What might be worrisome for Arab online activists that Twitter might collaborate with Arab oppressive regimes after Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud, and Kingdom Holding Company (KHC), announced today, Monday, December 19th 2011, a combined investment of $300 Million in Twitter.

Prince Alwaleed has a strong presence and influence in media through his investments in entertainment and media entities in the Arab world, and beyond, such as the Saudi Research and Marketing Group (SRMG), in which Kingdom Holding holds a 29.9% stake. The publications that fall under SRMG include Asharq Al Awsat, Al Eqtisadiah, Arab News, Hia magazine, Al Majalla magazine, Arrajol magazine and Sayidati magazine. Furthermore, other entities that fall under SRMG are Al Khaleejiya for Publicity Advertising and Public Relations and Al Madina Printing and Publishing Company. KHC is also owner of approximately 7 percent of News Corporation’s Class B Common Stock.

In February 2010, Rotana Group announced that Newscorp had reached an agreement to buy a 9.09 percent stake in Rotana Group.

Under the terms of the agreement, News Corporation will acquire newly-issued shares in Rotana for $70 million. News Corp. has an option to increase its stake to 18.18 percent in the 18 months following completion.

In addition, Prince Alwaleed recently announced his plans to launch his privately owned Alarab news channel. The news channel will be managed by Mr. Jamal Khashoggi.

Twitter trending topics are the most discussed topics on Twitter, last year Twitter added local trending topics to some US cities and some countries around the world, where it buzzed the most discussed topic coming from a given location. However now we can see United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Turkey were added to the list , where users can see trending topics from UAE and Turkey. We do not know when these 2 locations were added, a user told us it has been there for a while

Looking at UAE trending topics we found some of them similar to those trending worldwide, with the exception of hashtag #Syria and #Egypt. As we can see all trending topics are in English due to the high presence of expats in UAE. According to latest estimation there are around 2 million Twitter users in UAE:
#Top100Lies
#ThingsWeDoDuringExams

On Wednesday dozens of mental health doctors in the general secretary of mental health in Cairo Egypt protested in front of Abasia hospital against transferring Dr. Basma El Aziz manager of media at the secretary to investigation, after she issued a statement that rejected transferring political activists and those with opposing opinion to mental health hospital.

This comes after transferring Egyptian blogger Maikel Nabel to a mental hospital, he was sentenced of 3 years in person over charges of insulting the military on a tweet. Maikel was sentenced by an Egyptian Military court and he was on hunger strike since then.

Maikel is one of more than 10,000 Egyptians tried by military court since Mubarak’s ouster, according to human rights groups.

One of the tactics used by tyrant regimes is to accuse its opponents, journalists and others of being mentally ill. In many cases mental doctors work as undercover agents for secret police to pass whatever they like or they would be subject to blackmail.

This story reminds us of some suspicious people who wrongly accused ArabCrunch founder Gaith Saqer of being mentally ill after the site last year revealed parts of governments plots against the site and free media.

#image credit.

Twitter finally has enabled right to left writing, which is great news for languages such as Arabic Hebrew and Farsi.

Before this feature when writing in Arabic in Twitter, the tweeted message used to mixx words togather, in many times changing the meaning of the tweet. This case gets worse when adding an english word.

Now, this problem is solved and Arabic tweets can be read correctly.

It is worth mentioning that Google+ had right to left support since day one of its launch.

Scapehouse is a new social media site that might a little bet late to the Google+ game. the startup comes with a new vision for online discussion,

On facebook people share stuff with their friends only, on Twitter the game is different, people share with their followers who do not have to be their friends.

Scapehouse brings both: users can share stuff with their friends only or with friends and followers, something that is close to the idea of Google+ main feature: circles. The site brings full news feed page, where users activities of commenting or liking an update is visible.

Unlike Twitter, updating a post is not limited to 140 characters, and users can comment on each update in a chronicle order and can like or dislike it. Resharing an update is also available on Scapehouse and can be shared with friends only or with both friends and followers, with the option to add comment of the shared content.

Abdullah Khan cofounder of site who is the from Karachi Pakistan and currently lives in UAE told AC that they have been working on the site 6 months now and have launched in beta around 2 months ago, before Google+. ( the other cofounder is Ali Razzouk : From Aleppo Syria, Living in Dubai UAE.)

Now that Google+ has gained 10 million users in 2 weeks since its launch, Scapehouse has a challenging time to compete, But it was a nice idea nevertheless. Would you use it?

The “Israeli” army is banning its soldiers from using social media and networking sites such as Twitter and facebook for what it calls fears on national security leaks.

In justifying the move the Israeli army noted that soldiers post secret photos of bases and compounds and would post future battle plans on social media sites which can be used by liberation movements in the region to counter them.

We are not sure if securing military bases and battle plans is the only reason behind this ban, or if it is also to keep Israeli human right violations against Palestinian civilians behind closed doors as a number of facebook leaks ( one here) another one here ) by “Israeli” soldiers reveal miss treatment and human rights violations of palestinian prisoners.

“Israeli’ army has also established a social media task force which hired social media experts to spread propaganda and halt anything that does not portray “Israel” in a good way or reveal its wrong doings from spreading across social media sites. According to Aljazeera who picked up the story from an Israeli research center Another force was established to mine the internet and trace logs of soldiers activities in social media sites and chat rooms to make sure they did not connect the media .

If you work with the “Israeli” army shoot us an email with what and you friends share inside detention compounds and bases, we will post them.

3 years old Jordan based Arabic microblogging platform Watwet has closed down, in a massage posted on the site the site admins says that they are pulling the plug on WATWET and All your information on WATWET will be deleted permanently. However they are offering microblogging service to organizations.

Why did WatWet fail and close? I wrote a detailed analysis back in July 2009 saying that WatWet has a very hard chance to match with Twitter even though it had more members at the time.
In short cloning international site into Arabic is a bad idea for startups. However it works in some markets like group buying where GoNabit copied groupon and ended being sold to LivingSocial as they had the local advantage that LivingSocial did not have.

Saying that cloning international startups is bad idea for Arab entrepreneurs, the question is why local social networks in markets such as Russia and China are doing better than facebook while no single Arabic social network has made it?

Between 2009 and 2010 Twitter users from the Arab world were estimated to be around 15,000 to 40,000 but these figures were not official and not very accurate. But after the revolution on Tunisia and Egypt, as Twitter has been used as a tool to fuel the revolution,Twitter become a house hold name in the Arab world just like Facebook. An infographic about Digital Marketing Trends in the Middle East from socialbakers and IQPC estimated the number of Twitter users in the Arab region to be around 5.5 Million users, that is 136.5 % growth rate! The infographic goes to reveal that 40% of them are from UAE.
Other interesting figures from the report is that there is 15 million Facebook users, that number however might not be accurate as in Q1 2010 our sources inside Facebook estimated the number around 16-18 million users.
The complete inforgraghic is below, we have another two reservations, e-marketing budgets from the Arab world does not include banners ads spending as it focus on email marketing, smart phone apps, SMS marketing, social media marketing and google adwords. Another one it does not mention the source of the numbers for Twitter users!
Ari Kesisoglu – Regional Manager, Middle East North Africa said that online ad spending in the MENA region is between 110 to 130 Million, thus the report should include banner ad spending to offer a complete picture. USD annually.

Here us the infographics:

The U.S government suffers from “Dissociative identity disorder,” or multi-persona disorder. Publicly they talk about democracy, human rights, liberty and the right of nations to rule themselves and decide their future . Yet in practice the consecutive US administrations “Democrats or Republican” have been the historical backers of brutal dictatorship and police states in the Muslim world and non-Muslim world, alike.

From Tunisia to Egypt, the U.S governments has backed both regimes, in a recent Wikileaks leaked U.S diplomatic cables that provide a glimpses of the relationship of both oppressive: the FBI has been providing training to Egypt’s state security ‘torturers’ the state security and investigative service (SSIS).

Historically U.S governments have been supporting the state of “Israel” for decades in monetary funding that are being used to build new settlements on land that has been confiscated from the indigenous inhabitants of the land, and in advanced weapons used to kill Palestinians.
Yet in another evidence that the U.S government “under Bush or Obama “call for democracy is baseless the U.S government did not acknowledge the outcome of the last free parliamentary elections in west bank and Gaza!

In Iraq the government of the United States of America killed 2 million Muslims and Christian Iraqis in the name of freeing them ( according to International human right organizations) . And yet after the Iraqi resistance taught them the real lesson of freedom, they started withdrawing ( not finished withdrawing there are still thousands of US troops in Iraq) their troops and yet another deception, they handed the occupation to 100,000 or so of international mercenary forces and to a poppet Iraqi government and army.

So to conceal all their crimes against Muslims and Arabs and to help them win the propaganda war or what they call the “battle of hearts and minds.” Officials of the U.S states dep. are joining Twitter to “engage” “ it is to deceive” the world specially Muslims.

The latest U.S state dep., engagement (deception) effort with Muslims and Arabs is via launching an official Arabic account @USAbilAraby which its first tweet says:

“U.S state dep. acknowledge the role social media plays in the Arab world and we would like to be part of your discussion”

and that discussion to them are now in the forms of Tweets to deceive the Arab public opinion about what the U.S government is doing, as the account was tweeting about the need of change in Egypt praising the Egyptian revolution and so forth….

Oh Ya we believe you!

Political propaganda has entered a new chapter today, it is now Propaganda 2.0. courtesy of Hillary Clinton – Secretary of hypocrisy and miss-leading the public .

Hosni Mubarak is gone, yes gone and we are happy about it, the dictator is gone, The Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak is ousted and just handed power to the army.

This is the 3d week  of the blessed Egyptian revolution, it all started on Facebook with Khaled Saed page ( the young man who was killed while being beaten up by Egyptian police) with Twitter coordinating demonstration locations and spreading the news all over the world and Skype for background coordinations.

The fallen regime responded by blocking down Twitter, facebook and other sites, and then shut down the internet all together, to later come down to earth and meet the populations demands

More updates soon…

Few hours ago ArabCrunch sources inside Egypt told us that the internet is back to the country and that there is no blocking of any site.

Egyptian authorities turned off the internet on the 28th of last month in a bid to end the demonstrations in Egypt. It also blocked Facebook Twitter and other sites as these platforms are used by activist to coordinate demonstrations locations and inform the world about what is happing in Egypt amid the growing protests, however these tactics did not work as around 2 million egyptian demonstrated yesterday in Tahreer square in cairo asking for the resignation of Egypt’s president Husni Mubarak.

Opera the company behind the popular browsers opera has confirmed the restoration of the internet as it said that traffic from egypt is some how back to normal.

Sources to Ac also confirmed that BlackBerry services and 3G access are back too.

#image credit.

As theIinternet access remains blocked in Egypt a group of engineers from Google, Twitter and SayNow worked together in launching speak-to-tweet service— giving the  ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection.

Anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to @speak2tweet.

Google said in a blog post “We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time. Our thoughts are with everyone there.”

SayNow was acquired by Google  last week.

In a bid to stop the revolution from spreading  Egyptian authorities shut down the internet all together along with cell phone services according to Aljazeera Arabic channel.

Today is Friday and 100s of thousands are expected to join demonstrations after the Muslim pray of friday.

#image via RNN.

Early today, Egyptian authorities unblocked Facebook and Twitter, but they went into blocking it again according to ArabCrunch sources in Egypt.

The blocking is an attempt to stifle the Friday of Anger demonstrations tomorrow against dictatorship and tyranny, as Facebook and Twitter are used by activists to inform the world about the Egyptian revolution, rally support to bring more Egyptians  to join the efforts to topple Husni Mubarak regime and coordinate demonstration places and paths .

However there are several ways to bypass blocking: using a proxy server, Tor project and Opera browser with Turbo enabled.

To follow the events in Egypt follow hashtag #jan25 #25Jan. on Facebook we are all khaled Saed Page and RNN (arabic and sometimes English headlines)

#image via RNN.

Yesterday night Internet users in Egypt told ArabCrunch that Twitter and Facebook are unblocked in Egypt and they can access normally both social networks.

Egyptian authorities blocked both social networks to prevent activists from using them in order to prevent them form informing the public about the revolution that started in Egypt on Jan 25 the and prevent users from using both platforms in coordinating demonstrations and so forth.

In Suez province users reported to ArabCrunch that the authorities has blocked everything there: internet access and cell phone connections.

Suez is witnessing riots as protestors are fighting anti riot police on the streets and a number of casualties has been reported.

Egyptian authorities went into blocking spree, Egyptian users told ArabCrunch that  Twitter is blocked where the hashtag #jan25 is being used to update users about the revolution in Egypt against government dictatorship and corruption. VodaFone Egypt Twitter account confirms this with this tweet.

other web sites reported blocked are:

Bambuser.com to prevent live streaming of demonstrations

Websites and newspapers reporting live about the demonstrations in Arabic:

http://dostor.org/

http://www.shorouknews.com/

http://elbadil.net/

There are no shortage in options to bypass censorship, tor project comes handy.

#image inspiration credits.

F.B.I. director Robert Mueller III travled to Silicon Valley, Tuesday, to meet with top executives of several tech companies including Facebook and Google about a proposal that would make it easier to  spy on Internet users.

According to NY Times report, under Mueller’s proposal, ” firms would have to design systems to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages. Services based overseas would have to route communications through a server on United States soil where they could be wiretapped.”

ArabCrunch urges Silicon Valley companies to refuse cooperation with the F.B.I. in this matter, 100s of millions of Non-Americans rely on Google and Facebook for their daily internet life and these 100s of millions of people did not elect the government that wants to spy on their communications  and on what they say online.

The F.B.I. will not use wiretapping of criminals from U.S soil  only. But also opposition to its occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq,  and other countries in the world. Not to mention with the US government treatment of Wikileaks  and other free media would raise huge suspicion that  the FBI would wiretap journalists and bloggers like us in order to identify and suppress source of leaks of government criminal activities in USA and around the world.

NYTimes says that the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act requires phone and broadband network access providers  like Verizon and Comcast to make sure they can immediately comply when presented with a court wiretapping order.

As for the 100s of millions of non-americans would there be a court order to wirtetape anyone? we doubt.

It is really ironic that Hillary Clinton few months ago expressed concerns of wiretapping requests  to BlackBerry devices by governments in the Arab region, while its government is pursuing this on its soil. Preashing sometime overseas and do something else home!

#Robert S. Mueller III and Gorge Bush image from the White house archive.

Want to tweet a long email with attachments? want to share your email on Twitter? Twitemail helps you do that in very easy way: just send your email to your assigned Twitemail address and your email will be shared in your Twitter feed.

To start using Twitemail signup with your twitter handle get your Twitmail address and your done.

Here is our test:

If you want the other way around, which is sending your tweets to email addresses look for Tweet To Email covered last March here.

Twitemail is founded by Saleh Al Zaid, Saudi serial entrepreneur and former ArabCrunch Saudi Ambasador  his other projects are: untiny: uniting short URLs and twtbase: twitter app database.

Updated.

There is no doubt that here at ArabCrunch we were big fans of Twitter since the day it was launched. We favored it over its Arab clone WaWet, for many reasons on top of them international adoption rate and a large applications ecosystem.

We were happy that Twitter opened a new platform for the world to communicate on 1 to 1 and 1 to many bases, as it played an instrumental role in breaking barriers including boarders.

However the nasty hand of politics comes to spoil things up.

Our compeitiors the US state department interference is not new with Twitter, as they asked Twitter to postpone its scheduled maintenance to give a chance for “the pro democracy revolutionary attempts in Iran”

And since we are under cruel assault by the US administration and its CIA along with the Zionist movement and certain their Arab “allies.” We raised a very legitimate question whether the CIA, Mossad and any other intelligence agency have access to our accounts on Twitter or any of our staff, or not. We are looking for simple answer Yes or No. But until now there is no answer! the tweet was sent on the 27th of sep.

We feel suspicious because we’ve been seeing retweets and replies from mostly social media Arab mercenaries and not normal tweets! Those tweets were designed to install confusion in our staff mind as a physiological warfare against us and as a failed attempts to mislead the public with a new coverup for the CIA crimes against free media.

Giving access to the CIA, Mossad or any other intelligence such as NSA and specially those in certain Arab country has catastrophic results:

1- We can not rollout that we use Twitter to communicate with some of our news sources, as such access to the CIA, NSA and Mossad would put them in grave danger.

2- If the motive before for the CIA/Mossad and Zionism in destroying ArabCrunch is based on colonial dictator and imperial lust to control free media outlets in politics or tech. Now they have a new motive, which is retaliation because we exposed some of their plots against ArabCrunch and other independent Startups founded by independent Muslims, as such they can send a tweet on our behalf that would put us in legal trouble and impressment under certain anti-free media laws in certain Middle Eastern oppressive and dictator banana republics regimes.

We have a message to the CIA and their Aarab tails, we understand what social graph means since before Facebook was public, you will never be able to find our sources. We will do anything (legal) to protect the brave American men and woman who risked their lives to warn us of your criminal plots.

We will never share our password on Twitter, google or else where with anyone, even under torture or a new type of blackmail.

We hope Sean Garrett @SG from Twitter communictations or anyone from Twitter will come and answer our legitimate question.

Update 1:

Sean replied to our question if twitter gave admin access to the CIA/FBI/Mossad/NSA and Other Agencies to Our Twitter Accounts? “um no. just as much chance of this as Twitter being the gunman that killed JFK.”

which is a great news, but we still waiting for him to answer if these agencies asked/have/had any type of access to our accounts.

Following the steps by many politicians from around the world  and the region like Obama, Queen Rania, El Baradi or Hamas, “Israeli” Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu has joined Twitter, facebook and Youtube in what it seems a bid to open conversion with Israleis and thew world.
“Social media channels are today vital to Israeli public relations, government transparency and keeping the public informed,” the prime minster’s bureau said in a statement the Israeli newspaper Haartz has received.

@Netanyahu is where he tweets. His tweets include both Hebrow and English Tweets, but the guy seems not knowing his way around as at the time of writing this post -3:30 GMT- many of Netnayahu’s tweets include broken links to his facebook page that we could not find! Also his tweets include official non casual announcements which is not the common way among the tweeps, who mostly like casual less press release like tweets.

@Netanyahu is following 423 users, being followed by 8,053 and listed in 687 lists. By Taking a quick peek at who he is following we see that most of them are Jewish “Israelis” or Jwish Americans such as United States Of America Senator Joe Lieberman who is  also Jewish  and Israeli early stage VC Ouriel Ohayon. We could not find any Arab or Muslims that netanyahu follows.

On his Youtube channel the first video that appears date to the 11th of August where Netanyahu greats all Muslims in the Month of Ramadan.
In the 31st of May an attack by Netanyahu’s Army on Fotilla aid ships headed to beasgaed Gaza strip resulted in killing a number Internettionla activists and that has caused the hashtags #freedomflotilla and #Gazaflotilla to trend on Twitter, despite the few hours  of “glitches.”

The prime minister  office listed  aims with this entrance  are “transparency, public relations and public information.” Is Netanyahu enternce to social media world is to create transparency or will be used as a propaganda platform for his government policies?

#Pic Via Haartez

Bit.ly the popular link shortening service have posted a blog post about @clickabit saying that “Clickabit is a curated list of some of the surprising and delightful things that are trending in the bit.ly data stream.”

So is this Bit.ly’s new Twitter account for trending links? If so it would be helpful to see the most popular/trending posts/links since Bit.ly links are also shared over IM, email and Web not just Twitter and facebook giving more scope about trending links and posts than Twitter’s trending topics.

We tested the links on @clicabit and did not notice if something is trending or not!

WE are big fans of Twitter at ArabCrunch.NET that is one of the reasons that we enabled users to login to ArabCrunch.NET via their Twitter account. We’ve been using it since may day one of its launch.
Twitter keep advancing and adding features, and just now it released new social context features as Sean Garrett describes them.

The new features are:

- You can see in the user’s profile a list of  your followers who  also follow him/her  and in which of your lists he/she is listed.

- You can block that user’s retweets from that user and turn on off SMS updates

- You can see who you and the user follow, that feature first appeared by Syrian based Twitter app MuTweeps. Seems now MuTweeps is no longer useful.

Things related to Follow/followers seems to get confusing  :P

Via: freshid.

ComScore released today a report on Twitter stats for the month of June, the report reveals that 93 million Internet users visited Twitter.com -exluding third party app such as TweetDeck- an increase of 109% from last year.

Indonesia the largest Muslim country in terms of population achieved the highest penetration rate, at 20.8 percent of the country’s Internet users. Brazil and Venezuela follows Indonesia in that category.

In terms of users growth, Twitter is growing at much higher rates Internationally than in its homeland in North America as the region’s growth rate is at 22% to nearly 25 million visitors in June. Latin America had the strongest audience growth, surging 305 percent to 15.4 million users. Asia Pacific ranked as the second-fastest growing region, climbing 243 percent to 25.1 million visitors. The Middle-East Africa jumped 142 percent to 5 million visitors, while Europe soared 106 percent to 22.5 million visitors. ( we do not know what the term Middle East and Africa means to ComScore, is it the Arab world plus Iran and Turkey plus all Africa? last time we wrote about Twitter visitors  in early this year via 2 parties it was  about 15 to 30,000 thousand users, so 5 Million is a very massive growth rate)

The report reveals that Twitter is gaining adoption among smartphone users. In the U.S., 8.3 percent of smartphone users (4.2 million people) accessed Twitter.com in a month via the browser on their mobile devices, outpacing each of the European markets. In Europe, 2.8 percent of smartphone users overall accessed Twitter.com (1.7 million users), with the U.K. experiencing the strongest penetration in the region at 5.8 percent, followed by Germany with 3.1 percent and France with 2.1 percent.

It would be great to add third party apps usage, not sure how would that number increase, but many users who use apps like TweetDeck access Twitter.com occasionally over the month period. Another Interesting finding would be knowing who are the active memebrs from those reported and those coming as visitors via referrals like Google.

What is your take, why Twitter growth in Middle East and Africa plus Latin America is exploding?

#image via Si.

If some of us think SMS is dead in the US, Twitter do not. The social media startup just announced launching Fast Follow SMS feature, which allows anyone in the US to receive Tweets on their mobile phones even if they have not signed up for Twitter. For example juts type follow ArabCrunch to 40404 in the US and now you start receiving Tweets from ArabCrunch.

Fast Following is currently available in the US but Twitter  said it is working on more countries to add.

This feature is a smart move by Twitter as its adoption rates in the US is not close to Facebook’s 500 million members, now non Twitter users can start experiencing Twitter instantly even if they did not have an account as this cuts many steps of going online, signup and then figure out how Twitter works.  I think this feature will bring a great amount of  new Twitter users.

( You can Follow ArabCrunch on Twitter @ArabCrunch .)

Whistleblower website WikiLeaks that is now well known for releasing the Afghanistan War Log of around 90,000 secret US military documents and the Baghdad shooting Video seems to be preparing for a new massive batch of leaks.

A Tweet sent by the Twitter account of Wikileaks asked for 700,00 USD for its next harm-minimization review, and accused the Pentagon and the media of not helping in the efforts of harm minimization.

That money seems to be going to help edit 15,000 more documents about the war in Afghanistan which might mean removing the “informants” names or a 260,000 pages that involves the Middle East or a new  a batch of fresh leaks and that money might be used to support the organizations infrastructure such as servers and so on as it lives off donations as a not for profit organization. Wikileaks accepts donations via different means starting with big to small payments on sites such as micropayment site Flattr.com.

The Pentagon has asked wikileaks recently “to do the right thing” and remove the war logs but wikileaks spokesman said more leaks to come.

Wikileaks accused in another tweet that “the pentagon wants to bankrupt us by refusing to assist  the review.

“Pentagon wants to bankrupt us by refusing to assist review.Media won’t take responsibility.Amnesty won’t.What to do?”

The Obama administration has asked today Britain, Germany, Australia and its other allies to consider criminal charges against the founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange to limit his cores Europe movement.

While an American official was quoted by The Daily Beast saying ““It’s amazing how Assange has overplayed his hand,”…. “Now, he’s alienating the sort of people who you’d normally think would be his biggest supporters.”

He was referring to 4 human rights organizations such as the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission AIHRC.

Wikileaks replied via Twitter by saying “Research note: AIHRC is primary funded by the occupying forces of Afghanistan.” and “Remember well those organizations currently rushing to push the Pentagon’s agenda without fact checking.”

A Petition posted online with the title of “Defend WikiLeaks – End the Secret Wars” said that “We believe that WikiLeaks and those whistleblowers who declassify documents in a time of secret war should be welcomed as defenders of democracy, not demonized as criminals. We support their First Amendment rights and welcome their continued disobedience in response to a long train of official deception.” The Petition has gathered   a number of well known people with 3061 signatures saying.”

Wikileaks has released on March 15, 2010 a classified 32 page U.S. counterintelligence investigation reveled a plan in plotting to destroy the center gravity of the site by attacking its “trust.”