person:daniel ellsberg

  • Notes après la chute d’Assange
    http://www.dedefensa.org/article/notes-apres-la-chute-dassange

    Notes après la chute d’Assange

    14 avril 2019 – Comme l’on sait, il y a près de 50 ans éclatait l’affaire des Pentagon Papers qui reste une des sommets de l’action décisive d’intrusion de la presse dans le pouvoir politique et ses illégalités. L’affaire avait été déclenchée par l’icône des “lanceur d’alerte” (whistleblowers), Daniel Ellsberg, qui agit au péril de sa liberté et peut-être bien de sa vie. Le même Ellsberg, qui garde bon pied bon œil et poursuit ce même combat pour la liberté de la presse, a publié un communiqué à l’occasion de l’emprisonnement de Julian Assange, que quelques gros-bras du MI5 sont venus chercher dans son refuge minuscule de la minuscule ambassade d’Équateur à Londres, devenue pour lui, depuis un an, une véritable prison.

    « C’est une agression très grave contre le Premier Amendement. (...)

    • lien propre:

      Glen Greenwald, Micah Lee - 20190412

      https://theintercept.com/2019/04/11/the-u-s-governments-indictment-of-julian-assange-poses-grave-threats-t

      In April, 2017, Pompeo, while still CIA chief, delivered a deranged speech proclaiming that “we have to recognize that we can no longer allow Assange and his colleagues the latitude to use free speech values against us.” He punctuated his speech with this threat: “To give them the space to crush us with misappropriated secrets is a perversion of what our great Constitution stands for. It ends now.”

      From the start, the Trump DOJ has made no secret of its desire to criminalize journalism generally. Early in the Trump administration, Sessions explicitly discussed the possibility of prosecuting journalists for publishing classified information. Trump and his key aides were open about how eager they were to build on, and escalate, the Obama administration’s progress in enabling journalism in the U.S. to be criminalized.

      Today’s arrest of Assange is clearly the culmination of a two-year effort by the U.S. government to coerce Ecuador — under its new and submissive president, Lenín Moreno — to withdraw the asylum protection it extended to Assange in 2012. Rescinding Assange’s asylum would enable the U.K. to arrest Assange on minor bail-jumping charges pending in London and, far more significantly, to rely on an extradition request from the U.S. government to send him to a country to which he has no connection (the U.S.) to stand trial relating to leaked documents.

      Indeed, the Trump administration’s motive here is clear. With Ecuador withdrawing its asylum protection and subserviently allowing the U.K. to enter its own embassy to arrest Assange, Assange faced no charges other than a minor bail-jumping charge in the U.K. (Sweden closed its sexual assault investigation not because they concluded Assange was innocent, but because they spent years unsuccessfully trying to extradite him). By indicting Assange and demanding his extradition, it ensures that Assange — once he serves his time in a London jail for bail-jumping — will be kept in a British prison for the full year or longer that it takes for the U.S. extradition request, which Assange will certainly contest, to wind its way through the British courts.

      The indictment tries to cast itself as charging Assange not with journalistic activities but with criminal hacking. But it is a thinly disguised pretext for prosecuting Assange for publishing the U.S. government’s secret documents while pretending to make it about something else.

      Whatever else is true about the indictment, substantial parts of the document explicitly characterize as criminal exactly the actions that journalists routinely engage in with their sources and thus, constitutes a dangerous attempt to criminalize investigative journalism.

      The indictment, for instance, places great emphasis on Assange’s alleged encouragement that Manning — after she already turned over hundreds of thousands of classified documents — try to get more documents for WikiLeaks to publish. The indictment claims that “discussions also reflect Assange actively encouraging Manning to provide more information. During an exchange, Manning told Assange that ‘after this upload, that’s all I really have got left.’ To which Assange replied, ‘curious eyes never run dry in my experience.’”

      But encouraging sources to obtain more information is something journalists do routinely. Indeed, it would be a breach of one’s journalistic duties not to ask vital sources with access to classified information if they could provide even more information so as to allow more complete reporting. If a source comes to a journalist with information, it is entirely common and expected that the journalist would reply: Can you also get me X, Y, and Z to complete the story or to make it better? As Edward Snowden said this morning, “Bob Woodward stated publicly he would have advised me to remain in place and act as a mole.”

      Investigative journalism in many, if not most, cases, entails a constant back and forth between journalist and source in which the journalist tries to induce the source to provide more classified information, even if doing so is illegal. To include such “encouragement” as part of a criminal indictment — as the Trump DOJ did today — is to criminalize the crux of investigative journalism itself, even if the indictment includes other activities you believe fall outside the scope of journalism.

      As Northwestern journalism professor Dan Kennedy explained in The Guardian in 2010 when denouncing as a press freedom threat the Obama DOJ’s attempts to indict Assange based on the theory that he did more than passively receive and publish documents — i.e., that he actively “colluded” with Manning:


      The problem is that there is no meaningful distinction to be made. How did the Guardian, equally, not “collude” with WikiLeaks in obtaining the cables? How did the New York Times not “collude” with the Guardian when the Guardian gave the Times a copy following Assange’s decision to cut the Times out of the latest document dump?

      For that matter, I don’t see how any news organisation can be said not to have colluded with a source when it receives leaked documents. Didn’t the Times collude with Daniel Ellsberg when it received the Pentagon Papers from him? Yes, there are differences. Ellsberg had finished making copies long before he began working with the Times, whereas Assange may have goaded Manning. But does that really matter?

      Most of the reports about the Assange indictment today have falsely suggested that the Trump DOJ discovered some sort of new evidence that proved Assange tried to help Manning hack through a password in order to use a different username to download documents. Aside from the fact that those attempts failed, none of this is new: As the last five paragraphs of this 2011 Politico story demonstrate, that Assange talked to Manning about ways to use a different username so as to avoid detection was part of Manning’s trial and was long known to the Obama DOJ when they decided not to prosecute.

      There are only two new events that explain today’s indictment of Assange: 1) The Trump administration from the start included authoritarian extremists such as Sessions and Pompeo who do not care in the slightest about press freedom and were determined to criminalize journalism against the U.S., and 2) With Ecuador about to withdraw its asylum protection, the U.S. government needed an excuse to prevent Assange from walking free.

      A technical analysis of the indictment’s claims similarly proves the charge against Assange to be a serious threat to First Amendment press liberties, primarily because it seeks to criminalize what is actually a journalist’s core duty: helping one’s source avoid detection. The indictment deceitfully seeks to cast Assange’s efforts to help Manning maintain her anonymity as some sort of sinister hacking attack.

      The Defense Department computer that Manning used to download the documents which she then furnished to WikiLeaks was likely running the Windows operating system. It had multiple user accounts on it, including an account to which Manning had legitimate access. Each account is protected by a password, and Windows computers store a file that contains a list of usernames and password “hashes,” or scrambled versions of the passwords. Only accounts designated as “administrator,” a designation Manning’s account lacked, have permission to access this file.

      The indictment suggests that Manning, in order to access this password file, powered off her computer and then powered it back on, this time booting to a CD running the Linux operating system. From within Linux, she allegedly accessed this file full of password hashes. The indictment alleges that Assange agreed to try to crack one of these password hashes, which, if successful, would recover the original password. With the original password, Manning would be able to log directly into that other user’s account, which — as the indictment puts it — “would have made it more difficult for investigators to identify Manning as the source of disclosures of classified information.”

      Assange appears to have been unsuccessful in cracking the password. The indictment alleges that “Assange indicated that he had been trying to crack the password by stating that he had ‘no luck so far.’”

      Thus, even if one accepts all of the indictment’s claims as true, Assange was not trying to hack into new document files to which Manning had no access, but rather trying to help Manning avoid detection as a source. For that reason, the precedent that this case would set would be a devastating blow to investigative journalists and press freedom everywhere.

      Journalists have an ethical obligation to take steps to protect their sources from retaliation, which sometimes includes granting them anonymity and employing technical measures to help ensure that their identity is not discovered. When journalists take source protection seriously, they strip metadata and redact information from documents before publishing them if that information could have been used to identify their source; they host cloud-based systems such as SecureDrop, now employed by dozens of major newsrooms around the world, that make it easier and safer for whistleblowers, who may be under surveillance, to send messages and classified documents to journalists without their employers knowing; and they use secure communication tools like Signal and set them to automatically delete messages.

      But today’s indictment of Assange seeks to criminalize exactly these types of source-protection efforts, as it states that “it was part of the conspiracy that Assange and Manning used a special folder on a cloud drop box of WikiLeaks to transmit classified records containing information related to the national defense of the United States.”

      The indictment, in numerous other passages, plainly conflates standard newsroom best practices with a criminal conspiracy. It states, for instance, that “it was part of the conspiracy that Assange and Manning used the ‘Jabber’ online chat service to collaborate on the acquisition and dissemination of the classified records, and to enter into the agreement to crack the password […].” There is no question that using Jabber, or any other encrypted messaging system, to communicate with sources and acquire documents with the intent to publish them, is a completely lawful and standard part of modern investigative journalism. Newsrooms across the world now use similar technologies to communicate securely with their sources and to help their sources avoid detection by the government.

      The indictment similarly alleges that “it was part of the conspiracy that Assange and Manning took measures to conceal Manning as the source of the disclosure of classified records to WikiLeaks, including by removing usernames from the disclosed information and deleting chat logs between Assange and Manning.”

  • La guerre nucléaire qui vient | AOC media - Analyse Opinion Critique
    https://aoc.media/opinion/2019/02/26/guerre-nucleaire-vient

    par Jean-Pierre Dupuy

    Chacun des deux partenaires accuse l’autre d’être de mauvaise foi et d’avoir violé le traité INF depuis longtemps. L’un et l’autre ont de bonnes raisons pour le faire. Ensemble, ils se comportent comme des garçons de onze ans se querellant dans une cour de récréation et répondant au maître : « M’sieu, c’est pas moi qui ai commencé ». À ceci près que l’enjeu n’est pas moins que la paix du monde. L’opinion internationale – « le maître » – craint une nouvelle course aux armements. Si ce n’était qu’une question de moyens ! La fin, c’est les centaines de millions de morts que j’annonçais en commençant.

    On a accusé Donald Trump de n’avoir en tout domaine d’autre politique que celle qui consiste à détricoter tout ce que son prédécesseur Barack Obama a fait, mais sur ce point il est son digne successeur. C’est dès 2014 que l’administration américaine s’est inquiétée du déploiement par les Russes d’un missile de croisière conforme en tous points aux systèmes bannis par le traité INF. Les Russes ont mis ce missile à l’essai dès 2008, sans s’en cacher puisque Poutine se plaignait en 2013 que la Russie, contrainte par le traité, se trouvait entourée en Asie par des pays, la Chine en premier lieu, qui eux étaient libres de se doter d’armes nucléaires de moyenne portée. Après pas mal d’hésitations sur la riposte adéquate, l’Amérique a tranché : le traité est mort.

    De son côté, la Russie accuse l’Amérique de tricher, par exemple en se croyant libre d’installer en Europe de l’Est des systèmes de défense faits de missiles antimissiles. Outre qu’ils violent le traité dit ABM (Anti Ballistic Missile) par lequel les présidents Nixon et Brejnev se sont engagés en 1972 à limiter drastiquement le recours aux technologies de défense contre des attaques nucléaires portées par des missiles balistiques intercontinentaux, ils peuvent se transformer aisément en armes offensives. De plus, il n’y avait pas en 1987 de drones armés, et ceux-ci peuvent avoir le même office que des missiles.

    D’abord, on ne peut pas gagner une guerre nucléaire. La question de la parité des forces en présence est donc non pertinente. La France de Mitterrand aurait dû le savoir, puisque sa doctrine s’appelait « dissuasion du faible au fort ». L’instinct de Jimmy Carter aurait dû l’emporter sur la panique de l’Europe. L’Amérique elle-même n’avait cependant pas à donner de leçon : en 1961, les dirigeants américains s’affolaient d’avoir moins de missiles nucléaires stratégiques que les Soviétiques alors qu’ils en avaient dix fois plus [1]. Avec des armes conventionnelles, c’est la force relative des armements en présence qui dissuade. Rien de tel avec l’arme nucléaire.

    Ensuite, les armes à portée intermédiaire aux côtés de celles à courte portée étaient envisagées pendant la crise comme des armes d’emploi sur le « théâtre » européen plutôt que comme des armes dissuadant l’ennemi de frapper en premier. Cela présupposait que l’on puisse envisager une guerre nucléaire limitée avec un gagnant et un perdant, où la dissuasion faisait partie de la bataille elle-même (point précédent). Or dans le domaine nucléaire, on ne dissuade pas une attaque limitée en rendant hautement crédible une menace de riposte limitée. On la dissuade en maintenant à un niveau modique la probabilité de l’anéantissement mutuel.

    Il faut noter aussi que la défense contre une attaque nucléaire surprise est impossible. Le bouclier antimissile rêvé par Reagan ne pourrait être efficace que s’il l’était à 100%. Le premier missile qui passerait au travers serait le missile de trop. Aucune technique connue à ce jour n’est à la hauteur de cette exigence de perfection absolue.

    La dissuasion nucléaire prend acte de cette impuissance de la défense. Elle la remplace par la menace de représailles « incommensurables » si l’ennemi attaque vos « intérêts vitaux ». Il est essentiel de comprendre que la défense est non seulement mise hors circuit mais qu’elle est interdite. C’est le sens du traité ABM : on ne se défend pas. C’est en effet la meilleure garantie que l’on donne à l’ennemi qu’on ne l’attaquera pas en premier. Si on le faisait, sous l’hypothèse qu’il conserve une capacité de seconde frappe, on se suiciderait. Inversement, si l’on installe des systèmes de défense par missiles antimissiles, comme les États-Unis l’ont fait autour de la Russie en violant le traité ABM, on envoie à l’ennemi le signal qu’on est prêt à l’attaquer. Celui-ci peut alors décider qu’il lui faut prendre l’autre de vitesse et l’attaquer en premier. C’est ce qu’on appelle la préemption.

    Enfin, en langage militaire américain, le petit nom de la préemption, expression d’un paradoxe révélateur, est « striking second first », qu’on peut traduire par : être le premier à frapper en second, riposter avant l’attaque, exercer des représailles avant même que l’ennemi lance ses missiles, punir le criminel en l’éliminant avant qu’il commette son crime, c’est par le second que le premier est premier, etc. Dans son dernier livre déjà cité, The Doomsday Machine (la machine du jugement dernier) Daniel Ellsberg défend la thèse que les États-Unis n’ont jamais pris la dissuasion au sérieux et qu’ils se sont toujours préparés à frapper en premier.

    L’Amérique d’abord, bientôt suivie par la Russie, a trouvé une solution à ce problème sous le nom de « launch on warning » (« lancement déclenché par une alerte »). Si un système défensif détecte le lancement de missiles nucléaires ennemis, il déclenche immédiatement ses propres missiles sans attendre que les premiers atteignent leurs cibles. On s’assure ainsi contre le risque de se retrouver sans force défensive une fois celle-ci détruite par les missiles ennemis. Le problème est que les systèmes d’alerte sont connus pour fonctionner de manière très approximative. On ne compte plus les erreurs d’interprétation, les mauvais calculs, les fausses alertes.

    Ce qui risque de déclencher la guerre nucléaire à venir, ce ne sont donc pas les mauvaises intentions des acteurs. L’incrédulité générale par rapport à cette éventualité vient de la question que l’on pose immédiatement et par laquelle nous avons commencé : qui pourrait bien vouloir une telle abomination ? Ni Kim ni Trump ne veulent la guerre vers laquelle peut-être ils entraînent le monde tels des somnambules, pas plus que ne la voulaient Kennedy et Khrouchtchev pendant la crise des missiles de Cuba. Le tragique, c’est que cela n’a aucune importance. Comme dans les mythes les plus antiques, la tragédie s’accomplira par le truchement d’un accident, la nécessité par celui d’une contingence.

    #Guerre #Nucléaire

  • The Largest Act of Terrorism in Human History - Daniel #Ellsberg on RAI (4/8)
    https://therealnews.com/stories/the-largest-act-of-terrorism-in-human-history-daniel-ellsberg-on-rai-4-

    The British bombing of Hamburg in 1942, and the American firebombing of Japan in March 1945 that killed as many as 120,000 people in one night, created the conditions for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which were considered mere extensions of the firebombing tactics, says Daniel Ellsberg on Reality Asserts Itself with Paul Jay

    #histoire #terrorisme

  • The Killing of History
    https://consortiumnews.com/2017/09/21/the-killing-of-history

    I watched the first episode in New York. It leaves you in no doubt of its intentions right from the start. The narrator says the war “was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War misunderstandings.”

    The dishonesty of this statement is not surprising. The cynical fabrication of “false flags” that led to the invasion of Vietnam is a matter of record – the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” in 1964, which Burns promotes as true, was just one. The lies litter a multitude of official documents, notably the Pentagon Papers, which the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg released in 1971.

    There was no good faith. The faith was rotten and cancerous. For me – as it must be for many Americans – it is difficult to watch the film’s jumble of “red peril” maps, unexplained interviewees, ineptly cut archive and maudlin American battlefield sequences. In the series’ press release in Britain — the BBC will show it — there is no mention of Vietnamese dead, only Americans.

    “We are all searching for some meaning in this terrible tragedy,” Novick is quoted as saying. How very post-modern.

    All this will be familiar to those who have observed how the American media and popular culture behemoth has revised and served up the great crime of the second half of the Twentieth Century: from “The Green Berets” and “The Deer Hunter” to “Rambo” and, in so doing, has legitimized subsequent wars of aggression. The revisionism never stops and the blood never dries. The invader is pitied and purged of guilt, while “searching for some meaning in this terrible tragedy.” Cue Bob Dylan: “Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?”

    What ‘Decency’ and ‘Good Faith’?

  • Edward #Snowden: The #Media Isn’t Doing Its Job
    http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/36818-focus-edward-snowden-the-media-isnt-doing-its-job

    I believe very strongly that there’s no more important quality for a journalist than independence. That’s independence of perspective, and particularly skepticism of claims. The more powerful the institution, the more skeptical one should be. There’s an argument that was put forth by an earlier journalist, I.F. Stone: “All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.” In my experience, this is absolutely a fact. I’ve met with Daniel Ellsberg and spoken about this, and it comports with his experience as well. He would be briefing the Secretary of Defense on the airplane, and then when the Secretary of Defense would disembark right down the eight steps of the plane and shake hands with the press, he would say something that he knew was absolutely false and was completely contrary to what they had just said in the meeting [inside the place] because that was his role. That was his job, his duty, his responsibility as a member of that institution.

    #médias

  • Edward Snowden interview with Dagens Nyheter - DN Fokus
    http://fokus.dn.se/edward-snowden-english

    Is it about fighting terrorists or about winning elections?
    – It’s just it’s still politically beneficial. They can show that they’re doing something. When they use the word security, they’re not talking about safety. What they’re talking about is stability. Like when they’re saying that they’re saving lives by bombing them. Stability is the new highest value. It’s not about freedom, it’s not about liberty, it’s not even about safety. It’s about avoiding change. It’s about ensuring that things are predictable, shapeable, because then they are controllable.
    At least you think they are.
    – Right. You think they are controllable.
    Until IS comes along and destroys the whole idea.
    – Right. Like with the drone program, which creates more terrorists than it kills. There was no Islamic State until we started bombing these states. The biggest threat we face in the region was born from our own policies.

    • The announcement of the laureates, which usually is held in the Swedish Foreign Ministry, was temporarily banned last year by former Foreign Minister Carl Bildt. Edward Snowden’s father, Lon, attended the award ceremony in his son’s place.

      Your father said he wishes Sweden would give you asylum. Would you feel safe in Sweden?
      – It depends on the circumstances. But it would be important symbolically.

      It’s clear that he’s proud of you.
      He laughs.
      – Yes, he’s a little radical now. He never used to be radical.

      Seriously?
      – Yeah! I mean he worked for the military for 30 years. He’s as conservative as it gets.

      It was the same with Daniel Ellsberg’s father. Who later supported him.
      – Right, right. Well, it was the same with Daniel Ellsberg, he led the marines and I signed up for the war in Iraq when everybody else was protesting against it.

      Intéressant de lire l’évolution progressive du père, Lonnie, vers un #radicalisme. Au début des révélations, Lonnie avait déclaré aux médias à propos de son fils :

      EXCLUSIVE: Father of Edward Snowden urges son not to commit ’treason,’ to return home

      Published June 17, 2013FoxNews.com

      Lon Snowden spoke at length with Fox News about his son Edward’s decision to leak sensitive security details about U.S. intelligence-gathering operations. While defending his son’s integrity and criticizing the government, he pleaded with his son — who is thought to be weathering the political storm from a location in Hong Kong — to return home and not to leak more information.

      “I hope, I pray and I ask that you will not release any secrets that could constitute treason,” Snowden told Fox News, in a message meant for his son’s ears. He added: “I sense that you’re under much stress [from] what I’ve read recently, and [ask] that you not succumb to that stress ... and make a bad decision.”

      Further, Snowden said he would rather see his son return to the U.S. and face the U.S. justice system than stay abroad.

      “I would like to see Ed come home and face this. I shared that with the government when I spoke with them. I love my son,” he told Fox News’ Eric Bolling.

      http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/06/17/exclusive-father-edward-snowden-urges-son-to-stop-leaking-come-home

  • La vérité mais pourquoi faire ?
    http://www.la-bas.org/article.php3?id_article=3010

    Un entretien avec NOAM CHOMSKY

    En 1971, le scandale des « Pentagon Papers », les documents militaires secrets clandestinement transmis au New York Times, dévoilait soudain les mensonges du pouvoir concernant la guerre du Vietnam. Le lançeur d’alerte à l’époque s’appelait Daniel Ellsberg. Il fut aidé par un linguiste, un certain Noam Chomsky. C’est lui que nous retrouvons aujourd’hui pour une heure inédite enregistrée en octobre 2013.

    Entretien : Daniel Mermet (traduction : Giv Anquetil)

  • “I am Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. Edward Snowden is my hero. AMA (ask me anything)”
    http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1vahsi/i_am_pentagon_papers_leaker_daniel_ellsberg/ceqjvcl?context=3

    in answer to your question, I just became aware of some surveillance on me (BEFORE the Pentagon papers came out) ten minutes ago, from your link. I was being surveilled because I was a witness in a criminal trial of draft resisters, some of the Minnesota Eight. Their very good lawyer has been accused, I don’t know on what basis, of having been a Communist. And that allegation was not of particular significance to the DOJ UNTIL, months later, he was associated with me, after the Papers came out. (...)

    That’s what I’ve been talking about in earlier answers: the ability of the government to go back to taps collected years earlier to look for material with which to influence potential witnesses in the present. (See their interest in the allegation that the wife of one journalist may have been accused of shoplifting in her past). So people who have “nothing to hide” should ask themselves if that is equally true of their spouses or children, or neighbors, who could possibly be turned into informants by threat of their private lives being revealed.

    #surveillance #etats-unis #justice #WOW

  • #Snowden would be better off in Brazil, says Ellsberg | ZDNet
    http://www.zdnet.com/snowden-would-be-better-off-in-brazil-says-ellsberg-7000025083

    Daniel Ellsberg, a former military analyst who leaked the secret US government study of the Vietnam War to the press in 1971, told Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo that Dilma Rousseff’s government should support the whistleblower responsible for the biggest leak in modern US history.

    He made a great sacrifice. Snowden is in danger of death anywhere, maybe less in Russia, but I think he would be in a more democratic and open place,” Ellsberg told the newspaper.

    When asked whether Brazil would risk retaliation from the US by agreeing to help Snowden, Ellsberg agreed that antagonizing the richest and most powerful country in the world would not be an easy decision to make.

    “Brazil could face sanctions. But no country has the right to fully spy on private communications of citizens around the world,” the activist added.

  • ÉTATS-UNIS • Edward Snowden a bien fait de fuir | Courrier international
    http://www.courrierinternational.com/article/2013/07/08/edward-snowden-a-bien-fait-de-fuir

    Pour le célèbre lanceur d’alerte Daniel Ellsberg*, responsable de la fuite des « papiers du Pentagone » dans les années 1970, Snowden a eu raison de s’exiler.

    Bon nombre de gens nous comparent, Edward Snowden et moi, et lui reprochent d’avoir quitté le pays et de chercher asile à l’étranger plutôt que de se présenter devant un tribunal comme je l’ai fait. Je pense qu’ils ont tort. Mon histoire remonte à une autre époque, et les Etats-Unis n’étaient pas ce qu’ils sont aujourd’hui.

    Le 15 juin 1971, le New York Times a reçu l’ordre de ne pas publier les « papiers du Pentagone », ce qui constituait une première dans l’histoire de la presse américaine. Après avoir transmis une autre copie des documents au Washington Post (qui a ensuite reçu la même interdiction que le New York Times), ma femme et moi avons disparu de la circulation pendant treize jours.

    Mon objectif était d’échapper à la surveillance des autorités (un peu comme Snowden lorsqu’il a décidé de partir pour Hong Kong), pendant qu’avec l’aide de plusieurs autres personnes – encore inconnues du FBI – nous nous organisions pour faire passer les documents à dix-sept autres journaux, malgré deux injonctions. J’ai passé les trois derniers jours en violation du mandat d’arrêt lancé contre moi. J’étais comme Snowden : j’essayais de me soustraire à la justice.

    Je me suis rendu aux autorités de Boston après avoir envoyé mon dernier lot de documents la nuit précédente. J’ai été remis en liberté sous caution le jour même. Plus tard, alors que je faisais l’objet non plus de trois mais de douze chefs d’accusation (j’encourais alors une peine de cent quinze ans d’emprisonnement), ma caution a été relevée à 50 000 dollars.

    Mais durant les deux années où je me suis trouvé formellement accusé, je suis resté libre de parler aux médias, dans des rassemblements et des conférences publiques. Je faisais partie d’un mouvement hostile à la guerre. Ma première préoccupation était de mettre fin à cette guerre. Comme je ne pouvais pas le faire depuis l’étranger, je n’ai jamais pensé à quitter les Etats-Unis.

    Cela serait impossible aujourd’hui. Il serait impossible qu’un procès se termine par la révélation d’actes incontestablement criminels (et considérés comme tels à l’époque de Nixon) commis par la Maison-Blanche. Aujourd’hui tous ces actes (...) sont jugés légaux (y compris celui visant à me placer « dans une totale incapacité » de nuire).

  • Aux Etats-Unis, une cybersurveillance digne d’un Etat policier par Daniel Ellsberg

    http://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2013/06/25/aux-etats-unis-une-cybersurveillance-digne-d-un-etat-policier_3436008_3232.h

    Il n’y a jamais eu, à mes yeux, dans l’histoire américaine, de fuite plus importante que la divulgation par Edward Snowden des programmes secrets de l’Agence de sécurité nationale américaine (NSA). L’alerte qu’il a lancée permet de prendre la mesure d’un pan entier de ce qui se ramène à un « coup d’Etat de l’exécutif » contre la Constitution américaine.

  • Former C.I.A. Worker Says He Leaked Surveillance Data - NYTimes.com
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/10/us/former-cia-worker-says-he-leaked-surveillance-data.html?hp&_r=0

    Mr. Snowden said that he admired both Daniel Ellsberg, the source of the Pentagon Papers, and Bradley Manning, the Army private who has acknowledged providing huge troves of government documents in the WikiLeaks scandal.

    But he drew a contrast, saying that “I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest.” He said that “harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is.”

  • Daniel Ellsberg : In Hearing Bradley Manning Act Out of Conscience, Secret Tape Refutes Media Slander | Democracy Now !
    http://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/12/daniel_ellsberg_in_hearing_bradley_manning

    To discuss Bradley Manning’s recorded court statement that was recently leaked to the press, we’re joined by perhaps the country’s most famous whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, the secret history of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. “What we’ve heard are people like The New York Times who have consistently slandered him ... that he was vague and couldn’t think of specific instances that had led him to inform the American people of injustices,” Ellsberg says. “The American people can now, for the first time, hear Bradley in his own words, emotionally and in the greatest specific detail, tell what it was that he felt that needed revelation.”

    #wikileaks #Bradley_Manning