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

oh wait - people with the right cards in the brims of their fedoras "weigh" that stuff, as vs. these bad guys who don't even have hats

fuck trusting a hat

People should be legally accountable for actions that lead to people dying.

All American taxpayers are funding these wars, and have contributed far more than Wikileaks towards people dying. But yeah I think it'd be morally a good thing to do.

I mean seriously I can dig how freedom of the press is a pretty uncomfortable thing, but your position is basically only compatible with a wholly state-supervised press

― gross rainbow of haerosmith (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved), Friday, August 6, 2010 3:35 PM (5 seconds ago) Bookmark

depends where you set limits on the public interest, which is the test in the UK on this kind of thing. if wikileaks illegally obtained information about a private individual and published it, that would not be cool or legal unless it were in the public interest. i basically think this recent leak can be defended as being in the public interest, but the names of informants, hmm, probably not.

anyway, assange has fucked his own petard by making his shit the centre of the story. the idea upthread was that as the NYT/Guardian/German_dudes went through the unfiltered mass of documentation, new shit would come to light. i dunno if that's really paid off. i guess they are in hock to the govt after all.

yeah it pretty much is. don't agree w/ everything mordy is saying, but the core point that assange is an almighty dick, i am fully on board with

― unchill english bro (history mayne), Friday, August 6, 2010 4:34 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

eh, i think assange actually has higher standards of credibility for what hell print than, say, my employer

ho snap

I WENT THERE

yeah but we're talking about a man who'd juggle bags full of ebola if it got him hits.

"All American taxpayers are funding these wars, and have contributed far more than Wikileaks towards people dying."
I think wesley snipes is cool and all, but to follow this line of reasoning would lead to tax scofflaws having morally exculpated themselves, which i would like to believe on behalf of wesley snipes, but i get the feeling that most other people not paying taxes are generally either indifferent or in favor of foreigners dying. They simply don't want to pay for the bullets (or any life-saving treatment).

in order to demonstrate wikileaks culpability to be as diffuse as that of an average taxpayer, you'd have to show that wikileaks is about as effective as one. they at least have as much power as any tabloid, so it's not unreasonable to expect at least attempts at tabloid-level legal consequences.

so I assume you are against people publishing things that might outrage terrorists, since terrorists often kill people because they have published things the terrorists didn't like

Smithy, this is intellectually below you. Being irresponsible about information that could lead to someone dying is different than publishing something someone doesn't like and someone dying because of it. Think about it like this: Putting aside the "institution" of journalism (which you're already ready to do under different circumstances) we're talking about people. If I saw something that gets you angry, and you kill someone because of it, we can weigh what culpability I have in what I said. If I use racial rhetoric to inflame you and you kill someone, we understand that there's culpability, and even if I won't be legally prosecuted for murder I may be prosecuted for hate speech. We actually have the most liberal position on hate speech in the world in the United States, but there are lines you can still cross here and get in trouble. But that's one thing, what you could consider indirect culpability. I didn't tell you who to kill (except in the vaguest way), or how to do it, or where to do it. I just got you angry. Ok, that's one thing. Then there's this other thing where the information you provide actually actively leads to someone dying. You didn't inflame passions or encourage murder. You simply gave practical information that could lead to someone dying. Now there's obviously room for disagreement here -- if you publish a technical guide to poisoning someone without getting caught, you might be less responsible than if you out an informant. But this is clearly a different category of behavior than inflaming passions.

If I say* something

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/2/22/Anarchistcookbookdsfg.jpg/200px-Anarchistcookbookdsfg.jpg

see my copy was missing the appendix that had a list of all the people that had ever wronged me in secret

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/3f/AnarchistCookMovie.jpg/200px-AnarchistCookMovie.jpg

LOL

like i am still on the side that is pro-WL here but the anarchist cookbook /= a list of informants, at least w/r/t "someone getting harmed from the release of information"

anyway thank god pennies dropped from buildings don't actually kill ppl and go a few feet into the cement because all of our older siblings would be in jail right now

^^^reads sorta like a perry bible fellowship cartoon now that i think about it

1) hey little brother, if you drop a penny off the top of that skyscraper, you get to make a wish!
2) ~POV of penny, directly towards the hat of a businessman in a fedora
3) little brother dragged away in cuffs, sheet over a bloodied corpse, older bro laffin and laffin

wouldn't it be more like "you drop the penny, I get a wish!", then panel 2 is little bro dropping the penny while older bro closes his eyes and makes the wish, then panel 3 older bro is all "it came true!" while little bro is dragged away

haha, better

i suppose it WAS your bible fellowship, makes sense you'd be better at this than me

http://canvaspaint.org/30ac.png
i forgot the sheet.

http://reason.com/archives/2010/08/06/julian-assange-wikijournalist

^ linked to from Sullivan, a case against calling Assange a journalist

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-08-10/a-western-crackdown-on-wikileaks/?update=1

huh

Turns out Wikileaks did, in fact, ask the DoD for help in redacting the leaked documents, and DoD refused. Greenwald is, of course, all over it.

Julian Assange wanted in Sweden for rape!?

http://translate.google.se/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=sv&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.expressen.se%2FNyheter%2F1.2104976%2Fwikileaks-grundare-anhallen-for-valdtakt&sl=sv&tl=en

Wiki twitter: "it's just a tabloid + distraction" - http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/21731365419

Nice bit of character assassination.

Spreading outside of Sweden by now - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-11047025

Pentagon (by the way, there's a mosque in there, did you know?) looking into persecuting WikiLeaks

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704488404575441673460880204.html?mod=WSJEUROPE_hpp_MIDDLEThirdNews

Swedish rape warrant withdrawn http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11049316

Ridiculous. Way to martyr the guy.

http://www.internet-d.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Julian-assange-nyp.png

wow this whole thing is like

man

julian assange eats a cheeseburger - http://image3.examiner.com/images/blog/wysiwyg/image/cheeseburger1(1).jpg

no wait, julian assange finishes cheeseburger, throws it away - http://www.13dots.com/reddragon/trashcan/final.gif

Huh:

http://www.fox40.com/news/capitolpulse/ktxl-news-soldierwikileaks0823,0,2298783.story

But but... I've heard that Assange eats live puppies!

Countdown til "Assange is a Muslim".

that's awesome; no one will pay attention tho i bet

All they have to do is say he's an Australian, surely that'll do it right? :D

haha an article i read today called wikileaks "stockholm-based". maybe that's true, technically

The Pentagon said on Sunday it had a 120-member team prepared to review a massive leak of as many as 500,000 Iraq war documents, which are expected to be released by the WikiLeaks website sometime this month.

Pentagon spokesman Col. Dave Lapan told Reuters the timing of the leak remained unclear but the Defense Department was ready for a document dump as early as Monday or Tuesday, a possibility raised in previous WikiLeaks statements.

I suppose they will do their usual thing of throwing whistleblowers in jail and trying to shut down Wikileaks, rather than bothering to investigate any of the crimes the documents might expose.

lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_0-KUaQl7k

^^^
I don't understand this either - the NYTimes had an article that was totally about Julian Assange's personal life, I mean the guy just revealed that the US documented 100,000 deaths from the Iraq War and then lied about the fact that they documented those deaths... I mean are the large news outlets trying to smear him?

sex sells, right?

also

1. it's a lot easier & more fun for lazy journalists to focus on a rape scandal than to sift through thousands of war documents
2. it makes them feel like they're actually doing a job -- "asking the tough questions" -- rather than having to defer to someone who is doing it for them

are the large news outlets trying to smear him?

of course.