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This post was updated as more reaction to the verdict appeared.
Last Updated, 7:51 p.m. As my colleague Charlie Savage reports, a military judge found Pfc. Bradley Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who provided hundreds of thousands of secret documents to Wikileaks, not guilty of aiding the enemy but guilty on multiple counts of violating the Espionage Act at the conclusion of his court-martial in Fort Meade, Md., on Tuesday.
As Charlie explains: “Beyond the fate of Private Manning as an individual, the ‘aiding the enemy' charge - unprecedented in a leak case - could have significant long-term ramifications for investigative journalism in the Internet era. The government's theory was that providing defense-related information to an entity that published it for the world to see constituted aiding the enemy because the world includes adversaries, like members of Al Qaeda, who could read the documents online.â€
It was this aspect of the case that Wikileaks, like many journalists, focused on in response to the verdict. In an update posted on the official @Wikileaks Twitter feed shortly after the ruling, (which included a typo, misspelling the word “counts†as “courtsâ€), the group called the precedent troubling.
Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder, said in a statement released later: “Bradley Manning's alleged disclosures have exposed war crimes, sparked revolutions, and induced democratic reform. He is the quintessential whistleblower.â€
Jen Robinson, a media lawyer who worked on Mr. Assange's unsuccessful effort to have an extradition request from Sweden quashed in a British court, expressed dismay that the military judge called Private Manning's actions espionage, not whistleblowing.
The American Civil Liberties Union denounced the verdict as a government attempt “to intimidate anyone who might consider revealing valuable information in the future.â€
As the Slate blogger Dave Weigel reported, though, several members of Congress, expressed disappointment that the verdict was not a harsher one. “I'm very surprised by the verdict,†said Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the ranking Republican member of the Homeland Security committee who also sits on the Select Committee on Intelligence. “I believe the information he disclosed was extremely harmful to our country.â€
“I'm not saying Wikileaks was the enemy,†Senator Collins told Mr. Weigel. “I'm saying that the information revealed was helpful to those who do not wish us well.â€
Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a veteran Republican who was once as an Air Force lawyer, said: “This is one of the more serious things that I've seen a military member do in 30 years.†He added: “I hope people who say he's a hero see they're misguided in terms of what a hero might be.â€
Among those deeply critical of the verdict on Tuesday was Bill Keller, the former executive editor of The New York Times, who oversaw the publication of dozens of front-page articles in 2010 based on the secret State Department cables Private Manning provided to Wikileaks.
Mr. Keller, who is now an Op-Ed columnist, wrote:
In the cases of mega-leakers Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, the United States has sent a crude but clear message: if you're thinking of violating your obligation to keep secrets, think again, because we will track you down and smack you down. You may be sainted whistleblowers in the eyes of some, but you are traitors in the eyes of your government.
In the Manning case, the gratuitous and implausible charge of aiding the enemy â€" thankfully rejected Tuesday by the presiding judge, Colonel Denise Lind â€" was particularly chilling. Manning's motives in leaking a treasury of secrets to WikiLeaks seemed to be a mix of politics and personal discontent, but there was no evidence he intended or even imagined that his disclosures would help America's enemies.
Adrian Lamo, the former hacker who turned in Private Manning after the leaker had confided in him in an online chat, told The Guardian that the soldier was “guilty as hell†of the charges.
The Guardian also published a statement on the verdict from an unnamed aunt of Private Manning, who said: “While we are obviously disappointed in today's verdicts, we are happy that Judge Lind agreed with us that Brad never intended to help America's enemies in any way. Brad loves his country and was proud to wear its uniform.â€
While American cable news networks initially gave the verdict very little coverage - perhaps because the issues involved do not lend themselves to straightforward arguments along partisan political lines - the government-owned Russian network, Russia Today, has devoted a lot of time to the case. On Tuesday, Russia Today, which rarely misses an opportunity to highlight criticism of the American government, got a reaction to the verdict from Kristinn Hrafnsson, an Icelandic journalist and Wikileaks spokesman who is one of Mr. Assange's closest aides.
Mr. Hrafnsson called Private Manning “one of the most important whistle-blowers in history†and repeated the controversial claim made by Mr. Assange that the leak of State Department cables “led to profound political and social changes in the Middle East†by acting as a catalyst for the Arab uprisings of 2011.
Frank Jordans, an Associated Press correspondent in Berlin, reminded readers that the first item published by Wikileaks from the trove of material provided by Private Manning was video recorded from American helicopter gunships as the airmen shot and killed civilians they mistook for militants, including two Reuters journalists, in Baghdad in 2007.
An edited version of that video, titled “Collateral Murder†by Wikileaks, has been viewed nearly 14 million times on YouTube since it was uploaded in April 2010. As The Times reported then, the release of that video made the online whistle-blowing platform the focus of international attention.
By making that edit, and by dispatching an Icelandic journalist to Iraq to produce a video report on the victims of the attack, Wikileaks also began to act more like a journalistic organization than a pure platform for providing raw materials to the public. Within months, the organization all but abandoned the original idea of having readers analyze leaked documents through crowdsourcing, along the lines of Wikipedia, and formed a partnership with five news organizations - The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde, El PaÃs and Der Spiegel - whose journalists looked for important information in the trove of hundreds of thousands of leaked American diplomatic cables.
While it was not difficult to find the opinions of prominent critics of the verdict - no doubt in large part because the prosecution of someone who leaked government documents of interest to the public could well discourage other sources from providing similarly important information to reporters - strong supporters of the government's position were less in evidence in the media. One place to look, however, was in the forums devoted to comments from readers, rather than reporters, including the one beneath this blog post.
“I am a liberal Democrat, a sometimes member of the A.C.L.U. and a former Pfc. with the highest level security clearance, with statements signed under stiff penalties for violating any classified information received in the course of my army duties,†a Lede reader named John Beard wrote from North Carolina. “I took my commitment to safeguard those secrets seriously. I am not sympathetic to Pfc. Manning's post-disclosure predicament, and resent Ron Paul's and others assertions that “spying†or other covert actions undertaken to ferret out Taliban and other subversive groups originated with President Obama's administration. The spying originated and with and continued throughout the GWB post-9/11 administration.â€
A reader named Lucas, perhaps not incidentally writing from Washington, agreed:
Manning is not a whistleblower. Whisleblowers do not indiscriminately hand a foreign, anti-American entity hundreds of thousands of documents on various and sundry topics. Manning is a document dumper who deserves time in prison for his actions.
As for Wikileaks, the organization has become the Julian Assange show and taken up Assange's demented crusade against the United States. Assange claims that he supports transparency and press freedoms, yet he has sought refuge in the embassy of a nation that actively censors the press and is a presenter on Vladimir Putin's Russia Today propaganda channel. How many journalists has Putin jailed and assassinated? Look for Assange to go on an anti-American rampage in the press to please his Kremlin masters.
Still, there was widespread sympathy for Private Manning from his peers in the online community. Jacob Appelbaum, a developer and spokesman for the Tor project, which allows users to browse the Web anonymously, called Private Manning's solitary detention and court-martial “Manning's torture and show trial.â€
Mr. Appelbaum, who was interviewed by Mr. Assange, the Wikileaks founder, for a talk show broadcast on “Russia Today,†also drew attention to comments posted on Twitter by supporters of Private Manning who compared his prosecution to the actions of the notorious East German secret police and noted that Ron Paul recently called the soldier more deserving of a Nobel Peace Prize than President Obama.
A complete transcript of the verdict was posted online later by the Freedom of the Press Foundation, whose board members include: Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers; Xeni Jardin, who reported from Fort Meade for Boing Boing; and Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, who recently revealed the extent of the National Security Agency's surveillance program based on documents leaked to them by Edward Snowden.
Xeni Jardin, reporting on the trial from Fort Meade for Boing Boing, notes that while Private Manning was cleared of the most serious charge, he still faces a lengthy prison term at the conclusion of his sentencing hearing, which begins on Wednesday.
The independent journalist Alexa O'Brien, also reporting from Fort Meade, calculates that the prison term could be up to 136 years.
Ms. O'Brien, who is open about her sympathy for Private Manning, later posted a link to details of the verdict in a press release from the military.
Wikileaks expressed horror at the potential sentence.
Agence France-Presse - Getty Images Syrian government forces patrolled the Khalidiya neighborhood of Homs on Sunday.In 1982, after President Hafez al-Assad's forces leveled whole sections of Syria's fourth-largest city, Hama, to suppress a revolt, the first foreign journalists allowed to view the rubble were shocked by the scale of the destruction.
Three decades later, as another President Assad struggles to defeat a much broader insurgency, reporters have again been left searching for words as images emerge of vast tracts of ruins where, until recently, the vibrant residential neighborhood of Khalidiya stood in the country's third-largest city, Homs.
Sam Skaine/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images What an Agence France-Presse journalist found in the Homs neighborhood of Khalidiya on Tuesday.
Reuters, via Shaam News Network An image provided to news organizations by a Syrian opposition news agency, said to show the ruined Khalidiya neighborhood of Homs on Friday, as government forces regained control.The extent of the damage brought to mind the words of a United States Army officer who told the Associated Press correspondent Peter Arnett, as they surveyed the ruined Vietnamese city of Ben Tre, pulverized by American bombardment in 1968: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.â€
As a colleague who visited Homs this month reported, at the center of Khalidiya is the silver-domed mosque of Khalid bin al-Waleed - named for an early Islamic warrior particularly revered by the Sunni Muslims who make up the backbone of the rebellion - which is now “pockmarked and perforated.â€
Sam Skaine/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images A soldier loyal to President Bashar al-Assad outside the Khalid bin al-Waleed mosque in Homs on Monday.
Sam Skaine/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images Ruins around the historic Khalid bin al-Waleed mosque in Homs on Monday.When Syrians first took to the streets in 2011, Homs was known as “the capital of the revolution.†Video posted online by Syrian activists throughout the spring and summer of that year showed protest after protest in the neighborhood around the mosque, as demonstrators chanted for the downfall of President Bashar al-Assad and security forces struggled to contain them.
In video of the protests, the mosque's distinctive silver domes, a point of pride and wonder before the uprising, were frequently visible in the background - particularly in one clip recorded in July 2011 after the security forces opened fire at the funeral of a demonstrator.
In the past two years, as the uprising devolved into an armed conflict and rebel-held Khalidiya came under heavy bombardment by government forces, activists trained their cameras on the mosque.
Over the weekend, as government forces closed in on the area, opposition activists continued to record shells landing around the familiar domes.
Just hours after a final video of government shelling in the area was recorded on Saturday by an opposition activist, a reporter for state television accompanied Syrian Army troops as they took control of the mosque.
The capture of the mosque was greeted as a major propaganda victory by supporters of the Syrian government, who gleefully shared images of government troops in and around the famous domes.
Filming among the ruins, a crew from the Iranian government's Arabic-language news channel Al-Alam reported on Monday that government forces had taken control of all of Khalidiya.
In an English-language news bulletin broadcast Tuesday night, Syrian state television hailed the offensive and claimed that government forces were consolidating their gains in the city.
As my colleague Melena Ryzik reported, the two members of the Russian activist collective Pussy Riot who remain imprisoned were both denied parole last week. At separate hearings, Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova were judged to be insufficiently repentant for the “punk prayer†they performed in a Moscow cathedral last year, calling on the Virgin Mary to “send Putin packing!â€
The women, who were arrested together in March 2012 and sentenced to two years in prison for “hooliganism aimed at inciting religious hatred,†both denounced the Russian justice system during the parole hearings in Perm and Saransk.
On Thursday, the literary journal n+1 published an English translation of Ms. Tolokonnikova's defiant statement, in which she said: “I know that in Russia under Putin I will never receive parole. But I came here, to this courtroom, in order to cast light once again on the absurdity of the justice of the oil-and-gas-resource kingdom, which condemns people to rot pointlessly in camps.â€
RIA Novosti During her parole hearing last week, the Pussy Riot activist Nadezhda Tolokonnikova referred to protests in Moscow after the conviction of the anti-corruption blogger Aleksei A. Navalny.As one Russian art blogger explained, Ms. Tolokonnikova also took issue with the charge that she had failed to display “a positive attitude†in the penal colony by boycotting an essentially mandatory beauty contest for female prisoners. According to the n+1 translation by Kevin M. F. Platt, Ms. Tolokonnikova told the court:
The style of the Putin regime is a conservative, secret-police aesthetic. By no accident - and actually quite logically - this aesthetic persistently samples and recreates the principles of two previous regimes, both of them historical precedents to the present one: the czarist-imperial aesthetic and the wrongly understood aesthetic of Socialist Realism, complete with workers from some kind of standard-issue Train-Car Assembly Plant of the Urals. Given the clumsiness and thoughtlessness with which all of this is being recreated, the present political regime's ideological apparatus deserves no praise. Empty space, in its minimalism, is more attractive and tempting than the results of the aesthetic efforts of the current regime.
This worthless aesthetic is lovingly recreated by each and every state institution in Russia, including, of course, the prison colonies, which form such an important part of the repressive machine of the state.
And so, if you are a woman and, what is more, if you are a young woman and even the slightest bit attractive, then you are basically required to take part in beauty contests. If you refuse to participate, you will be denied parole based on your disdain for the “Miss Charm†event. In the opinion of the prison colony administration and the court that supports it, nonparticipation means that you lack a “positive attitude.†However, I claim that in boycotting the beauty contest I express my own principled and painstakingly formulated “positive attitude.†My own position, in distinction from the conservative, secret-police aesthetic of the camp administration, consists in reading my books and journals during moments that I extract by force from the deadening daily schedule of the prison colony.
On the same day that Ms. Tolokonnikova made her impassioned plea for justice to the court in Saransk, a third Pussy Riot member, Yekaterina Samutsevich - who was jailed with the other women but released on appeal last October - took part in a bizarre protest in the Netherlands organized by Amnesty International to press for the release of the Russian activists. Ms. Samutsevich fired the starter's pistol, via video link, for Amnesty's “Naked Run for Freedom,†but the Russian judges were somehow unmoved by the spectacle of hundreds of Dutch protesters running around a muddy track during a music festival wearing only motorcycle helmets.
Updated, Friday, 11:32 a.m. When the former United States intelligence analyst Edward J. Snowden was finally allowed to leave his limbo in the transit zone of Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport on Thursday with a permit granting him political asylum in Russia, Russian bloggers, activists, entrepreneurs and journalists posted messages on social networks welcoming him to his new home.
The messages mixed praise for his courage in leaking details of the National Security Agency's vast surveillance programs with sardonic asides about his choice to live in a country where life can be nasty, brutish and short for whistle-blowers and democracy activists. Since Mr. Snowden has just started studying Russian, The Lede has translated a selection of the welcome messages into English.
Mark Feygin, a Russian lawyer who defended three members of the activist collective Pussy Riot jailed for a political stunt, wrote on Twitter: “Snowden doesn't quite understand that his acceptance of Russian asylum is the same as his agreeing to receive his inheritance from a Nigerian lawyer by e-mail.â€
Pavel Durov, the founder of the most prominent Russian social network, VKontakte, offered Mr. Snowden immediate employment in data security:
Today Edward Snowden - the man that exposed the crimes of the U.S. intelligence agencies against citizens across the globe - received temporary asylum in Russia. At such moments, one feels proud of our country and sadness over U.S. policy - a country that has betrayed the principles that it was once built upon.
We invite Edward to St. Petersburg and will be thrilled if he decides to join our stellar team of programmers at VKontakte. At the end of the day, there is no European Internet company more popular than VK. I think Edward might be interested in protecting the personal data of our millions of users.
Vladimir Varfolomeyev, a host at the radio station Ekho Moskvy, said: “The Russian Federation took the correct decision on Snowden. We cannot give him to the U.S. However, the asylum seeker picked a very odd place of refuge.â€
The Russian news site Sputnik & Pogrom joked, “For crimes against the American government, a U.S. court sentenced Snowden to the highest form of punishment - life in Russia.â€
In a series of Twitter updates, the ecological activist Yevgenia Chirikova wrote:
I'm happy for Snowden. If he returns to the U.S., torture and death await him. Russia is most certainly better - a huge country, he'll find somewhere to go.
Snowden can be saved not by the Russian government, but by its vastness. Lots of people have saved themselves that way.
If Snowden doesn't want to be a toy in someone else's game, he will lose himself in the endless Russian countryside. God give him strength!
The journalist Maxim Shevchenko suggested that Mr. Snowden, like the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, could soon be given his own talk show on Russia Today, the Kremlin-owned network known for its consistent criticism of the United States government.
The Gruppa Voina Twitter feed, run by Pyotr Verzilov, the husband of the jailed Pussy Riot activist Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, seconded a comment from a blogger who wrote, “Poor Snowden - the guy thinks he's free.â€
Ilya Mouzykantskii is a freelance journalist and a New York Times intern in Moscow. Follow him on Twitter @ilyamuz.
Robert Mackey also remixes the news on Twitter @robertmackey.
Last Updated, 6:46 p.m. | As my colleague Thomas Erdbrink reports from Tehran, Iran's state media scrambled on Friday to correct comments wrongly attributed to the country's president-elect, Hassan Rouhani, after he was incorrectly quoted calling Israel “a sore which must be removed.â€
Press TV, the English-language arm of Iran's state broadcaster, subtitled Mr. Rouhani's actual remarks, made to a reporter during the Islamic republic's annual march for Quds, the Arabic name for Jerusalem. The video shows that the cleric did not mention Israel by name or call for its elimination, but did compare “the shadow of the occupation of the holy land of Palestine and the dear Quds,†to a “wound†or “sore†that “has been sitting on the body of the Islamic world for many years.â€
Those remarks were still disturbing to Israelis, since they hewed to the Iranian government line that the entire state of Israel is occupied Palestinian territory. A longer clip of the state television broadcast showed Mr. Rouhani smiling and waving in the parade as chants of “Death to Israel†echoed in the background.
That report also showed other senior figures marching, including the former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. According to Shiva Balaghi, an Iranian-American cultural historian, Mr. Rafsanjani explained as he marched that the point of the annual Quds Day rally was to encourage Palestinians. “When they see this support,†he said, “they will become hopeful.â€
Arash Karami, a journalist who blogs about the Iranian media, noted that two semi-official news agencies that initially misreported Mr. Rouhani's remarks, subsequently corrected their reports in articles headlined: “The Occupation of Palestine Is a Wound on the Body of the Islamic World.â€
International news organizations that had relied on the initial, flawed reports from Iran were forced to explain the error later in the day. Rana Rahimpour of the BBC's Persian service explained what happened in an appearance on BBC World News.
After the video showed that Iran's incoming president had been misquoted, a spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the Israeli leader stood by his initial response, in which he said:
Rouhani's true face has been revealed earlier than expected. Even if they will now rush to deny his remarks, this is what the man thinks and this is the plan of the Iranian regime. These remarks by President Rouhani must rouse the world from the illusion that part of it has been caught up in since the Iranian elections. The president there has changed but the goal of the regime has not: To achieve nuclear weapons in order to threaten Israel, the Middle East and the peace and security of the entire world. A country that threatens the destruction of the State of Israel must not be allowed to possess weapons of mass destruction.
That comment remains on the prime minister's Facebook page, still explained as his response to Mr. Rouhani's “remarks in which he was cited as saying that Israel ‘has been a wound on the body of the Islamic world for years and should be removed.'â€
Hours later, the prime minister's official spokesman to the Arab media, Ofir Gendelman, drew attention on Twitter to an Arabic translation of Mr. Netanyahu's rejoinder without mentioning that there was no evidence the comment that prompted the response was ever made.
There was evidence of some confusion in the Israeli response, though, since Golnaz Esfandiari, a reporter who blogs on Iran for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, noticed that part of the statement initially posted on Mr. Netanyahu's personal Twitter feed was deleted shortly after she replied to it.
The Buzzfeed reporter Rosie Gray captured a screenshot of two updates that were later removed from the verified @netanyahu account, which is affiliated with the leader's Likud Party office.
An Israeli government spokesman told Ms. Gray to ignore that personal account, and insisted that the statement had not been retracted. Indeed, one of the comments that disappeared from the @netanyahu feed was also posted on the government-run @IsraeliPM account, and was not deleted.
Later on Friday, the social media team that helped Mr. Rouhani's campaign prevail in the election uploaded its own subtitled video of his remarks to YouTube, and circulated it on Twitter.
The rapid spread of these false reports that Iran's new president had explicitly called for Israel's destruction echoed an incident in 2005, when the country's current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was incorrectly quoted as saying that Israel “must be wiped off the map.†As The Lede explained last year, Mr. Ahmadinejad had, in fact, used a metaphorical turn of phrase in Persian that has no exact English equivalent, made no mention of a map, and might have intended his comment to be more of a prediction than a threat.
That said, Mr. Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the far more powerful cleric who rules Iran, have repeatedly predicted that Israel will cease to exist and openly support militant groups that are pledged to the destruction of the Jewish state. In some cases, they have even used language similar to what was falsely attributed to Mr. Rouhani on Friday. “The Zionist regime is a true cancer tumor on this region that should be cut off,†Iran's supreme leader said in a speech last year. “And it definitely will be cut off.â€
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Updated, 4:53 p.m. | In July, the Justice Department won its antitrust lawsuit that accused Apple of conspiring with publishers to raise the prices of e-books. Now, the government wants to use its victory to discipline Apple in other markets where it does business, like movies, music and television shows.
The Justice Department on Friday proposed guidelines to the United States District Court in Lower Manhattan on how to enforce the July ruling. The guidelines suggest that Apple should be forced to terminate its existing agreements with five major publishers and also avoid entering similar agreements in the future with providers of music, movies and TV shows and games.
The guidelines would put rules in place to prevent Apple from facilitating price-fixing among publishers, or from retaliating against publishers that refuse to bend to its terms. The Justice Department also suggested that Apple allow Amazon and Barnes & Noble to insert links inside their e-book apps to their e-bookstores, so that consumers can easily compare prices of e-books.
“The court found that Apple's illegal conduct deprived consumers of the benefits of e-book price competition and forced them to pay substantially higher prices,†William J. Baer, assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice's antitrust division, said in a statement. “Under the department's proposed order, Apple's illegal conduct will cease and Apple and its senior executives will be prevented from conspiring to thwart competition in the future.â€
In a statement filed by Apple's legal counsel, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Apple said the government's proposal was a “draconian and punitive intrusion†into its business.
The “overreaching proposal would establish a vague new compliance regime - applicable only to Apple - with intrusive oversight lasting for 10 years, going far beyond the legal issues in this case, injuring competition and consumers, and violating basic principles of fairness and due process,†Apple's lawyer, Orin Snyder, said in its statement. “The resulting cost of this relief - not only in dollars but also lost opportunities for American businesses and consumers - would be vast.â€
The Justice Department declined to comment.
In the case, brought last year, the Justice Department accused Apple and five book publishers of conspiring to raise e-book prices. It cast Apple as the ringmaster of the conspiracy, colluding with the publishers to collectively help them defeat Amazon's uniform pricing of $9.99 for new e-books.
As part of its pitch, Apple asked the publishers to switch to a different model of selling books, called agency pricing, in which the publishers set the price of the books instead of the retailers. The publishers' contracts with Apple included a so-called most-favored-nation clause, requiring that no other retailer sell e-books for a lower price; if they did, the publisher would have to match the price of the e-book in Apple's store. That, the Justice Department said, defeated price competition and resulted in higher prices across the industry.
The Justice Department's proposed remedy would presumably prohibit Apple from using contracts with a most-favored-nation clause to help providers of music, TV shows and movies raise their prices. But it is unlikely that it would have implications for every contract that includes a most-favored-nation clause. The judge, Denise L. Cote, said in her ruling against Apple that the most-favored-nation clause itself was not the issue, but more specifically the manner in which the clause was used as a mechanism to execute a price-fixing conspiracy.
Outside the book business, it is still unclear whether most-favored-nation clauses raise prices for other industries, like music, said Charles E. Elder, an antitrust lawyer at Irell & Manella. “One question is, to what extent would Apple's getting rid of most-favored-nation clauses in those industries help for competition?†Mr. Elder said. “I don't know the answer to that question, but it's one the court should think about before rubber-stamping a requested remedy by the Department of Justice.â€
Judge Cote will hold a hearing next week to discuss the Justice Department's proposed remedy.
Ten years ago this week, Senator James M. Inhofe, the Republican from Oklahoma, used a two-hour floor speech to launch his campaign on the credibility of climate science pointing to dangers from the unabated release of greenhouse gases. There was a a touch of lawyerly nuance in that speech â€" with Inhofe specifying he was asserting that “catastrophic†man-made global warming was a hoax.
It's one thing to have a political debate about the level of danger posed by the building greenhouse effect. “How much is too much†is in fact a societal choice more than a question answerable by science. But it's another to spend a decade, as Inhofe has since, making ever more caricatured attacks on climate scientists in the name of preserving the country's dependence on fossil fuels.
By 2010, digging through the cache of climate scientists' e-mail exchanges revealed in the incident that became best known as Climategate, Inhofe was using Senate committee time and resources to probe the actions of 17 climate scientists who Inhofe said should be investigated as potential criminals.*
That's why so many scientists and others (me included) were irked last month to learn that Google, a company that in recent years gained a green reputation by investing aggressively in renewable energy projects, was hosting a July 11 fund-raising luncheon for Inhofe.
Big companies have many, and sometimes conflicting, interests, as a spokesperson for Google tried to explain to the environmental blogger Brian Merchant this way: “[W]hile we disagree on climate change policy, we share an interest with Senator Inhofe in the employees and data center we have in Oklahoma.â€
Now the Web giant is facing fresh criticism, this time in an open letter from 17 scientists and policy researchers who were invited to Google's Silicon Valley headquarters back in 2011 to explore ways to improve climate science communication (I was also invited and gave a talk).
Below you can read an essay by the four lead authors of the letter, which was sent yesterday to Google's executive leadership. The letter is posted here and at Climate Science Watch:
Google's Troubling Alliance with Senator James Inhofe
The company betrays core principles and risks its own business success
Matthew Nisbet, Alan Townsend, Jonathan Koomey, and Julia Cole
Climate change is a grave moral challenge that cannot be addressed without smart government policy, corporate innovation, and public participation. Leaders and citizens must collaborate in ways that transcend differences, and call out those who impede progress by denying the reality of the problem.
Recently, Google Inc. failed in this duty by hosting a July 11, 2013 fund-raiser in support of Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe's re-election campaign. The political gridlock that has derailed efforts to address climate change in the US owes much to Senator Inhofe. His denial of the problem and fact-free assaults on the scientific community are designed to promote political dysfunction, to destroy the reputation of scientists, and to undermine our ability to find common ground.
Such strategies conflict with Google's successful evidence-based, problem-solving culture, and are arguably contrary to its corporate philosophy of “Don't Be Evil.â€
In 2011, as participants in Google's science communication fellows program, we were inspired by the company's unique culture and investment in climate change education. We left the Mountain View headquarters eager to apply the new tools we learned to our public outreach activities.
But Google's recent support for Senator Inhofe forces us to seriously question the company's commitment to climate change leadership. This week, joined by 13 other distinguished fellows, we released an open letter to Google calling on the company to reconsider its fund-raising efforts on behalf of Senator Inhofe's re-election.
Not only does supporting Senator Inhofe go against Google's core principles, the company also risks its reputation.  Increasingly, consumers expect their most admired companies to “walk the walk†on climate issues.  According to a recent survey, about a quarter of Americans say that they have used their purchasing power to either reward or punish companies for their climate change track record.  An equivalent number say they have discussed what they see as a company's irresponsible environmental behavior with friends or family.
Google's support for Senator Inhofe has already angered consumers and looks especially bad in comparison to the recent actions of a major competitor. In 2009, Apple quit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over the group's opposition to limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. “We would prefer that the Chamber take a more progressive stance on this critical issue and play a constructive role in addressing the climate crisis,†the company wrote in a letter announcing its resignation.
Earlier this year, Apple hired former Environmental Protection Administrator Lisa Jackson to expand the company's environmental and energy initiatives. As Apple CEO Tim Cook declared in a statement, Jackson would make Apple the “top environmental leader in the tech sector,†using its influence to “push electric utilities and governments to provide the clean energy that both Apple and America need right now.â€
Apart from the possible damage to its reputation, Google's support for Senator Inhofe matters in other ways as well. To power its operations, Google has invested heavily in energy efficiency strategies and renewable energy projects. These investments are predicated on the idea that climate change creates business risks, and among the best actions for managing those risks is to reduce emissions.
Yet absent the proposed climate policies that Senator Inhofe and his allies have so effectively blocked, these technologies will remain more costly than they otherwise would be, limiting Google's return on investment. Political paralysis also muddles the ability of Google and other companies to engage in long-term planning, creating further financial risk.
The lack of international cooperation on meaningful actions to address climate change poses an even greater threat to global companies like Google, since their profits are closely tied to the performance of the world economy. Each year we delay acting, the more vulnerable our economies become to potentially catastrophic climate change impacts and the more costly it becomes to transform our global energy system.
Large companies must â€" and should â€" work with political leaders on both sides of the aisle. Moreover, vigorous debate over policy options and technological trade-offs will be needed if we are going to identify effective paths forward and build broad support for action.
But when political leaders like Senator Inhofe deny the problem of climate change, they do not make the problem disappear-instead, they compound it by blocking constructive solutions. And when corporations like Google support these same political leaders, they endanger our ability to manage the climate crisis before it exacts even greater costs.
In the face of overwhelming evidence and the growing number of groups working together to address the problem, the politics of climate change are shifting. For both economic and moral reasons, Google needs to stand on the right side of history and stop supporting those who are best known for attacking scientists, denying reality and obstructing government action.
Responsibility, however, also rests with scientists, civil society leaders, and the public. Indeed, this may be the enduring lesson of Google's mistake. By speaking out when our admired companies and political leaders let us down, we are the only ones who can create the conditions where the morally right thing to do is also good for politics and business.
Matthew Nisbet is Associate Professor of Communication at American University, Washington D.C.; Alan Townsend is Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado-Boulder; Jonathan Koomey is Research Fellow at the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance, Stanford University; and Julia Cole is Professor of Geosciences and Atmospheric Sciences at The University of Arizona.
Updated at asterisk above, 1:43 p.m. |
Thanks, A.L. Hern, for catching the “whom / who†grammar glitch that my grandmother was always eager to point out.
TOKYO - The Samjiyon tablet computer, it is safe to say, is no threat to the iPad.
While Apple and other leading tablet makers keep adding more features to these devices, the Samjiyon is more notable for what it lacks: YouTube, Gmail, Wi-Fi, even access to the Internet â€" at least, the Internet that most of the world knows.
Samjiyon is a North Korean brand, if that is the right word for the labels affixed to electronics in the world's most hard-line communist country. Word of the Samjiyon began to trickle out of North Korea last year after the device was shown off at a trade fair in Pyongyang.
A demonstration of the Samjiyon tablet.
Now an intrepid traveler has gone into North Korea and brought back a Samjiyon tablet for the rest of the world to see. IDG, a technology news service and trade publisher, has provided a report based on his review.
The device, IDG says, comes equipped with a 7-inch screen, a 2-megapixel camera, a 1.2-GHz processor and it runs a version of Google's Android operating system. Several apps, including games like “Angry Birds,†come pre-installed.
IDG said the information was provided by a tourist who asked that he be identified only by his first name, Michael, to ensure that he could re-enter the country.
The Samjiyon, acquired at a gift shop in Pyongyang for $200, is “surprisingly impressive,†IDG quotes Michael as saying.
“In terms of responsiveness and speed, it can almost compete against the leading tablets,†the news service quotes him as saying. “Tapping and launching apps feels fairly fluid, initializing the camera is as fast as the world's leading tablets, and there is no noticeable lag when playing games I'm familiar with, like ‘Angry Birds.' ''
But there is a hitch. Michael tells IDG that he has been unable to get the Samjiyon online. While there is limited Internet connectivity in North Korea, access requires government permission. Even mobile phones remain rare.
Instead, North Korea has its own walled garden of an online service, called Kwangmyong, and the tablet has a Web browser for access. The Samjiyon also provides access to government-run television broadcasts, IDG says.
Brendan O'Connor is a security researcher. How easy would it be, he recently wondered, to monitor the movement of everyone on the street â€" not by a government intelligence agency, but by a private citizen with a few hundred dollars to spare?
Mr. O'Connor, 27, bought some plastic boxes and stuffed them with a $25, credit-card size Raspberry Pi Model A computer and a few over-the-counter sensors, including Wi-Fi adapters. He connected each of those boxes to a command and control system, and he built a data visualization system to monitor what the sensors picked up: all the wireless traffic emitted by every nearby wireless device, including smartphones.
Each box cost $57. He produced 10 of them, and then he turned them on â€" to spy on himself. He could pick up the Web sites he browsed when he connected to a public Wi-Fi â€" say at a cafe â€" and he scooped up the unique identifier connected to his phone and iPad. Gobs of information traveled over the Internet in the clear, meaning they were entirely unencrypted and simple to scoop up.
Even when he didn't connect to a Wi-Fi network, his sensors could track his location through Wi-Fi “pings.†His iPhone pinged the iMessage server to check for new messages. When he logged on to an unsecured Wi-Fi, it revealed what operating system he was using on what kind of device, and whether he was using Dropbox or went on a dating site or browsed for shoes on an e-commerce site. One site might leak his e-mail address, another his photo.
“Actually it's not hard,†he concluded. “It's terrifyingly easy.â€
Also creepy â€" which is why he called his contraption “creepyDOL.â€
“It could be used for anything depending on how creepy you want to be,†he said.
You could spy on your ex-lover, by placing the sensor boxes near the places the person frequents, or your teenage child, or the residents of a particular neighborhood. You could keep tabs on people who gather at a certain house of worship or take part in a protest demonstration in a town square. Their phones and tablets, Mr. O'Connor argued, would surely leak some information about them â€" and certainly if they then connected to an unsecured Wi-Fi. The boxes are small enough to be tucked under a cafe table or dropped from a hobby drone. They can be scattered around a city and go unnoticed.
Mr. O'Connor says he did none of that â€" and for a reason. In addition to being a security researcher and founder of a consulting firm called Malice Afterthought, he is also a law student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He says he stuck to snooping on himself â€" and did not, deliberately, seek to scoop up anyone else's data â€" because of a federal law called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Some of his fellow security researchers have been prosecuted under that law. One of them, Andrew Auernheimer, whose hacker alias is Weev, was sentenced to 41 months in prison for exploiting a security hole in the computer system of AT&T, which made e-mail addresses accessible for over 100,000 iPad owners; Mr. Aurnheimer is appealing the case.
“I haven't done a full deployment of this because the United States government has made a practice of prosecuting security researchers,†he contends. “Everyone is terrified.â€
He is presenting his findings at two security conferences in Las Vegas this week, including at a session for young people. It is a window into how cheap and easy it is to erect a surveillance apparatus.
“It eliminates the idea of ‘blending into a crowd,'†is how he put it. “If you have a wireless device (phone, iPad, etc.), even if you're not connected to a network, CreepyDOL will see you, track your movements, and report home.â€
Can individual consumers guard against such a prospect? Not really, he concluded. Applications leak more information than they should. And those who care about security and use things like VPN have to connect to their tunneling software after connecting to a Wi-Fi hub, meaning that at least for a few seconds, their Web traffic is known to anyone who cares to know, and VPN does nothing to mask your device identifier.
In addition, every Wi-Fi network that your cellphone has connected to in the past is also stored in the device, meaning that as you wander by every other network, you share details of the Wi-Fi networks you've connected to in the past. “These are fundamental design flaws in the way pretty much everything works,†he said.
Brendan O’Connor is a security researcher. How easy would it be, he recently wondered, to monitor the movement of everyone on the street - not by a government intelligence agency, but by a private citizen with a few hundred dollars to spare?
Mr. O’Connor, 27, bought some plastic boxes and stuffed them with a $25, credit-card size Raspberry Pi Model A computer and a few over-the-counter sensors, including Wi-Fi adapters. He connected each of those boxes to a command and control system, and he built a data visualization system to monitor what the sensors picked up: all the wireless traffic emitted by every nearby wireless device, including smartphones.
Each box cost $57. He produced 10 of them, and then he turned them on - to spy on himself. He could pick up the Web sites he browsed when he connected to a public Wi-Fi - say at a cafe - and he scooped up the unique identifier connected to his phone and iPad. Gobs of information traveled over the Internet in the clear, meaning they were entirely unencrypted and simple to scoop up.
Even when he didn’t connect to a Wi-Fi network, his sensors could track his location through Wi-Fi “pings.†His iPhone pinged the iMessage server to check for new messages. When he logged on to an unsecured Wi-Fi, it revealed what operating system he was using on what kind of device, and whether he was using Dropbox or went on a dating site or browsed for shoes on an e-commerce site. One site might leak his e-mail address, another his photo.
“Actually it’s not hard,†he concluded. “It’s terrifyingly easy.â€
Also creepy - which is why he called his contraption “creepyDOL.â€
“It could be used for anything depending on how creepy you want to be,†he said.
You could spy on your ex-lover, by placing the sensor boxes near the places the person frequents, or your teenage child, or the residents of a particular neighborhood. You could keep tabs on people who gather at a certain house of worship or take part in a protest demonstration in a town square. Their phones and tablets, Mr. O’Connor argued, would surely leak some information about them - and certainly if they then connected to an unsecured Wi-Fi. The boxes are small enough to be tucked under a cafe table or dropped from a hobby drone. They can be scattered around a city and go unnoticed.
Mr. O’Connor says he did none of that - and for a reason. In addition to being a security researcher and founder of a consulting firm called Malice Afterthought, he is also a law student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He says he stuck to snooping on himself - and did not, deliberately, seek to scoop up anyone else’s data - because of a federal law called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Some of his fellow security researchers have been prosecuted under that law. One of them, Andrew Auernheimer, whose hacker alias is Weev, was sentenced to 41 months in prison for exploiting a security hole in the computer system of AT&T, which made e-mail addresses accessible for over 100,000 iPad owners; Mr. Aurnheimer is appealing the case.
“I haven’t done a full deployment of this because the United States government has made a practice of prosecuting security researchers,†he contends. “Everyone is terrified.â€
He is presenting his findings at two security conferences in Las Vegas this week, including at a session for young people. It is a window into how cheap and easy it is to erect a surveillance apparatus.
“It eliminates the idea of ‘blending into a crowd,’†is how he put it. “If you have a wireless device (phone, iPad, etc.), even if you’re not connected to a network, CreepyDOL will see you, track your movements, and report home.â€
Can individual consumers guard against such a prospect? Not really, he concluded. Applications leak more information than they should. And those who care about security and use things like VPN have to connect to their tunneling software after connecting to a Wi-Fi hub, meaning that at least for a few seconds, their Web traffic is known to anyone who cares to know, and VPN does nothing to mask your device identifier.
In addition, every Wi-Fi network that your cellphone has connected to in the past is also stored in the device, meaning that as you wander by every other network, you share details of the Wi-Fi networks you’ve connected to in the past. “These are fundamental design flaws in the way pretty much everything works,†he said.
Brendan O’Connor is a security researcher. How easy would it be, he recently wondered, to monitor the movement of everyone on the street - not by a government intelligence agency, but by a private citizen with a few hundred dollars to spare?
Mr. O’Connor, 27, bought some plastic boxes and stuffed them with a $25, credit-card size Raspberry Pi Model A computer and a few over-the-counter sensors, including Wi-Fi adapters. He connected each of those boxes to a command and control system, and he built a data visualization system to monitor what the sensors picked up: all the wireless traffic emitted by every nearby wireless device, including smartphones.
Each box cost $57. He produced 10 of them, and then he turned them on - to spy on himself. He could pick up the Web sites he browsed when he connected to a public Wi-Fi - say at a cafe - and he scooped up the unique identifier connected to his phone and iPad. Gobs of information traveled over the Internet in the clear, meaning they were entirely unencrypted and simple to scoop up.
Even when he didn’t connect to a Wi-Fi network, his sensors could track his location through Wi-Fi “pings.†His iPhone pinged the iMessage server to check for new messages. When he logged on to an unsecured Wi-Fi, it revealed what operating system he was using on what kind of device, and whether he was using Dropbox or went on a dating site or browsed for shoes on an e-commerce site. One site might leak his e-mail address, another his photo.
“Actually it’s not hard,†he concluded. “It’s terrifyingly easy.â€
Also creepy - which is why he called his contraption “creepyDOL.â€
“It could be used for anything depending on how creepy you want to be,†he said.
You could spy on your ex-lover, by placing the sensor boxes near the places the person frequents, or your teenage child, or the residents of a particular neighborhood. You could keep tabs on people who gather at a certain house of worship or take part in a protest demonstration in a town square. Their phones and tablets, Mr. O’Connor argued, would surely leak some information about them - and certainly if they then connected to an unsecured Wi-Fi. The boxes are small enough to be tucked under a cafe table or dropped from a hobby drone. They can be scattered around a city and go unnoticed.
Mr. O’Connor says he did none of that - and for a reason. In addition to being a security researcher and founder of a consulting firm called Malice Afterthought, he is also a law student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He says he stuck to snooping on himself - and did not, deliberately, seek to scoop up anyone else’s data - because of a federal law called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Some of his fellow security researchers have been prosecuted under that law. One of them, Andrew Auernheimer, whose hacker alias is Weev, was sentenced to 41 months in prison for exploiting a security hole in the computer system of AT&T, which made e-mail addresses accessible for over 100,000 iPad owners; Mr. Aurnheimer is appealing the case.
“I haven’t done a full deployment of this because the United States government has made a practice of prosecuting security researchers,†he contends. “Everyone is terrified.â€
He is presenting his findings at two security conferences in Las Vegas this week, including at a session for young people. It is a window into how cheap and easy it is to erect a surveillance apparatus.
“It eliminates the idea of ‘blending into a crowd,’†is how he put it. “If you have a wireless device (phone, iPad, etc.), even if you’re not connected to a network, CreepyDOL will see you, track your movements, and report home.â€
Can individual consumers guard against such a prospect? Not really, he concluded. Applications leak more information than they should. And those who care about security and use things like VPN have to connect to their tunneling software after connecting to a Wi-Fi hub, meaning that at least for a few seconds, their Web traffic is known to anyone who cares to know, and VPN does nothing to mask your device identifier.
In addition, every Wi-Fi network that your cellphone has connected to in the past is also stored in the device, meaning that as you wander by every other network, you share details of the Wi-Fi networks you’ve connected to in the past. “These are fundamental design flaws in the way pretty much everything works,†he said.