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Why did it take so long for Reddit and Facebook to block racist groups? – The Guardian

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This week, in a matter of just 48 hours, several social media companies made major changes to how their platforms are and can be used. Reddit deleted a group, or subreddit, called The Donald that was known for encouraging targeted harassment and hate speech. YouTube banned videos from white supremacists like David Duke and Richard Spencer. And Facebook cracked down on a wide swath of dangerous content, including groups devoted to the boogaloo movement, which hopes to spark a race war in the United States.

These developments signal a significant shift in how these companies see their role and responsibility in the world. Until extremely recently their leaders repeatedly declared that free speech was their primary value, and trumped other values like safety, dignity and democracy.

Now, without declaring they had been wrong all along, these companies seem to have all decided it was time to declare a different way of dealing with dangerous, extremist content at least on the surface. Why all this action, and why now?

The first half of 2020 was a perfect storm of factors that made many of these companies reconsider how they want to represent themselves to the world and how they want to treat their users. The flood of misinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic endangered lives. The bold movements for social justice that rose up in the wake of the martyrdom of George Floyd heightened sensitivity and awareness of the dangers of white supremacy in the US like nothing else in recent years. And the re-election effort of Donald Trump has grown increasingly dangerous, with the president and his followers frequently deriding public health efforts and celebrating state and vigilante violence against Black people and their allies.

In this environment, corporate leaders at Google, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and other companies had to take much more seriously the question of how they influence the world. Of course, social media scholars have been calling for this level of attention for almost a decade. Since around 2017, many journalists have, as well. But it took more than scholarship and journalism to make a difference.

Companies as rich, powerful, and ubiquitous as Facebook and Google only have two real soft spots. One is labor. Both Google, which owns YouTube, and Facebook face a constant shortage of highly qualified and experienced workers. Many people who work for these companies have other employment options in ways that most American workers will never enjoy. Technology workers command high salaries and have unusual flexibility in their career plans and life choices. They are also in constant communication with each other, meaning that Silicon Valley workers, when they choose to, have a lot of power in terms of collective message-making. Recent months have seen growing expressions of disgust among workers at major tech companies who are frustrated at their companies refusal to respond more assertively to problems with how their platforms are used. The CEOs and COOs of these companies are now, belatedly, realizing they have to take these concerns seriously.

The other soft spot is advertising. Advertisers have even more power than workers. This week several major global advertisers, apparently led by Unilever, announced that they are suspending advertising on Facebook until the company has stronger protocols against the use of its platform for hate speech and disinformation.

Unilever may be one of the few institutions on earth that Facebook needs more than it needs Facebook. In fact, the consumer products conglomerate has a fairly strong record on matters of social responsibility. Yet its been somewhat surprising when companies beyond the usual list of do-gooders step up to make a stand against racism and fascism. Advertisers as powerful and diverse as Clorox, Ford, HP and Adidas have decided that they do not want their products and logos associated with racism, calls to violence, or other trappings of emerging fascism in the United States. The number of boycotting companies has grown to more than 300, and even Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were reportedly phoning their corporate friends to encourage them to stop advertising on Facebook.

Why did it take so long, however, to get major tech companies to change their tune? Why werent the leaders of Reddit, YouTube and Facebook willing to take such steps in the aftermath of the 2017 genocide of the Rohingya minority in Myanmar? Why didnt they act in 2016, when Facebook actively supported the Trump campaign as the failed businessman pledged to build a wall to keep Mexicans out of the US and ban Muslim immigration? Why did it take the visual evidence of the killing of George Floyd and all of the fallout within just one country, the US, to move advertisers, labor and management to take such action? Didnt all the algorithmically stoked violence in Sri Lanka, India, Kenya, Myanmar and the Philippines matter?

We shouldnt celebrate this moment. Lets mark it, instead, as a potential turning point in the history of Silicon Valley and its relationship with movements for global social justice, and try to understand its limitations. We still dont know to what extent these recent moves to de-platform extremism will make a difference over time.

Its likely these advertisers will return to Facebook still the best advertising platform ever created after the US election in November. There is also a very good chance that the extremist actors who are pushing for violence and racism will just find a way to re-platform themselves under new aliases. Other social media services might help these movements promote themselves and generate not only wider audience participation, but also the sense of victimhood and indignation that is one of the chief drivers of fascism.

So these moves could backfire or yield only marginal results over time. Nonetheless we should review the Great Deplatforming of 2020 as a potentially positive shift in the awareness of powerful people about the plight of the powerless and the rising forces of fascism in the United States.

If only these companies, and the democracies they operate in, took the global threats more seriously. We still have much work to do.

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Why did it take so long for Reddit and Facebook to block racist groups? - The Guardian

Whats the Deal With Parler? – Slate

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Maybe a Parler logo on your screen next?Denis Charlet/Getty Images This article is part of the Free Speech Project, a collaboration between Future Tense and the Tech, Law, & Security Program at American University Washington College of Law that examines the ways technology is influencing how we think about speech.

The basic idea of Parler is an awful lot like Twitter. But instead of tweets, users post Parleys; instead of retweets, there are echoes. And upon registering, the suggested accounts to follow include Breitbart, the Epoch Times, and the Daily Caller, as well as Rand Paul, Mark Levin, and Team Trump.

In June, right-wing users started flocking to this alt-Twitter, whose main selling point is that it vows to champion free speech. As mainstream platforms banned more far-right accounts, removed hate speech with newfound vigor, and attached warning labels to a few of President Donald Trumps tweets, Parler became, for many, an attractive solution to Twitters supposed ills. Now, its the second most popular app in the App Store, and last week it was estimated to have reached more than 1.5 million daily users, snagging somehigh-profile newbies: Sen. Ted Cruz, Rep. Elise Stefanik, Rep. Jim Jordan, Donald Trump Jr., and Eric Trump. What led to Parlers founding in August 2018 was, predictably, disillusionment with the likes of the Silicon Valley giants. Henderson, Nevadabased software engineers Jared Thomson and John Matze created the platform, according to Parlers website, [a]fter being exhausted with a lack of transparency in big tech, ideological suppresssion [sic] and privacy abuse.

Yet while the platform is being billed as the big free speech alternative to Twitter, it isnt exactly unique. Nor is it as uncensored as it claims to be. Parler is just the latest in a long line of rival social networks that have appeared (and, often, disappeared) in the past decade as alternatives to Big Tech. And, if the past is any indicator, its unlikely that Parler will become anything more than a fringe platform in the near future.

Some of the platforms to emerge as alternatives to the major social networks have taken a hard line on data privacy. Ello, for example, was founded in 2014 as an ad-free network that promised never to sell user data to advertisers. (After being dubbed a Facebook killer, the site was overwhelmed with new users and crashed frequently; it could never scale up and instead became a community for digital artists.) MeWe, another Facebook rival, offers the industrys first Privacy Bill of Rights. (It also takes a laissez-faire approach to content moderation.) And while its 8 million users are dwarfed by Facebooks 2.6 billion, MeWe is one of the few successful alternative networks in that its continued to grow since its founding in 2016.

Matze, Parlers CEO who counts Ayn Rand and conservative economist Thomas Sowell among his influences, fancies his platform a sort of free-speech utopia: Were a community town square, an open town square, with no censorship, Matze told CNBC. If you can say it on the street of New York, you can say it on Parler. And while Parler says it is unbiasedMatze is offering a $20,000 progressive bounty for a popular liberal pundit to joinits evidently become an unofficial home to the far right, which has long claimed to be mistreated by mainstream platforms. When alt-right celebrities, such as Milo Yiannopoulos and Laura Loomer, are banned from Twitter, Parler is their next step. (Loomer announced last week that she has become the first person whose Parler following572,000exceeds her pre-ban Twitter following.)

In this regard, Parler is most similar to Gab, the free speechdriven platform launched in 2017 thats known as a haven for extremists. [F]ar angrier and uglier than Parler, Gab quickly became a breeding ground for anti-Semitism and neo-Nazism, where posts calling for terrorist attacks and violence against minorities circulate. Gabs fate, however, represents one iteration of the circle of life for platforms of its ilk: After it was connected to an instance of terrorism in 2018, when the suspect in the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting posted about his intentions to act just before he killed 11 people, Gab never quite recovered. Its server, GoDaddy, dropped it, and though it eventually found another home online, its popularity waned following the shooting and the period offline. In 2019, a software engineer for Gabs web hosting company said that the platform probably had a few tens of thousands of users at mostrather than the 835,000 that Gab claimedthough the hosting company later denied that.

But Parler doesnt quite have Gabs teeth. (Andrew Torba, Gabs founder, has referred to Parler as a network for Z-list Maga celebrities.) While even Gab has limits to free speech, since its content policy purports to ban extremism, Parler is stricter. It goes far beyond what you might expect from a platform whose entire ethos is freedom of expression. Matze listed a few of the basic rules in a Parley on Tuesday:

As the top Twitter comment points out, Twitter allows four of the five things that Parler censors. Parlers thorough community guidelines also prohibit spam, terrorist activity, defamation, fighting words, and obscenity, among other kinds of speech. And Parlers user agreement includes clauses that may seem antithetical to its mission. The platform may remove any content and terminate your access to the Services at any time and for any reason or no reason, it states. But perhaps most surprising is this:

17. You agree to defend and indemnify Parler, as well as any of its officers, directors, employees, and agents, from and against any and all claims, actions, damages, obligations, losses, liabilities, costs or debt, and expenses (including but not limited to all attorneys fees) arising from or relating to your access to and use of the Services. Parler will have the right to conduct its own defense, at your expense, in any action or proceeding covered by this indemnity.

The indemnity provision means that if Parler faces a lawsuit for something you post, you pay. Basically, youre free to say whatever you wantas long as it falls within the community guidelines, and as long as youre willing to take the risk.

That Parler has been reportedly banning users en masse this week only further illuminates the faade of free speech on the platform; but regardless of the extent to which one can or cannot Parley whatever they want, the fact remains that the platform is becoming an important space for the American far right. Its worth considering, then, what its members might do with it. Part of the concern over polarized platforms is that they can lead to radicalization: In general, theyre seen as part of the pipeline to extremism. First, extremist movements find a foothold in mainstream platforms, where they present their norms in a slightly more palatable way, explained Jeremy Blackburn, a computer science professor at Binghamton University who researches fringe and extremist web communities. Then they gain ground in platforms like Parler that straddle the fringe and mainstream. Once you remove any question of there being an echo chamber, theres just obvious consequences, Blackburn said.

While this may be cause for concern, Amarnath Amarasingam, an extremism researcher and professor at Queens University, is skeptical that Parler will really galvanize the right. I think part of what animates the rightand the left to some extentand particularly the far right, is the ability to argue with the other, Amarasingam said. Interacting (and fighting) with the left reinforces the far rights identity, giving it meaning and purpose, he said, and from studying similar platforms like Gab, Amarasingam has found that talking to yourself in the dark corners of the internet is actually not that satisfying. And while he believes it might lead to the radicalization of certain individuals within the far right, the platform itself wont necessarily further the ideologies of extremist right-wing groups.

What Parler could do, Amarasingam believes, is serve as a kind of sounding board for the far right, a place for fringe movements to try out and refine different arguments. Essentially, it could be a factory of sorts, churning out ideas before theyre deployed into the mainstream. Maybe one day, at leastfor now, a good portion of the conversation of Parler is about how fantastic the platform is and how dumb the old tech giants are. Amarasingam acknowledged this. [W]hat that indicates to me is that they actually are just using Parler to vent their anger of being suspended from what really matters, which has been more mainstream platform, he said. And so I think theyll very much try to get back into wherever the conversation is happening.

Theres also the matter of growth. Normally, these networks just dont get that big. Theyre considered fringe platforms for a reason, and theres rarely a solid business model behind them. In Parlers case, the network was started with angel funding, and Matze hasnt devised a clear business plan since. Currently, his tentative model is to match conservative influencers with advertisers, and have Parler take a cut of the influencer fee. But given brands recent reluctance to advertise on Facebook, this plan seems far from foolproof. With only 30 employees, Parlers ability to handle more users will be tested. It might growespecially if Trump does decide to join after allbut, as Amarasingam put it, if youre not in the mainstream, youre not in the mainstream.

Generally speaking, what I expect to see in these sites is they hit a certain threshold of users, just like any other social networking platform, said Blackburn. And then for these types of platforms that are explicitly attracting these certain types of users, probably one of them will do something stupid, then they get shut down or deplatformed, and the next one pops up.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

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Whats the Deal With Parler? - Slate

Democratic Candidate James Averhart Personally Oversaw …

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The man responsible for some of the most inhumane punishment of whistleblower Chelsea Manning stands a good chance of becoming a Democratic Congressional candidate. On July 14, Democrats in Alabamas First District will go back to the polls to choose from one of two candidates. In the March primary, James Averhart finished less than 2,000 votes behind leader Kiani Gardner, forcing a runoff. A 30-year military veteran, Averhart began as a Marine infantryman in 1987 before transferring to the Military Police and becoming a corrections officer. Between 2010 and 2011, he was in charge of the military brig at Quantico, VA, where Manning was held on 22 counts of leaking classified information to Wikileaks.

During her time at Quantico, Manning was held in solitary confinement, a practice roundly condemned by human rights groups, the United Nations, and almost universallydescribedas a form of torture. In her testaments and complaints, Manning singled out Averhart as a particularly sadistic torturer, claimingthat he entered her cell, yelled at her, and declared that he was her God, implying he had total control over her life. Averhart repeatedly rejected psychiatrists constant recommendations that Manning should not be held in solitary in an 8-by-6 foot (2.4-by 1.8-meter) cellaround the clock. According to Mannings complaint:

On 18 January 2011, over the recommendation of Capt. Hocter and the defense forensic psychiatrist, Capt. Moore, CWO4 Averhart placed me under Suicide Risk. The Suicide Risk assignment resulted in me being required to remain in my cell for 24 hours a day. I was stripped of all clothing with the exception of my underwear. My prescription eyeglasses were taken away from me and I was forced to sit in essential blindness.

On the matter, Amnesty International wroteto Defense Secretary Robert Gates, expressing their dismay that Manning was being locked up in a windowless box and shackled during visits, claiming that her treatment violated both domestic U.S. and United Nations laws on the minimum standards of prisoner welfare. The Marine Corps Chief of Corrections would later testify that Averhart wrongfully kept Manning on suicide watch (meaning she was disturbed every five minutes). All this was for the pretrial detention of a suspect that should have been presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Averhart had previously led a task force dedicated to finding and arresting Vietnam War veterans who refused to fight. As The Guardianwrotein 2006: Since he took over the Marine Corps Absentee Collection Centre in 2004, Chief Warrant Officer James Averhart has reopened cold cases and claims to have tracked down 33 deserters. One 65-year-old Floridian was held in jail for five months for a desertion that occurred 40 years earlier. This zealous persecution, according to writer Andrew Perez, who first covered the Averhart story, was an attempt to discourage any modern-day deserters from the Iraq War.

Despite his history, the former soldier presents himself as a civil libertarian, his campaign website putting civil rights and criminal justice at the forefront of his message: Averhart believes that all people have a right to participate in our government and our society without fear, oppression, or discrimination, it reads, promisingto preserve and expand protections for all Americans and fight for end-to-end criminal justice reform.

The most consequential of Mannings leaks was the infamous Collateral Murder video, which showed U.S. military personnel carrying out a massacre of civilians (including two Reutersjournalists), in cold blood, laughing at the carnage they were creating. Neither the military units who carried out the atrocity nor their superiors faced any consequences, unlike Manning, who was prosecuted for sharing the tape and labeledan ungrateful traitor by Donald Trump. She was sentenced to 35 years in prison, although that was later commuted by President Obama. In 2018, she unsuccessfully ran for the Senate, challenging the incumbent Ben Cardin. Since then, she has faced constant harassment and was jailed againfor refusing to testify against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

The runoff election on July 14 is sure to be a hard fought race, given the close outcome in March. Averharts opponent is Kiani Gardner, a former research scientist and biology professor from Hawaii, who has been endorsedby influential Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Feature photo | Former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning speaks with reporters, after arriving at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Va., May 16, 2019. Cliff Owen | AP

Alan MacLeodis a Staff Writer forMintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books:Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and MisreportingandPropaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent. He has also contributed toFairness and Accuracy in Reporting,The Guardian,Salon,The Grayzone,Jacobin Magazine,Common DreamstheAmerican Herald TribuneandThe Canary.

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Democratic Candidate James Averhart Personally Oversaw ...

Ai Weiwei: Yours Truly Review: On the Irony of Personal Freedom – The New York Times

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The irony of personal freedom is that those who fight for it are robbed of their own. Ai Weiwei: Yours Truly explores the tension between the idea of liberty and the fate of those in pursuit of it by following the Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei as he creates @Large, an ambitious site-specific exhibition on Alcatraz Island.

The documentary, directed by Cheryl Haines, examines human rights issues by connecting Ais personal history and activism with the history of Alcatraz and with those of other political dissidents across time and the world. Also explored are the challenges of producing site-specific work, made more complex by an artist who can never see the space (Ai was under house arrest in Beijing at the time), as well as a brief meditation on the role of public art. The result: a dizzying narrative that doesnt leave much room for processing.

When the film does slow down, it shines. Interviews with Ai and his mother reveal the psychological impact of the familys exile to a labor camp in northeast China in the late 1950s, and directly link to two main components of the exhibition: Trace, a room with Lego portraits of 176 people imprisoned for their beliefs laid out on the floor; and Yours Truly, another room where visitors are able to write postcards to a select number of those incarcerated people, which would later be mailed.

The film explores the positive impact of this analog correspondence and features interviews with Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who in 2010 leaked archives of military and diplomatic documents, and John Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. agent who confirmed the agencys use of torture.

Even for those familiar with Ai and his work, the films offerings of fascinating insights into his personal life and an exploration of the stakes of personal freedom make it a worthy viewing experience.

Ai Weiwei: Yours TrulyNot rated. In English, Mandarin and Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 16 minutes. Watch through virtual cinemas.

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Ai Weiwei: Yours Truly Review: On the Irony of Personal Freedom - The New York Times

New Indictment Tries To Tie Julian Assange To A Hacking He Had Nothing To Do With – Techdirt

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from the several-versions-of-truth-and-this-one-is-the-DOJ's dept

The government is still trying to get Julian Assange out of the UK so it can ring him up on a variety of charges related to obtaining and publishing a large number of sensitive documents. Most of the charges are still related to the documents obtained from Chelsea Manning. The DOJ wants to use the oft-abused CFAA to put Assange behind bars because he supposedly helped Manning hack a CIA database.

Another indictment [PDF] has been issued by the DOJ, making this its third attempt to throw the book at Assange. If the DOJ can prove Assange contributed to hacking attempts, it may end up with a case worth pursuing. But much of what the indictments deal with is normal journalism behavior: the cultivation of sources and the encouragement of sources to locate/leak newsworthy documents. The blurry line the DOJ is walking on is the same line the previous administration seemed to feel wasn't worth crossing, no matter how much harm/embarrassment Assange had caused with the release of sensitive documents.

The latest indictment expands the government's espionage theories. The government's second superseding indictment deals with Assange's alleged "unlawful overt acts:" the hacking attempts supposedly made targeting Defense Department computers, possibly with the aid of Chelsea Manning and other Wikileaks associates.

Much of this expanded narrative seems to rely on the input of FBI informants, including Sigurdur Thordarson, who was convicted twice for sex with minors after he began working for the FBI in 2011. Sketchy contributors aside, there are some major omissions in the government's narrative.

First, as Dell Cameron points out for Gizmodo, the indictment casually ignores the government's contribution to cyber attacks on American businesses located overseas, as well as some foreign government targets. But there is a significant omission in the new indictment. And the purpose of this crucial admission appears to be an attempt to link Assange to a data breach he never participated in.

A section of the indictment titled Sabu, Hammond, and ASSANGE begins on the date December 25, 2011, and refers to an attack on servers belonging to a private firm identified only as Intelligence Consulting Company. This is obviously Stratfor, the Austin-based private intelligence company whose millions of pilfered emails comprise the WikiLeaks drop known as the Global Intelligence Files.

DOJ omits several crucial details about the Stratfor hack in its attempts to name Assange as a conspirator in a breach that happened without his knowledge. Most notably, prosecutors exclude that the actual breach of Stratfors security, in late 2011, occurred 83 days prior to the events they describe, unknownst by anyone DOJ identifies as part of the conspiracy, including Assange.

Assange and Wikileaks may have helped distribute the documents obtained in the breach and there does appear to be evidence Assange provided the hackers with some tools for searching the stash of five million emails, but there's nothing in the indictment that ties Assange to the underlying hacking. The only thing in the indictment is stuff the DOJ is generously calling "evidence."

At best, these are copies of exchanges taken from chat rooms in which a user claims to be Assange, which is not likely to hold up in court.

To be sure, indictments are often a pile of helpful omissions designed to speedily initiate prosecutions. But the more the government adds to its accusations, the more glaring its omissions become. This case was already problematic -- willing to walk right up to the First Amendment and dare it to do something about it. Now it's become more farcical, with the government accusing someone of doing something it appears clear they didn't do and bolstering it with half-truths about the FBI's own involvement in malicious hacking efforts.

Filed Under: cfaa, doj, extradition, hacking, indictment, julian assange, leaksCompanies: stratfor, wikileaks

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New Indictment Tries To Tie Julian Assange To A Hacking He Had Nothing To Do With - Techdirt

The real war against the press: Julian Assange as public enemy number one – DiEM25

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Now, as Assange fights extradition to the United States from a courtroom in the United Kingdom, the same media organisations that worked with WikiLeaks to share stories of government misconduct remain silent about a case with an obvious negative impact on press freedom and democracy.

Find out what happened and how DiEM25 is committed to preventing this injustice against Assange, WikiLeaks, and the free press.

Slavoj iek, philosopher and DiEM25 Advisory Panel member, on Julian Assange.

WikiLeaks began in 2006 out of a radical belief in transparency. The objective of the organisation was simple: create an online platform for whistleblowers to make secret documents publicly available.

Founder Julian Assange relied on prior experience in computer technology and privacy protection to build the organisation. This included partaking in the early developments of encryption technology, as well as providing technical skills to help authorities expose an underage sex ring in his native Australia.

This belief in encryption technology and exposing injustice made WikiLeaks standout to whistleblowers. They could now share classified documents and evade detection with WikiLeaks encrypted dropbox.

WikiLeaks first big break came in April 2010 with the release of US Army files provided by intelligence officer Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning. Most striking from the release hundreds of thousands of classified files from the US Army about the war in Iraq was the collateral murder video of US soldiers fatally shooting 18 people, including two Reuters journalists.

WikiLeaks followed the Manning leaks with the Afghanistan War Logs (July 2010), the Iraq War Logs (October 2010), Cablegate (November 2010) and the Guantnamo files (April 2011).

The Cablegate Files marked the largest and most newsworthy of these releases. WikiLeaks worked with Western media organisations including New York Times, Guardian, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, and El Pais to release a quarter of a million US diplomatic cables. The information shared in these cables revealed US spying on the United Nations and other world leaders, tensions between the US and allies, and corruption in countries throughout the world documented by US diplomats.

The disclosures of 2010-2011 from WikiLeaks have been cited as a driving factor in the Arab Spring protests of 2011, ending public business done in private, and the beginning of what appeared as the golden age of whistleblowing.

Political pressure quickly grew against WikiLeaks and Assange.

The US government and financial institutions went after WikiLeaks on a multitude of fronts: shutting down donations, blocking access to the WikiLeaks website, threatening prosecution, and asking allies to open criminal cases against the organization. Specifically, its founder and spokesperson: Julian Assange.

Confronted with mounting pressure on WikiLeaks, Assange fled to Sweden, where whistleblowers and journalists enjoy more legal protection.

However, Assange was soon the subject of controversy in the country: two women accused the WikiLeaks founder of molestation and rape. A preliminary investigation was opened by Swedish prosecutors after Assange reported for questioning about the allegations. The rape allegation was soon dismissed and the arrest warrant for Assange was dropped less than a day after it was issued.

In the meantime, Assange relocated to London after his request for a work and residency permit was denied by the Swedish government. Upon hearing of an Interpol warrant for his arrest after the preliminary investigation was reopened by Swedish prosecutors, Assange turned himself over to the UK police.

After initially receiving bail, a UK court soon issued his extradition to Sweden to answer further questions about the allegations.

Fearful of a sealed indictment in Washington that would lead to his extradition to the United States by the Swedish government, on June 19 2012 Assange skipped a bail hearing in the UK and took refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador in London.

On August 16th 2012, Assange was granted political asylum by Ecuadors president Rafael Correa because of political persecution and prospect of an unfair trial in the US.

Assange announced his asylum on the now famous balcony across from Harrods in London.

While in the embassy, Assange continued to publish WikiLeaks material, including the Saudi Cables and Stratfor Leaks.

The Saudi Cables exposed the Middle Eastern kingdoms checkbook diplomacy to undermine Iran and their strong dislike for Israel. Meanwhile, the Stratfor Leaks explored how the US-based private intelligence company monitored activists, made payments to the controversial Pakistani intelligence service, and engaged in insider trading.

Though, most notable during this period was WikiLeaks involvement in securing asylum for whistleblower Edward Snowden.

In the meantime, a tug of war continued between Assange and Swedish prosecutors, (along with the US and the UK). The Assange legal team requested Swedish lawyers interview the WikiLeaks founder at the embassy in London or over video link. They declined until 2015, when lawyers from the Swedish government interviewed Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy.

The preliminary investigation was eventually dropped in 2019 after years of international pressure, including a UN panel describing Assanges asylum as arbitrary imprisonment and, by UN representative Nils Melzer as physiological torture.

WikiLeaks and Assange came under a different kind of pressure during the 2016 US election.

WikiLeaks was embraced by then-candidate Donald Trump during the heat of the presidential campaign infamously claiming he loved WikiLeaks after the release of emails from Hillary Clintons campaign chair John Podesta showing quid pro quo foreign policy, financing by US allies of terror group ISIS, and working to elevate pied piper candidates like Donald Trump to be Clintons challenger.

While US intelligence claim the Podesta emails were funneled to WikiLeaks by Russia-linked hacker Guccifer 2.0, they did not find any evident forgeries in the content of the emails.

Whatever admiration candidate Trump had for WikiLeaks was quickly lost after his entry to the White House.

Three months into the new administration, Trumps newly appointed CIA director Mike Pompeo declared WikiLeaks a hostile non-state actor. The agency worked behind the scenes with Trump donor Sheldon Adelson to spy on meetings Assange had with his lawyers in the Ecuadorian embassy.

Meanwhile, Democrat senators in the US pressured Ecuadors new president Lenn Moreno to cut ties with Assange because WikiLeaks continues to undermine democracies globally.

Soon enough, Assange was accused of violating terms of his asylum by publishing material on news events in Ecuador (as well as commenting on the Catalonia independence movement of 2017 and leaking CIA spycraft tools with the Vault 7 release).

Finally, Moreno allowed British police to enter the embassy and arrest Assange on April 11 2019, marking the first time in history a government allowed a foreign law enforcement agency to enter its sovereign territory and arrest one of its citizens.

The original US case against Assange accuses the WikiLeaks founder of conspiring with Chelsea Manning (then Bradley) in 2010 to commit intrusion of a government computer. This charge grew in May 2019 to 18 counts under the Espionage Act, which targets Assange as a publisher of government documents.

Before Trump, the Obama administration considered charging Assange with the Espionage Act a World War I based law used by the administration more than all predecessors combined but dropped their pursuit over First Amendment concerns. Specifically: if the government prosecuted WikiLeaks and Assange for revealing secrets, they would also have to prosecute US news organisations and journalists like the New York Times and Washington Post.

Such a revelation seems to add legal protection to Assange, despite the Trump administrations war on the press; a war which the WikiLeaks founder is scarcely mentioned as a casualty. Yet its been revealed the judge overseeing the case, Vanessa Baraitser, has connections to corporations exposed by WikiLeaks.

Recent developments are even more troubling for Assange, with indictment charges expanding in scope, the reliance of US prosecutors on evidence from a deemed psychopathic FBI informant who infiltrated WikiLeaks, and speculation about the fairness of the trial after the WikiLeaks founder was stripped naked and had legal documents taken from him.

To lock away a journalist for exposing secrets defines authoritarianism. Recent events have showcased the increasing deterioration of our democratic institutions. This years COVID-19 pandemic, and documented accounts of police brutality worldwide have shed light on the disregard of many democratic governments for their own citizens lives.

We need to protect people like Julian Assange now more than ever. Whistleblowers ensure the functioning of our democracies by revealing what is being done by governments in the name of citizens.

As a movement committed to the belief that transparency makes strong democracies, we stand with and will fight for Julian, WikiLeaks, and the free press.

Sign DiEM25s Dont Extradite Assange petition.

#FreeAssange

Do you want to be informed of DiEM25's actions? Sign up here

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The real war against the press: Julian Assange as public enemy number one - DiEM25

Best Artificial Intelligence Software – Reviews 2020 …

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Modern society depends a lot on computing to help accomplish a variety of tasks. From creating ideal temperatures in refrigerators to store grocery to widespread application in government defense systems, basic AI systems are near-ubiquitous.

Machines such as Roomba have taken the home care industry by storm. Clever implementation of AI has resulted in cleaning tasks being conducted efficiently. Kismet, a social smart bot manufactured by researchers at MIT, is an AI machine that can converse emotionally with humans.

Powerful AI software is at our fingertips as well. Applications such as SIRI and Alexa hone in on human needs to accomplish tasks on iOS and Amazon devices. The help retrieves instant answers, using the internet, as well as accomplish a set of limited tasks.

One of the biggest advancements in AI has been the implementations (and adoption) of self-driving or autonomous vehicles. E.g., Teslas models rely on advanced AI features and hardware upgrades to navigate through cities and open roads alike.

Similarly, hospitals around the world have become accustomed to having AI devices take over important processes. Some of them include measurement of dosages to patients during a procedure and surgical assistance. AI-powered robots have been taken up in the disinfection of hospitals as well to check the spread of dangerous diseases.

Elsewhere, artificial intelligence software is being put to use in molecular biology and biotechnology to analyze compounds, viruses, and bacteria to ensure pandemic-like situations can be better forecasted and combated.

Marketers have used AI to achieve better positioning, awareness, and sales for their brands. Chatbots converse with users on a website and guide them in decision making, by simply computing the nature of their input. AI is also used to analyze big data of digital marketing campaigns and tweak them based on daily analysis, without human intervention.

In the entertainment sector, Over the Top (OTT) platforms such as Netflix run recommendation engines and predictive analysis tools anticipate user behavior, tastes. They keep their libraries updated on this information as well as suggest new shows in every region or language to the user.

With significant contributions to the fields of astronomy, customer service support, as well as logistics, AIs implementations are endless in the modern era.

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Best Artificial Intelligence Software - Reviews 2020 ...

8 Pros And Cons Of Artificial Intelligence | You Must Be …

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There is lots of talk about Artificial Intellenege in IT industry. Needless to say, it is going to be a big advancement in the technology field.

As like every other growing technology, plenty of statements is going around about AI ethics.

Is it good or bad?

What are the pros and cons of Artificial Intelligence?

There are lots of myths about artificial intelligence. Before getting into it, here is Artifical Intelligence, I can define it in a simple way

Artificial intelligence (AI) is described as the intelligence of machines. Its all about creating machines that have the ability to think like humans and as the technology is advancing with time, researchers and scientists are aiming to introduce an emotional characteristic as well into these machines.

With the growing technological advancements, it looks like artificial intelligence would definitely be the next big thing of this era.

Ever thought how would this affect human life?

Go through the following points to know what advantages and disadvantages artificial intelligence can bring with it.

AI comes with advantages and disadvantages. Lets look at them one-by-one.

Here are the advantages of using Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Unlike humans, robots and machines do not have to get paid every month for the work they do.

Although machines are pretty much expensive to maintain, the maintenance cost is very small as compared to the expenses that an organization bears for its employees.

Hence, it helps to reduce and to control the cost by using artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence provides work efficiency.

Since manpower would be replaced by machines, work would be performed in a more efficient manner, depending on the type of intelligence.

If machines would be built without any flaw, no doubt they would be able to perform even the most complex tasks without any error.

One of the top benefits of using artificial intelligence in the workplace is that machines and robots can perform lengthy and important tasks in a more effective manner.

Even the machine doesnt need to take a break to accomplish a big task. Unlike humans, machines dont need to rest or take a break.

They dont need to eat or sleep like us and never fell ill or take leaves.

They only need to be recharged or refueled by an energy source to reach their full potential.

Ultimately, this enables the companies to boost their productivity by working 24 hours.

Artificial intelligence has many benefits to the human. By automating a simple task, we can save a lot of time.

Since machines dont have emotions, there are no chances of any emotional barriers getting in the way of the workplace.

This is a great advantage because having no emotions means that nothing is going to affect their performance.

However, this is completely different in the case of humans because we have emotions and many of us find it hard to work in a stressful environment.

These are all advantages of AI. It is not easy to see future programming prediction. So its time that will tell us more about it.

Now lets see what are the disadvantages of Artifical Intelligence.

Here are the disadvantages of Artifical Intelligence (AI).

There is no doubt that machines are much better when it comes to working efficiency but they cannot replace the human connection that makes the team. Machines cannot develop a bond with humans.

With more and more machines being designed, there will be an abrupt increase in unemployment and job security. Since machines are replacing human resources, the rate of people losing their jobs will increase.

Needless to say, humans will be no longer a priority for companies.

The only way to empower yourself in the IT industry is by improving your technical skills and by finding trends for future jobs requirement.

If you are aprogrammer, you should always keep analyzing the programming job requirement in the future.

Living in the 21st century, weve seen and even experienced it once or more than once in our lives that our important information gets missing due to technical issues such as machine damages or the software of our system getting corrupt.

We use computers, smartphones and other devices to store almost all our important documents, files, pictures, and videos. Once lost, it is not possible (or very difficult) to retrieve this information.

This can cause serious trouble for your businesses.

Misuse or exploitation of anything is bad.

In the case of artificial intelligence, its worse.

We often hear threats that the misuse of technology can bring the world to a destructive end. This stands true to a great extent as we have seen in animated movies and films.

If AI is given into wrong hands, high technology machines can definitely destroy society.

Wrapping Up My Thoughts on Artificial Intelligence Growth

Despite all the pros and cons Of Artificial Intelligence, Industries are adopting Artificial Intelligence to do the work more efficiently and with less cost. So as the way Big data is becoming a future trend, Artificial Intelligence is too.

We saw the advantages and disadvantages of artificial intelligence. Today machines possess almost human-like abilities and artificial is a perfect example of this fact.

As per derived knowledge, the outcomes in artificial intelligence are getting better rapidly.

Therefore, it is best to accept the changes in the world we live and take benefit from all the amazing features that artificial intelligence has to offer to us.

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8 Pros And Cons Of Artificial Intelligence | You Must Be ...

Pentagon AI center shifts focus to joint warfighting operations – C4ISRNet

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The Pentagons artificial intelligence hub is shifting its focus to enabling joint warfighting operations, developing artificial intelligence tools that will be integrated into the Department of Defenses Joint All-Domain Command and Control efforts.

As we have matured, we are now devoting special focus on our joint warfighting operation and its mission initiative, which is focused on the priorities of the National Defense Strategy and its goal of preserving Americas military and technological advantages over our strategic competitors, Nand Mulchandani, acting director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, told reporters July 8. The AI capabilities JAIC is developing as part of the joint warfighting operations mission initiative will use mature AI technology to create a decisive advantage for the American war fighter.

That marks a significant change from where JAIC stood more than a year ago, when the organization was still being stood up with a focus on using AI for efforts like predictive maintenance. That transformation appears to be driven by the DoDs focus on developing JADC2, a system of systems approach that will connect sensors to shooters in near-real time.

JADC2 is not a single product. It is a collection of platforms that get stitched together woven together into effectively a platform. And JAIC is spending a lot of time and resources focused on building the AI component on top of JADC2, said the acting director.

According to Mulchandani, the fiscal 2020 spending on the joint warfighting operations initiative is greater than JAIC spending on all other mission initiatives combined. In May, the organization awarded Booz Allen Hamilton a five-year, $800 million task order to support the joint warfighting operations initiative. As Mulchandani acknowledged to reporters, that task order exceeds JAICs budget for the next few years and it will not be spending all of that money.

One example of the organizations joint warfighting work is the fire support cognitive system, an effort JAIC was pursuing in partnership with the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab and the U.S. Armys Program Executive Office Command, Control and Communications-Tactical. That system, Mulchandani said, will manage and triage all incoming communications in support of JADC2.

Mulchandani added that JAIC was about to begin testing its new flagship joint warfighting project, which he did not identify by name.

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We do have a project going on under joint warfighting which we are going to be actually go into testing, he said. They are very tactical edge AI is the way Id describe it. That work is going to be tested. Its actually promising work were very excited about it.

As I talked about the pivot from predictive maintenance and others to joint warfighting, that is probably the flagship project that were sort of thinking about and talking about that will go out there, he added.

While left unnamed, the acting director assured reporters that the project would involve human operators and full human control.

We believe that the current crop of AI systems today [...] are going to be cognitive assistance, he said. Those types of information overload cleanup are the types of products that were actually going to be investing in.

Cognitive assistance, JADC2, command and controlthese are all pieces, he added.

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Pentagon AI center shifts focus to joint warfighting operations - C4ISRNet

Integrating Artificial Intelligence in Treatment Planning – Imaging Technology News

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At the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) 2019 meeting, new artificial intelligence (AI) software to assist with radiotherapy treatment planning systems was highlighted. The goal of the AI-based systems is to save staff time, while still allowing clinicians to do the final patient review.

RaySearch demonstrated a new U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-cleared machine learning treatment planning system. The RaySearch RayStation machine learning algorithm is being used clinically by University Health Network, Princess Margaret Cancer Center, Toronto, Canada, where it was rolled out over several months in late-2019. Medical physicist Leigh Conroy, Ph.D., was involved in this rollout and helped conduct a study, showing the automated plans and traditionally made plans to radiation oncologists to get valuable feedback. She spoke at the AAPM 2019 meeting on this topic.

In an interview with itnTV, Conroy explained that she worked with an algorithm that uses machine learning to create automated treatment plans. With this, we train the algorithm using a curated set of high-quality, previously delivered plans. Then, it is able to detect the patient that is most similar to a novel patient and create a new treatment plan with no user interaction beyond pressing the play button, she explained.

Conrads study directly compared those automated treatment plans to traditionally generated manual plans. The radiation oncologist then compared those two plans head-to-head and decided whether each plan was acceptable, and chose the favored plan. The plans are not modified as they are performing them, however they are modifiable. The automated plan is modifiable, but for the purposes of this study, we are not going to be modifying them so we can directly compare the output of the machine learning algorithm to the output of the planners, she said.

The system was trained using a model that was developed at Princess Margaret, and the model is being used clinically. The way that we are doing our study is if the doctor does choose the automated plan, then its underlined that the physicist knows when they are doing their plan QA that it is an automated plan, and it goes to the same QA that it normally would, and the patient-specific QA is a fully deliverable plan, and that is the plan that the patient is treated with.

Depending on how things go with the study, it is predicted that AI should see a regular implementation. That is the point of the study, to make sure we can do this and work it into our regular process and eventually provide it if the doctors continue to like the automated plans, she said.

One of the main ideas in implementing AI is to save time to get more patient throughput. We are not measuring the end to end timing of a planner vs. the machine learning. But one of the major advantages is that it takes about 20 minutes for a new patient, however there is no user interacting during those 20 minutes, so the planner can go and do other work or other plans during that time, and come back so there is a fully done plan.

There is a different process depending on what plan is being created. However, the AI would help to free them up to be able to do other duties. From a planner expertise perspective, some of the planning techniques such as head and neck might be more complicated so it might take longer for the planner to do it. Its more reliant on their level of expertise, she explained.

Varian also has developed AI-driven automated treatment planning software that is currently being used by several hospitals.

Recently, Varian released the newest version of its treatment planning system, Eclipse v16. This new release includes intelligent features such as RapidPlan PT, a clinical application of machine learning in proton treatment planning, and RT Peer Review, a collaborative workspace designed to streamline and accelerate the peer review process for radiotherapy treatment plans.

Previously only available for photon-based radiotherapy treatment planning, RapidPlan is knowledge-based treatment planning software that enables clinicians to leverage knowledge and data from similar prior treatment plans to quickly develop high-quality personalized plans for patients. This knowledge-based planning software is now available for proton treatment planning with RapidPlan PT. The software also allows dose prediction with machine learning models that can be used as a decision support tool to determine which patients would be appropriate for proton or photon therapy.

With the number of operational proton treatment rooms continuing to increase, there is a need for experienced proton therapy clinicians, said Kolleen Kennedy, chief growth officer, president, Proton Solutions, Varian, in a written statement. RapidPlan PT helps bridge the learning curve, allowing established centers to share their models and clinical experience. The machine learning in RapidPlan PT has the potential to reduce proton treatment plan optimization from a one- to eight-hour process, as reported by clinical proton centers, to less than 10 minutes, while also potentially improving plan quality.

Eclipse v16 has received the CE mark and is 510(k) pending.

Artificial Intelligence Greatly Speeds Radiation Therapy Treatment Planning

VIDEO: Use of Machine Learning to Automate Radiotherapy Treatment Planning

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Integrating Artificial Intelligence in Treatment Planning - Imaging Technology News


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