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

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

OMG they're onto us, I'm getting virus warnings on this thread! emma.gif apparently

richard dawkins

nfw

WAY

nsfw

omg @ pic

it cannot be unseen

who is the girl

julian assange

am resisting the overwhelming temptation to spam it all over the boards

also I am super mad I am not modding anymore as this would be choice #1 for the next subversive substitution against jjjusten

i have adjusted to the image-damage by deciding that dawkins is v pretty

http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/NewAnswersControllerServlet?boardid=40

oops: Richard Dawkins: pretty?

Ha at the idea Assange reportedly has some sort of super-top secret dangerous dossier of damaging info he could or may have released if arrested or, um, killed. Not only does such a threat make him out to be a standard bad guy extortionist, but it's just hilarious if he actually thinks he's sitting on something so huge that it would elicit some reaction that all manner of bad shit reported on over the past few years somehow didn't manage, considering all the collective shrugging that's (cynically) met all the post-Bush/economic meltdown revelations. OMG, the banks are crooks! The politicians crooked! War kills innocent people!!! We torture!!! The result of these (non-leaked) revelations? Nothing.

What he's sitting on is all the angry, sad, drunk, or horny emails everyone's ever written but never actually sent. He's gonna blow the lid off the WORLD! No more secrets, people.

The man is playing God, I tell you. Playing GOD!!!

him releasing the u.s. compiled list of vulnerable targets is p :-/

NYT:

In a video interview with the BBC, Kristinn Hrafnsson, a spokesman for WikiLeaks, asserted that a leaked American cable, listing infrastructure and facilities outside the United States that are considered critical America's national security and economic health proves that U.S. diplomats have been acting as spies.

Mr. Hrafnsson dismissed criticism that WikiLeaks had aided terrorists by publishing the cable with the list as "a rather lame attempt to spin and draw attention from the real issue here, which is that, in this cable, you can see that the diplomats around the world are asked to gather information about the vulnerabilities of these sites and that seems to go contrary to a very recent declaration by the U.S. State Department that diplomats are not spying."

The cable, however, merely lists factories and installations without making any reference to their vulnerability to attacks and there is no evidence in it that the diplomats did anything other than gather information that was publicly available. That sounds closer to journalism than spying.

I'd better throw out all my Lonely Planets because they contain information about infrastructure and facilities that could be vital to US interests and I don't want to be seen helping THE SPIES -- or wait, are Lonely Planet's brave adventurers the real heroes here, leaking information to the public that the US Government won't dare to do? I'm confused.

Do have to say that it's strange how impressive everyone is taking the extradition requests for this guy re: those Swedish charges vs. the foot dragging on Roman Polanski earlier. Just shows what happens when you piss off every world leader, I guess.

some slight differences in those cases lol

guys bear in mind that these sites weren't collected because they were "vulnerable," they were collected because they were of interest to the State Dept (and the US govt's economic interests as well as it's "security" interests). i could very easily make a list of places like that for the state of MN because, you know, that shit is fucking obvious. i could even make a list of Bad Places For Terrorists To Terrorize and that would be obvious, too. Schools! Overpasses! Power plants!

getting butthurt about this is hand-wringing of the highest order. also, keep in mind: a lot of these "interesting sites" are...not controlled by America! a factory that the state dept is interested in might just have US investors or make shit that goes into US goods---don't think for a minute that we're concerned about protecting these things because we're looking out for US citizens going about their daily business.

moreover, to the snarks pointing out that cablegate, in general, is merely uncovering stuff that is 90% business-as-usual, not at all scandalous, and certainly not worth the crackdown it's likely to elicit from the gov't: think long and hard about what taking that stance means. if yr all "way to go, assange, you just provoked the US govt to crack down over some bullshit" maybe you should be more concerned about the fact that the US govt is poised to crack down....over some bullshit? like, for real, the response these boring yeah what else is new cables is getting from nutjobs like palin and lieberman and harper et al is astonishingly violent and pretty alarming imo

of course the reaction is preposterous and overblown - that's exactly what you can expect from the US gov't, witness the Patriot Act, the invasion of Iraq, Gitmo, etc. That Assange provoked this reaction basically over trivial bullshit speaks volumes about his character/competency. He's an idiot.

like oh good you leaked stuff most people already knew/took for granted and in return we got a gov't crackdown! way to go! Really picking your battles there!

Greenwald is mostly otm:

Just to underscore the climate of lawless initmidation that has been created: before WikiLeaks was on many people's radars (i.e., before the Apache video release), I wrote about the war being waged on them by the Pentagon, interviewed Assange, and urged people to donate money to them. In response, numerous people asked -- both in comments and via email -- whether they would be in danger, could incur legal liability for providing material support to Terrorism or some other crime, if they donated to WikiLeaks. Those were American citizens expressing that fear over an organization which had never been remotely charged with any wrongdoing.

Similarly, I met several weeks ago with an individual who once worked closely with WikiLeaks, but since stopped because he feared that his country -- which has a very broad extradition treaty with the U.S. -- would arrest him and turn him over to the Americans upon request. He knew he had violated no laws, but given that he's a foreigner, he feared -- justifiably -- that he could easily be held by the United States without charges, denied all sorts of basic rights under the Patriot Act, and otherwise be subject to a system of "justice" which recognizes few limits or liberties, especially when dealing with foreigners accused of aiding Terrorists.

All the oppressive, lawless policies of the last decade -- lawless detention, Guantanamo, disappearing people to CIA black sites, rendition, the torture regime, denial of habeas corpus, drones, assassinations, private mercenary forces, etc. -- were designed, first and foremost, to instill exactly this fear, to deter any challenge. Many of these policies continue, and that climate of fear thus endures (see this comment from today as but one of many examples). As the treatment just thus far of WikiLeaks and Assange demonstrates, that reaction -- though paralyzing and counter-productive -- is not irrational. And one thing is for sure: there is nothing the U.S. Government could do -- no matter how lawless or heinous -- which (with rare exception) would provoke the objections of the American establishment media.

yeah pretty much

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.

― phish in your sleazebag (contenderizer), Monday, December 6, 2010 2:24 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

otm