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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.
They could only publish it if they were getting the acceptable, authorized leaks which told them so.
"Lost time is not found again."
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
Julian? Sure, he's the face of WL, but that would not stop the signal.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
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/
This wasn't the Washington Post saying this, it was a columnist who writes a weekly column for the Post. Saying that the Post says this is like attributing George Will's tirades to the Post. The Post publishes opeds from all over the political spectrum that may or may not reflect the editorial stance of the Post. Thiessen is a right-winger from the American Enterprise Institute. If you want to get pissed at someone, get pissed at the AEI, not the Post.
No sig? Sigh...
...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.
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)
Isn't "Clear and Present Danger" the terminology used to justify Executive Orders to assassinate someone Without Remorse? The Washington Post is playing Patriot Games. I think we owe Wikileaks a Debt of Honor.
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.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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...
This is neither about putting the cat back into the bag nor about preventing future leaks. This is about responding by doing something , regardless of whether or not that something that must be done is justified, legal, pragmatic, ethical, or effective.
Reacting has become the solitary goal of politicians...to take some kind of action when their constituents feel threatened, regardless of whether that action is appropriate, or if there even exists any action whatsoever is appropriate.
Cases in point:
The TSA
The War on Terrorism
Warrantless Wiretapping
The War on Drugs
MADD
Felony Time for Personal Drug Use
Religion
The Pledge of Allegiance
The Witchhunt to Determine Who Killed Michael Jackson
Laws Banning Assisted Suicide
Censorship of (insert media here)
Laws Against Flag Burning
The RIAA
The MPAA
etc.
etc.
etc.
It's a tragedy of this fully-padded, 100% sterilized, risk-free, instant-gratification, 24/7-connected dreamworld that we are increasingly inhabiting that there has to be an immediate cure for every evil. People no longer accept that sometimes the best action is no action at all.
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.
Presumably that encrypted file would contain information that the government would want to remain secret more than they would want wikileaks in general silenced.
So obviously the file must contain highly sensitive copyrighted works like the music for next year's Disney pop star lineup. The economic damage from piracy of that magnitude could destroy the world economy 300 times over.
Brilliant move on Wikileak's part. Who in the US government will care about our minor military secrets when the RIAA's profits are at risk?
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.
Thiessen didn't just work for Bush, Helms and Rumsfeld. He was spokesman for and senior policy advisor to Helms, when the ancient and decrepit Helms was in charge of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee 1995-2001. He moved with Rumsfeld to the top of the Pentagon as his chief speechwriter 2001-2004, then to Bush's speechwriting team, becoming its chief in 2008.
He's "a well regarded pundit and speechwriter in Conservative circles" in that he was among the people most responsible for starting the Iraq War (as they'd planned through the 1990s), for ignoring the threats from the Qaeda in Afghanistan (because they cared only about invading Iraq), for running both wars as epic catastrophes while attacking everyone questioning them as a "clear and present danger" to America's security.
The Washington Post publishes columns by Thiessen because his radical rightwing warmonger faction is the Post's board's favorite tiny sliver of Americans. Who always get whatever they want, especially wars.
--
make install -not war
Two of the most recent wiki leaks (Collateral damage and Afghan War diary) are examples of not strategic information but examples of information that shows that the wrong things are done in the wrong places and in the wrong way.
One of those tells us that the strategic efforts of the USA in the war were wrong in many ways; the other tells us that civilians were killed by a psycho that was imploring to kill civilians.
I don’t see how this can be of any use to an “enemy” if this is just a report of things your enemy knows but you don't.
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.
As long as bad people exist, you will always need to keep certain information secured
As long as bad people exist, you will always need to know what your government is doing in your name. Any solution to any problem which amounts to "trust the government to do the right thing" is wrong.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
He isn't a US citizen, so, is he breaking any Australian laws by publishing US state secrets? If not, then publishing more state secrets is not a crime either. He has not made any statements about the contents or use of the 'insurance' file, so it would be hard to pin extortion on him.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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.
"In the territory of the Third Reich, we should presume he would have similarly exposed Jews, without concerning himself with their fate. If not, perhaps Jewish lives are more sacred to him than Afghan lives?"
Ever heard the term "straw man"?
He's generally anti authoritarian so he'd more likely be leaking the locations of nazi generals who went into hiding and V2 plans.
Believe it or not wikileaks did make an effort to redact sensitive information.
To propose a similar strawman, if wikileaks doesn't care about afghans who could be killed by the taliban does that mean you don't care about afghans have been killed by US army fuckups?
Would the world be a better place if the military knew it could get away with slaughtering civilians without getting caught?
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?
Yeah, but that's not what they're doing, is it? Wikileaks isn't actually doing anything that our journalists wouldn't be doing, if they had the integrity to do their damned jobs.
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.
Why isn't the US military just as evil or even more so for putting the names in the documents in the first place?
And remember that those who aided and abetted the US military can hardly be considered innocent civilians -- to the occupied, they are fifth colonists or worse: Quislings.
No, the brunt of the responsibility rests firmly on the shoulder of the US military, politicians and voters here:
1: For using civilians in the war effort.
2: For making notes that identify them.
3: For not safeguarding those notes, making a leak possible.
Against those travesties, the disclosure of a redacted subset of those notes is negligible.
Face it, it's all about lost face at this point, and taking out revenge at the whistleblower and his or her associates. Revenge and anger and two of the few things my country, 'tis of thee, are good at.
FLOG the impertinent child who dare to say that the emperor has no clothes. He's directly responsible for people's anger when being exposed to the truth! If someone throws a rock at the emperor's haberdasher as a result, it's clearly the evil child's fault! Shoot the messenger; off with his head!
Do any of you young folk remember a man by the name of Daniel Ellsberg? If not, please take a little bit of your time and look up a movie called "The Most Dangerous Man in America". For more information please visit the Internet Movie Database at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1319726/.
Daniel Ellisberg was the man who leaked what has become known as "The Pentagon Papers". He was the first man to be charged under the Espionage Act, with results that the administration did not intend. He never spent a minute in jail. The documentary of his actions came out last year (2009).
Here is a little breakdown of the story:
"The Most Dangerous Man in America" is the story of what happens when a former Pentagon insider, armed only with his conscience, steadfast determination, and a file cabinet full of classified documents, decides to challenge an "Imperial" Presidency-answerable to neither Congress, the press, nor the people-in order to help end the Vietnam War. In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg shook America to its foundations when he smuggled a top-secret Pentagon study to the New York Times that showed how five Presidents consistently lied to the American people about the Vietnam War that was killing millions and tearing America apart. President Nixon's National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger called Ellsberg "the most dangerous man in America," who "had to be stopped at all costs." But Ellsberg wasn't stopped. Facing 115 years in prison on espionage and conspiracy charges, he fought back. Ensuing events surrounding the so-called Pentagon Papers led directly to Watergate and the downfall of President Nixon, and hastened the end of the Vietnam War. Ellsberg's relentless telling of truth to power, which exposed the secret deeds of an "Imperial Presidency," inspired Americans of all walks of life to forever question the previously-unchallenged pronouncements of its leaders. "The Most Dangerous Man in America" tells the inside story, for the first time on film, of this pivotal event that changed history and transformed our nation's political discourse. It is told largely by the players of that dramatic episode-Ellsberg, his colleagues, family and critics; Pentagon Papers authors and government officials; Vietnam veterans and anti-war activists; Watergate principals, attorneys and the journalists who both covered the story and were an integral part of it; and finally-through White House audiotapes-President Nixon and his inner circle of advisors.
Documentary is available at Megavideo: http://www.megavideo.com/?d=6VI4M5CC
I look at all these relics of the Nixon administration that got us into this, and can't help but think . . . as much as I have to believe that Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon in good faith, so much of their actions seems to me to indicate that they took that pardon as a validation of the kind of imperial presidency Nixon sought to create. "If he had been *wrong*, then why would Ford have pardoned him?" goes the rationalization in my mind.
And I have to wonder, are we going to be dealing with these fools again in another 30 years. McCarthy begat Nixon, Nixon begat Cheney, Cheney begat . . . Yoo, Thiesen, Gonzales, Bush himself . . . another cabal of contemporaries determined to rewrite history after the fact, to show the world "No . . . we were *right* and we will prove it to you" again in thirty years.
We can't keep having this "Well, politics is politics" attitude that pardons and covers for the crimes of an administration as Obama and the Media has done here. We need to make sure that the historical record is clear that these people are war criminals.
Or we're going to go through this again in a generation.
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media