Hey Xeni The link, Click here to donate takes us to Chelsea Handler Instagrams Nipple policy is sexist. I’m sure that was an unintentional mistake. 
I want to applaud this effort. I also want to remind people how the payment processors TOS were used to block money getting to WikiLeaks in the past.
What have we learned from that? How will that information be used by the government? Will the payment processor turn over their records to the government about who is funding this effort?
Remember when the government wanted to shut down support for the work of Wikileaks they couldn’t shut down the site, but they shut down how the site was funded.
The use of TOS and EUPs are one way that a government can block support for things like legal defense funds. And without money, the people and groups can be more easily crushed.
There is also the issue of tracking. The government knows that I support certain efforts, does that turn into putting me on a watch list? Do they start stopping me at the airport like they did the filmmaker of Citizen Four? How would I know how they got that information?
PayPal has to turn over certain records if the government requests it, but what are the criteria for that? Can the government define what the criteria is and the processor has to agree or simply shut down the method to get money to the people?
Do we have any idea what the grounds are for the appeal?
I thought that by the letter of the Espionage Act, since there’s basically no doubt that she leaked the documents, she had no defense.
Or are they challenging the Espionage Act as being unconstitutional?
To this day, those materials she made public — which revealed massive wrongdoing, deceit and criminality — are centrally featured in journalism about critical stories in the public interest all over the world.
This sentence is duplicated for some reason. Also, is that really the case? I was under the impression that said materials demonstrated little more than that there were spies who were spying, and that the media seems to have largely forgotten them (particularly considering “the US government could not point to any concrete harm”).
I was surprised more by the stories of her brutal imprisonment in solitary confinement than anything else.
You were under a mistaken impression. One of the many amazing things Manning revealed was the cover-up of crimes by U.S. soldiers in Iraq. This leak caused Iraq officials to demand that U.S. forces should be subject to the Iraqi justice system if they were to stay past the deadline set by the Bush administration, which the Obama Administration was trying to talk them into. This new demand was a deal-breaker for them. Chelsea Manning and Bush Jr. are much more responsible than Obama for the removal (however temporary) of combat troops from Iraq .
There is a long list of very important secrets which Manning’s leaks revealed.
The artists drawing of what we want Chealsea to look like is pretty sad. She is a military prison with military discipline enforced, AFAIK male appearance is enforced including male hair regs.
[quote=“aikimo, post:7, topic:61910”]One of the many amazing things Manning revealed was the cover-up of crimes by U.S. soldiers in Iraq.[/quote]It wasn’t already abundantly clear at that time that U.S. soldiers were committing crimes that were being covered up, and that the government had lied to the American people?
The leaks revealed that the Pentagon had failed to list tens of thousands of civilian casualties, which inspired the Iraq leadership to insist that U.S. troops not be immune to Iraqi law, which was a deal-killer for Obama’s plan to keep combat troops in the country.
It certainly wasn’t “abundantly clear at the time” that Hillary Clinton ordered American diplomats to spy on U.N. officials (which would be a crime for a normal person).
It wasn’t clear that Obama worked with the GOP to kill a probe into the Bush Administration’s torture program.
It wasn’t clear that the Obama administration had pressured Germany not to prosecute CIA officers for torture and rendition.
It wasn’t clear that the U.S. had pressured the president of Yemen to lie about U.S. airstrikes in that country which killed many civilians.
It wasn’t clear that the Obama administration lied about shipping weapons to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen.
It wasn’t clear that the UK had given assurances to the U.S. that it would limit the scope of any investigations in the Iraq war.
A few of these things might have been suspected, but Wikileaks provided direct evidence.
[quote=“aikimo, post:10, topic:61910”]A few of these things might have been suspected[/quote]So how does one reconcile these disclosures being particularly revelatory with the above suggestion that the US government could not point to their posing any concrete harm?
I think that’s because the US government defined “harm” as making secret operatives or operations vulnerable to harm from enemies, as opposed to the reputation of the U.S. government. And even then, it’s not like Clinton’s or Obama’s reputations have been significantly harmed by the information. Maybe the cult of personality provides a significant defense against such things.
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