Manning’s childhood as an outsider and his distress as a gay man in the military. Assange complained that we “psychologicalized” Manning and gave short shrift to his “political awakening.”

The final straw was a front-page profile of Assange by John Burns and Ravi Somaiya, published Oct. 24, that revealed fractures within WikiLeaks, attributed by Assange’s critics to his imperious management style. Assange denounced the article to me, and in various public forums, as “a smear.”

Assange was transformed by his outlaw celebrity. The derelict with the backpack and the sagging socks now wore his hair dyed and styled, and he favored fashionably skinny suits and ties. He became a kind of cult figure for the European young and leftish and was evidently a magnet for women. Two Swedish women filed police complaints claiming that Assange insisted on having sex without a condom; Sweden’s strict laws on nonconsensual sex categorize such behavior as rape, and a prosecutor issued a warrant to question Assange, who initially described it as a plot concocted to silence or discredit WikiLeaks.

I came to think of Julian Assange as a character from a Stieg Larsson thriller — a man who could figure either as hero or villain in one of the megaselling Swedish novels that mix hacker counterculture, high-level conspiracy and sex as both recreation and violation.

In October, WikiLeaks gave The Guardian its third archive, a quarter of a million communications between the U.S. State Department and its outposts around the globe. This time, Assange imposed a new condition: The Guardian was not to share the material with The New York Times. Indeed, he told Guardian journalists that he opened discussions with two other American news organizations — The Washington Post and the McClatchy chain — and intended to invite them in as replacements for The Times. He also enlarged his recipient list to include El País, the leading Spanish-language newspaper.

The Guardian was uncomfortable with Assange’s condition. By now the journalists from The Times and The Guardian had a good working relationship. The Times provided a large American audience for the revelations, as well as access to the U.S. government for comment and context. And given the potential legal issues and public reaction, it was good to have company in the trenches. Besides, we had come to believe that Assange was losing control of his stockpile of secrets. An independent journalist, Heather Brooke, had obtained material from a WikiLeaks dissident and joined in a loose alliance with The Guardian. Over the coming weeks, batches of cables would pop up in newspapers in Lebanon, Australia and Norway. David Leigh, The Guardian’s investigations editor, concluded that these rogue leaks released The Guardian from any pledge, and he gave us the cables.

On Nov. 1, Assange and two of his lawyers burst into Alan Rusbridger’s office, furious that The Guardian was asserting greater independence and suspicious that The Times might be in possession of the embassy cables. Over the course of an eight-hour meeting, Assange intermittently raged against The Times — especially over our front-page profile — while The Guardian journalists tried to calm him. In midstorm, Rusbridger called me to report on Assange’s grievances and relay his demand for a front-page apology in The Times. Rusbridger knew that this was a nonstarter, but he was buying time for the tantrum to subside. In the end, both he and Georg Mascolo, editor in chief of Der Spiegel, made clear that they intended to continue their collaboration with The Times; Assange could take it or leave it. Given that we already had all of the documents, Assange had little choice. Over the next two days, the news organizations agreed on a timetable for publication.

The following week, we sent Ian Fisher, a deputy foreign editor who was a principal coordinator on our processing of the embassy cables, to London to work out final details. The meeting went smoothly, even after Assange arrived. “Freakishly good behavior,” Fisher e-mailed me afterward. “No yelling or crazy mood swings.” But after dinner, as Fisher was leaving, Assange smirked and offered a parting threat: “Tell me, are you in contact with your legal counsel?” Fisher replied that he was. “You had better be,” Assange said.

Fisher left London with an understanding that we would continue to have access to the material. But just in case, we took out a competitive insurance policy. We had Scott Shane, a Washington correspondent, pull together a long, just-in-case article summing up highlights of the cables, which we could quickly post on our Web site. If WikiLeaks sprang another leak, we would be ready.

Because of the range of the material and the very nature of diplomacy, the embassy cables were bound to be more explosive than the War Logs. Dean Baquet, our Washington bureau chief, gave the White House an early warning on Nov. 19. The following Tuesday, two days before Thanksgiving, Baquet and two colleagues were invited to a windowless room at the State Department, where they encountered an unsmiling crowd. Representatives from the White House, the State Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the C.I.A., the Defense Intelligence Agency, the F.B.I. and the Pentagon gathered around a conference table. Others, who never identified themselves, lined the walls. A solitary note-taker tapped away on a computer.

The meeting was off the record, but it is fair to say the mood was tense. Scott Shane, one reporter who participated in the meeting, described “an undertone of suppressed outrage and frustration.”

Subsequent meetings, which soon gave way to daily conference calls, were more businesslike. Before each discussion, our Washington bureau sent over a batch of specific cables that we intended to use in the coming days. They were circulated to regional specialists, who funneled their reactions to a small group at State, who came to our daily conversations with a list of priorities and arguments to back them up. We relayed the government’s concerns, and our own decisions regarding them, to the other news outlets.

The administration’s concerns generally fell into three categories. First was the importance of protecting individuals who had spoken candidly to American diplomats in oppressive countries. We almost always agreed on those and were grateful to the government for pointing out some we overlooked.

“We were all aware of dire stakes for some of the people named in the cables if we failed to obscure their identities,” Shane wrote to me later, recalling the nature of the meetings. Like many of us, Shane has worked in countries where dissent can mean prison or worse. “That sometimes meant not just removing the name but also references to institutions that might give a clue to an identity and sometimes even the dates of conversations, which might be compared with surveillance tapes of an American Embassy to reveal who was visiting the diplomats that day.”

The second category included sensitive American programs, usually related to intelligence. We agreed to withhold some of this information, like a cable describing an intelligence-sharing program that took years to arrange and might be lost if exposed. In other cases, we went away convinced that publication would cause some embarrassment but no real harm.

The third category consisted of cables that disclosed candid comments by and about foreign officials, including heads of state. The State Department feared publication would strain relations with those countries. We were mostly unconvinced.

The embassy cables were a different kind of treasure from the War Logs. For one thing, they covered the entire globe — virtually every embassy, consulate and interest section that the United States maintains. They contained the makings of many dozens of stories: candid American appraisals of foreign leaders, narratives of complicated negotiations, allegations of corruption and duplicity, countless behind-the-scenes insights. Some of the material was of narrow local interest; some of it had global implications. Some provided authoritative versions of events not previously fully understood. Some consisted of rumor and flimsy speculation.

Unlike most of the military dispatches, the embassy cables were written in clear English, sometimes with wit, color and an ear for dialogue. (“Who knew,” one of our English colleagues marveled, “that American diplomats could write?”)

Even more than the military logs, the diplomatic cables called for context and analysis. It was important to know, for example, that cables sent from an embassy are routinely dispatched over the signature of the ambassador and those from the State Department are signed by the secretary of state, regardless of whether the ambassador or secretary had actually seen the material. It was important to know that much of the communication between Washington and its outposts is given even more restrictive classification — top secret or higher — and was thus missing from this trove. We searched in vain, for example, for military or diplomatic reports on the fate of Pat Tillman, the former football star and Army Ranger who was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan. We found no reports on how Osama bin Laden eluded American forces in the mountains of Tora Bora. (In fact, we found nothing but second- and thirdhand rumors about bin Laden.) If such cables exist, they were presumably classified top secret or higher.

And it was important to remember that diplomatic cables are versions of events. They can be speculative. They can be ambiguous. They can be wrong.

One of our first articles drawn from the diplomatic cables, for example, reported on a secret intelligence assessment that Iran had obtained a supply of advanced missiles from North Korea, missiles that could reach European capitals. Outside experts long suspected that Iran obtained missile parts but not the entire weapons, so this glimpse of the official view was revealing. The Washington Post fired back with a different take, casting doubt on whether the missile in question had been transferred to Iran or whether it was even a workable weapon. We went back to the cables — and the experts — and concluded in a subsequent article that the evidence presented “a murkier picture.”

The tension between a newspaper’s obligation to inform and the government’s responsibility to protect is hardly new. At least until this year, nothing The Times did on my watch caused nearly so much agitation as two articles we published about tactics employed by the Bush administration after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The first, which was published in 2005 and won a Pulitzer Prize, revealed that the National Security Agency was eavesdropping on domestic phone conversations and e-mail without the legal courtesy of a warrant. The other, published in 2006, described a vast Treasury Department program to screen international banking records.

I have vivid memories of sitting in the Oval Office as President George W. Bush tried to persuade me and the paper’s publisher to withhold the eavesdropping story, saying that if we published it, we should share the blame for the next terrorist attack. We were unconvinced by his argument and published the story, and the reaction from the government — and conservative commentators in particular — was vociferous.

This time around, the Obama administration’s reaction was different. It was, for the most part, sober and professional. The Obama White House, while strongly condemning WikiLeaks for making the documents public, did not seek an injunction to halt publication. There was no Oval Office lecture. On the contrary, in our discussions before publication of our articles, White House officials, while challenging some of the conclusions we drew from the material, thanked us for handling the documents with care. The secretaries of state and defense and the attorney general resisted the opportunity for a crowd-pleasing orgy of press bashing. There has been no serious official talk — unless you count an ambiguous hint by Senator Joseph Lieberman — of pursuing news organizations in the courts. Though the release of these documents was certainly embarrassing, the relevant government agencies actually engaged with us in an attempt to prevent the release of material genuinely damaging to innocent individuals or to the national interest.

The broader public reaction was mixed — more critical in the first days; more sympathetic as readers absorbed the articles and the sky did not fall; and more hostile to WikiLeaks in the U.S. than in Europe, where there is often a certain pleasure in seeing the last superpower taken down a peg.

In the days after we began our respective series based on the embassy cables, Alan Rusbridger and I went online to answer questions from readers. The Guardian, whose readership is more sympathetic to the guerrilla sensibilities of WikiLeaks, was attacked for being too fastidious about redacting the documents: How dare you censor this material? What are you hiding? Post everything now! The mail sent to The Times, at least in the first day or two, came from the opposite field. Many readers were indignant and alarmed: Who needs this? How dare you? What gives you the right?

Much of the concern reflected a genuine conviction that in perilous times the president needs extraordinary powers, unfettered by Congressional oversight, court meddling or the strictures of international law and certainly safe from nosy reporters. That is compounded by a popular sense that the elite media have become too big for their britches and by the fact that our national conversation has become more polarized and strident.

Although it is our aim to be impartial in our presentation of the news, our attitude toward these issues is far from indifferent. The journalists at The Times have a large and personal stake in the country’s security. We live and work in a city that has been tragically marked as a favorite terrorist target, and in the wake of 9/11 our journalists plunged into the ruins to tell the story of what happened here. Moreover, The Times has nine staff correspondents assigned to the two wars still being waged in the wake of that attack, plus a rotating cast of photographers, visiting writers and scores of local stringers and support staff. They work in this high-risk environment because, while there are many places you can go for opinions about the war, there are few places — and fewer by the day — where you can go to find honest, on-the-scene reporting about what is happening. We take extraordinary precautions to keep them safe, but we have had two of our Iraqi journalists murdered for doing their jobs. We have had four journalists held hostage by the Taliban — two of them for seven months. We had one Afghan journalist killed in a rescue attempt. Last October, while I was in Kabul, we got word that a photographer embedded for us with troops near Kandahar stepped on an improvised mine and lost both his legs.

We are invested in the struggle against murderous extremism in another sense. The virulent hatred espoused by terrorists, judging by their literature, is directed not just against our people and our buildings but also at our values and at our faith in the self-government of an informed electorate. If the freedom of the press makes some Americans uneasy, it is anathema to the ideologists of terror.

So we have no doubts about where our sympathies lie in this clash of values. And yet we cannot let those sympathies transform us into propagandists, even for a system we respect.

I’m the first to admit that news organizations, including this one, sometimes get things wrong. We can be overly credulous (as in some of the prewar reporting about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction) or overly cynical about official claims and motives. We may err on the side of keeping secrets (President Kennedy reportedly wished, after the fact, that The Times had published what it knew about the planned Bay of Pigs invasion, which possibly would have helped avert a bloody debacle) or on the side of exposing them. We make the best judgments we can. When we get things wrong, we try to correct the record. A free press in a democracy can be messy. But the alternative is to give the government a veto over what its citizens are allowed to know. Anyone who has worked in countries where the news diet is controlled by the government can sympathize with Thomas Jefferson’s oft-quoted remark that he would rather have newspapers without government than government without newspapers.

The intentions of our founders have rarely been as well articulated as they were by Justice Hugo Black 40 years ago, concurring with the Supreme Court ruling that stopped the government from suppressing the secret Vietnam War history called the Pentagon Papers: “The government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people.”

There is no neat formula for maintaining this balance. In practice, the tension between our obligation to inform and the government’s obligation to protect plays out in a set of rituals. As one of my predecessors, Max Frankel, then the Washington bureau chief, wrote in a wise affidavit filed during the Pentagon Papers case: “For the vast majority of ‘secrets,’ there has developed between the government and the press (and Congress) a rather simple rule of thumb: The government hides what it can, pleading necessity as long as it can, and the press pries out what it can, pleading a need and a right to know. Each side in this ‘game’ regularly ‘wins’ and ‘loses’ a round or two. Each fights with the weapons at its command. When the government loses a secret or two, it simply adjusts to a new reality.”

In fact, leaks of classified material — sometimes authorized — are part of the way business is conducted in Washington, as one wing of the bureaucracy tries to one-up another or officials try to shift blame or claim credit or advance or confound a particular policy. For further evidence that our government is highly selective in its approach to secrets, look no further than Bob Woodward’s all-but-authorized accounts of the innermost deliberations of our government.

The government surely cheapens secrecy by deploying it so promiscuously. According to the Pentagon, about 500,000 people have clearance to use the database from which the secret cables were pilfered. Weighing in on the WikiLeaks controversy in The Guardian, Max Frankel remarked that secrets shared with such a legion of “cleared” officials, including low-level army clerks, “are not secret.” Governments, he wrote, “must decide that the random rubber-stamping of millions of papers and computer files each year does not a security system make.”

Beyond the basic question of whether the press should publish secrets, criticism of the WikiLeaks documents generally fell into three themes: 1. That the documents were of dubious value, because they told us nothing we didn’t already know. 2. That the disclosures put lives at risk — either directly, by identifying confidential informants, or indirectly, by complicating our ability to build alliances against terror. 3. That by doing business with an organization like WikiLeaks, The Times and other news organizations compromised their impartiality and independence.

I’m a little puzzled by the complaint that most of the embassy traffic we disclosed did not profoundly change our understanding of how the world works. Ninety-nine percent of what we read or hear on the news does not profoundly change our understanding of how the world works. News mostly advances by inches and feet, not in great leaps. The value of these documents — and I believe they have immense value — is not that they expose some deep, unsuspected perfidy in high places or that they upend your whole view of the world. For those who pay close attention to foreign policy, these documents provide texture, nuance and drama. They deepen and correct your understanding of how things unfold; they raise or lower your estimation of world leaders. For those who do not follow these subjects as closely, the stories are an opportunity to learn more. If a project like this makes readers pay attention, think harder, understand more clearly what is being done in their name, then we have performed a public service. And that does not count the impact of these revelations on the people most touched by them. WikiLeaks cables in which American diplomats recount the extravagant corruption of Tunisia’s rulers helped fuel a popular uprising that has overthrown the government.

As for the risks posed by these releases, they are real. WikiLeaks’s first data dump, the publication of the Afghanistan War Logs, included the names of scores of Afghans that The Times and other news organizations had carefully purged from our own coverage. Several news organizations, including ours, reported this dangerous lapse, and months later a Taliban spokesman claimed that Afghan insurgents had been perusing the WikiLeaks site and making a list. I anticipate, with dread, the day we learn that someone identified in those documents has been killed.

WikiLeaks was roundly criticized for its seeming indifference to the safety of those informants, and in its subsequent postings it has largely followed the example of the news organizations and redacted material that could get people jailed or killed. Assange described it as a “harm minimization” policy. In the case of the Iraq war documents, WikiLeaks applied a kind of robo-redaction software that stripped away names (and rendered the documents almost illegible). With the embassy cables, WikiLeaks posted mostly documents that had already been redacted by The Times and its fellow news organizations. And there were instances in which WikiLeaks volunteers suggested measures to enhance the protection of innocents. For example, someone at WikiLeaks noticed that if the redaction of a phrase revealed the exact length of the words, an alert foreign security service might match the number of letters to a name and affiliation and thus identify the source. WikiLeaks advised everyone to substitute a dozen uppercase X’s for each redacted passage, no matter how long or short.

Whether WikiLeaks’s “harm minimization” is adequate, and whether it will continue, is beyond my power to predict or influence. WikiLeaks does not take guidance from The New York Times. In the end, I can answer only for what my own paper has done, and I believe we have behaved responsibly.

The idea that the mere publication of such a wholesale collection of secrets will make other countries less willing to do business with our diplomats seems to me questionable. Even Defense Secretary Robert Gates called this concern “overwrought.” Foreign governments cooperate with us, he pointed out, not because they necessarily love us, not because they trust us to keep their secrets, but because they need us. It may be that for a time diplomats will choose their words more carefully or circulate their views more narrowly, but WikiLeaks has not repealed the laws of self-interest. A few weeks after we began publishing articles about the embassy cables, David Sanger, our chief Washington correspondent, told me: “At least so far, the evidence that foreign leaders are no longer talking to American diplomats is scarce. I’ve heard about nervous jokes at the beginning of meetings, along the lines of ‘When will I be reading about this conversation?’ But the conversations are happening. . . . American diplomacy has hardly screeched to a halt.”

As for our relationship with WikiLeaks, Julian Assange has been heard to boast that he served as a kind of puppet master, recruiting several news organizations, forcing them to work in concert and choreographing their work. This is characteristic braggadocio — or, as my Guardian colleagues would say, bollocks. Throughout this experience we have treated Assange as a source. I will not say “a source, pure and simple,” because as any reporter or editor can attest, sources are rarely pure or simple, and Assange was no exception. But the relationship with sources is straightforward: you don’t necessarily endorse their agenda, echo their rhetoric, take anything they say at face value, applaud their methods or, most important, allow them to shape or censor your journalism. Your obligation, as an independent news organization, is to verify the material, to supply context, to exercise responsible judgment about what to publish and what not to publish and to make sense of it. That is what we did.

But while I do not regard Assange as a partner, and I would hesitate to describe what WikiLeaks does as journalism, it is chilling to contemplate the possible government prosecution of WikiLeaks for making secrets public, let alone the passage of new laws to punish the dissemination of classified information, as some have advocated. Taking legal recourse against a government official who violates his trust by divulging secrets he is sworn to protect is one thing. But criminalizing the publication of such secrets by someone who has no official obligation seems to me to run up against the First Amendment and the best traditions of this country. As one of my colleagues asks: If Assange were an understated professorial type rather than a character from a missing Stieg Larsson novel, and if WikiLeaks were not suffused with such glib antipathy toward the United States, would the reaction to the leaks be quite so ferocious? And would more Americans be speaking up against the threat of reprisals?

Whether the arrival of WikiLeaks has fundamentally changed the way journalism is made, I will leave to others and to history. Frankly, I think the impact of WikiLeaks on the culture has probably been overblown. Long before WikiLeaks was born, the Internet transformed the landscape of journalism, creating a wide-open and global market with easier access to audiences and sources, a quicker metabolism, a new infrastructure for sharing and vetting information and a diminished respect for notions of privacy and secrecy. Assange has claimed credit on several occasions for creating something he calls “scientific journalism,” meaning that readers are given the raw material to judge for themselves whether the journalistic write-ups are trustworthy. But newspapers have been publishing texts of documents almost as long as newspapers have existed — and ever since the Internet eliminated space restrictions, we have done so copiously.

Nor is it clear to me that WikiLeaks represents some kind of cosmic triumph of transparency. If the official allegations are to be believed, most of WikiLeaks’s great revelations came from a single anguished Army private — anguished enough to risk many years in prison. It’s possible that the creation of online information brokers like WikiLeaks and OpenLeaks, a breakaway site announced in December by a former Assange colleague named Daniel Domscheit-Berg, will be a lure for whistle-blowers and malcontents who fear being caught consorting directly with a news organization like mine. But I suspect we have not reached a state of information anarchy. At least not yet.

As 2010 wound down, The Times and its news partners held a conference call to discuss where we go from here. The initial surge of articles drawn from the secret cables was over. More would trickle out but without a fixed schedule. We agreed to continue the redaction process, and we agreed we would all urge WikiLeaks to do the same. But this period of intense collaboration, and of regular contact with our source, was coming to a close.

Just before Christmas, Ian Katz, The Guardian’s deputy editor, went to see Assange, who had been arrested in London on the Swedish warrant, briefly jailed and bailed out by wealthy admirers and was living under house arrest in a country manor in East Anglia while he fought Sweden’s attempt to extradite him. The flow of donations to WikiLeaks, which he claimed hit 100,000 euros a day at its peak, was curtailed when Visa, MasterCard and PayPal refused to be conduits for contributors — prompting a concerted assault on the Web sites of those companies by Assange’s hacker sympathizers. He would soon sign a lucrative book deal to finance his legal struggles.

The Guardian seemed to have joined The Times on Assange’s enemies list, first for sharing the diplomatic cables with us, then for obtaining and reporting on the unredacted record of the Swedish police complaints against Assange. (Live by the leak. . . .) In his fury at this perceived betrayal, Assange granted an interview to The Times of London, in which he vented his displeasure with our little media consortium. If he thought this would ingratiate him with The Guardian rival, he was naïve. The paper happily splashed its exclusive interview, then followed it with an editorial calling Assange a fool and a hypocrite.

At the mansion in East Anglia, Assange seated Katz before a roaring fire in the drawing room and ruminated for four hours about the Swedish case, his financial troubles and his plan for a next phase of releases. He talked vaguely about secrets still in his quiver, including what he regards as a damning cache of e-mail from inside an American bank.

He spun out an elaborate version of a U.S. Justice Department effort to exact punishment for his assault on American secrecy. If he was somehow extradited to the United States, he said, “I would still have a high chance of being killed in the U.S. prison system, Jack Ruby style, given the continual calls for my murder by senior and influential U.S. politicians.”

While Assange mused darkly in his exile, one of his lawyers sent out a mock Christmas card that suggested at least someone on the WikiLeaks team was not lacking a sense of the absurd.

The message:

“Dear kids,

Santa is Mum & Dad.

Love,

WikiLeaks.”

Bill Keller is the executive editor of The New York Times. This essay is adapted from his introduction to “Open Secrets: WikiLeaks, War and American Diplomacy: Complete and Updated Coverage from The New York Times,” an ebook available for purchase at nytimes.com/opensecrets.

Extremists considered in bomb investigation - Rachel Maddow updates viewers on the story of attempted bombing in Spokane, Washington and talks with New York Times columnist Bob Herbert about the dangerous rise of violent extremism in America.

2011-01-21T09:13:00.001-05:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Criminal Justice And Human Rights Law Blog

The Associated Press: Malaysia police slammed for cattle-branding women

Related articles

Obama breaks promise on Guantanamo - Rachel Maddow notes that by settling on military tribunals for Guantanamo prisoners, the Obama administration has broken the first promise it made in office.

Fixing the Mistake With Young Offenders - NYTimes.com

Fox underestimates crisis in Japan

A bleak future for boys in China, India and South Korea

Related articles

Assange case in turmoil as accuser linked to police

Related articles

'Jonathan voted four times in 2007'

PressTV - Georgia considers anti-immigrant bill

Shield law now goes beyond the media to cover everyone | The Australian

Egyptian Activists Expose Torture Tools and Files, Tied to US Renditions | Firedoglake

Bradley Manning Forced to Strip Naked… Again | FDL Action

Related articles

Harvard Law Reviews WikiLeaks Censorship | GroundReport

Beijing to Track People's Movements via Their Mobile Phones - PCWorld

Related articles

The Law Office of David E. Coombs: PFC Manning Forced to Strip Naked

Related articles

Justices Rule for Protesters at Military Funerals - NYTimes.com

Related articles

Supreme Court Back in Session; Nine Cases to Watch Legality of Military Funeral Protests, Other High Profile Cases on Docket

Monroe Price: Clinton's "Long Game" Advancing Internet Freedom

Related articles

Protests continue across Middle East

Related articles

The ‘Italian Job’ and Other Highlights From U.S.’s Rendition Program With Egypt - ProPublica

Related articles

Waseem Wagdi, Egyptian Protester. Egyptian Embassy, London. 29.1.11

Egypt Leaves the Internet - Renesys Blog

Related articles

Protests in Egypt follow Tunisian uprising - Rachel Maddow reports on popular uprisings in the Middle East, especially Egypt where protests against the government are expected to intensify with Friday's planned "Day of Rage."

Related articles

The Times's Dealings With Julian Assange - NYTimes.com

Related articles

Extremists considered in bomb investigation - Rachel Maddow updates viewers on the story of attempted bombing in Spokane, Washington and talks with New York Times columnist Bob Herbert about the dangerous rise of violent extremism in America.

Related articles