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DNC serves WikiLeaks with lawsuit via Twitter
The Democratic National Committee on Friday officially served its lawsuit to WikiLeaks via Twitter, employing a rare method to serve its suit to the elusive group that has thus far been unresponsive.
As CBS News first reported last month, the DNC filed a motion with a federal court in Manhattan requesting permission to serve its complaint to WikiLeaks on Twitter, a platform the DNC argued the website uses regularly. The DNC filed a lawsuit in April against the Trump campaign, Russian government and WikiLeaks, alleging a massive conspiracy to tilt the 2016 election in Donald Trump's favor.
All of the DNC's attempts to serve the lawsuit via email failed, the DNC said in last month's motion to the judge, which was ultimately approved.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has been holed up in Ecuador's London embassy for six years, is considering an offer to appear before a U.S. Senate committee to discuss alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, his lawyer said on Thursday.
WikiLeaks published a letter from the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday which asked Assange to make himself available to testify in person at a closed hearing as part of its investigation into whether Moscow meddled to help Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election. "The U.S. Senate Select Committee request confirms their interest in hearing from Mr Assange," lawyer Jennifer Robinson said in a statement.
Julian Assange 'seriously considering' request to meet US Senate committee
Lawyers for Julian Assange say they are "seriously considering" a request from a US Senate committee to interview the WikiLeaks founder as part of its investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US election.
The Senate select committee on intelligence has written to Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has been living for more than six years.
[...] The chairman of the committee, Richard Burr, wrote: "As you are aware, the Senate select committee on intelligence is conducting a bipartisan inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 US elections. As part of that inquiry, the committee requests that you make yourself available for a closed interview with bipartisan committee staff at a mutually agreeable time and location."
The ultimate irony would involve Julian Assange avoiding Metropolitan Police arrest by somehow fleeing to the United States.
See also: Mueller subpoenas Randy Credico, who Roger Stone says was his WikiLeaks back channel
Previously: DNC's Lawsuit Against WikiLeaks is an Attack on Freedom of the Press
Related: Prominent Whistleblowers and Journalists Defend Julian Assange at Online Vigil
Ecuador Reportedly Almost Ready to Hand Julian Assange Over to UK Authorities
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 12 2018, @11:32AM
[1] Here are some ideas of how to build a better web in the dark:
We have the chance to mirror all of the sites and services of use or mass appeal that are capitalist-controlled on the clearnet, on our own terms, before the web corporatocracy even notices. We can put all the information we can liberate from for-pay academia publishing, copyrighted or forbidden books or trade secrets revealed to us under NDA there, for free. We can infringe on any and all trademarks and "IP" to our heart's content, we can make fake facebook and twatter buttons that direct to our own, free implementations to ease transition for those of challenged understanding or high inertia. We can speak freely without fear of repercussion by an intolerant society, draconian laws or secret agencies. We can build social networks free from censorship, shadow profiles, Skinner Box addiction mechanisms and enforced filter bubbles. We can build decentralized news outlets without inherent bias, with crowd-sourced reporting and fact checking and we can build forums for open discussion of even unpopular ideas and few rules. We can build repositories to share code and software, without a care for software patents and without fear of a corporate buyout and monetization of our idealism. We can build places to upload cute pictures of kittens. And porn. And we won't be getting creepy mails titled "You might also be interested in the following products" from Amazon, offering trinkets connected to our weird sexual fetish after visiting those sites.
All free as in libre. Of course, free as in beer would be even more awesome, but we'll have to find out how that works taking avantage of "free" commercial services. Voluntary donations, crowdfunding or micro payments seem to work for sites with quality content, we need to trial this at scale and work out the kinks. As a parallel model, we can build crowd-sourced compute and data clouds and CDNs where everyone donates a configurable amount of CPU time, bandwidth and storage but noone has central control. Instead, for their compute resources, everyone receives a proportional amount of tokens they can freely allocate to worthy projects promoting themselves in a central directory. Making informed decisions can be enabled by semantic search and built-in comparison of offered features along with the TOS (restricted to a selectable set of modular clauses written in natural language and devoid of the usual anti-consumer bullshit and weasel words, with controversial/questionable clauses marked in red.) There should be a space for user reviews that themselves can be grades for accuracy by other users and a transparent process for resolving possible violations of terms.
A set percentage of donated resources should be kept for community purposes to be allocated by a trusted, elected council. A set percentage of bandwidth available should be reserved for improving the network (in I2P, everyone is a router). Good projects will succeed in growing by way of user satisfaction or fail by trying to force unacceptable features or policies. A lot of a little can become huge, we'll have a community-powered Amazon EC2. But with the potential to grow much larger.
We could make it so that users can also allocate some of their tokens to an offering of for-pay rentable capacity so those willing to spend real cash to kickstart their project can do so, and those with lots of spare resources can make some money. It might be a necessary concession to capitalism, but we should make sure to clearly mark the commercial projects as such in the public directory and make it impossible to allocate resource tokens to them. At the same time, community-endorsed projects shall be prohibited from monetizing in any way. This way, capital investors are prevented from gaming the voting system in a bid to try to induce network effects by fake community endorsement donating a large amount of resources and then self-voting. We need to trial this good and hard and refine the system until it's bulletproof. When we're ready, we just wait, probably not for long, until...
[2] The drug dealers are already there, if that floats your boat ;)