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

is it me or does it seem pretty clear that he turned himself in and the media just doesn't want to report that? hard to believe one could be "arrested" "by appointment"... wtf is that? the incompetence of the media is one of the main arguments in support of assange/wikileaks at this point...

Am pretty sure he's been staying at the Frontline Club this whole time.

the bbc website is not the best for facts, it's true

that arrest may just be the kind of arrested you get when you volunteer for questioning by turning up at the police station at the agreed time. it's basically done to give you rights and protect you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXbCwq4ewBU

love the fake american accents!

i didn't realise the frontline club had rooms! maybe he slept on the floor.

Man, I can't wait for the porn parody movie about this. Ass angel, leaks? :-/

I can't wait for the leaks that show how the US is puppetmaster for the Swedes on this

how will you react when they occur?

a little endzone dance

Oh no, arrested! Does this mean this insurance.aes256 file I downloaded months ago will explode now?

From the Daily Mail:

They argue that the whole squalid affair is a sexfalla, which translates loosely from the Swedish as a ‘honeytrap’.

um so now mastercard and visa have blocked payments to wikileaks? wtf!?

What's the precedent for this? Do credit card companies maintain a substantial blacklist? (I have no idea) I can see them blocking payments to child porn sites without hesitation, what about Canad1an V1agra Pharmacy or Pirate Bay?

I get that this ignores the whole "Wikileaks isn't doing anything illegal" argument, just trying to find out how common this kind of thing is.

Yeah, it's alwo the first time a Swiss bank has ever cared where money came from, imo.

they used a technicality in the paperwork

more
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11937110

comment from that Daily Mail article.

This is the most boring story I have ever read in my whole life.
- Dan Hutchin-Plsung, Burnley Lancs, 07/12/2010 09:18
Click to rate Rating 219

classic!

i can see how refusing bail makes sense though

the incompetence of the media is one of the main arguments in support of assange/wikileaks at this point...

― ╭∩╮⎝⏠⏝⏠⎠╭∩╮ (jeff), Tuesday, December 7, 2010 5:58 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

its more than incompetence, the media is genuinely pissed at this guy, somewhat cause hes another amateur trespassing on their territory (lol blogs etc), and a lot because hes exposing them for the credulous animals they are

Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard: "The foundation stone of it is an illegal act, information was taken and that was illegal."

the deliberate elision here is immense, and completely shameful

independent tomorrow no doubt to feature lengthy pilger article about how israel is to blame

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2010/12/06/natpkg.lister.wikileaks.cnn?hpt=T1

"What you need to know about WikiLeaks" carefully avoids telling you anything you ~really~ need to know about wikileaks

one of the args against wikileaks is kind of persuasive, and that is that their M.O. is doing these giant, undirected data dumps rather than doing, say, reporting around a particular issue in the data - an injustice of some kind - and then releasing that, along with the pertinent data. but they don't do that. so individual issues of injustice or what have you just get swallowed in the mountains of other stuff and none of it gets any traction. i can sympathize with trad news orgs who are like "dude, you're doing it wrong"

in that case said organizations should consider doing the reporting themselves

Well the Wiki part of it is that they're expecting/hoping people will sort through it all and find the good stuff. That's how the whole site's set up, so you can tag and share significant things.

TH---you're right about wikileaks "doing it wrong," maybe, but i don't get what you mean by "arguments against." against....what? their continued existence? their legal status as "journalists"? just because wikileaks did it wrong doesn't mean that they should be singled out for special treatment in the legal sphere.

trad news orgs are also "doing it wrong" so

one of the args against wikileaks is kind of persuasive, and that is that their M.O. is doing these giant, undirected data dumps rather than doing, say, reporting around a particular issue in the data - an injustice of some kind - and then releasing that, along with the pertinent data. but they don't do that. so individual issues of injustice or what have you just get swallowed in the mountains of other stuff and none of it gets any traction. i can sympathize with trad news orgs who are like "dude, you're doing it wrong"

this IS what he's doing, but that doesn't mean it isn't journalism. It's just really shitty journalism. Internet takes once august profession and makes it shitty SHOCKAH

wikileaks is not journalism! it is intended to be a permanent repository for leaked, sensitive information, no more, no less.

gbx i mean as an argument against the effectiveness of their methods, not whether what they're doing is legal (which it is, i'm pretty sure)

timing and context is a huge part of getting a story to "stick" and the only context for such reporting at this stage is "this was part of the wikileaks document dump". many trad news orgs ARE building up entire issue pieces based on these cables but not only are individual revelations buried in the mass of themselves, the assange drama overshadows them as well.

i think this was once referred to in the old, decrepit, discredited world of newsgathering as "don't become the story"

wikileaks is not journalism! it is intended to be a permanent repository for leaked, sensitive information, no more, no less

i mean, that's fine and i get that, but it's fair game to wonder whether this is an effective model for actually getting crucial information to the public

it's journalism in the legal sense, it's protected by the law

which should be pretty self-evident to any American lawyer, but unsurprisingly that's too much to expect of our elected officials

I wonder how many encrypted secret "whatever you do, don't let him go" wires were sent this morning.

what's interesting, too, is how the sheer magnitude of what wikileaks is capable of, in the technical sense, is what breaks pundits/politicians ability to see it as journalism. i've just suffered through some CNN videos and op-eds and you have ppl that would say "yes well of course journalists should do their job and be a check on gov't and expose corruption woodward/bernstein ya ya ya but c'mon the guy released two hundred fifty thousand cables!! and they're hosted on servers all over the world, where anybody can just read them!"

its almost as if our old protections were granted grudgingly because the authorities (whoever) knew that the spread of information operated at a very human rate, and that stray copies of documents typically numbered in the dozens. but ffs if tens of thousands of ppl are sitting on insurance.aes256 its a bit of a game changer.

79 according to wikileaks
xp

wikileaks is not journalism! it is intended to be a permanent repository for leaked, sensitive information, no more, no less

there's already a place for that:

http://cryptome.org

tracer, tipsy makes an excellent point:

Well the Wiki part of it is that they're expecting/hoping people will sort through it all and find the good stuff. That's how the whole site's set up, so you can tag and share significant things.

― a tenth level which features a single castle (tipsy mothra), Tuesday, December 7, 2010 10:23 AM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark

ideally, WL would function as a resource FOR journalists/interested members of the public.

i mean, i still have never even looked around the site! all the stuff from the cables that i've heard has been from traditional news sources cuz, you know, i don't want to go sifting through it all.

there's already a place for that:

http://cryptome.org

― progressive cuts (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, December 7, 2010 11:39 AM (38 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

there can be more than one place for that its ok

look the govt's are all just freaked because there's no readily identifiable "gatekeepers" in these scenarios anymore - the scale doesn't allow it. they find the prospect of dealing with a bunch of anonymous idiots much more terrifying than dealing with a handful of publishers, who represented a known quantity and could be leaned on/negotiated with/cajoled/bribed, etc

xp

just sayin like

in either case, i've always been pretty skeptical of the whole web 2.0 "do our work for us" media model

"gatekeepers" (i.e. artisans) do more than hold back information, they present it in a way that has an impact

or at least they should

i'm just a little worried that if "well wikileaks isn't REAL journalism" gains traction as a salient point in the unfolding fiasco (and it isn't one, TH, sorry), that it will be leveraged by lawmakers as a way to ram draconian anti-internet legislation through.

i think this was once referred to in the old, decrepit, discredited world of newsgathering as "don't become the story"

― progressive cuts (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, December 7, 2010 11:29 AM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

it is you know the old, decrepit, discredited world of news gathering that decides what becomes the story - painting dude as a preening media whore while covering the wikileaks story 1mx more than the content of the leaks is somewhat rich

like i don't really care if wikileaks and blogs are bad journalism (i prefer the old-fashioned stuff, like you), they serve a purpose. and if a false legal distinction is made between anonymous wags on the internet and noble reporters in the newspaper, then we're heading for trouble.

haha cr?m i'm not saying that trad news orgs are covering this particularly well!

gbx what purpose do you think these particular cable leaks serve? or purposeS, if you like. speaking for myself, i think they COULD have served many specific purposes - shining a light on US relations with Yemen, for example - but it's pretty clear that their M.O. has diluted the impact of that potential purpose - perhaps even defused it as an issue - which is a shame

you know what, i'm really less interested in an inverted pyramid with a few culled quotes from interviews than i am in reading transcripts of those interviews. depends on the kind of story, sure. i really don't like this idea that the journalist sheds light but a data dump is... too much light to handle? maybe, maybe not, in both cases

ugh, i really don't want to watch it again, but CNN had some talking head ish between mccain's one-time campaign advisor (a brunette lady with v white teeth) and a dude from the guardian, and the mccain lady's way of describing journalism was....revealing.

...and now i can't find it on CNN, but when asked about the reporter's role (w/r/t finding stories in the cables) she said something, and i'm paraphrasing, like "well they've got to go out there and talk to people and understand the issues and explain the issues to their readers." just totally glossed over the bit about journalism reporting the facts.

and i realized that that is kinda how loads and loads of people in america, at least, see the role of journalism. don't tell me what's happening, tell me about ~the issues~. don't say "this is this," tell me what's an issue, what's making people talk.

If the Abu Gharib photos/videos had been dumped instead of a half-dozen selected photos...