Wikileaks

When U.S. Army Pfc. Bradley Manning walks into a military court Friday in Maryland, his many supporters and detractors will get their first glimpse of the soft-spoken Oklahoma native since his arrest in Iraq 19 months ago. Manning is the only person charged with unauthorized release of more than half a million classified U.S. military reports and diplomatic cables from around the globe, as well as a 2007 video of a deadly U.S. helicopter attack in...

U.S. diplomats have been directed by Washington to gather detailed data on their foreign counterparts, including the kinds of information usually sought by spies, according to diplomatic cables made public Sunday. The cables, part of the WikiLeaks website's massive release of secret U.S. dispatches, show that diplomats have been asked to gather counterparts' credit card and frequent flier numbers, iris scans, as well as information on their Internet identities and the telecommunications networks they use. The activities are laid out in dispatches that describe how the diplomats must fulfill their obligations under a previously undisclosed program called the National Humint Collection Directive.

Many disclosures of classified information, such as the release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, have served the public interest by shedding light on the previously obscure development of government policy. The latest document dump by WikiLeaks, consisting of diplomatic cables rather than military reports, so far falls short of that noble purpose, though it contains some fascinating ? even titillating ? details. The primary objective seems to be to embarrass the United States and complicate its foreign policy.

Swedish prosecutors won permission Thursday from a Stockholm court to seek an international arrest warrant for Julian Assange, the founder of the WikiLeaks website, whom they want to question about allegations of rape and other sexual offenses. The accusations stem from encounters that Assange, 39, had with two women during a visit to Sweden in August. Assange denies any unlawful conduct, saying that his relations with the women were consensual. But the Swedish Prosecution Authority said it wanted to bring Assange in for questioning and asked the district court in Stockholm to declare him detained in absentia.

Glenn Greenwald, the ne plus ultra of critics of what he calls the "surveillance state" -- and of the Obama administration's anti-terror tactics -- is accusing Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) of being hostile to "basic press freedoms. "  Greenwald's evidence consists of Feinstein's statement to an Australian newspaper that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be prosecuted under the Espionage Act.  "To see how hostile Feinstein is to basic press freedoms, [Greenwald writes]

Rafix was set to attack. The target was Visa.com. The weapon: a battery of personal computers ready to jam the site with millions of simultaneous log-in requests. "FIRE at WILL, gentlemen!" Rafix wrote in an online message. "Enjoy the epic battle of glory!" Within seconds of the battle cry, the attackers crippled the website of the world's largest credit card company. Unable to weather the massive surge in traffic, Visa's site remained out of commission for most of the day. Visa came under fire for its decision to suspend processing donations to WikiLeaks, the controversial website that has been publishing confidential U.S. government documents.

The publication this week by the New York Times and others of excerpts from a six-year archive of classified documents generated by U.S. military operations in Afghanistan raises a number of provocative questions about news organizations' ethical obligations in the Digital Age. The tens of thousands of reports provide a kind of ground-level account of the Afghan war between the beginning of 2004 and the end of 2009. Unlike the Pentagon Papers, to which they've been erroneously compared, the documents published simultaneously by the Times, the Guardian in London and Der Spiegel in Germany do not reveal any pattern of governmental mendacity.

Julian Assange, the founder of the controversial WikiLeaks website, was arrested here Tuesday and ordered to remain in custody until a hearing next week on his possible extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over allegations that he sexually assaulted two women. The jailing of Assange came as governments and businesses around the world continued their efforts to halt the ability of WikiLeaks to function. A Visa Europe spokesman said Tuesday that the firm was suspending its business with WikiLeaks, following in the footsteps of Amazon.

Two recent and seemingly unrelated events, the release of 250,000 unredacted State Department cables written between 1966 and 2011 via WikiLeaks and the pro-Palestinian protests at the Israel Philharmonic concert in London, got us thinking: How closely entwined are politics and classical music in diplomatic circles? A few weeks ago WikiLeaks published cables sent by American diplomats who were reporting back to the government on events and people of interest to the United States.