The State Department has responded to a six months-old FOIA request filed by the ACLU to compel the release of twenty-three US State Embassy cables by releasing eleven of the cables. However, the eleven cables released contain redactions leading the ACLU to conclude this latest development “reveals” the State Department’s “penchant for excessive secrecy in defiance of all reason.”

The batch of US State Embassy cables recently published by the media organization WikiLeaks contain a few assessments of how other countries’ governments manage their terrorism watch lists. The assessments reveal much about how countries have tried to implement security regimes for travel in the aftermath of 9/11. And, each assessment is in the form of questionnaire.

The ACLU has launched a massive effort with more than thirty of its state affiliates to uncover just how law enforcement agencies, large and small, are using cell phone location data to track Americans. The national organization and its affiliates submitted 379 requests through state Freedom of Information (FOI) laws and hope to unearth documentary evidence to show just how law enforcement is using new technology to invade Americans’ privacy.

The Bradley Manning Support Network has put together a call-in day for those who wish to show their support for the accused whistleblower to WikiLeaks, Pfc. Bradley Manning. The Manning Support Network, an international grassroots organization that for months now has been organizing in support and for the legal defense of Manning, is urging supporters to call President Obama at the White House and also call the Secretary of the Army John McHugh.

For the past months, I have hosted a show called “This Week in WikiLeaks,” where I bring a guest on to talk about a WikiLeaks-related story or to talk about the latest news and updates on WikiLeaks, an organization that provides a lens for understanding so much about how the press, policy and politics, the national security state, etc. Sometimes, I don’t have guests on that are part of the WikiLeaks story. Sometimes they simply provide greater context for understanding the US government reaction and the players, who are a part of this story.

Joshua E.S. Phillips, a writer, journalist and author of None of Us Were Like This Before: American Soldiers and Torture, is this week’s guest. The conversation was recorded after Phillips’ story in The Nation, “Inside the Detainee Abuse Task Force,” was published. We discuss this task force that was created after the Abu Ghraib scandal to, as he writes, investigate “abuse cases that occurred in and around Victory Base Complex—a huge area of responsibility that included the heaviest concentration of detainees.” In his story, he highlights a retired officer, who claims it was a “whitewash.”

Cass Sunstein doesn’t really have all that much to do with the content of this post. I named it after him as an excuse to recommend that you read Glenn Greenwald’s take-down of Sunstein as a potential SCOTUS appointee, and particularly to remind you of Sunstein’s paper advocating extensive propaganda to knock down the theories of those Sunstein deems to have committed “cognitive blunders.” There is no evidence Sunstein’s theories of governmental information control have to do with the apparent increasing persecution of open source leak outlets, but it does seem to stem from the same kind of authoritarian instinct.