Iraq

"A 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst was ratted out by a fellow hacker, accused of providing the Collateral Murder video and hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records to Wikileaks. He is currently imprisoned in Kuwait."

"WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad -- including two Reuters news staff.

Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-sight, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.

In an earlier blog story, we asked about how mobile banking could be used to alleviate poverty. According to the FinancialExpress.com, mobile banking could benefit both sellers and buyers in the developing world. Development Economist Robert Jensen of Harvard University has discovered that, while fishermen in Kerala, India, earn 8% more from their produce, retail buyers pay 4% less. So far, producers and buyers were using mobiles only for price negotiation, cutting out middle men and saving time so crucial for perishable items. Now, without even having a bank account, buyers and sellers in the least developed countries can use mobile-linked no-frills accounts not only to enable cash deposits and withdrawals but also to transfer money from one account to another, solely by using a mobile phone.

The news today on many Middle Eastern blogs is the commemoration of the one-year anniversary of IraqiStreets.com. Three Iraqi civil society youth activists created the site last year to provide a space where Iraqis could express their interests and concerns, to support the efforts of young Iraqis bloggers, and to help disseminate information about the challenges confronting Iraq today. In this time, IraqiStreets.com has developed an e-mail network of more than 5,000 people along with a social network of more than 600 on Facebook. During the recent Iraqi elections, Global Voices (GV) selected IraqiStreets.com to work in collaboration with the Hamzoz blog to cover the Iraqi elections in English and Arabic. IraqiStreets.com is also supported by Middle East Youth and the Iraqi Alamal Association (IAA), as well as civil society groups in the Netherlands and elsewhere. Middle East Youth, in particular, is of special interest to the liberation technology community. The group is a student-owned independent network comprising Arabs, Iranians, Kurds, and Israelis that conducts a variety of projects to promote democracy and development throughout the Middle East.

Noam Cohen and New York Times report on the leaking of an Iraq video that has brought notoriety to WikiLeaks, the site founded by Julian Assange to give safe haven to whistle blowers throughout the world:

"Three months ago, WikiLeaks, a whistleblower Web site that posts classified and sensitive documents, put out an urgent call for help on Twitter. “Have encrypted videos of U.S. bomb strikes on civilians. We need super computer time," stated the Web site, which calls itself “an intelligence agency of the people.” Somehow — it will not say how — WikiLeaks found the necessary computer time to decrypt a graphic video, released Monday, of a United States Army assault in Baghdad in 2007 that left 12 people dead, including two employees of the news agency Reuters. The video has been viewed more than two million times on YouTube, and has been replayed hundreds of times in television news reports."

According to the article, the success of WikiLeaks has positioned the inserted the site into the national discussion about the role of journalism in the digital age: "Where judges and plaintiffs could once stop or delay publication with a court order, WikiLeaks exists in a digital sphere in which information becomes instantly available." WikiLeaks refuses to say how it acquired the video.