freedom of the press

Media Decoder: Group Aims to Be a Conduit for WikiLeaks Donations

Paul J. Richards/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Daniel Ellsberg, a board member of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, disclosed the Pentagon Papers in 1971.

A group advocating a more transparent government has formed a nonprofit organization called the Freedom of the Press Foundation to serve as a conduit for donations to organizations like WikiLeaks. The goal is to insulate those groups’ fund-raising efforts from political and business pressures.

In December 2010, Visa, MasterCard and PayPal announced that they would no longer accept transactions for WikiLeaks, the online leak group that released thousands of secret documents from the American government. The move to cut off donations, which came after vocal protests against the organization’s activities from members of Congress, eliminated the vast majority of financing for WikiLeaks.

Board members of the Freedom of the Press Foundation include Daniel Ellsberg, the whistle-blower who disclosed the Pentagon Papers; Glenn Greenwald, a journalist who writes about civil liberties for The Guardian; John Perry Barlow, a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; Xeni Jardin of the Web site Boing Boing; and John Cusack, an actor who has been a vocal opponent of government secrecy.

The foundation has created a Web site, which was scheduled to go online Sunday night, that will allow visitors to donate anonymously to various journalistic and investigative projects. By accepting donations for more than one organization, the site hopes to prevent any single one of them from being targeted.

In addition to WikiLeaks, the site will take donations for MuckRock News, which serves as a proxy and a guide for people seeking to make Freedom of Information requests; The UpTake, a citizen journalism site that generates online video news; and the National Security Archive, a repository of declassified government documents. There will be a rotating list of participating organizations expected to receive financing.

“We believe in openness in government, in transparency, and we don’t think that WikiLeaks alone should have to bear that burden,” Mr. Barlow said. “We are also hoping to support others of the same ilk, organizations that can serve an important journalistic function at a very important time.”

Mr. Ellsberg said that WikiLeaks’ future was in doubt because 95 percent of its donations had effectively been blocked. He said he hoped the foundation would help ensure the survival of the site, which has served as a repository for people seeking to expose secret dealings by governments.

“WikiLeaks is not perfect, but whatever mistakes it might have made, it serves a legitimate and necessary function in exposing an administration that is completely lacking in transparency,” Mr. Ellsberg said.

After WikiLeaks released a huge cache of secret State Department cables in November 2010 — many of which were published in The New York Times — it was sharply criticized by various government officials.

Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York, wrote a letter to the secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, saying he believed that WikiLeaks met the criteria of a terrorist organization and that it presented “a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States.”

Soon afterward, Visa, MasterCard and PayPal announced that they would not accept donations for WikiLeaks. In a statement, MasterCard said its rules “prohibit customers from directly or indirectly engaging in or facilitating any action that is illegal.”

At the time, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, denounced Visa, MasterCard and PayPal as “instruments of U.S. foreign policy.”

WikiLeaks suspended publication of documents in 2011 because of financial distress, which it said was a result of what it called “a banking blockade.”

“The cutoff in funds of WikiLeaks occurred without any court proceedings,” said Trevor Timm, co-founder and executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. “By crowdsourcing funding for a variety of open-government initiatives, we can prevent the kind of commercial censorship that took place.”

A version of this article appeared in print on 12/17/2012, on page B4 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Group Aims to Be a Conduit For WikiLeaks Donations.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/group-aims-to-be-a-conduit-for-wikileaks-donations/?partner=rss&emc=rss

British Press Lauds Cameron Over Leveson Stand

What a surprise, then, to find so much happy agreement on Friday, as the papers reacted almost as one to remarks Prime Minister David Cameron made in Parliament on Thursday.

Here was The Sun, which has lately wasted no chance to torture Mr. Cameron while praising his rival, Mayor Boris Johnson of London, applauding Mr. Cameron’s “courage.”

Here was The Daily Mail, taking time out from its daily antigovernment screed to call Mr. Cameron a “freedom lover” poised to “earn a place of honor in our history.” Meanwhile, The Daily Telegraph admired the way Mr. Cameron had “taken a stand on an important matter of principle.” The Independent, which is virtually allergic to the Conservative Party, said Mr. Cameron “was quite right,” and The Times of London said it admired his courage.

To provoke this shower of affection, Mr. Cameron had not solved the European financial crisis, nor had he brought peace to the Middle East. Instead, he had declared in Parliament that he was opposed to the main recommendation in the 1,987-page Leveson report on press culture and practices, unveiled Thursday: the establishment of a new system of press regulation that would be backed by parliamentary statute.

He said that passing such a statute would be akin to “crossing the Rubicon” and would subvert the principle of freedom of the press, and that he did not want to do that.

Mr. Cameron’s stand was opposed by the opposition Labour Party and by the Liberal Democrats, the junior partners in his coalition government. But with the bulk of Britain’s newspapers — which want to keep regulating themselves, without government interference — behind him, Mr. Cameron has a great deal of leverage in the matter.

In a somewhat odd development on Friday, the government said it would work swiftly to draft legislation that, if enacted, would put into practice the recommendations from the inquiry led by Lord Justice Sir Brian Leveson. But it seemed to be doing so to prove that the proposals would not work as law — “to look at what the bill might look like, to demonstrate our concerns,” the culture secretary, Maria Miller, said in a series of remarks to reporters on Friday.

In response, the Labour Party accused the government of setting out to produce legislation so restrictive that nobody could reasonably enact it.

There were others who disagreed with the Conservative stand. The Guardian, whose reporting revealed the phone hacking scandal that led to the Leveson inquiry, said it was in favor of enacting some form of legislation. And victims of press intrusion, many of whom testified at the committee hearings, said they were disappointed in Mr. Cameron’s response.

“Full implementation of Lord Leveson’s report is the minimal acceptable compromise for me and many other victims that have suffered at the hands of the press,” said Gerry McCann, whose daughter Madeleine disappeared in 2007 and whose family was harassed by newspapers.

Before the report was released, Mr. Cameron said at one point that unless the Leveson proposals were “bonkers,” he would support them without reservation.

Speaking for the government on Friday, Ms. Miller did not reveal Mr. Cameron’s current position on the “bonkers” issue.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/01/world/europe/british-press-lauds-cameron-over-leveson-stand.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Media Decoder: Group Aims to Be a Conduit for WikiLeaks Donations

A version of this article appeared in print on 12/17/2012, on page B4 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Group Aims to Be a Conduit For WikiLeaks Donations.

British Press Lauds Cameron Over Leveson Stand

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