Wikileaks.org
Eventually MB's work on the larger cloud of corruption within the DOJ, the DOI, the MMS, and of course, the BIA, will reach the point where more interesting things are possible than just a braziltelecom user's midnight download of 3,815 entries out of wampum's vault -- not the usual spider indexing.
So I'm interested in the Gag Order that Jeffery White ordered on the 15th in the US District Court for Northern California. h/t Avedon.
You might think that "law" that results in ICANN accredited domain name registrars, a California LLC in particular, getting a TRO to take down a website that hosts leaked memos, memos like the ones that come our way, from somewhere, or "heavily redacted", come from FOIA filings by CREW and others, would be of interest to the civil libertarians of the ICANN policy domain.
One of the more amusing things that happened at the New Delhi ICANN meeting was when Robin Gross made the following utterance:
>>ROBIN GROSS: I just wanted to second what Adrian said and also take issue with the choice of this venue. I'm considerably concerned about an organization that calls itself "inclusive and bottom-up" et cetera, et cetera that would select a venue and all the surrounding venues where less than 1% of the world's population can even afford to be in the room. That's unexcusable. That's unconscionable.
The shock in the hall was palapable.
We were in India, a country with 11 official scripts and 22 official languages, next to Pakistan with some of the same, and some different, ditto for Iran and Afghanistan, and looking in the other direction, Bengaladesh, Burma, Cambodia, Laos, ... and we were there to work on getting more than ASCII [a-zA-Z][0-9] and "-" into the DNS, what we call LDH for lettersdigitshyphen, and Robin was going non-linear -- "That's unexcusable. That's unconscionable." -- because the Taj Palace room rate, like all the five-stars in the diplomatic enclave of New Delhi (construction going on like Beijing '08 for the '10 Commonwealth Games) is around $500/night. Delhi is full of family hotels, we booked a floor at a room rate of $50/night.
The previous night I'd the pleasure of words with Ms. Gross, who is certain that "free speech" requires that the names of all Indian tribes, like "Cherokee" or "Lakota" be free for unlicensed commercial users like auto companies. She never got beyond the phrase "free speech", and "first come, first served".
So not only are kwel words about exotic people and their culture the property of the first person with $6.20 each, but Asians don't need scripts to allow languages to allow meaningful words as domain names more than they need cheaper room rates in five-star hotels (which tossed in the meeting rooms and the meals as well).
At least her term expires this year. Compared to Norbert Klein, also a Non-Commercial User Constituency rep, who single-handedly brought the Internet to Cambodia, she's the protagonist from "Legally Blond", but without fashion sense or common sense.
But the take away is that to the North American representative to the policy making body for generic top-level domains isn't interested in illegal wiretap in North America, or suppression of websites in North America that host documents that governments and corporations want suppressed, by courts of law in North America, she just wants "Lakota" to be free to the first buyer with six dollars and change, for large values of "Lakota".
She'd her moment of clarity. I understand that Michelle Obama just had one too. She's ashamed of her neighbors.
