Um, I Think It's Time for a Thread on WikiLeaks

Mordy, how have you the time to compose these long posts continuously?

Web sites similar to Wikileaks.org will continue to proliferate and will continue to represent a potential force protection, counterintelligence, OPSEC, and INFOSEC threat to the US Army for the foreseeable future. Sensitive or classified information posted to Wikileaks.org could potentially reveal the capabilities and vulnerabilities of US forces, whether stationed in CONUS or deployed overseas.

I'm actually secretly Artificial Intelligence, Alfred.

btw the administration's handled this shrewdly: let the national security guys like Gates and Jones wag their fingers while the Oval Office affects disinterest.

lol Shakey "vindictive" - who do I want vengeance on & for what? dude I am doing exactly what you are doing: guessing, thinking out loud. only one of us admits it I guess, you presumably are blessed with great insight. "The administration was in cahoots with the people who released sensitive information" seems a much more serious charge than the day-to-day ammo of taking easily-reparsed positions, etc.

I'm actually secretly Artificial Intelligence, Alfred.

this would make me incredibly happy btw

I'm more interested in Assange's claim that there are no verified examples of people's names being exposed -- Gates has claimed it, but we can't really trust him on this, and I think the NY Times has made a similar claim. It's either true or not, and it seems silly that Assange is like, "First of all, no one was harmed by what I released, and second of all, the WH didn't work with me to minimize harm." (How would he even know if he's only read 2% of the documents he put online?)

dude I am doing exactly what you are doing: guessing, thinking out loud. only one of us admits it I guess,

I'm always admitting this! This is like my MO on ILX: "I'm just thinking through this shit out loud."

yeah I think it's unconscionable to share data that he himself hasn't gone over btw, like, personally, not his staff of w/e

xp I was talking to Shakey Mo there.

"The administration was in cahoots with the people who released sensitive information"

except that this accusation makes absolutely NO FUCKING SENSE? why would Obama want to deliberately undermine his own war effort, one that he has increased troop levels/funding for and gotten support from Republicans on? how does that make any sense whatsoever?

vindictive in the sense that your default position is Obama = wrong

xp

except that this accusation makes absolutely NO FUCKING SENSE?

it would make every bit of narrative sense if he'd met or spoken with wikileaks in any way, or even acknowledged any contact with them. it would be an easy narrative to spin.

your default position is Obama = wrong

imo that is not being vindictive just realistic lol

it would be an easy narrative to spin.

really? please spin it then. cuz its inconceivable to me. explain to me how Obama is in cahoots with an organization who's stated intention is to undermine his war efforts, and how Obama doesn't really want to fight the war in Afghanistan, in fact he's so uninterested in it, all those troop levels/budget increases are just a cover for actually wanting to endanger the lives of American soldiers. let's hear it. get yr Glenn Beck on.

except that this accusation makes absolutely NO FUCKING SENSE?

just to game out this particular thought experiment -- have you noticed that the accusations don't have to make sense anymore? they just have to feel good to make them!

xps heh

if you can tie in some socialism and reverse-racism that'd be good too

xp

umm hi mr. even-more-excitable-than me I already did it the first time I introduced the idea. WL contacts admin, says "we have documents we are going to release - will you go over them and let us know what we can't release? nb we are going to release docs." WH weighs options: 1) go over documents, get concessions, documents are released with a big ol "this information has been vetted by the white house" on 'em 2) let guy hang self with own rope, attack source, minimize any information that might seem damning, etc etc. Latter option: worst anybody can say about WH is "they didn't stop this guy from leaking this stuff." Former option: because you sifted through the information with this guy, anything he revealed is on your head.

how is this even hard to accept as probable, let alone possible?

I mean srsly I am not accustomed to being in the position of finding my own stance the more reasonable of any two in play but here we are

why would Obama want to deliberately undermine his own war effort, one that he has increased troop levels/funding for and gotten support from Republicans on? how does that make any sense whatsoever?

Actually this recent leak showing how bad the war is going has been cited by the President to back up last year's 30,000 troop surge.

have you noticed that the accusations don't have to make sense anymore? they just have to feel good to make them!

they have to fit the narrative though. so far, there is no "Obama does not care about Afghanistan" narrative. no one on the right is pushing him to commit MORE troops and MORE money and saying he has no intentions of winning. If anything the existing underlying narrative is kinda going the OTHER way - that Obama's getting us into a war that we can't win and it's all pointless (see recent Steele flap). the kind of hypothetical accusations being considered here don't fit any existing narrative about Obama and Afghanistan, they're just nonsensical.

xp

Two different types of undermining, I think; undermining the war effort by showing that it's going very poorly (a conclusion I'm skeptical of in the first place), and undermining the war effort but scaring off people who would otherwise work with the army but now won't because of fear of losing their lives in another leak.

Steve Coll, an expert on the region and a former senior editor of The Washington Post, said in a New Yorker podcast on Thursday, “my reading of the disclosure of these informants in the context of Taliban-menaced southern Afghanistan is that people named in those documents have a reasonable belief that they are going to get killed, or — actually the way it works with the Taliban is, if they can’t find you, they’ll take your brother instead.”

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/taliban-study-wikileaks-to-hunt-informants/

It's gonna be a miracle finding people to work with after this, I think.

highlighting that these cables all come from (i think) 03 - 09 is another "things were sooo much worse under bush amirite" kind of move, but it's not like anyone will believe things are totally different or better now.

Something that occurred to me -- surely if the administration were worried about looking like they signed off on the leaks, they wouldn't have met with the NYT either, right? But they did go over the info with the NYT and tell them what was an actual risk...

i think aerosmith is right about why the WH would not want to haggle on this. better to be completely hands-off. the position has to be that none of this should be leaked. no room for negotiation there.

not sure why it's surprising that the CIA would want to shut down an organization committed to illegally releasing embarrassing secret info abt the US military/govt/________. obviously it's just terrible, but im trying to think of a state that wouldn't try the same.

hm, not a surprise they'd want to shut it down. I'm just skeptical that they decided to shut down an organization because they're afraid it'll harm their war efforts -- and the way they decide to do it is by letting the organization harm their war efforts. Kinda silly. And like I said, WH haggled with the NYT.

Yeah but the Times is a different deal - they are reporting on the release of information; there's a longstanding relationship between them and any admin. The White House, in answering any communication from WikiLeaks, would essentially be validating WL as an organization. Working with the Times - they'll be doing that anyway. If I were the White House, I'd be extremely careful about setting a precedent of "yeah, I know that guy."

That you think the administration is SO AFRAID of the rightwing media spin machine that they would overlook all these advantages is just... I dunno, J0hn yr a sharp a guy but I think yr judgment is seriously clouded here.

LOL it took them like 30 seconds to fire Shirley Sherrod just because of Andrew fucking Breitbart.

Fair enough, but there wasn't a similar downside to firing Shirley Sherrod -- here if they didn't take advantage of a chance to protect sources in Afghanistan they've compromised their war effort. Ok, also -- I just realized we're just repeating the same stuff over and over again, and it's really just conjecture. I assume we'll hear more soon (probably in the NYT).

LOL it took them like 30 seconds to fire Shirley Sherrod just because of Andrew fucking Breitbart.

this was quickly reversed fyi

and the racism thing is something the WH is WAY more sensitive about in terms of media narrative, much bigger cause for worry for them than "Obama does not want to win the war in Afghanistan" which, again, is not something I have seen anyone anywhere argue.

yeah I mean I try to avoid saying "if you don't agree with me you aren't seeing things clearly," as strident as I can get, but I mean, it just seems extremely clear that the admin is very, very concerned with & reactive to the media spin on the choices they make, and I don't think it's really obsessive hateful anti-Obama-ism to think that the decisions they make have "how will this play out on TV?" very near the forefront of all their thinking.

I just think that yr hypothetical scenario for how it will play on TV is ridiculous

you're joking, right? have we forgotten the "no talks without preconditions" meme?

anyway i have no idea whether actual informants/civilians were named in this - if this is the case, that's a pretty grave fuckup and assange should own up to that. however it doesn't mean he was wrong to release all the other information and doesn't change the issue for me at all

you honestly don't think that if the admin had had any communication with a guy who wound up leaking sensitive documents, the spin would be "the white house: in on the spin"

okey dokey, that's "ridiculous," no-one can even imagine such a scenario, yr right

"White House Complicit In Release of Sensitive Data" - only on Mars could we imagine a headline like that following the White House answering mail from the founder of fucking WikiLeaks

Someone please define "war effort" for me. I see that phrase alot. In my most cynical moods, it basically means continuing this war so that sweet money keeps flowing to the military/industrial complex in the midst of a worldwide recession.

wikileaks volunteer detained at us border for 3 hours

so is this a big deal or just business as usual?

'war effort' sounds more manly and aggro than 'nation building'
wartime accounting is pretty heinous, but has there been any tracking of monies used for development projects under the pretext of war spending?

nothing mind-blowing but i think she and i are coming from the same place: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2010/08/09/100809taco_talk_davidson

So just to reboot the conversation over here; Can you really consider WikiLeaks a journalism institution? Isn't journalism more than acquiring documents and then releasing them into the public? Don't we expect some context (like a nutt graph at least), some expertise in the area (Assange doesn't have to know anything to accept anonymous documents and then repost them), and also a confirmation that the information is trustworthy? (Assange claims he has a technique to validate whether his information is true or not, but a) we don't know what it is while in journalism we know how relying upon sources works, and b) it's not just about what information is true but also who stands to gain from a particular bit of information, journalistic expertise is not just knowing that something is true, it's knowing why it matters and why the source benefits from it.) In general, it's this last thing that puts me in favor of a bill to protect journalists from subpoenas. Tho there has been a huge increase of using anonymous sources unnecessarily (Shafer has been really good on this beat), any time you use an anonymous source you are entering a relationship with an editor and your journalist institution about that source. A good editor makes sure it's necessary, and makes sure that you aren't just manufacturing sources yourself (and that you've thought through why a particular source needs to remain anonymous). I know this to be true because when I've had to deal with anonymous sources in investigative pieces I've had to have long conversations with editors about why/and to what extent we can use that information. These are all important hallmarks of journalism to me, and things that Assange does not qualify for.

Question: If Assange is a journalist and WikiLeaks is journalism, then what exactly is journalism?

i dunno if that matters. cynical face on: journalism is corrupt as fuck anyway, in hock to corporate interests blah blah blah. wikileaks happened, and saying it isn'y journalism won't stop the fact that 'in the web 2.o era' leaking s going to be a part of lyfe.

so is that an opinion or should I judge your intentions?

insurance

i dunno if that matters. cynical face on: journalism is corrupt as fuck anyway, in hock to corporate interests blah blah blah. wikileaks happened, and saying it isn'y journalism won't stop the fact that 'in the web 2.o era' leaking s going to be a part of lyfe.

I'm actually kinda skeptical of this claim. It assumes that there's an infinite supply of leaks and just a lack of locations for those leaks to play out. Leaks will still require people to leak information and those people are rare and arguably the real force behind leaks coming out -- not Web 2.0 websites giving them an opportunity to give out the information. Yes, it could mean that people will be more willing to leak information, but that's arguably because of the radical anonymity, not because it's a transnational server. The bill currently under consideration could also increase leaks since people will feel safer bringing information to traditional media venues. Essentially, I have a hard time hearing the case for why Web 2.0 is going to introduce some radical new form of transparency. It's still a tool, and it'll require people to use it. Maybe people like Pfc. Bradley Manning will be more likely to leak information but a) I'm not convinced he has leaked anything that would indicate that WikiLeaks has "changed the game," and b) people who have the kind of information that leaks facilitate best will continue to use traditional media and not just release tons of documents online.

Leaks will still require people to leak information

this isn't as necessarily true as it used to be! its hard to secure information in "the digital age." especially personal-type information.

Maybe, but WikiLeaks as it currently exists is only a location for people to leak information to.

whats your point

I'm actually kinda skeptical of this claim.

^^ That was basically my point?

Like I've read this (which seems to be the big argument for why WikiLeaks is changing the game): http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2010/07/26/wikileaks_afghan.html

If you go to the Wikileaks Twitter profile, next to “location” it says: Everywhere. Which is one of the most striking things about it: the world’s first stateless news organization. I can’t think of any prior examples of that. (Dave Winer in the comments: “The blogosphere is a stateless news organization.”) Wikileaks is organized so that if the crackdown comes in one country, the servers can be switched on in another. This is meant to put it beyond the reach of any government or legal system. That’s what so odd about the White House crying, “They didn’t even contact us!”

Appealing to national traditions of fair play in the conduct of news reporting misunderstands what Wikileaks is about: the release of information without regard for national interest. In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it. But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new. Just as the Internet has no terrestrial address or central office, neither does Wikileaks.

But I'm not clear on the innovation here. It's a paradigm change because a State can't crack down on it if it reports something the State doesn't like? Newspapers often report on things that the State doesn't like. "Because the laws of a given nation protect it," versus "because the logic of the Internet permits it" is an interesting distinction with possible consequences, but it's not like suddenly you can deliver information that you previously couldn't deliver. Is there an example of someone with a leak who actually couldn't get a hearing on the information because the State wouldn't let newspapers report it? There are examples of newspapers holding back on information, or only delivering some of the information -- but WikiLeaks is doing that too! (They still have 15,000 documents they haven't released.) You essentially have to believe that there is a lot of leakable information that the NYT or WaPost refuses to touch that can now go up on WikiLeaks -- except that we haven't seen any leaks like that. Manning couldn't have leaked the "Collateral Murder" to the NYT or NPR or Village Voice Media or the many journalistic upstarts that are dying for a huge scoop? So yes, there's def a change in how these things work, but I haven't seen the case for what that difference actually means to journalism. (Especially since when WikiLeaks decided to leak 90,000 documents who'd they go to to report the information? The NYT, Der Spiegel + the Guardian.)

Is there an example of someone with a leak who actually couldn't get a hearing on the information because the State wouldn't let newspapers report it?

In my opinion, that isn't the relevant point.

There are examples of newspapers holding back on information, or only delivering some of the information

THAT is the point.