| Subject: that press release |
| From: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> |
| Date: 1/10/11, 19:52 |
| To: Caleb Pritchard <cpritchard2001@gmail.com> |
|
For Immediate Distribution Press Release January 10th, 2011 An unprecedented coalition of information activists and organizations has come together in an effort to advance the ongoing campaign against the methods informational tyranny that have been on instructive view in the context of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, and Bradley Manning. All three of these parties have been subjected to state oppression without due regard for the alleged "rule of law;" all three have been maligned in dishonest and often bizarre ways; all three have earned such treatment by way of having together ensured that all of humanity may, for the first time in history, together learn how it is that their wealth, loyalty, and lives are being used by those who plead national security while having provided no such thing to their own citizens and even seizing it from those living elsewhere. In response to these latest outrages against competence and decency but mostly competence, our coalition - comprised of veterans and anti-war groups, a faction of the Anonymous movement, the distributed think-tank Project PM, and a loose network of journalists, media professionals, scientists, former intelligence and government officials, and related organizations - announces a stepped-up campaign of information and direct action that begins tomorrow and which will culminate in a rally and press conference on the steps of New York City Hall on April 7th at 3:00 pm. The event itself will be supplemented by similar protests and meetings in other cities across the world, themselves organized by Anonymous and each charged with bringing attention to one of the dozens of significant stories that the media has largely ignored due to the unfortunate dynamics by which those media have come to operate. The New York conference - conceived by longtime resident activist, Navy veteran, and acclaimed photographer John Penley - will feature about a dozen speakers including Penley, author and Project PM founder Barrett Brown, key Anonymous activist and Chanology co-instigator Gregg Housh, and National Lawyers Guild executive director Heidi Boghosian. Messages from other figures in the pro-transparency movement will also be presented in lieu of their ability to attend. Never in human history has mankind endured a period in which so much of the terminology employed at its end would have been unrecognizable at its beginning. The last twenty years have changed the landscape in which man operates, expanding the potential for human collaboration in such a way as to eliminate the barriers that rendered the nation-state a viable institution. As those barriers fall, so too does the primacy of the world's governments, which in turn have increasingly found themselves unable to maintain the secrecy through which they have run the bulk of human affairs with results that may be politely characterized as mixed. The various states have responded to these developments with a collective message to the effect that such secrecy is necessary if they are to continue operating without the informed consent of their respective populations, though this has been expressed in slightly different words. Meanwhile, several such governments have, through their specific conduct in the wake of the last year, provided a timely reminder as to why it is that many of those who truly value liberty and morality can no longer support such governments and are now working to develop their replacements. This event is part of an effort to counter the dishonesty and injustice of those states which have reacted to such emergent phenomena with censorship and persecution of the sort that the observant have come to expect, while also forging greater coordination among the various parties that have been fighting on behalf of the cause. |