Tag: Morning Shinbun

WikiLeaks’ advocates are wreaking ‘hacktivism’



By Ian Shapira and Joby Warrick

Washington Post Staff Writers

In England, a 26-year-old advertising agency employee caters to multinational clients but on the side has been communicating with a secretive band of strangers devoted to supporting WikiLeaks.

Halfway around the world, a 24-year-old in Montana has used a publicly available – and, according to security experts, suddenly popular software program called Low Orbit Ion Cannon with the goal of shutting down Web sites of WikiLeaks’ perceived enemies.

How I met Julian Assange and secured the American embassy cables



Philip Dorling

December 11, 2010

GETTING to WikiLeaks’s secret headquarters took quite some time and was not without complications.

This year a careful reading of statements by the WikiLeaks co-founder, Julian Assange, led me to conclude his small organisation had landed what could be the biggest leak of classified information – a vast trove of US documents that, among other things, would provide deep insight into the realities of Australia’s relationship with our most important ally, the US.

Goldman has an unexpected ally in court: federal prosecutors

The banking giant, which has been under relentless scrutiny for its role in the financial crisis, relies on the U.S. government to protect its trade secrets in a trial of a former worker accused of stealing valuable computer code.

By Nathaniel Popper, Los Angeles Times

Reporting from New York – Goldman Sachs, the most powerful firm on Wall Street, makes an unlikely victim.

That, however, is the role that the bank has played over the last two weeks in a Manhattan courtroom, where prosecutors have argued that Sergei Aleynikov, a skinny, bespectacled former computer programmer at Goldman, stole valuable computer code from the bank before moving to a start-up firm that was trying to build its own trading operations.

Although the code in question was a mere 32 megabytes – less than a 10th of what fits on a data CD – Goldman executives have said it was a central cog in their high-frequency trading operations, a lucrative division at one of the most profitable companies in the world.

As jurors go online, U.S. trials go off track

Facebook, Twitter and smart phones cause mistrials, appeals and overturned verdicts

Reuters  

ATLANTA – The explosion of blogging, tweeting and other online diversions has reached into U.S. jury boxes, raising serious questions about juror impartiality and the ability of judges to control courtrooms.

A Reuters Legal analysis found that jurors’ forays on the Internet have resulted in dozens of mistrials, appeals and overturned verdicts in the last two years.

For decades, courts have instructed jurors not to seek information about cases outside of evidence introduced at trial, and jurors are routinely warned not to communicate about a case with anyone before a verdict is reached. But jurors these days can, with a few clicks, look up definitions of legal terms on Wikipedia, view crime scenes via Google Earth, or update their blogs and Facebook pages with snide remarks about the proceedings.

9th Circuit judges explore narrow routes to reinstate gay marriage

U.S. appeals court appears to be seeking a way to restore same-sex marriage in California while avoiding a decision that would send Prop. 8 to the U.S Supreme Court.

By Maura Dolan and Jessica Garrison, Los Angeles Times

December 7, 2010, 12:18 a.m.

Federal appeals court judges Monday seemed headed toward a decision that could reinstate same-sex marriages in California while avoiding a ruling of national sweep that would invite U.S. Supreme Court action.

The judges explored at least two routes that could achieve that goal. One would be a ruling that California, having granted marriage rights to same-sex couples, could not take them away by popular vote.

E-mails from the front lines of the Iraq war

E-mails from sources in Iraq describe the daily carnage; these terse missives are an almost poetic chronicle of the war. No commas. No names. Is punctuation necessary when meaning is so clear?

By Jeffrey Fleishman, Los Angeles Times

December 6, 2010

Reporting from Cairo – They arrive nearly every day, these sad, strange e-mails from Iraq.

They are unsentimental and hard, gathered by stringers scattered across a country at war. They’re often tough to follow, terse poems with broken rhythms and words landing in wrong places. But there’s an unadorned power that speaks to things beyond style and grammar.

“An IP source said that some gunmen assassinated yesterday evening staff brigadier general in the Iraqi army and his wife in Tobchi (west Baghdad) while he was driving his car… both were killed instantly.”

Fed workers told: Stay away from those leaked cables

Directive notes the content ‘remains classified’; Columbia U. also warns future diplomats

msnbc.com staff and news service reports

NEW YORK – With tens of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables still to be disclosed by WikiLeaks, the Obama administration has warned federal government employees, and even some future diplomats, that they must refrain from downloading or even linking to any.

“Classified information, whether or not already posted on public websites or disclosed to the media, remains classified, and must be treated as such by federal employees and contractors,” the Office of Management and Budget said in a notice sent out Friday.

The New York Times, which first reported the directive, was told by a White House official that it does not advise agencies to block WikiLeaks or other websites on government computer systems. Nor does it bar federal employees from reading news stories about the leaks.

Democrats try to regain balance in fight over tax cuts

Emboldened Republicans seem unlikely to back down on extending breaks for wealthy taxpayers.

By Lisa Mascaro and Kathleen Hennessey, Tribune Washington

Reporting from Washington – Congressional Democrats searched for leverage Friday in their bitter debate with Republicans over extending George W. Bush-era tax cuts, lashing out against giving “tax breaks to millionaires” and preparing for a rare weekend session in the Senate on the issue.

But the increasingly aggressive Democratic posture may come too late in the protracted battle over the fate of tax cuts that are set to expire Dec. 31. The White House has indicated it would consider an agreement with Republicans to temporarily extend all tax breaks, even for households earning more than $250,000 annually, if the GOP agreed to concessions and withdrew its block on certain Democratic priorities.ties.

WikiLeaks goes off-line after ‘multiple’ attacks

U.S. firm says denial of service attacks on site threatened nearly 500,000 others

msnbc.com staff and news service reports

WikiLeaks went off-line late Thursday after a U.S. firm providing its domain name system said the controversial website had come under mass denial-of-service attacks.

EveryDNS.net said it had “terminated” its services to WikiLeaks as the attacks and ones expected in the future would “threaten the stability” of the company’s services to nearly 500,000 other websites.

WikiLeaks has been continuing to release classified cables sent by U.S. officials, causing huge embarrassment to diplomats and world leaders amid growing outrage and calls for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to be prosecuted under the U.S. Espionage Act.

Fed aid in financial crisis went beyond U.S. banks to industry, foreign firms



By Jia Lynn Yang, Neil Irwin and David S. Hilzenrath

Washington Post Staff Writers

Thursday, December 2, 2010; 12:15 AM

The financial crisis stretched even farther across the economy than many had realized, as new disclosures show the Federal Reserve rushed trillions of dollars in emergency aid not just to Wall Street but also to motorcycle makers, telecom firms and foreign-owned banks in 2008 and 2009. The Fed’s efforts to prop up the financial sector reached across a broad spectrum of the economy, benefiting stalwarts of American industry including General Electric and Caterpillar and household-name companies such as Verizon, Harley-Davidson and Toyota. The central bank’s aid programs also supported U.S. subsidiaries of banks based in East Asia, Europe and Canada while rescuing money-market mutual funds held by millions of Americans.