12.12.10

Carta-Manifesto dos Anonymous, os activistas que têm atacado os sites inimigos do Wikileaks




Carta-Manifesto dos Anonymous, os activistas que têm atacado os sites inimigos do Wikileaks

We are fighters for internet freedom.




As elites políticas procuram por todos os meios calar o mensageiro quando este expõe os golpes sujos dos Estados

As elites políticas dos Estados manipulam, mentem e intoxicam a opinião pública, mas quando os seus golpes sujos são revelados e expostos tentam por todos os meios calar o mensageiro.

Leitura imperdível do artigo de John Naughton no jornal inglês The Guardian


Live with the WikiLeakable world or shut down the net. It's your choice

Western political elites obfuscate, lie and bluster – and when the veil of secrecy is lifted, they try to kill the messenger

Never waste a good crisis" used to be the catchphrase of the Obama team in the runup to the presidential election. In that spirit, let us see what we can learn from official reactions to the WikiLeaks revelations.

The most obvious lesson is that it represents the first really sustained confrontation between the established order and the culture of the internet. There have been skirmishes before, but this is the real thing.

And as the backlash unfolds – first with deniable attacks on internet service providers hosting WikiLeaks, later with companies like Amazon and eBay and PayPal suddenly "discovering" that their terms and conditions preclude them from offering services to WikiLeaks, and then with the US government attempting to intimidate Columbia students posting updates about WikiLeaks on Facebook – the intolerance of the old order is emerging from the rosy mist in which it has hitherto been obscured. The response has been vicious, co-ordinated and potentially comprehensive, and it contains hard lessons for everyone who cares about democracy and about the future of the net.

There is a delicious irony in the fact that it is now the so-called liberal democracies that are clamouring to shut WikiLeaks down.

Consider, for instance, how the views of the US administration have changed in just a year. On 21 January, secretary of state Hillary Clinton made a landmark speech about internet freedom, in Washington DC, which many people welcomed and most interpreted as a rebuke to China for its alleged cyberattack on Google. "Information has never been so free," declared Clinton. "Even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable."

She went on to relate how, during his visit to China in November 2009, Barack Obama had "defended the right of people to freely access information, and said that the more freely information flows the stronger societies become. He spoke about how access to information helps citizens to hold their governments accountable, generates new ideas, and encourages creativity." Given what we now know, that Clinton speech reads like a satirical masterpiece.

One thing that might explain the official hysteria about the revelations is the way they expose how political elites in western democracies have been deceiving their electorates.

The leaks make it abundantly clear not just that the US-Anglo-European adventure in Afghanistan is doomed but, more important, that the American, British and other Nato governments privately admit that too.

The problem is that they cannot face their electorates – who also happen to be the taxpayers funding this folly – and tell them this. The leaked dispatches from the US ambassador to Afghanistan provide vivid confirmation that the Karzai regime is as corrupt and incompetent as the South Vietnamese regime in Saigon was when the US was propping it up in the 1970s. And they also make it clear that the US is as much a captive of that regime as it was in Vietnam.

The WikiLeaks revelations expose the extent to which the US and its allies see no real prospect of turning Afghanistan into a viable state, let alone a functioning democracy. They show that there is no light at the end of this tunnel. But the political establishments in Washington, London and Brussels cannot bring themselves to admit this.

Afghanistan is, in that sense, a quagmire in the same way that Vietnam was. The only differences are that the war is now being fought by non-conscripted troops and we are not carpet-bombing civilians.

The attack of WikiLeaks also ought to be a wake-up call for anyone who has rosy fantasies about whose side cloud computing providers are on. These are firms like Google, Flickr, Facebook, Myspace and Amazon which host your blog or store your data on their servers somewhere on the internet, or which enable you to rent "virtual" computers – again located somewhere on the net. The terms and conditions under which they provide both "free" and paid-for services will always give them grounds for dropping your content if they deem it in their interests to do so. The moral is that you should not put your faith in cloud computing – one day it will rain on your parade.

Look at the case of Amazon, which dropped WikiLeaks from its Elastic Compute Cloud the moment the going got rough. It seems that Joe Lieberman, a US senator who suffers from a terminal case of hubris, harassed the company over the matter. Later Lieberman declared grandly that he would be "asking Amazon about the extent of its relationship with WikiLeaks and what it and other web service providers will do in the future to ensure that their services are not used to distribute stolen, classified information". This led the New Yorker's Amy Davidson to ask whether "Lieberman feels that he, or any senator, can call in the company running the New Yorker's printing presses when we are preparing a story that includes leaked classified material, and tell it to stop us".

What WikiLeaks is really exposing is the extent to which the western democratic system has been hollowed out. In the last decade its political elites have been shown to be incompetent (Ireland, the US and UK in not regulating banks); corrupt (all governments in relation to the arms trade); or recklessly militaristic (the US and UK in Iraq). And yet nowhere have they been called to account in any effective way. Instead they have obfuscated, lied or blustered their way through. And when, finally, the veil of secrecy is lifted, their reflex reaction is to kill the messenger.

As Simon Jenkins put it recently in the Guardian, "Disclosure is messy and tests moral and legal boundaries. It is often irresponsible and usually embarrassing. But it is all that is left when regulation does nothing, politicians are cowed, lawyers fall silent and audit is polluted. Accountability can only default to disclosure." What we are hearing from the enraged officialdom of our democracies is mostly the petulant screaming of emperors whose clothes have been shredded by the net.

Which brings us back to the larger significance of this controversy. The political elites of western democracies have discovered that the internet can be a thorn not just in the side of authoritarian regimes, but in their sides too. It has been comical watching them and their agencies stomp about the net like maddened, half-blind giants trying to whack a mole. It has been deeply worrying to watch terrified internet companies – with the exception of Twitter, so far – bending to their will.

But politicians now face an agonising dilemma. The old, mole-whacking approach won't work. WikiLeaks does not depend only on web technology. Thousands of copies of those secret cables – and probably of much else besides – are out there, distributed by peer-to-peer technologies like BitTorrent. Our rulers have a choice to make: either they learn to live in a WikiLeakable world, with all that implies in terms of their future behaviour; or they shut down the internet. Over to them.

22 sugestões de leitura

‎22 leituras que nos transportam da realidade para a utopia, e desta para a reflexão e acção social, pelo que servem de pistas para quem desejar LER, PENSAR e AGIR:

Odisseia - Homero
D. Quixote – Cervantes
Gangantua e Pantagruel – Rabelais
As Viagens de Gulliver - Jonathan Swift
Contos - Voltaire
O Vermelho e o Negro – Stendhal
Ana Karenine - Tolstoi
Ulisses – J.Joyce
Metamorfose – Kafka
Os Cadernos de Malte Laurids Brigge - R.M. Rilke
Templo Dourado - Yukio Mishima
Viagem ao fim da noite – Celine
Cem anos de Solidão – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A mãe – Máximo Gorki
Siddharta – Herman Hesse
Pela Estrada Fora – Jack Kerouac
Capitães de Areia – Jorge Amado
Meu pé de laranja lima – José Mauro de Vasconcelos
Eva Luna – Isabel Allende
Mendigos e Altivos- Albert Cossery
A Selva – Ferreira de Castro
Um escritor confessa-se – Aquilino Ribeiro



Porque é tão importante ler os autores clássicos?

"Os clássicos são aqueles livros que chegam até nós trazendo consigo as marcas das leituras que precederam a nossa e atrás de si os traços que deixaram na cultura ou nas culturas que atravessaram. Os clássicos são livros que, quanto mais pensamos conhecer por ouvir dizer, quando são lid...
os de facto mais se revelam novos, inesperados, inéditos. É clássico aquilo que tende a relegar as actualidades à posição de barulho de fundo, mas ao mesmo tempo não pode prescindir desse barulho de fundo. "

(Italo Calvino)

Os cidadãos não deveriam ter medo do Estado

It is not the citizens that should fear the state.
It´s the state that should fear the citizens

(Não são os cidadãos que deveriam ter medo do estado
É o estado que deveria ter medo dos cidadãos)

Contratos de amor casual para evitar o «sex by surprise»?

Contratos de amor casual para evitar o «sex by surprise»?

Ou como a comédia se pode tornar a triste realidade!!!

Será que os contratos de amor casual irão agora irromper nos aposentos das nossas casas, nos hóteis e nos hiper-mercados para evitar o «sex by surprise» de que Julian Assange é ridulamente acusado pela não menos rídicula ...lei penal sueca?

Pelo sim ou pelo não, quando visitarem a Suécia levem uma fotocópia do contrato do amor casual, para não terem o Estado sueco à perna!!!

Chappelle's Show
Love Contract
http://www.comedycentral.com/
Black Comedy

Sê subversivo, Sê generoso,...

Bee subversive.
Bee generous
Bee radical
Bee deterritorialised
Bee thoughtful
Bee disruptive
Bee angry
Bee happy
Bee social
Bee colective
Bee passionate
Bee together
Bee sincere
Bee where you shouldn’ it
Bee brave
Bee resourceful
Bee humble
Bee outspken
Bee proud
Bee open to others
Bee always finding connections
Bee autonomous
Bee singular
Bee unafraid
Bee in discussion
Bee in love
Bee aware
Bee connected
Bee online
Bee offline
Bee present
Bee important
Bee local
Bee international
Bee in solidarity
Bee in occupation
Bee on the streets
Bee opposed to marketisation
Bee free thinking
Bee well read
Bee always learning
Bee with your eyes open
Bee realistc
Bee idealist
Bee makink mistakes sometimes
Bee listenings
Be mindful
Bee flexible
Bee temporary
Bee warm
Bee just
Bee amazed
Bee amazing
Bee where the action is
Bee spectacular
Bee strategically optimistic
Bee literate
Be desiring
Bee playful
Bee practical
Bee political
Bee fierce
Bee tough
Bee expressive
Bee clever
Bee ridiculous
Bee the resitance

...

WikiRebels (documentário da televisão sueca sobre o Wikileaks)



http://svtplay.se/v/2264028/wikirebels_the_documentary


A balada de Julian Assange (The Ballad of Julian Assange)

The Ballad of Julian Assange


I heard the news just yesterday that they've taken you away
to be extradited to the USA
They say that it's to Sweden that they're gonna take you first
but the Yankees are pressing hard - for revenge is what they thirst

They persecute your website and they kill your funding too
There simply isn't anything they'd hesitate to do
They've used bullets, napalm, bombers to get rid of who they hate
and they're willing to use all these things to seal up your fate

They'll be doing all they can to lock truth up in jail
but what their efforts will come down to is one big epic fail

They claim that you're a rapist but we all know it's not true
Instead the cause for all this is what you and others do
to spread the word 'bout nasty deals, to spill their beans big time
to tear the veil of secrecy that's covering up their crime

If you lived in China we all know what that would mean
you would get a Nobel prize and your own limousine
and lots of good publicity for doing the right thing
but you've taken on Amerikkka - and that's the biggest sin

They say that you're a menace to society for delivering them a blow
revealing what the ruling class don't want us to know

These Huckabees and Palins they all wish that you were dead
but even if they succeeded in cutting off your head
they couldn't turn the tide, their system's cracking at the seams
you can always kill a man but you can never kill our dreams