Sent: Sunday, December 05, 2010 4:22 PM
Subject: [R-G] Juan Cole checks in on the legality of harassing WikiLeaks
Among other things...
"Wikileaks continues to be under political pressure (I say political
rather than legal because as far as I can tell, the organization has not
been indicted or formally charged with wrongdoing), and I found it
impossible to get through to their new Swiss site this morning. But
there are now lots of mirror sites up all over Europe. The documents are
also being made available via torrents that can be picked up through
peer to peer (p2p) networks. Presumably the more important cables are in
the "insurance" file available at the various wikileaks mirror sites and
also via torrents, and which founder Julian Assange says has been
downloaded 100,000 times. An encryption key will be disseminated if
anything happens to the organization.
The mirror sites were made necessary when Amazon.com removed Wikileaks
from its servers, and when Wikileaks' domain name system provider,
Everydns, stopped servicing their registered web address. The reason
given was that the site was the object of concerted denial of service
attacks by hackers, which was inconveniencing the other customers of the
service. (Hackers can set up internet robots to bombard a site with so
many hits per minute that it overloads the servers and makes the site
inaccessible to others trying to reach it).
But if that is the reasoning, then the victim is being punished, since
denial of service attacks are illegal in the US. And they are, to boot,
a form of thuggery and bullying. It surely is just wrong for Everydns to
have dumped a customer simply because that customer had been targeted.
The reasons for which Amazon.com gave for booting Wikileaks off their
servers, likewise, do not hold water.
Amazon wrote:
' for example, our terms of service state that "you represent and
warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the
content… that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy
and will not cause injury to any person or entity." It's clear that
WikiLeaks doesn't own or otherwise control all the rights to this
classified content.'
But the US Government does not hold copyright in government-generated
documents. They are paid for by the public and are in the public domain.
The US government has the right to withhold the documents it generates
from the public, according to US law and court decisions. But once a
document has become public, no matter how, the government cannot sue for
copyright infringement or demand its return on those grounds, at least
in the United States. It could demand the documents' return on grounds
that they are classified, but it is not in fact clear that it is illegal
to be in possession of classified US government documents, assuming the
possessor was not the one who absconded with them in the first place."
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From: "Portside Moderator" <moderator@PORTSIDE.ORG>
http://www.foei.org/en/blog/commodifying-nature-in-an-age-of-climate-change
Commodifying Nature in an Age of Climate Change
By Nnimmo Bassey
Friends of the Earth: November 29, 2010
A few days before the UN climate negotiations in Cancun, Mexico, Nnimmo
Bassey, Chair of Friends of the Earth International, writes about the carbon
speculators who will be there hyping the utility of the carbon market as a
means of fighting climate change through offsetting rather than taking real
drastic action. We will be there to drown out the hype with the message of
climate justice.
For about two weeks, starting from next Monday, the world will be locked
into another session of negotiations on how to tackle climate change. The
conference, to be held in Cancun, Mexico, has drawn less excitement than its
predecessor held in Copenhagen, Denmark, a year ago.
The excitement of Copenhagen was partly driven by the false information that
circulated that the Kyoto Protocol was ending at that meeting. Though there
were serious, but failed efforts, made at that conference to lay the
protocol to rest, its first period actually ends in 2012, while a second
commitment period will be entered into as soon as the first period elapses.
But why would anyone want to kill the protocol and why should it be
sustained? The Kyoto Protocol is seen by some as the only legally binding
instrument to which the industrialised and highly polluting nations can be
made to commit to cutting emissions at source. From this perspective, when
countries fight to abolish the protocol, they are simply trying to avoid
making any real commitment to tackling climate change.
One problem with the workings of the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the ongoing negotiations is that it bases a
chunk of its reasoning and framings on the market logic. This follows the
path created by the mindset that has built a vicious paradigm of disaster
capitalism, in which tragedy is seen as opportunity for profit. What do we
mean by this?
Rather than take steps to curtail emissions of greenhouse gases responsible
for global warming, some people are busy devising ways of making every item
of nature a commodity placed at the altar of the market. Through this,
everything is being assigned a value and many others are privatised in
addition.
What makes this offensive is firstly that you cannot place a price on
nature, on life. Secondly, speculators are hyping the utility of the carbon
market as a means of fighting climate change. Some of the ways this
manifests is through the carbon offsetting projects by which polluters in
the industrialised countries continue to pollute, on the calculation that
their emissions are being compensated for elsewhere.
As Friends of the Earth International stated in a recent media advisory,
"Carbon trading does not lead to real emissions reductions. It is a
dangerous distraction from real action to address the structural causes of
climate change, such as over-consumption. Developed countries should
radically cut their carbon emissions through real change at home, not by
buying offsets from other countries. Carbon offsetting has no benefits for
the climate or for developing countries - it only benefits developed
countries, private investors, and major polluters who want to continue
business as usual."
Cancun will obviously be crawling with carbon speculators and traders, as
was the case in Copenhagen. And they have good reasons to be there. They
will be there because policy makers on both sides of the divide see benefits
in the schemes, even though the so-called benefits are pecuniary and are
actually harmful to Mother Earth. But as far as the money enters the pockets
of some poor countries, the rich countries can go on polluting, having paid
their "penance."
The world appears deaf to the need for real actions to curb climate change,
and the focus remains on money. In fact, while many of the items of the
Cancun agenda have stalled, with regard to reduction of carbon emissions in
the industralised nations, there is no shortage of proposals on how carbon
markets can be brought in to give appearance of action.
Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) is one of such
schemes in the scheme. Quick progress is being made on REDD and already,
talks are advancing on other variants of the scheme. Indigenous and forest
community people are opposed to REDD and object to its implementation, as
attention is being focused on forests merely as carbon stocks for mercantile
purposes. Significantly, many see REDD as not seeking to stop deforestation,
but merely to reduce it.
It is also argued that that any reduced deforestation may not be sustained,
as deforesters may just shift to another forest or zone to continue with
their activities. In other words, REDD is a pretty fiction that may pump
money into the pockets of some countries and corporations, but will
marginalise forest peoples and will not help to fight climate change. The
attraction, as critics have said, is that if this mechanism is linked to the
carbon market, it will allow developed countries pay money to REDD-projects
that preserve forests in developing countries, and in return receive carbon
credits - buying the right to pollute.
There will also be strident rejection of any role at all for the World Bank
in the climate finance architecture that may be devised in Cancun.
The atmosphere is set for a somber, winding series of negotiations. However,
social movements and other civil society groups are set to push up the
voices of the people, as already broadly articulated in the Peoples
Agreement, reached at the World Peoples Conference on Climate Change and the
Rights of Mother Earth held in April 2010 at Cochabamba, Bolivia.
The environmental justice movement that took first serious steps in
Copenhagen is sure to take firmer steps on the streets of Cancun and in
thousands of Cancuns being planned for a multitude of locations around the
world.
The message in Cancun, if we must expect motions towards real actions to
tackle climate change, is that governments must pay attention to what the
people are saying, to the real challenges faced by vulnerable peoples around
the world, and not lend their ears to carbon speculators.
Find out more about what we're calling for in Cancun
Document Actions (click on the url at the top, then on 'Find out...")
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