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Interview With the Man Behind WikiLeaks
An anonymous reader writes "Julian Assange, the man behind WikiLeaks, explains why he feels it is right to encourage the leaking of secret information. He maintains that the more money an organisation spends on trying to conceal information, the more good it is likely to do if leaked. For Assange, leaked intelligence reveals the true state of governments, their human rights abuses, and their activities, it's what the 'history of journalism is.' On the media's role in making information available to the public, Assange maintains that 'the rest of the world's media is doing such a bad job that a little group of activists is able to release more of that type of information [classified documents] than the rest of the world press combined.'"
I don't know how much of the content at the links below is repeated in TFA, but I thought these were good:
Apologies to those outside the UK or otherwise without access as the second interview is on iPlayer.
(Incidentally, the Guardian also had access to the Afghanistan data, as was mentioned in a previous /. article. Since I have the tabs open, I'll repeat some key links from that here:)
If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar
Many government agencies have inspectors general who are *supposed* to fill that very role. But the problem is that they're rarely independent in any meaningful way, making it highly unlikely that they'll perform any other role than making it *look like* someone is there to do fair investigations. Even at the executive level (in the U.S.) the Attorney General is theoretically supposed to handle such investigations. But who is going to conduct any investigation of the President or his party when he is the very man who appoints (and can fire) them?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
If you want to know why we invaded Iraq, all you need to do is dig around a little. Check out this letter from the PNAC to President Clinton, when Clinton was president. Look at who signed the letter, you have Donald Rumsfeld, John Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz, etc. Bush stacked his administration with members of the PNAC and they shaped his foreign policy. Go read what they wrote, what their ideology was before 9/11, and the way they acted after 9/11 will make sense. They wanted to attack Iraq, and after 9/11 they took advantage of the chance.
Basically it was to get rid of a bad guy, stabilize the region (which is a strategically important region), and intimidate other bad guys. To a degree these goals were effective, they got rid of the 'bad guy,' and they were able to intimidate Syria (another regional 'bad guy') to get out of Lebanon (for a while anyway). Whether it helps to stabilize the region remains to be seen. Iraq has democracy now, for better or for worse. Personally, while I think these are good goals, there were better ways to achieve them, and the end wasn't worth the cost. The administration led by the PNAC was an arrogant bunch.
They weren't hiding any of this if you were paying attention. The marketing speak became about terrorism when they tried to sell it to the American public, and it became about WMD when they tried to sell it to the United Nations. It is also worth remember that, while we didn't find any WMD, pretty near every country who investigated at the time, including US Democrats who voted to authorize the war, believed Saddam had WMD. It is also possible that Saddam himself thought he had WMD; at the time his administration was kind of falling apart and there was a lot of corruption, so people could have been telling him things that weren't true.
Qxe4
They really are - MSNBC reports "this dude said A". And that's it.
The Daily Show reports "this dude said A today, but last month he was saying not A! Further, his entire political position is premised on not A! So when he says A today, he's full of shit".
And that's the sort of analysis we want to hear. The fact that it's also hilarious is a bonus.