FYI - news sources about Russia and the Ukraine

Friends, thanks a lot for the very long list of information sources about Russia, the Ukraine and the current crisis.  I have not checked each link, nor do I personally vouch for the quality or contents of each link, and I share them with you as they are and in no particular order.  Those interested will have to refine and tune this list by themselves.  I hope that this is useful!

The Saker

PS: I might have missed an email or comment, so if you sent me a link which I forgot, please re-post them in the comments section or email me.  Thanks!
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Internet based information sources about the Ukrainian crisis:

http://anna-news.info
http://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/
http://el-murid.livejournal.com
http://e-news.in.ua
http://goodgame.ru/channel/demon_dobra/
http://goodgame.ru/player3?6147
http://krizis-ua.livejournal.com - Ukrainian police-related
http://lifenews.ru/watch-live
http://live.russia.tv/index/index/channel_id/3
http://novorossia.tv/
http://oko-planet.su/
http://politikus.ru
http://public.od.ua/
http://putnik1.livejournal.com
http://radiovesti.ru/
http://rbctv.rbc.ru/live
http://rt.com/on-air/
http://russia.tv/
http://russia.tv/video/?cid=video&d=0
http://shrek1.livejournal.com/
http://stbcaptain.livejournal.com - military-related
https://vk.com/antymaidan
http://tv-novosti.ru/
http://twower.livejournal.com
http://u-96.livejournal.com
http://watch.squidtv.net/europe/russia.html
http://wesservic.livejournal.com/1483393.html
http://www.1tv.ru/
http://www.etvnet.com (Paid service)
http://www.newsru.com/
http://www.ntv.ru/
http://www.odnako.org/blogs/
http://www.pravdatoday.info/content/maydan-po-puti-raspada
http://www.radiorus.ru/
http://www.rbc.ru/
http://www.vesti.ru/videos?vid=onair
http://www.youtube.com/user/novostnojdonbass

Streams:

http://goodgame.ru/player3?6147
http://goodgame.ru/channel/demon_dobra/
http://wesservic.livejournal.com/1483393.html

East Ukraine news:

http://emelamud.livejournal.com/
http://beekjuffer.livejournal.com
http://wesservic.livejournal.com

Kharkov:

http://mikle1.livejournal.com/
http://hippy-end.livejournal.com/

Odessa:

http://ivakin-alexey.livejournal.com/
http://grey-croco.livejournal.com/

Donetsk:

http://donbassrus.livejournal.com

Lugansk:

http://luganskiy-lgua.livejournal.com
http://yadocent.livejournal.com

Dnepropetrovsk:

http://crustgroup.livejournal.com

Crimea:

http://colonelcassad.livejournal.com
http://1greywind.livejournal.com
http://poltora-bobra.livejournal.com

Kiev:

http://varjag-2007.livejournal.com

Richard Stallman: Snowden & Assange besieged by empire but not defeated

First impressions - and misgivings - in reaction to Hassan Nasrallah's speech today

I have been studying Hezbollah since 1995 and I don't recall Hassan Nasrallah ever delivering such a strongly worded warning as what he did today at the "Prophet Loyalty Rally".  I might be mistaken, but I see several unprecedented elements in his speech today:

1.  First, he clearly and unambiguously threated the USA and its Empire by stating that the consequences for releasing the full movie "Innocence of Muslims" would be extremely severe.  The Americans seem to be so afraid that they began burning classified materials in the US Embassy in Beirut.

2.  Second, he demanded that all the websites which would be showing the movie be shut down by national governments.

3.  Third, he demanded nothing short of a worldwide legal ban on blasphemous attacks against the major figures of Islam, Christianity and Judaism.

4. Fourth, he warned any nominally "Muslim" leader who would not do their utmost to support these steps that they would be considered inadequate.

5.  Fifth, he indicated that all of these demands were non-negotiable and that the Islamic world would have to choose between humiliation and martyrdom, in other words, that the price to pay for insisting on these terms did not matter.

This is, in my opinion, nothing short of amazing and even somewhat disturbing.

One one hand, in a world ruled by an Empire with no other morals than hedonism and greed, with no sense at all of right and wrong and whose arrogance and hubris has exploded beyond anything imaginable, it is deeply moving and exhilarating to see that somebody has finally dared to say that "enough is enough" and that there will be a real price to pay for such infinite arrogance.  On the other hand, I am disturbed when I see a political and religious figure like Hassan Nasrallah (whom I immensely admire) take it upon himself to set demands about what should be done not only inside the Islamic world, but globally, world-wide.

For all my numerous and recent articles condemning what I call "modern blasphemies as a quintessential hate crime", it is unclear to me by what authority Hassan Nasrallah would have the right to decree that, say, Papua New Guinea or Paraguay would have to ban a movie or shutdown a website.  I would have felt more comfortable if Sayyed Hassan had invited all the countries of the world to ban insults to the religious figures central to any major faith, but what I heard today sounded less as an invitation than as an ultimatum and that is problematic to say the least.

Finally, I profoundly believe in the right to freely choose between right and wrong.  That right, as far as I am concerned, was granted to mankind by God in the Garden of Eden already, and I am therefore fundamentally opposed to censorship.  I find any attempts at censoring the Internet as particularly dangerous because if/when the technological tools to do so are developed with the express purpose of fighting that which is fundamentally bad, the very same tools can then be used to suppress what which is fundamentally good.

I have to stress here that I am basing all of the above on the on-the-fly interpretation of Nasrallah's speech by Press TV, which one can hardly consider an official position of Hezbollah.  I also am not sure as to whether Hassan Nasrallah has the rank and authority to make such global statement in the name of his followers or whether he should have waited for an official position on this matter by his spiritual guide Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Whatever may be the case, it sure looks like there is going to be hell to pay for the US Empire for is systematic lack of even minimal respect for that which other nations or religious hold for sacred.  In that sense, what is happening today is a much needed wake-up call for the rest of the planet indeed.

What I see here is what I would call a "return of the sacred" and I welcome it with all my heart.  That sense of sacred is, I strongly believe, a central characteristic of the truly civilized human being (as opposed to the only technologically advanced one but with the conscience and morals of an amoeba) and while the Western world, terminally brainwashed by secularism and Masonic propaganda, thinks that it can "de-sacralize" the rest of humanity it appears that these attempts are resulting into some rather nasty blowback.

If the translation by Press TV is correct and if, indeed, Nasrallah's reaction is a bit over the top and raises all sorts of delicate issues with its "planetary scope", I still can't say that I feel very sorry for those who, by design or by crass ignorance, never bothered to contemplate the potential consequences of their actions or their allegiance.

The issue of freedom of thought versus blasphemy is an important and complex one and, at least so far, the utter lack of anything worthy of being called "thought" in the imbecile movie which triggered it all does not quite call for a discussion of it.  However, Hassan Nasrallah's speech might provide an excellent opportunity to ask the right questions about how to deal with true thought which might still be perceived as blasphemous by some. 

Your thoughts?

The Saker

Eben Moglen: Why Freedom of Thought Requires Free Media and Why Free Media Require Free Software

Dear friends,

I urge you all to listen to this amazing, truly visionary, presentation by Eben Moglen, one of the most knowledgeable and savvy defenders of freedom of our times.  To be honest, I find his arguments very disturbing, because he brilliantly shows that our society and our technology are truly headed in the wrong way, and because I find it very believe that this can be stopped.  But maybe it can? At hte very least, the more people will truly understand his arguments, the longer we can resist.

Just like George Orwell showed in his book "1984" how thought is dependent on words, so does Moglen show that modern thought is dependent on media, which itself is dependent on the technology which runs and, really, defines it.

The biggest problem underlying the current lack of freedom on the Internet is that it was really primarily shaped by capitalism and its single, all-consuming "value" or goal: greed.

Originally, of course, the Internet was a designed military product, then as a scientific one, but nowadays the Internet is seen by those who control most, though not all, of it, as a money making machine.

To make things worse, New World Order Fascists like "Evil Joe" Lieberman are acutely aware that he and his likes will not succeed in their long-held dream of lobotomizing us all as long as we can simply ignore their massive corporate propaganda machine and simply use what remains, for the time being, the only truly free mass media on the planet.  This state of affairs is, of course, absolutely unacceptable to them.

So what is gradually being formed is an unholy alliance of, on one side, greedy capitalist money-makers and, on the other, what the Russian philosopher Ivan Illiin called the "world's backstage" (мировая закулиса).  Many, if not most, of the time - these are really the same people, of course.

They corrupted our political system, turned our republics and democracies into plutocracies, they own our so-called "elected representatives", and they own our government, our courts and our executive.  All the biggest corporations also belong to them.  Our only blessing is that the Internet - being originally designed to withstand a nuclear war - was built in a very redundant and, more importantly, extremely decentralized way: a peer-to-peer architecture, something capitalists hate.  And soon enough, they began replacing it with a far more dangerous model, a client-server architecture.  At the same time, the Establishment also found the weak-link of the Internet: its main "access point": the Internet Service Provider (ISP).  How so?  Simple: once a person has access to the Internet, it is still practically impossible to limit his/her access to any other part of the Net.  But now the "One Percenters" have figured out is that there is one point of entry were no anonymity exists and which is controlled by the capitalist corporate world: the so-called "last mile" where the user connect to the rest of the network.

Visionary hackers and lawyers, including Eben Moglen, of course, are already working on a counter-measure called the "Freedom Box" which aims at nothing less than to make the ISP and even telephone providers technologically obsolete.

But even if the Freedom Box is a success, and I believe that it will be, the very structure of the Internet as it is today puts our freedoms at risk, and this is what this presentation of Eben Moglen is all about.

I urge you all to watch it.

Enjoy!

The Saker

PS: I am also posting another presentation by Moglen entitled "Freedom in the Cloud" which explains the "Freedom Box" issue.

Predictably, YouTube censors Alan Lawson's video on the 'Holocaust', hate speech and 'stupid' Germans

Dear Sirs,

Re:  Spurious Copyright Claim
YouTube Account:  http://www.youtube.com/user/alawson911

I have just received the following notice:

We have disabled the following material as a result of a third-party notification from James Allan Khan claiming that this material is infringing:

Holocaust, Hate Speech & Were the Germans so Stupid?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gycNMf0xAc

I think that this is a spurious action; an attempt to infringe my right to freedom of speech and expression under Article 20 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

While making the video in question I was careful to ensure that any material noted as being the subject of a copyright notice was not used.  Furthermore, I have been unable to find any reference to a person named James Allan Khan on the Internet, using Google's search engine.

As with all of my videos, this one was made for educational purposes; I will not derive any financial benefit from uploading it, and I sincerely think that the material I've used is in the public interest and, therefore, comes under the protection of Fair Use in the copyright law (title 17, U. S. Code) as follows:

Section 107 contains a list of the various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered fair, such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Section 107 also sets out four factors to be considered in determining whether or not a particular use is fair:

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
2. The nature of the copyrighted work
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work

http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html

If the accuser, James Allan Khan can demonstrate otherwise, I will remove the material in question and re-upload the edited video.  If not, I think that it is incumbent on the owners of YouTube to try and prevent Mr. Kahn and others like him from stifling a free exchange of ideas on its otherwise excellent website.

One of the main issues I have with being accused of a copyright infringement, and having one of my videos suspended, more accurately suppressed, is that my accuser was not, apparently, required to make any specific charge as to what image or images or quoted text he has based his claim on (the only musical content in the video is my own work: a single chord).

Accusers should be bound to give YouTube's legal department a reasonable amount of detail regarding the alleged infringement—at the very least the item that has been allegedly infringed—and this should be passed on to the alleged culprit, who should be given a reasonable amount of time to dispute such a claim, before any action is taken.

Shortly, I will be uploading a video regarding this notice, giving others the benefit of what I have learned from what I think is a spurious attack on my right to freedom of expression as well as my time in having to respond to what I regard as a nuisance accusation.

Sincerely,

Anthony Lawson
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Addendum by The Saker

Here is the "offending" video:

If Blogger also removes this video, I will make it available for download from Rapidshare, Megaupload, Mediafire, The Pirate Bay, Demonoid, Torrent411, Rutor, Rutracker, OneBigTorrent, Wawa-Mania, Quebec-team, TorrentSpain and whatever number of file hosting sites needed to keep it available to those who care about the truth.

The Saker

Kettling Wikileaks

by Richard Stallman for Defective by Design

Kettling: also known as containment or corralling - a police tactic for the management of large crowds during demonstrations or protests.

The Anonymous web protests over WikiLeaks are the internet equivalent of a mass demonstration. It's a mistake to call them hacking (playful cleverness) or cracking (security breaking). The LOIC program that is being used by the group is prepackaged so no cleverness is needed to run it, and it does not break any computer's security. The protesters have not tried to take control of Amazon's website, or extract any data from MasterCard. They enter through the site's front door, and it just can't cope with the volume.

Calling these protests DDoS, or distributed denial of service, attacks is misleading, too. A DDoS attack is done with thousands of "zombie" computers. Typically, somebody breaks the security of those computers (often with a virus) and takes remote control of them, then rigs them up as a "botnet" to do in unison whatever he directs (in this case, to overload a server). The Anonymous protesters' computers are not zombies; presumably they are being individually operated.

No – the proper comparison is with the crowds that descended last week on Topshop stores. They didn't break into the stores or take any goods from them, but they sure caused a nuisance for the owner, Philip Green. I wouldn't like it one bit if my store (supposing I had one) were the target of a large protest. Amazon and MasterCard don't like it either, and their clients were probably annoyed. Those who hoped to buy at Topshop on the day of the protest may have been annoyed too.

The internet cannot function if websites are frequently blocked by crowds, just as a city cannot function if its streets are constantly full by protesters. But before you advocate a crackdown on internet protests, consider what they are protesting: on the internet, users have no rights. As the WikiLeaks case has demonstrated, what we do online, we do on sufferance.

In the physical world, we have the right to print and sell books. Anyone trying to stop us would need to go to court. That right is weak in the UK (consider superinjunctions), but at least it exists. However, to set up a website we need the co-operation of a domain name company, an ISP, and often a hosting company, any of which can be pressured to cut us off. In the US, no law explicitly establishes this precarity. Rather, it is embodied in contracts that we have allowed those companies to establish as normal. It is as if we all lived in rented rooms and landlords could evict anyone at a moment's notice.

Reading, too, is done on sufferance. In the physical world, you can buy a book with cash, and you own it. You are free to give, lend or sell it to someone else. You are also free to keep it. However, in the virtual world, e-readers have digital handcuffs to stop you from giving, lending or selling a book, as well as licences forbidding that. Last year, Amazon used a back door in its e-reader to remotely delete thousands of copies of 1984, by George Orwell. The Ministry of Truth has been privatised.

In the physical world, we have the right to pay money and to receive money – even anonymously. On the internet, we can receive money only with the approval of organisations such as PayPal and MasterCard, and the "security state" tracks payments moment by moment. Punishment-on-accusation laws such as the Digital Economy Act extend this pattern of precarity to internet connectivity. What you do on your own computer is also controlled by others, with non-free software. Microsoft and Apple systems implement digital handcuffs – features specifically designed to restrict users. Continued use of a program or feature is precarious too: Apple put a back door in the iPhone to remotely delete installed applications and another in Windows enabled Microsoft to install software changes without asking permission.

I started the free software movement to replace user-controlling non-free software with freedom-respecting free software. With free software, we can at least control what software does in our own computers.

The US state today is a nexus of power for corporate interests. Since it must pretend to serve the people, it fears the truth may leak. Hence its parallel campaigns against WikiLeaks: to crush it through the precarity of the internet and to formally limit freedom of the press.

States seek to imprison the Anonymous protesters rather than official torturers and murderers. The day when our governments prosecute war criminals and tell us the truth, internet crowd control may be our most pressing remaining problem. I will rejoice if I see that day.

Richard Matthew Stallman is a software developer and software freedom activist. In 1983 he announced the project to develop the GNU operating system, a Unix-like operating system meant to be entirely free software, and has been the project's leader ever since. With that announcement Stallman also launched the Free Software Movement. In October 1985 he started the Free Software Foundation.

Two important articles by the EFF about the Internet freedom in the Wikileaks context

Information is the Antidote to Fear: Wikileaks, the Law, and You 

by Kevin Bankston

When it comes to Wikileaks, there's a lot of fear out there on the Internet right now.

Between the federal criminal investigation into Wikileaks, Senator Joe Lieberman's calls for companies to stop providing support for Wikileaks and his suggestion that the New York Times itself should be criminally investigated, Senator Dianne Feinstein's recent Wall Street Journal op-ed calling for prosecution of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, and even the suggestion by some that he should be assassinated, a lot of people are scared and confused.

Will I break the law if I host or mirror the US diplomatic cables that have been published by Wikileaks? If I view or download them? If I write a news story based on them? These are just a few of the questions we've been getting here at EFF, particularly in light of many US companies' apparent fear to do any business with Wikileaks (with a few notable exceptions).

We unfortunately don't have the capacity to offer individualized legal advice to everyone who contacts us. What we can do, however, is talk about EFF's own policy position: we agree with other legal commentators who have warned that a prosecution of Assange, much less of other readers or publishers of the cables, would face serious First Amendment hurdles ([1], [2]) and would be "extremely dangerous" to free speech rights. Along with our friends at the ACLU, "We're deeply skeptical that prosecuting WikiLeaks would be constitutional, or a good idea."

Even better than commentary, we can also provide legal information on this complicated issue, and today we have for you some high quality legal information from an expert and objective source: Congress' own research service, CRS. The job of this non-partisan legal office is to provide objective, balanced memos to Congress on important legal issues, free from the often hysteric hyperbole of other government officials. And thanks to Secrecy News, we have a copy of CRS' latest memo on the Wikileaks controversy, a report entitled "Criminal Prohibitions on the Publication of Classified Defense Information" and dated this Monday, December 6.

Like this blog post itself, the CRS memo isn't legal advice. But it is a comprehensive discussion of the laws under which the Wikileaks publishers — or anyone else who obtains or publishes the documents, be it you or the New York Times — might be prosecuted and the First Amendment problems that such a prosecution would likely raise. Notably, the fine lawyers at CRS recognize a simple fact that statements from Attorney General Eric Holder, the Senators, the State Department and others have glossed over: a prosecution against someone who isn't subject to the secrecy obligations of a federal employee or contractor, based only on that person's publication of classified information that was received innocently, would be absolutely unprecedented and would likely pose serious First Amendment problems. As the summary page of the 21-page memo succinctly states,

This report identifies some criminal statutes that may apply [to dissemination of classified documents], but notes that these have been used almost exclusively to prosecute individuals with access to classified information (and a corresponding obligation to protect it) who make it available to foreign agents, or to foreign agents who obtain classified information unlawfully while present in the United States. Leaks of classified information to the press have only rarely been punished as crimes, and we are aware of no case in which a publisher of information obtained through unauthorized disclosure by a government employee has been prosecuted for publishing it. There may be First Amendment implications that would make such a prosecution difficult, not to mention political ramifications based on concerns about government censorship.

The report proceeds to discuss the Espionage Act of 1917 and a number of other potentially applicable statutes, followed by an extended discussion (at pp. 14-20) of how the Supreme Court's First Amendment decisions — and in particular the Pentagon Papers case — could complicate such a prosecution. For anyone interested in or concerned about the legality of publishing the Wikileaks documents and the legal and political challenges to a successful prosecution, this CRS memo is an absolute must-read.

Hopefully, this information will help counter much of the fear that our government's so-called "war" against Wikileaks has generated. Meanwhile, we will continue our effort to oppose online censorship and provide additional news and commentary on the ongoing WikiLeaks saga, which is shaping up to be the first great free speech battle of the 21st century. We hope you'll join us in the fight.

Amazon and WikiLeaks - Online Speech is Only as Strong as the Weakest Intermediary

Co-authored by Rainey Reitman and Marcia Hofmann

The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees freedom of expression against government encroachment — but that doesn't help if the censorship doesn't come from the government.

The controversial whistle-blower website WikiLeaks, which has begun to publish a trove of over 250,000 classified diplomatic cables, found itself kicked off of Amazon's servers earlier this week. WikiLeaks had apparently moved from a hosting platform in Sweden to the cloud hosting services available through Amazon in an attempt to ward off ongoing distributed denial of service attacks.

According to Amazon, WikiLeaks violated the site's terms of service, resulting in Amazon pulling the plug on hosting services. However, news sources have also reported that Amazon cut off WikiLeaks after being questioned by members of the staff of Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman. While it's impossible to know whether or not Amazon's decision was directly caused by the call from the senator's office, we do know that Lieberman has proposed "anti-WikiLeaks legislation" and that he has a history of pushing for online censorship in the name of "security."

Importantly, the government itself can't take official action to silence WikiLeaks' ongoing publications — that would be an unconstitutional prior restraint, or censorship of speech before it can be communicated to the public. No government actor can nix WikiLeaks' right to publish content any more than the government could stop the New York Times and Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers, which were also stolen secret government documents.

But a web hosting company isn't the government. It's a private actor and it certainly can choose what to publish and what not to publish. Indeed, Amazon has its own First Amendment right to do so. That makes it all the more unfortunate that Amazon caved to unofficial government pressure to squelch core political speech. Amazon had an opportunity to stand up for its customer's right to free expression. Instead, Amazon ran away with its tail between its legs.

In the end, it's not just WikiLeaks that suffers from corporate policies that suppress free speech, here on matters of intense public importance. It's also readers, who lose out on their First Amendment right to read the information WikiLeaks publishes. And it's also the other Internet speakers who can't confidently sign up for Amazon's hosting services without knowing that the company has a history of bowing to pressure to remove unpopular content.

Today Amazon sells many things, but its roots are in books, which historically have been a lightning rod for political censorship campaigns. These campaigns tried and failed to suppress Allen Ginsberg's Howl, Nabokov's Lolita, and even Orwell's 1984. And it's the book industry — including writers, publishers, booksellers and libraries — that has championed the rights of readers and helped America maintain a proud history of free speech in the written word, even when faced with physical danger.

While it's frustrating to think of any hosting provider cutting services to a website because it considers the content too politically volatile or controversial, it's especially disheartening to see Amazon knuckle under to pressure from a single senator. Other Internet intermediaries should now expect to receive a phone call when some other member of Congress is unhappy with speech they are hosting. After all, it worked on Amazon.