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WikiLeaks 'a Clear and Present Danger,' Says WaPo
bedmison writes "In an op-ed in the Washington Post titled 'WikiLeaks must be stopped,' Marc A. Thiessen writes that 'WikiLeaks represents a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States,' and that the US has the authority to arrest its spokesman, Julian Assange, even if it has to contravene international law to do so. Thiessen also suggests that the new USCYBERCOM be unleashed to destroy WikiLeaks as an internet presence."
Reader praps tips an interview with another WikiLeaks spokesman, Daniel Schmitt, who says they have no regrets about releasing the Afghanistan documents, and says WikiLeaks is "changing the game." Several other readers have pointed out that WikiLeaks posted a mysterious, encrypted "insurance" file on Thursday, which sent the media into a speculative frenzy over what it could possibly contain.
So apparently The Washington Post presents a clear and present danger to public freedom and the accountability of government and industry.
I love that an organization is a danger because it reveals coverups and secrets to ordinary citizens.
"But Pojut, our enemies will use this information against us!"
Well then maybe we shouldn't be doing it in the first place. Doy.
Living With a Nerd
'The US Government is a Clear and Present Danger' says US Citizens
Sounds to me more like the United States is the clear and present danger. Particularly when they claim an authority and yet admit a conflict with international law.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I think it's safe to say that they're more concerned about what Wikileaks will publish in the future. This isn't about putting the cat back into the bag, but about prior restraint of future publication.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
...but Marc Thiessen is downright scary. Secret indictments. Grabbing foreign citizens in other countries against local laws and extradition treaties. Are you kidding, Marc? Want to bring back the Alien and Sedition Acts while you're at it?
I'm not sure that a regime where stuff like this happens is really worth protecting in the name of "national security".
... to the mainstream media who are more interested in printing out press releases than going out and finding news.
haven't you seen star wars? if you strike him down, he will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Dude, Julian Assange is not a Jedi. He won't come back as a ghost after death to advise Luke. If you strike him down, he'll be dead.
And, sure, martyrs can have a power to move opinion that living people lack, but I'm not convinced this is one of those situations.
The clear and present danger doesn't come from *talking* about the actions of the American government, but from the actions themselves.
Newspapers didn't aid the Northern Vietnamese when they published the Pentagon Papers, but instead the Government and Military hurt the America with their secretive and malicious actions in Southeast Asia.
Just the same, releasing more information about the military actions in Afghanistan (especially after taking all possible precautions to prevent harm before release) does not cause injury to the US. It's the actions the US is ashamed to talk about that cause the harm.
"and that the US has the authority to arrest its spokesman, Julian Assange, even if it has to contravene international law to do so"
Interesting interpretation of "international law" and America's opinion of it. No wonder the world hates the US.
One of the major complaints by the gov't was that some of the Afghan informers that were named will now be Taliban targets. Seems an easy way to flush out more Talibs...just set up surveillance on the informers, and wait for the rats to find their way to the cheese...
And yet (without taking a position for/against this leak in specific or WikiLeaks in general), if I'm an Afghan considering becoming an informer, that's sure going to make me think twice about it, especially if I have a family.
Trapping rats is great and all, until someone makes you the cheese without your consent.
Well then maybe we shouldn't be doing it in the first place. Doy.
As long as bad people exist, you will always need to keep certain information secured. Whether you're a government or a citizen. How would you respond if Wikileaks put up your credit card information, bank account numbers, social security number and all your known residences and acquaintances?
I'm not implying that our current scenario is as cut and dried as World War II but how would you react if Wikileaks had been broadcasting over a magical radio station that blanketed the Earth the location of allied forces in 1942? Would you so callously respond that "maybe the Allies shouldn't be doing that in the first place?"
Yes, as an American, I am concerned about the people fighting for my country abroad. I'm not concerned one bit about the politicians and generals, it's the grunts and people out in the field that could suffer from this. And most of all the people helping those forces by giving them intelligence. War is not a cover-up. It has necessary secrets. It has since Roman times and it will continue to as long as humans exist. You know the names and locations of people informing American forces about where the Taliban are needs to be classified. At this point it's not even using this information against me sitting at home in comfort but about the people in Afghanistan and their safety.
My work here is dung.
Hence the insurance file. Presumably that encrypted file would contain information that the government would want to remain secret more than they would want wikileaks in general silenced.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
And in other news, Joseph Goebbels has written a scathing denunciation of the Jews, and the threat they pose to German society.
Don't blame the Post (entirely) for this opinion piece; they merely published it. It was written by one of Bush and Rummy's chief apologists, an alarmist advocate of martial law.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Eh, my guess is that if it really is an "insurance" file, then someone involved in whatever department the files pertain to has already received the key, decrypted it, and knows exactly what it is. After all, if you really want to blackmail someone, you don't benefit from keeping the information secret from the person you're trying to blackmail. "I have 1.4GB of very sensitive information but I won't tell you what it is" isn't going to be particularly persuasive when you're trying to stop someone from coming after you. On the other hand, "I have 1.4GB of very sensitive information, it's already on thousands or millions of people's computers, and here's the key so you can see what it really is" carries an awful lot of weight if it's really something you don't want people to see. And the beauty of posting it in encrypted form is that if whoever holds this particular insurance policy decides to call it into effect, the US government has to prevent not the dissemination of a 1.4GB file (which would be nigh-well impossible anyways) but a 256 bit key, and we've all seen how well trying to stop people from sharing a single hexadecimal string worked out for the HD-DVD folks ;) Of course, there's also the danger that the public could get together and crack your key with distributed computing, and then you lose your leverage...
Horse shit. Their ink, their paper, their website, their responsibility.
It's all well and good to play both sides of the political theater, but ultimately anything they choose to print is endorsed by the entire organization, two line legal blurb or no.
Isn't the death rate already well over 100% due to them killing suspected informers whom aren't informers?
You're looking at the math from the wrong end.
If I'm a potential informant, one of my probable goals is not to reduce the death rates of informants overall; it is to reduce the death rates of specifically me.
Regardless of how often the Taliban murders false positives, if my name has a good chance of being leaked to the world if I inform, my risk goes up a lot if I inform.
According to The Register, there is a huge encrypted file up on wikileaks now, called 'insurance.' The US goes after wikileaks or Julian Assange, the key to that file goes out to the world. And according to Assange, everything dangerous was redacted out of the Afghanistan documents. Cryptome's John Young speculates that the 'insurance' file contains all the redacted bits.
Ah, like the redacted bits involving the names of informants and other such things that, if they got out, would cause irreparable harm without doing a single bit of good? Meaning, if at some point Assange doesn't get his way, he threatens to blackmail the war efforts? I mean, the data Wikileaks already gave shows current military failures and could be construed as dangerous to a wide, faceless entity and effort, but as an act of vengeance, he's willing to knowingly and directly put named individuals in mortal danger and ruin trust built up by putting up data which had a very fair assumption that it would be kept secret?
So what you're saying is Assange isn't some hero. He's not some revolutionary or the new messiah or something. He's not even a troll, aiming to get a rise out of the government. He's an immature, blackmailing asshole who's willing to send people to death to prove whatever point he's trying to make.
I'm impressed. We found someone worse than Zuckerberg. At least Zucky doesn't hold peoples' lives at stake for teh lulz. Thanks. You've showed me what sort of a brat this guy really is.
For those of you who've forgotten this fellow, he's a former Bush speechwriter and author of the terribly misleading "Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack".
The New Yorker did a piece on that book, investigating some of the claims made within and revealing many to be clearly false. Basically the book was a defense of "enhanced interrogation". One claim that I recall off the top of my head is that information obtained by the CIA through enhanced interrogation was instrumental in preventing a conspiracy to hijack several planes flying from London in 2006. Yet according to the head of Scotland Yard's anti-terrorism unit, all the intelligence involved was gathered in the uk. Thiessen's version of events is flatly contradicted.
This guy has been one of the primary fonts of misinformation and foolishness in the media since then. He has no credibility, and should be regarded only as a bellwether of neoconservative opinion.
WikiLeaks is in its essence just a Wiki site. A web site. It's clear that publishing text is in no way unique to that site, you can do it on any site. Hopefully the government isn't saying that free communication is the real threat to national security.
WikiLeaks didn't commit any of the acts in the leaked documents, it wasn't their job or responsibility for keeping those documents secret, and they didn't leak the documents from their origin: some unknown source did on their own will, and sent them to WikiLeaks.
All WikiLeaks did was take those documents, make a cursory check of authenticity, and publish them.
Of course, by doing so, they become an easy target for people who are willing to turn heads away from the actual problems that lead to projects like WikiLeaks, and instead blame the messenger.
The real problem (for certain people) is that WikiLeaks is now a vivid symbol nurturing an environment where people may not simply do something because it was ordered from above, and especially if it's in conflict with basic human rights and morals.
But by loudly blaming WikiLeaks for the created situation, they only serve to further strengthen the very symbol they want to destroy. Somewhat ironic. As long as WikiLeaks is on everyone's target, and not their anonymous sources, more and more whistle-blowers will choose to trust them with their data.
Lets assume something completely crazy for a moment: that there really is information that ought to be kept secret. for example, launch codes for nukes. let's continue with the mental exercise so far as to say other facts may similarly be in the legitimate national interest to conceal. I'll even give you that in some rare cases, THE TRUTH may be so shocking / valuable / topical / money making that that PUBLIC INTEREST demands disclosure. so, bobby, wtf is the one new thing you learnt from this leak? seriously? whats the one new piece of public interest type of info that you got from this? I sure as hell havent seen anything new. and why on earth couldnt someone have just REDACTED THE NAMES AND ADDRESSES of the informers?
Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so.
The documents contain identities of Afghans who are providing information to us about the Taliban. The Taliban have issued a press release promising to extract the names from the documents and kill our sources.
There can be no question that WikiLeaks has done evil here - and not against American or NATO forces, but against Afghan civilians who merely wish to remain free of Taliban dictatorship.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Let's keep it straight just who has blood on their hands.
Doctors Without Borders was in Afghanistan for 30 years, running rural health clinics and supporting and teaching Afghani doctors and nurses. They treated everyone without regard to who they were affiliated with or which side they were on. Their medical clinics were one of the few neutral areas in Afghanistan, respected by everyone, where guns were not permitted.
After the U.S. invasion, Colin Powell moved in a lot of U.S. medical charity workers, and referred to medical workers as "force extenders." The U.S. passed out fliers telling villagers that if they joined the American side and turned in the Taliban, they would get all kinds of benefits, including medical services.
That politicized medical services in Afghanistan. Doctors Without Borders was no longer safe, and had to leave the country. I read an account in which a German obstetrician was crying and refused to leave her patients -- Afghanistan has one of the highest infant and maternal death rates in the world -- and her supervisor had to order her to leave. It was too dangerous.
The other problems like checkpoints manned by soldiers who didn't speak the local language, and killed civilian families who didin't understand their orders, is too much to get into here.
The Bush Administration has blood on its hands. Thiessen was George W. Bush's speechwriter. Thiessen has blood on his hands.
Thiessen is arguing that we should ignore international law. He's using the logic of terrorists.
Wikileaks only posts leaks. The leaks have already happened. Someone, somewhere in the organisation has decided that it's worth risking their job and their liberty over to get this information out, and since they have access to classified information, they must realise that by providing it to wikileaks, everyone will have access to it.
So what would happen if wikileaks didn't exist? Would the leakers simply not leak, or would they leak to the media? Or to the countries that the US is at war with? Do they leak because they get a thrill of being the whistleblower, oblivious to the dangers? I think it's much more important to understand the motives than to try to close down a website.
But only CORRECTLY classified works. 99% of the classified works are incorrectly marked classified to hide malfeasance or just plain incompetency.
See, for example, ACTA.
And that oft-repeated slogan is also oft-derided here on Slashdot as a ridiculous notion that flies in the face of the very concept of privacy, and the fact that some things really should remain private.
How about the Taliban saying they're going to target Afghan people named in the documents as providing intelligence to US forces? Are you okay with those people being killed? Are you okay with the chilling effect this will undoubtedly have on people's willingness to cooperate and provide intelligence to the military, when intelligence is one of the critical components to ending an insurgency? Let's be honest, the Taliban pretty much knows where the Americans are - they're the guys in the Hummvees. I don't think these documents are going to have much of an effect on the Taliban forces knowing "the locations of American soldiers." I think it's going to have a HUGE effect on the willignness of Afghan civilians to work with the military, which means: more people dead - Afghan & American.
I'm sick of hearing about how the American military is "committing atrocities" as if that's the only thing that's happening over there from mindless, knee-jerk "america is always evil" fuckwits who think that exposing sensitive documents with the equivalent of a MS Word "find and replace" command on a few "arabic-sounding names" constitutes "reasonable efforts at harm prevention." I'm also sick of hearing about Julian Assange's smug, twattish response that the military is to blame for putting those names in classified fucking documents, so it's not his fault that the names got leaked.
If there is evidence in those documents that "atrocities" have been committed, they absolutely should hold the military accountable. That doesn't justify the widespread dissemination of those documents to anybody who wants to take a look without a serious, legitimate attempt at vetting the documents to minimize harm to innocent people named in the reports by people who actually understand what the fuck they're reading.
...for repeating the "nothing new here" line.
Then there's known facts vs what the media bothers to report vs what's common knowledge.
Examples:
None of this things would be "new" news, but it would be news if the media started talking about them.
Not revealing secrets can be even more dangerous.
If someone throws you in prison and rapes or tortures you daily would you prefer that the world never found out about it? .....oh! you mean it's ok as long as it's someone else on the other side who's getting raped,tortured or killed?
that it was never stopped?
If a family member of yours was shot because some idiot thought his camera was a gun would you prefer they kept it secret?
You may as well say 'they could put the pyromaniac in prison, but that wouldn't prevent someone else from coming along and setting a fire.' Or 'we could plug the leak in the boat, but that wouldn't prevent another leak from occurring sometime later.'
There is basically nothing, aside from publicity, preventing him from being black-bagged by some three-letter-agency and never heard from again.
Aside from a pissed-off US government, I'd also worry about someone acting outside the realm of government direction (pissed-off Taliban sympathizers, etc.) deciding they want to find out what intel Assange is sitting on and just grabbing him off the street without concern for the consequences.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Please give me all your personal information, bank account numbers, credit card numbers and any other information I need to drain your bank accounts dry and order services as if I was you.
Post them as a reply to this and share them with all of slashdot if you have nothing to hide.
What? You do have something to hide and fear by letting the information out?
If you're going to use that battle cry you better have your information freely and publicly available or your nothing nor than an ignorant hypocrite.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
ah, yes, but then you have to gamble that the secrets which you hold are damaging enough that they'll consider leaving you alone (and keeping the secrets safe) to be the best option. (Or, that once they know what it is, they won't work to smother it before it even gets out.)
If you don't tell them what the secret is, then you can let their imaginations run wild as to exactly how damaging it is - they know all the secrets already, and have to gamble how far up the scale the one (or ones) you have is (or are).
The other option, of course, is to use a hybrid approach, and have within the file one damaging secret, and another encrypted file which has the others in it. This leaves them aware that you genuinely have damaging secrets, but leaves them guessing as to what else there is waiting to be released. Or give them 3 or 4 different samples which have clearly come from different sources, so they can't be sure that only one source has been compromised (and pin down the extent of the damage).
FGD 135
I really need to write a check to Wikileaks. And EFF. And ACLU. This liberty thing could get expensive, what with us having to fund the fight against the people who we elected to uphold it, who are also using our money.
All those purple thumbs sure were epic catastrophes.
All those purple thumbs voting in yet another Islamic government whose first step was to declare Sharia law, and will inevitably take the guns and bombs we gave them and use them against us when they declare jihad on us, yet again.
Which I guess is an EPIC WIN if all you care about is your stock in KBR. To the rest of us, it looks like you're a fucking idiot who pretends history doesn't exist because it doesn't agree with your masters' spin.
We're going to be right back where we are now, replacing the "president" of Iraq by force in a couple of decades. Assuming Iran doesn't do it first.
There's one reason why this is a poor method of insurance. Suppose there's somebody out there with an even bigger axe to grind than Assange, who will stop at nothing to get the contents of this "insurance" file released. With over six billion people in the world, and a substantial number of them having a beef with the U.S., it's not beyond the realms of possibility.
The implication here is that if something happens to Assange, then the key gets released. So, it logically follows that if you want the key to be released.......
(For my own safety, I have no interest in the contents of that file. And while I personally think Julian Assange is a self-righteous ass, I don't wish physical harm on him or any of the other people involved with Wikileaks.)
Depraved Indifference: "to bring defendant's conduct within the murder statute, that the defendant's act was imminently dangerous and presented a very high risk of death to others and that it was committed under circumstances which evidenced a wanton indifference to human life or a depravity of mind. . . . . The crime differs from intentional murder in that it results not from a specific, conscious intent to cause death, but from an indifference to or disregard of the risks attending defendant's conduct."
I hope for Julian Assange's sake that no Afghani or Iraqi informants are killed because someone figured out from the unredacted information who the informants are. His releasing of this information directly led to these informant's death.
Step back out of the land of speculation. What is known about the insurance file:
* It's 1.4 GB
* It's encrypted with AES-256
* If anybody has the key they haven't published it.
What you can reasonably infer: It's information the gov. doesn't want released, providing Assange with "insurance".
Unless you have AES-256 goggles that let you peer through the encryption I would hesitate to comment in further detail on the contents of the file and therefore the moral character of the man who published it.
that video shows soldiers killing kids and reporters for the hell of it.
Actually, that's what the editors wanted you to see. Here's what I saw and heard:
There is nothing in the tape to indicate intent to kill photographers, or knowledge that kids were in the van. There is certainly nothing that indicates they did it for the hell of it. Please point out where you find this.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
It's a brilliant documentary, but times have changed. And changed in a big way.
One of the best things in the documentary, was when the US government got a court injunction to prevent the publication of a US Newspaper.
That was how they tried to plug the leaks.
In an amazing display of journalism doing its job, other newspapers collectively put their heads on the block, and took over the release of information.
As the government shut one down, another would step up and take over.
It was like a pre-internet version of whack-a-mole, but with potentially very very serious consequences for each of the news papers involved, including their owners, editors, CEO's.
You simply wouldn't see that today. Murdoch put his neck on the line to release damaging papers criticising the war? You must be mad.
That is why we need wikileaks.
Resolution 1441 does NOT authorise use of force.
Nor did the 1991 resolution that led to the first Iraq war. There is some contention that 1441 did not specifically authorize war. France argued that "serious consequences" doesn't mean war. We'll never know, because no further UN action was taken from that point.
Or to put it another way, the UN has no pull if they don't actually back up what they say with action. If we told Iraq "or else be faced with serious consequences" then not give them serious consequences, why even have a UN?