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US Intelligence Planned To Destroy WikiLeaks
An anonymous reader writes "This document is a classified (SECRET/NOFORN), 32-page US counterintelligence investigation into WikiLeaks (PDF). 'The possibility that current employees or moles within DoD or elsewhere in the US government are providing sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.org cannot be ruled out.' It concocts a plan to fatally marginalize the organization. Since WikiLeaks uses 'trust as a center of gravity by protecting the anonymity and identity of the insiders, leakers or whistleblowers,' the report recommends 'The identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could potentially damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions from using the Wikileaks.org Web site.' [As two years have passed since the date of the report, with no WikiLeaks' source exposed, it appears that this plan was ineffective.] As an odd justification for the plan, the report claims that 'Several foreign countries including China, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe have denounced or blocked access to the Wikileaks.org website.' The report provides further justification by enumerating embarrassing stories broken by WikiLeaks — US equipment expenditure in Iraq, probable US violations of the Chemical Warfare Convention Treaty in Iraq, the battle over the Iraqi town of Fallujah and human rights violations at Guantanamo Bay."
When a government serves its own purposes it cannot serve its citizens.
I think that's a false dichotomy. Similar to your subject line.
... so historically there have been very clever tyrants to embrace the big freedoms and squash the tiny ones that matter to them. And that, in my opinion, is what China is doing. They don't hate freedom and I find personifying things like tyranny, terror and information saying that they hate, love or want is very detrimental to arguments.
Look at China. It's own purposes overlap the needs of its people. It needs to artificially manipulate the value of its money for many reasons. Some for its own purposes, some for the betterment of some of the citizens. Now look at China again for your subject line. Yeah, absolute freedom is impossible with a tyrant running the country. And your likely to have more freedom in a republic. But you never have absolute freedom anyway in a group larger than one.
I would rephrase your subject to read "Tyranny Often Finds Freedom Annoying" and since tyrants have complete control by definition, they often just get rid of the freedoms. And then there would be a revolution or something
The war that began in the 60s has finally come to an end, and it looks like all the players switched sides.
It's great purple prose but it's kind of erroneous. That's a great one liner there but I would have preferred a lengthy paragraph on COINELPRO in today's contexts.
These 200 odd years were certainly a nice time.
And cut the goddamn fake apathy for crying out loud. Man up and speak about it to your friends and family ...
My work here is dung.
Would you prefer that the torture at Guantanamo had been kept secret?
Thanks! Generally I agree with you, I just would rather people made a list whenever they say secrecy is necessary, so they could perhaps see how much their government is overstepping their own list.
Well, there are classified documents and unclassified documents. I can work with either. You can't.
I'm a military contractor, and the work on a daily basis is on unclassified documents. That makes it easy to work with. I can email the documents, throw them on an FTP server to transfer back east, or have a working copy on my hard drive plus a backup (or 50) on the server. Realistically, nobody's going to care if someone find out that hey, we use this type of wire, or that, ooh, that cable runs from this box to that box. There aren't any of those fabled "weak points" that would destroy the thing in one shot. You want to talk about bulletproof design? The military takes that literally.
If you had a valid FOI request, odds are you could get your hands on the plans for the thing. They'd be more interesting than useful, and you'd get a hell of a lot of jiffy marker on them, but you could get them. It might be faster to go to school, get an Engineering degree, and get a job for a military contractor yourself, but you could probably get them.
Some procedures for using the items, or what's inside the mysterious black boxes, or certain protocols, are outside what you are allowed to know. It took me a year to get my security clearance. That doesn't mean I can read any given document with that level -- I also have to have a "need to know". Classified documents require work on a seperate machine, not on the corporate network, and usually require work in pairs. There's a special room that we use to work on the classified documents. Lockboxes, keyed entry, no copies, ugh. File transfer is via ... let's just say it's not electronic because you can't make copies without filling out lots of forms in lotsplicate. It's just easier on everyone if we work with unclassified all the time. (Sometimes, it's just not possible.) That's why I'm not going to read this leak. It'll mean a fucking huge PITA pile of paperwork if I get a classfied document, even a publicly available one, on this machine.
I may read it at home, though. ;)
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.