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

I am 100% for the dump on the banks fwiw xp

assuming it's about the banks doing illegal shit and not about their affairs or whatever

idk dude i don't think any poster here or pundit in the world thinks every last thing assange has done has been awesome. neglecting to redact the names of afghan informants was a regrettable mistake. the argument that undermining diplomacy increases the likelihood of war is perfectly legitimate - i don't necessarily think that's the case here tho, first of all, and i'd disagree that it'd be wikileaks' "fault".

xp iatee

yeah, def pumped for the bank dump

same

also, c'mon, the fact that we're anticipating another hit from wikileaks serves to buttress the idea that it's a useful thing to have around, just so long as the person(s) in charge aren't idiots

color me skeptical it will yield any results (beyond a pr hit and brief stockdip to bank of america supposedly); someone noted 'think if we knew what we now know about enron' but the thing w/ enron (and most financial scandals) is the information was out there already, what was lacking was any action or consequences. not sure this infodump will change that. still considering how many banking practices are designed to fuck the poor a few juicy memos and other gossip illustrating that could spur some action or at least pressure for action. worked w/ big tobacco.

that's assange's exact logic for gov't. 'color me skeptical'.

i'm just asking if any of the wikileaks defenders here why they are repping for wikileaks. genuinely openminded here!

Love to read how my government is (mis)spending my money on foreign wars and bankrupt crypto-terrorist regimes like Saudi Arabia. According to Robert Gates, no one has died yet as a result of these leaks, so ayo.

US Politics: Pumped for the bank dump

lol

I can't say that there will be any immediate useful policy changes resulting from damning info like the debacle w/the Honduran coup, but I'd like to think that it might help proponents of peace/democracy/socialism in South/Central America at least a smidgen in being able to call bullshit on our lip service in future situations and maybe eventually corralling up enough public support to be able to demand even minor positive actions from our gov't towards our southern neighbors. Wishful thinking, I know, but one can dream.

Central Americans have the Contras, Arbenz, etc to remind them if they do nothing.

Well-put, I thought: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/12/the-shameful-attacks-on-julian-assange/67440/

the fact that so many prominent old school journalists are attacking him with such unbridled force is a symptom of the failure of traditional reporting methods to penetrate a culture of official secrecy that has grown by leaps and bounds since 9/11, and threatens the functioning of a free press as a cornerstone of democracy.

I'm sick of the overblown reaction to this. It is such a dull story. Do I need to know someone thinks the German chancellor is a lazy fat ass?

do you think that's the biggest news to come out of that document dump?

If there were bigger and better news surely these brave crusaders for freedom of the press would have found it. Instead they pepper their stories with stupid gossip.

u s steel is a great poster

for me to poop on

I can't tell if his last post is supposed to be ironic or not, or both. Or if he even knows.

If there were bigger and better news surely these brave crusaders for freedom of the press would have found it.

The point that the Atlantic piece I linked is making, and that I would back up, is that there are MANY bigger stories out there that traditional journalism can't get at, because everything is classified whether its really "sensitive information" or not, whether lives will be lost if it gets out or not, and sometimes just for no reason at all, seemingly. The government does not want us to know what it's doing, and it's a matter of fundamental principle that the public MUST know what the government is doing.

Not everything, I'll grant. But certainly more than we know, and far, far more than NOTHING, which is what the government would want if it had its way. Journalism is supposed to be a check and balance. When journalism can't do that anymore, then we must find other ways. That's Assange's logic, and I'm hard put to disagree with him.

"According to the AP (through Google News), WikiLeaks isn't just sitting on the recent material so they can release it bit by bit to the press, as many people implied. On the contrary, it's quite the other way around: 'only after considering advice from five news organizations with which it chose to share all of the material' are they releasing it themselves. These newspapers 'have been advising WikiLeaks on which documents to release publicly and what redactions to make to those documents.' AP questions whether WikiLeaks will follow these redactions, but nevertheless seems quite impressed by this 'extraordinary collaboration between some of the world's most respected media outlets and the WikiLeaks organization.'"

What exactly is Wikileaks doing that all these other media organizations aren't also doing?

No one gave Wikileaks a security clearance; they are incapable of leaking anything. They are merely publishing information that was leaked by someone else. So how are all these attacks on Wikileaks' right to publish justified vs. those of the NY Times or the Associated Press?

http://politics.slashdot.org/story/10/12/05/1639253/WikiLeaks-Took-Advice-From-Media-Outlets?from=rss

That last comment is a pretty good point.

and what alfred and i were talking about upthread.

Indeed, and all due credit.

http://grab.by/7Kgr

balllin

this thread is a little tl;dr but so apologies if this is old news, but i think this dude is kinda gangsta

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/assange-threatens-to-release-entire-cache-of-unfiltered-files/article1825922/

hahhaha xp

Yeah that goes back to what I was saying abt the fact Assange/wikileaks per se arent technically breaking a law. Not a US law anyway. He cant commit treason - he isnt a US citizen and he isnt the one who had access to/leaked the documents from the source(s).

The fact our own (Aus) Prime Minister is saying in the media he's broken laws and should be held to account is hideously embarrasing.

this thread is a little tl;dr but so apologies if this is old news, but i think this dude is kinda gangsta

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/assange-threatens-to-release-entire-cache-of-unfiltered-files/article1825922/

daaaaang

theres one way that he's right about this whole thing being revolutionary I guess---thousands of ppl ~already~ have the intel on their computers and cant get at it due to the encryption. you could fucking tweet the key probably, and the govt would have no way of knowing who has the shit on their hard drive.

pfc manning will never see the light of day again tho. :-/

I can agree that he isn't breaking any laws and I'm pretty much on his side with his arguments, I just wish he wasn't coming across in such a douchey way, it certainly doesn't help his cause.

He's been doing this shit for a very long time - he ran an ISP in melb in the 80s that hosted an anti-$cientology website of a friend of mines, and that's still there depite years of death threats, smear campaigns and attempted lawsuits.

the fact that he is operating within the law is basically why he's got my support at this point.

manning broke the law and should, legally, face the consequences (which, imo, are almost certainly going to be disproportionate to the crime). assange did not, and if we or Australia or whoever bend the rules to nail him then we'll basically be admitting that we were kidding about this whole democracy thing from the get go

pfc manning will never see the light of day again tho. :-/

I guess the next person who downloads a quarter of a million international gov't secrets should remember not to go onto chat rooms and blab about it in detail (including their motivations for doing it) to random ex-convict computer hacker strangers who just happen to be government informants connected at the hip for self-promotional reasons to a fellow ex-convict journalist. That must have been where he slipped up.

uh

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/06/18/wikileaks

he ran an ISP in melb in the 80s that hosted an anti-$cientology website of a friend of mines

literally does not compute

hah true... it was probably a BBS.

1989 is still the 80s. Suburbia's been around as an ISP since at least 1987 or 88, afaik.

...I may have my dates rong.

Its been around a fuck of a long time is all I know.

I guess the next person who downloads a quarter of a million international gov't secrets should remember not to go onto chat rooms and blab about it in detail (including their motivations for doing it) to random ex-convict computer hacker strangers who just happen to be government informants connected at the hip for self-promotional reasons to a fellow ex-convict journalist. That must have been where he slipped up.

― Telephoneface (Adam Bruneau), Sunday, December 5, 2010 11:35 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark

yes, exactly, that IS where he slipped up. dude i know you're all up on WL's dick or w/e, but the fact that manning was a g-d intelligence analyst in the fucking army means that it is actually against the rules that he knew about to leak classified documents. you can think he's a hero, you can think that the sentence he's facing is unjust or immoral, but you can't pretend that it's anything other than exactly what you'd expect to happen. that greenwald piece (tl;dr) suggests, very briefly, that he's a fall guy who likely couldn't have had access to that sort of intel (200k documents is a lot, tbh) and that this whooooooole thing is some elaborate way of dissuading future informants by making an example. maybe. but it seems like greenwald settles on manning being a hero, though, and the rest of that column is about lamo being a dick. fine. agreed. whatever.

the fact remains: if a private in the US army disseminates classified intel, he can be held accountable for his actions. those are the rules. so he got sold out by someone he thought was a journalist. monstrous, sure, but he's still accountable. how is this so hard to understand.

ok dad

jeez

can i get puddle of mudd mp3s on this thing

Fuck I meant 1998-99, I always skip 10 years when thinking baot interwebs startups. wtf me.

if only we lived in a world where the puddle of mudd mp3s that are tens of thousands of people's computers were unplayable thanks to 256bit encryption that could only be unlocked by a man who will soon be assassinated

sure if you break the rules youd be foolish to not acknowledge the possibility that you might get punished - and while its impossible that any government could function w/o the ability to regulate secrecy i feel like the u.s. government isnt at all holding up its end of the bargain as far as the spirit of the law - which is you keep secrets for reasons better than petty ass covering, you do it for the good of the country with you know a heavy heart

and im sure that this has been said up thread but all this oh noes hes endangering peoples lives w/his leaks rhetoric drives me bonkers - you know what really endangers people lives - waging war on them