The climate negotiations were cast as a choice last year between Hopenhagen or Nopenhagen, and this year between Can-Cun or Can’t-Cun. John Ashton, the senior negotiator from the UK Foreign Office, told me yesterday that he sees four possible outcomes here: momentum, a lifeline, zombie-hood, or collapse. Since no one wishes to push the negotiations over the brink (on the...
This message just went out on Twitter: WE ARE ATTACKING WWW.VISA.COM IN AN HOUR! GET YOUR WEAPONS READY http://bit.ly/e6iR3X AND STAY TUNED. #ddos #wikiealsk #payback Sure sounds like war to me. I have no idea what the weapons actually consist of, but they were apparently effective earlier today against Mastercard. I wonder if Visa's "troops" are now metaphorically massing on the other...
He may be a horrible senator, but at least Joe Lieberman is (relatively) consistent: Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), who has become one of the most vocal critics of Wikileaks, said today that while Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is definitely guilty of crimes, the New York Times may also have broken the law by posting some of those diplomatic cables. "To...
John Perry Barlow has made a call to arms (via Twitter): "The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops." That's a little grandiose to my taste. But among the many interesting things going on here is the prominent role of nonstate actors. The battleground players include: Domain name services: On the first day,...
Presswires are reporting that Judge John Bates has dismissed the much-noticed case in which the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights sought to bring suit on behalf of Anwar Al-Aulaqi's father, contesting the ability of the President to target his son, an American citizen hiding abroad in Yemen who the government says is a targetable participant in a terrorist...
The Swiss domain name registrar Switch announced today that it will not shut down Wikileaks.ch as a result of Wikileaks' criminal activity. It does so at its peril. The pharmaceutical industry has long faced the question of registrar liability for hosting illegal pharmaceutical drug websites. Legitscript.com, a pharmaceutical watchdog, has summarized the obligations of domain name registrars...
As numerous other websites happily conspire with the US government to shut down WikiLeaks, despite the fact that neither Assange nor anyone else associated with the website has ever been charged, much less convicted, of a disclosure-related crime, it is good to see that the world's foremost social networking site is willing to stick to its principles: Classified document publishing website...
According to a press release today, the OTP is conducting a preliminary examination into whether two recent North Korean attacks on South Korea qualify as war crimes: The shelling of Yeonpyeong Island on the 23 November 2010 which resulted in the killing of South Korean marines and civilians and the injury of many others; and The sinking of a South...
A couple of years ago, Josh Newcomer and I argued that political commitments have developed to a point where they should receive constitutional scrutiny. In other words, we do not accept that because political commitments lack international legal force they should have absolute immunity from domestic legal processes. Indeed, to the extent that political commitments may perform the same (or at least...
According to Oxford University Press, my book checks in at a healthy 452 pages. I still can't quite believe that I wrote something so long -- approximately 165,000 words, 130,000 more than anything else I've ever written. Writing the book was extremely fun, but the hard work before the writing, the researching and the outlining, was often anything but. It's...
Needless to say, there’s a much warmer atmosphere at this year’s climate conference in Cancun than last year’s conference in Copenhagen. By all accounts, the Mexicans have done a great job both in preparing the diplomatic groundwork for this year’s meeting and in running the conference during its first week. They certainly have learned the lessons of the last war. ...
It's easy to laugh at the USG for its directives to employees re the handling of Wikileaks cables (as the NYT put it this morning, a case of "shutting the barn door after the horse has left"). The idea that a State Department employee talking about the cables in a Starbucks, much less with her spouse at home, would constitute...
