Manning Verdict (Apparently Conviction) To Be Announced Today On An Historic Day That Is No Coincidence - UPDATED

Courtroom Sketch of Manning
by Clark Stoeckley
via Kevin Gosztola

Kevin Gosztola of FDL, present for most of Manning's two-month trial, will announce the details when the judge rules this afternoon. This link is to Gosztola's preface, backgrounder, setup, call it what you will. He begins by noting the historical significance of today's date chosen by the judge, clearly no coincidence:

A military judge is set to issue a verdict in the trial of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the soldier prosecuted for disclosing information to WikiLeaks, [today] in the early afternoon. The verdict will come on the same day that America passed its first whistleblower protection law.

The law passed by the Continental Congress on July 30, 1778, declared that it was the “duty of all persons in the service of the United States, as well as all other the inhabitants thereof, to give the earliest information to Congress or other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds or misdemeanors committed by an officers or persons in the service of these states, which may come to their knowledge.”

This law emphasizes the crux of the matter: whistleblowing is a duty of everyone in military or civil service to the US. It is not discretionary; it is obligatory.

In the 1778 case, the man on whom the whistle was blown was powerful, and immediately engaged in retaliation against the whistleblower. Some things start early and never change; retaliation against whistleblowers is one of them. Unlike the early case, it is likely that retaliation against Manning, who reported some activities that are manifestly illegal, will be allowed to take place... with the active cooperation of the military system of justice. Given what has been reported to date, I am convinced that Manning's trial... from his year-long abusive detention with no opportunities to defend himself, through to the military judge's repeated rejection of defense's introduction of potentially exculpatory evidence... is a drumhead, a trial whose outcome is predetermined, in this case by no less than the President of the United States.

Here's Gosztola on Manning's actions:

Manning did not go to Congress with his information but had he gone to Congress it is a virtual guarantee that he would have lost his security clearance for trying to provide information to Congress that included evidence of torture and other war crimes. The world would never have seen the information he disclosed to WikiLeaks.

Not every one of the more than 700,000 documents he released contained evidence of a major crime, and yet a statement Manning read in court February 28 indicates his decisions to release certain sets of information were that of a classic whistleblower. Yet, he faces a potential sentence of life in prison without parole if convicted of “aiding the enemy.”

Manning was categorized by prosecutors as "anarchist," "hacker" and "traitor." He will be convicted of every charge and sentenced to life without parole, that is, if the government doesn't renege on its promise not to seek the death penalty, which would not surprise me. Manning is being made an example of, indirectly by your man Barack Obama. Whistleblowing and leaking, both essential to journalism in pursuit of illegal government activity, will likely dwindle to nonexistence after Manning's verdict. And Manning may never see the light of day again.

It was a great country while it lasted...

UPDATE 7/30/2013 6:00pm EDT - Manning was acquitted of the most serious charge... "aiding the enemy" ... but convicted of 19 other charges, mostly under the ancient W.W. I-era Espionage Act, created in its own day specifically to harass, discredit and disable antiwar activists, and a point of contention thought to be at odds with the First Amendment... until now. Please read Kevin Gosztola's post What the Verdict in Bradley Manning’s Trial Means for Whistleblowers. This is a day in which the phrase "military justice" may well have become an oxymoron as surely as "military intelligence." As a nation we should be ashamed, not only of this result but of the deplorable actions of the court which brought it forth.

WikiLeaks Hammered By DDoS Attacks

According to Dara Kerr at c|Net, repeating a tweet from WikiLeaks,

"The attack is well over 10Gbits/second sustained on the main WikiLeaks domains," read one of several tweets the organization posted on Friday. "The bandwidth used is so huge it is impossible to filter without specialized hardware, however... the DDoS is not simple bulk UDP or ICMP packet flooding, so most hardware filters won't work either. The range of IPs used is huge. Whoever is running it controls thousands of machines or is able to simulate them."

There's no way there's not a government behind this: no ordinary group of hackers has the means, or even the motive. Look to the government most embarrassed by WikiLeaks's releases... right.

WikiLeaks has responded with a somewhat credible "Is that all you've got?" ... perhaps not the wisest thing they could do. As of the c|Net article they're still running, if a bit beleaguered. When they reach a point at which they are spending more time fighting attacks than transmitting leaks, they may need to rethink their strategy.

One Nation Under Surveillance: FDA Spies On Its Own Scientists

Mordor - Total Information Awareness

From the NYT, we learn that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) engaged in a "wide-ranging surveillance operation... against a group of its own scientists", using "an enemies list of sorts as it secretly captured thousands of e-mails" to everyone from Congress to journalists and the president:

...

The agency, using so-called spy software designed to help employers monitor workers, captured screen images from the government laptops of the five scientists as they were being used at work or at home. The software tracked their keystrokes, intercepted their personal e-mails, copied the documents on their personal thumb drives and even followed their messages line by line as they were being drafted, the documents show.

The extraordinary surveillance effort grew out of a bitter dispute lasting years between the scientists and their bosses at the F.D.A. over the scientists’ claims that faulty review procedures at the agency had led to the approval of medical imaging devices for mammograms and colonoscopies that exposed patients to dangerous levels of radiation.

A confidential government review in May by the Office of Special Counsel, which deals with the grievances of government workers, found that the scientists’ medical claims were valid enough to warrant a full investigation into what it termed “a substantial and specific danger to public safety.”

...

It seems very likely that the FDA's actions were worthy of reporting. But nothing could so effectively reinforce the mostly false image of scientists as brilliant in their field of study but naive about political matters as those scientists' allowing their external communications to be spied upon.

A few simple rules of thumb would probably have allowed the scientists to continue undetected and unimpeded: use your own personal equipment to send the emails, not something your employer's IT department supplied to you; don't use your employer's network to transmit the emails; obtain and use your own personal privacy keys to encrypt the email; don't make copies of files onto removable media. Yes, all of that makes whistle-blowing considerably more inconvenient, but if you're going to do it at all, you may want to exercise at least that much common sense and good judgment.

(H/T Mustang Bobby.)