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

as others have mentioned these leaks basically contain boring common knowledge - heres umberto eco in a typically for people famous for other things half assed half insightful piece pointing out that this intel is entirely comprised of press clippings http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/article/414871-not-such-wicked-leaks

Im only interested in these UFO leaks now!

The thing that still worries me most about all this is what kind of legislation is now going to get rammed through to close the "gaps" Eric Holder talked about (i.e. to make illegal what have until now been probably-legal activities). Because that's going to apply to a hell of a lot more than WikiLeaks.

the list is really a non-issue

The list is part of a lengthy cable the State Department sent in February 2009 to its posts around the world. The cable asked American diplomats to identify key resources, facilities and installations outside the United States "whose loss could critically impact the public health, economic security, and/or national and homeland security of the United States."

this is basically just a way of asking diplomats: "hey, what's in yr area that the state dept ought to be interested in? anything new that we dont already know about?" i sincerely doubt the request was made with an eye to terrorism, and the "prevention" thereof. it's not like they were setting out to make a list of Places Terrorists Might Want To Blow-Up.

worth noting, too, that WL didn't highlight this specific document, CNN did!

tipsy: agreed, the most worrisome thing about all this is that it will be used as an excuse to crack down even more tightly on journalism and transparency. but i think if yr gonna blame WL for that (as balls was sorta doing upthread), it's veering pretty close to 'well what do you expect, dressing like that' territory.

"What WikiLeaks has done amounts to espionage in a most serious form," said Lieberman. "It's probably the most terrible act and greatest act of espionage against the United States in our history."

stfu u fukkin clown

jeez even i think the rosenbergs were guilty

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/12/what-is-julian-assange-up-to.html

this is going around. i'm about halfway through and it's pretty good

sorry if it's on the thread already

what is it

tryin to get signed to kompakt is what he's up to

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/.a/6a00d8341c562c53ef0148c670d250970c-800wi

He's got Bono's eyes.

Assange’s strategy starts from the premise that authoritarian governments--among which he includes the U.S. and other major and semimajor world powers--are, at root, conspiracies. Diagnosing authoritarian governments as conspiracies allows Assange, ever the hacker, to put secrecy at the heart of his political philosophy. He sees the secret (or “conspiratorial interaction”) not only as the sine qua non of the conspiracy but as the actual source of the conspiracy's power:

Where details are known as to the inner workings of authoritarian regimes, we see conspiratorial interactions among the political elite not merely for preferment or favor within the regime but as the primary planning methodology behind maintaining or strengthening authoritarian power.

this is kind of idiotic and juvenile.

Bill Maher + Colin Mochrie =

http://i.imgur.com/4JNLc.jpg

lol

how? sounds like authoritarianism 101

maybe classifying the US as authoritarian is juvenile, as well as his aspirations, but the rest seems ok

lol I kept thinking he looked like maher and one of the dudes from kids in the hall

Where details are known as to the inner workings of authoritarian regimes, we see conspiratorial interactions among the political elite not merely for preferment or favor within the regime but as the primary planning methodology behind maintaining or strengthening authoritarian power.

like, dude, this is pretty much exactly how you could characterize dprk/Stalin/Argentina/etc.

why no mention of internet payment giant I Rate Everything?

how? sounds like authoritarianism 101

the US, Great Britain, France, etc. do not function this way. sorry. they just really aren't that coordinated.

oh sure.

(not sarcasm)

also, secrecy on some level or another is essential to politics, perhaps even the essence of politics. politics is about the management of power, more specifically, about the negotiations that allow groups & individuals with differing aims to cooperatively interact. to insist that all legitimate political interaction must take place out in the open, with 100% transparency at all times, is not only juvenile and simplistic, but absurd. it's not going to happen. such an insistence will only force the more subtle aspects of political interaction further underground - or else result in a backlash against the very idea of political transparency, which is exactly what seems to be happening here.

not saying that governments shouldn't be held accountable, shouldn't be pressured toward as much transparency as is feasible, but it's not a black and white issue: good openness vs. bad "conspiracy".

such an insistence will only force the more subtle aspects of political interaction further underground - or else result in a backlash against the very idea of political transparency, which is exactly what seems to be happening here.

^^^this is absolutely what's going to happen/is happening right now. way to go Julian!

in exchange we learned critical things about the US gov't like they think Berlusconi is a lecherous playboy and the Panama Canal is critical to our national security! good t rade-off.

be patient ufo cables on the way

As Assange told Time: “It is not our goal to achieve a more transparent society; it's our goal to achieve a more just society.”

leakfail

he seems deeply, deeply inept from a tactical standpoint cuz he is not achieving his goal

but i think if yr gonna blame WL for that (as balls was sorta doing upthread), it's veering pretty close to 'well what do you expect, dressing like that' territory.

Yeah, I don't blame WikiLeaks, I'm just alarmed about what new press restrictions we're going to get out of this. (And alarmed about it happening while we have a Supreme Court that I'm pretty sure would have ruled differently in the Pentagon Papers case.)

ufo cables on the way

http://www.derekhess.com/images/upload/8/image1/ufo10.JPG.jpeg

And Assange is really not the issue, because if it wasn't him it was going to be somebody. As has been said upthread, there are going to be more WikiLeak-type operations, and future ones will probably be (obvious irony alert) more secretive. (including all the puppet ones that are going to be set up by governments everywhere either to leak shit they want leaked or to trap leakers, or both)

alien diplomat insists on being taken to "your dealer"

I haven't read any of the leaked documents yet, I'm waiting for the 3D version.

/such an insistence will only force the more subtle aspects of political interaction further underground - or else result in a backlash against the very idea of political transparency, which is exactly what seems to be happening here./

^^^this is absolutely what's going to happen/is happening right now. way to go Julian!

rmde

well, the other way to see this is as the 1st volley in a war that's going to define political interactions in the coming century. technology and governments have been tracking more and more information over the course of the last 100 years or so, to the detriment of individual privacy. we're at a point now where it's hard (for me, anyway) to conceive of a future in which "individual privacy rights" exist in the way that that they were defined during most of the 20th century. it seems much more reasonable to say, "that which can be known will be known, and that which is known will be shared."

but this annihilation of the private will likely begin to affect governments and large organizations, too. and i'm sure they'll strike back at it more effectively and dramatically than citizens have been able to thus far, but i can't imagine that they'll win in the long run. more and more of what they'd like to keep private will leak out, one way or the other. suspect that this will be true even if the governments of ostensibly free nations begin to restrict internet access and use in the name of "national security", something that wouldn't surprise me at all.

In this sense, most of the media commentary on the latest round of leaks has totally missed the point. After all, why are diplomatic cables being leaked? These leaks are not specifically about the war(s) at all, and most seem to simply be a broad swath of the everyday normal secrets that a security state keeps from all but its most trusted hundreds of thousands of people who have the right clearance. Which is the point: Assange is completely right that our government has conspiratorial functions. What else would you call the fact that a small percentage of our governing class governs and acts in our name according to information which is freely shared amongst them but which cannot be shared amongst their constituency? And we all probably knew that this was more or less the case; anyone who was surprised that our embassies are doing dirty, secretive, and disingenuous political work as a matter of course is naïve. But Assange is not trying to produce a journalistic scandal which will then provoke red-faced government reforms or something, precisely because no one is all that scandalized by such things any more. Instead, he is trying to strangle the links that make the conspiracy possible, to expose the necessary porousness of the American state’s conspiratorial network in hopes that the security state will then try to shrink its computational network in response, thereby making itself dumber and slower and smaller.

Early responses seem to indicate that Wikileaks is well on its way to accomplishing some of its goals. As Simon Jenkins put it (in a great piece in its own right) “The leaks have blown a hole in the framework by which states guard their secrets.” And if the diplomats quoted by Le Monde are right that, “we will never again be able to practice diplomacy like before,” this is exactly what Wikileaks was trying to do. It’s sort of pathetic hearing diplomats and government shills lament that the normal work of “diplomacy” will now be impossible, like complaining that that the guy boxing you out is making it hard to get rebounds. Poor dears. If Assange is right to point out that his organization has accomplished more state scrutiny than the entire rest of the journalistic apparatus combined, he’s right but he’s also deflecting the issue: if Wikileaks does some of the things that journalists do, it also does some very different things. Assange, as his introductory remarks indicate quite clearly, is in the business of “radically shift(ing) regime behavior.”

http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/julian-assange-and-the-computer-conspiracy-%E2%80%9Cto-destroy-this-invisible-government%E2%80%9D/

that's laughably paranoid bullshit

jenkins is an arch-tory btw. useful to know context of these attacks on the (mostly) normal functions of state. perhaps next time assange should release details of benefit payments. that'd blow the whole conspiracy sky-high.

lol

These leaks are not specifically about the war(s) at all, and most seem to simply be a broad swath of the everyday normal secrets that a security state keeps from all but its most trusted hundreds of thousands of people who have the right clearance. Which is the point: Assange is completely right that our government has conspiratorial functions. What else would you call the fact that a small percentage of our governing class governs and acts in our name according to information which is freely shared amongst them but which cannot be shared amongst their constituency?

this seems pretty retarded to me. secrecy in itself is not conspiratorial. *some stuff* the US government does *is* conspiratorial. but arguing that there should be *no secrets ever* is like really. hold on tight coz this will blow your mind: DOESN'T ASSANGE ACT IN SECRET??!!??!

history mayne OTM. for god's sake, let's say a diplomat talking to foreign leader expresses distrust or dislike of another foreign leader. this might be done to curry favor or create a false sense of shared goals/problems, but it also might be nothing more than real talk. the point is, it's exactly the kind of thing that can't take place out in the open, where the stakes are high and there's no point in offending powerful people without reason. this is not "conspiracy" in any meaningful sense. it's simply the division between public and private applied to the human beings that compose governments.

if diplomats and political leaders feel that they can't communicate privately without risk of exposure, they will simply begin doing more and more of their business off the record, thus truly conspiring to keep secrets. this isn't to say that conspiracies, deceit and corruption don't exist in governments, but attempting to destroy all privacy in government hardly seems the best way to fight against its worst abuses. i'd much rather see those who find real evidence of wrongdoing leak that.

that particular irony has already been noted

xp

assange pic reminds me of
http://camaholic.net/emma.gif

stop it

stop stop stop

delete pic forever

wtf!?!

holy lol

who is the dude

down boy