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Dear Chelsea Manning: birthday messages from Edward …

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Chelsea Manning birthday letters. Guardian Photograph: Guardian

On Wednesday, Chelsea Manning heroine, whistleblower and inmate turns 27. She has been behind bars for four years and eight months, ever since her arrest for leaking classified US documents. There isnt much prospect that she will be released any time soon. Manning is serving a 35-year sentence, with the earliest possibility of parole being in 2021. She has appealed to Barack Obama for a pardon. It seems unlikely he will grant it.

It is against this gloomy and unpropitious backdrop that leading writers, artists and public figures from around the world are today sending Chelsea birthday greetings. Their contributions include letters, poems, drawings and original paintings. Some are philosophical yes, thats you, Slavoj iek others brief messages of goodwill. A few are movingly confessional.

All send a powerful reminder: that for millions in the US and beyond, Chelsea Manning is an inspiring moral figure who deserves our continued support. Her leaks, published in 2010, at a time when Manning was unhappily stationed with the US military in Baghdad, revealed the true nature of Americas twin wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They also illuminated the gulf between Washingtons private thinking and its public diplomacy.

Edward Snowden sums up the mood of collective gratitude: I thank you now and forever for your extraordinary act of service and I am sorry that it has come with such an unbelievable personal cost. As a result of your courageous act, the American people are more informed about the workings of our government as it positions itself for endless war ... For this we all thank you. Happy birthday, Chelsea.

For the moment, the attitude of the US administration towards whistleblowers is unrelenting. Snowden faces indeterminate exile in Moscow. And yet several contributors argue, persuasively in my view, that future White Houses will celebrate Manning and Snowden. Writing from his home in Adelaide in South Australia, the author and Nobel Prize winner JM Coetzee praises Chelsea for the steps you took in the service of democracy that is to say, of the right of people to govern themselves.

Coetzee adds: I myself am in my 70s so dont expect to be around when you regain your freedom (unless your president comes to his senses and offers you a pardon), but I want you to know that I am confident there will come a day when your image, and the image of Edward Snowden, will appear on postage stamps of the US Postal Service.

The traffic is mostly one-way sent to Chelseas current postal address, Fort Leavenworth military prison in Kansas. But we do get a glimpse of her life through her correspondence with the British fashion designer Vivienne Westwood. (Westwoods birthday card is a striking green-red print with the slogan: Whats good for the planet is good for Chelsea.)

On 8 December, Manning wrote an article for the Guardian, recounting her struggle to be recognised as a young trans woman, fighting against an implacable US court and government system. Two days later, she tells Westwood that her days are busy. I am working a lot, studying, working on the appeal and a lawsuit on fundraising, writing articles and trying to stay healthy. Chelsea admits she gets too many letters to answer them all but promises to try harder.

Not a bad message for all of us. Happy birthday, Chelsea. Luke Harding

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Dear Chelsea Manning: birthday messages from Edward ...

Judge questions evidence on whether NSA spying is too broad

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A federal judge on Friday questioned the strength of a key lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the governments Internet surveillance program known as upstream data collection.

Judge Jeffrey White heard oral arguments by attorneys from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed the suit, and the government, during a hearing in a federal district court in Oakland, California. The EFF says its suit is the first challenge in public court to the governments upstream data program, which copies online data from the main cables connecting Internet networks around the world.

The EFF first filed its suit in 2008 after an AT&T technician provided evidence that the company routed copies of its Internet traffic records to the NSA.

The National Security Agency program is unconstitutional because it collects communications, including content such as email, of people without ties to issues of national security, EFF attorney Richard Wiebe told the judge. Thats an overly broad dragnet that violates the Constitutions Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure, he said.

U.S. Justice Department attorney James Gilligan did not deny the government taps the Internets backbone to gather data. But the government uses filtering mechanisms to automatically destroy certain communications records within milliseconds, he said.

Judge White could declare the upstream collection program unconstitutional, a ruling the government would probably appeal. But on Friday, he questioned whether there was enough evidence on either side to say whether the program is constitutional.

The judges ruling might take months, judging from the number and complexity of questions he asked Friday.

What evidence is there that its all international communications [gathered], not just communications with suspected terrorists or hot spots? he asked EFF attorney Wiebe.

Wiebe cited a top-secret 2009 report by the NSA inspector general detailing the governments email and Internet data collection, published by The Guardian. Other documents, including AT&Ts first surveillance transparency report, published earlier this year, provide evidence of the programs reach, he said.

But the government has never confirmed nor denied the 2009 secret report, Gilligan said, and AT&Ts report only pertains to legal court orders received under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

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Judge questions evidence on whether NSA spying is too broad

LucidWorks preps Solr stack as Splunk killer

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Enterprise search software provider LucidWorks has introduced a package based on its open-source Apache Solr search engine that will allow administrators and business analysts to extract more information from IT system logs.

SiLK "is a solution that relies on open core components that organizations can use to manage log data at scale," said Will Hayes, LucidWorks chief product officer.

The SiLK package combines Apache Lucene/Solr with a number of open-source analysis tools, namely Apache Flume, LogStash and Kibana.

Kibana offers the reporting visualization capabilities and LogStash is used to collect, store and parse logs. Flume provides a way to connect with Hadoop repositories. Apache Solr, which LucidWorks oversees, provides the searching and indexing capabilities. Solar used to be called Lucene/Solr, after two technologies that were combined, before the name was shortened to Lucene. LucidWorks employs about 25 percent of the core developers who manage and update Lucene and Solr.

The software package could help in security analysis, business intelligence, fraud detection and other use cases, according to the company. It can offer time-series analysis, data discovery and correlation.

The open source software stack that powers SiLK is not new -- many organizations have already combined LogStash and Kibana to analyze log data. Most implementations have used another open source search engine, Elasticsearch, however.

"A lot of people out in the community were talking about using LogStash with Solr," Hayes said. "A number of organizations are running into issues with using Elasticsearch at scale."

LucidWorks says that using Lucene instead of Elasticsearch will allow an organization to aggregate and search across more data, Hayes said. SiLK is aimed at organizations that have anywhere from hundreds of gigabytes to terabytes of data to ingest daily.

According to Hayes, SiLK can also provide some scalability advantages over the commercial market leader of log-data analysis, Splunk. Splunk charges, at least in part, based on how much data is being analyzed, which can add up when dealing with extremely large amounts of data.

SiLK also works well with Hadoop deployments, Hayes said. It has been certified to work with the Cloudera Enterprise 5 commercial Hadoop package and Solr is frequently incorporated into other Hadoop distributions, such as those offered by MapR and Hortonworks.

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LucidWorks preps Solr stack as Splunk killer


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