Heather Brooke is the American-trained "data journalist" who upended British politics when she moved to the UK and began to use the UK's Freedom of Information law to prise apart the dirty secrets of power and privilege, most notably by exposing the expense cheating by Members of Parliament. — Read the rest

A cache of Wikileaks Cablegate cables disclose that Saudi Royals — with collusion of the religious police — throw wild drug- and alcohol-fuelled parties, sponsored by western energy beverage companies, despite the strict rules in Saudi Arabia and the harsh penalties imposed on everyday people for their violation. — Read the rest

The Spanish House of Representatives has rejected a new copyright law that would have made the nation's file-sharing sites and services illegal. Some of the leaked #cablegate cables affirmed what many had suspected: the law had been pushed by the US government on behalf of the Hollywood studios. — Read the rest

Bruce Sterling's take on the #cablegate situation is pure gold — a fierce, clear-eyed look at the forces that made pieta Manning, the ideology of assangeism, the wounded bellowing of an empire in decline with its trousers around its knees. Must-read stuff:

The one grand certainty about the consumers of Cablegate is that diplomats are gonna be reading those stolen cables.

(Image contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr pool by BB reader Tom Blanton)

A reminder that various news organizations are still doing the hard work of digging through the Wikileaks-leaked US diplomatic cables, and parsing out the newsworthy contents. — Read the rest

"Cablegate: The Game" gameifies the job of sorting through the #cablegate leaks, awarding points for reading, tagging and summarizing the enormous heap of Wikileaks plunder. (via /.)

UPDATE: Michael Moore responds here. In short, he says Sicko was not banned in Cuba, and describes the cable referenced below as "[A] stunning look at the Orwellian nature of how bureaucrats for the State spin their lies and try to recreate reality." — Read the rest

"In the coming days, we are going to see some quite startling disclosures about Russia, the nature of the Russian state, and about bribery and corruption in other countries, particularly in Central Asia. We will see a wrath of disclosures about pretty terrible things going on around the world."— — Read the rest

Dan Gillmor's commentary on the Wikileaks #cablegate release takes the form of a series of questions — questions for governments, for Julian Assange, for the media, and even for Sarah Palin. The questions form a thought-provoking analysis of the larger context of Wikileaks — is the US government right to stamp "Secret" on every bit of gossip it sees? — Read the rest

(Illustration by Rob Beschizza)

Rob Beschizza covered the massive Wikileaks release yesterday of hundreds of thousands of US State Department diplomatic cables—including, as one might expect on Boing Boing, a focus on the weird stuff. In case you missed it:

• US foreign policy gets enhanced patdown: oddities from the leaks

• More from the cables: "9/11 of diplomacy" identifies Putin as Batman and Medvedev as Robin

• Colonel Gaddafi uses Botox to maintain own youth, beauty

• "Global diplomatic crisis" sparked by cables: U.N. — Read the rest

By design, data placed in the blockchain is visible to everyone in the world and can never be removed; everyone who mines bitcoin makes a copy of the blockchain, and so any illegal content stashed in the blockchain ends up on the computers of every miner.

More than 71 US agencies — mostly under the DoD and State Department — run expensive, unaudited, chaotic, overlapping military and police training programs in more than 150 countries on every continent except Antarctica, with no real oversight and only pro-forma checks on the recipients of this training to ensure that they aren't human rights abusers or war criminals.

Author and former CIA officer Barry Eisler spoke at the Association of Former Intelligence Officers opposite ex-CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden on Monday. Below, an adaptation of his opening remarks about the importance of whistleblowers and government transparency. Eisler's new novel, "God's Eye View," inspired by the Snowden revelations, is available now on Amazon. — Read the rest

Artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg creates portraits from DNA samples, usually working from found samples -- chewing gum, cigarette butts -- of people she's never met. But this year, she's done a pair of extraordinary portraits of Chelsea Manning, the whistleblower currently serving a 35-year sentence in Fort Leavenworth for her role in the Wikileaks Cablegate publications.

Julian Assange has presented a set of data protection act liberated messages from GCHQ, the UK spy headquarters, concerning his own case. According to Assange, the messages reveal that UK spies believed that the Swedish rape inquiry against him was a "fit up" aimed at punishing him for his involvement in Wikileaks (many believe that the Swedish government would have aided in Assange's extradition to the USA, where there is a sealed Grand Jury indictment against him). — Read the rest

"The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer." — Henry A. Kissinger, US Secretary of State, March 10, 1975.

Julian Assange today announced the launch of the Public Library of US Diplomacy, or PLUSD, the publication of more than 1.7 million US diplomatic and intelligence documents from the 1970s. — Read the rest

WikiLeaks reports having received 2.5m emails from Syrian government officials, which it began releasing Thursday night. Founder Julian Assange: "The material is embarrassing to Syria, but it is also embarrassing to Syria's opponents."

The database comprises 2,434,899 emails from the 680 domains.

Micah Sifry's WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency is a thoughtful and thought-provoking look at the promise and limits of Internet-based transparency efforts. Sifry looks at everything from digital sunshine laws to the Iranian election to Cablegate, and examines what has worked to make the world's governments and corporations more accountable and when technology-driven transparency efforts have failed. — Read the rest

Quadrature du Net's repository of #cablegate cables related to ACTA, the secretive copyright treaty reveal that governments all over the world were pissed off that the USA and Japan wouldn't let them discuss the treaty with their citizens and industry.

More importantly, they explicitly confirm that the reason that ACTA was negotiated in secret among rich countries was that this was seen as the most expeditious way of getting a super-extreme copyright agreement passed with a minimum of fuss, and that all the poor countries who were excluded from the negotiation would later be coerced into agreeing to it. — Read the rest

ResourceShelf has a number of links and excerpts relating to the sordid story of the Enfield, Connecticut public library being forced to cancel its showing of Michael Moore's Sicko after a few people complained to the town council, who took issue with the characterization of the film as "non-fiction." — Read the rest