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Wikileaks Donations Account Shut Down
Scrameustache writes "The whistleblowing group WikiLeaks claims that it has had its funding blocked and that it is the victim of financial warfare by the US government. Moneybookers, a British-registered internet payment company that collects WikiLeaks donations, emailed the organisation to say it had closed down its account because it had been put on an official US watchlist and on an Australian government blacklist. The apparent blacklisting came a few days after the Pentagon publicly expressed its anger at WikiLeaks and its founder, Australian citizen Julian Assange, for obtaining thousands of classified military documents about the war in Afghanistan."
The US military whistle blowers would have been MUCH better off going to the Project on Government Oversight, an organization which has a history of helping whistle blowers get out their stories and keep them out of jail. Other than continuing to link to Wikileaks and give them publicity, I have no clue as to how to help them.
Im not totally on Wikileaks side because they didn't take enough care to protect peoples names in the content they released.
They held back 15 thousand pages to protect people's names while they tried to sort through them. Google it.
They asked the pentagon to tell them which name to remove, the pentagon told them to go to hell.
Its one thing to release content for the world to see but its another thing to get people killed by releasing it with out at least removing names.
They did remove names, and they got no one killed. Try to find someone they got killed: You can't. The people who said they were gonna get people killed are the people who actively do indeed actually kill real people, have been for years, plan on doing it for years still. They fed you FUD, and you ate it all up.
That totally turned me off from Wikileaks.
Mission accomplished.
You can't take the sky from me...
a problem with pogo.org is they are in inside the US.. so they are subject to National Security letters and gag orders.. if they had gone there - none of this stuff would have made the light of day except as a rumor before it was shut down.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
My feeling exactly. Wikileaks has conflated the public "right to know" with an imaginary "need to know," and decided that this right is more important than the lives of the people named in the documents. IMAO, they've consistently shown a complete lack of common sense and a reckless disregard for the danger they're exposing people to.
You obviously don't know that they held back fifteen thousand pages because they contained names that ma or may not be innocent people. You hate them for something they're not guilty of. You've been successfully manipulated by well crafted propaganda, but don't feel bad, it happens to millions of people every day.
Yes, we all know of times when things have been classified because that's the easiest way to cover up mistakes, and things like that deserve leaking, but leaking the names and locations of people who are helping the US to fight terrorists is Simply Wrong.
And that is why wikileaks did not do that, but the pentagon says they did. So you'll hate them and refuse to listen. And it works sooooo well.
You can't take the sky from me...
Reading, sharing, and publishing classified information is not against the law unless you have a security clearance. Obviously the classified documents passed into the public domain by someone who obtained them by having the proper clearance, and that person (those people) are the ones that should be punished for the release. And if someone without clearance broke into the place where they were stored, they may be guilty of burglary or theft, but the person who failed to physically secure the docs is responsible for the unlawful dissemination of classified information.
If you don't have a security clearance, you are not bound by the rules governing their access. Your access is the result of someone with a clearance (and thus bound by the rules) failing to secure them.
It's like if I reveal trade secrets to someone not employed by my company, they are under no obligation to prevent the spread of those secrets. Since I am employed by that company, I am responsible.
WikiLeaks is doing nothing wrong. They are acting honorably.
AIUI, those documents contain the names of people in Afghanistan who are giving information to the US. Publishing the documents without redacting the names tells the Taliban exactly who to kill. Does that answer your question?
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Regardless of what you might think, the US law doesn't apply worldwide.
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Remember guys that the government that was installed in Chile with a lot of US help was the same one that later set off a car bomb in Washington D.C. to get rid of an exiled political opponent.
There was no names nor pictures leaked... WikiLeaks actually went through the reports as best they could to censor that kind of information.
But go ahead, troll harder for the great of America.
- These characters were randomly selected.
For Christ's sake all the US Govt did was put him on a watch list
No, the LATEST thing the US did was put them on watchlists, causing them to lose access to their money. It's not the only thing they've done.
You can't take the sky from me...
AIUI, those documents contain the names of people in Afghanistan who are giving information to the US. Publishing the documents without redacting the names tells the Taliban exactly who to kill. Does that answer your question?
Publishing the names without redacting them WOULD HAVE told the Taliban who to kill. But they DID REDACT AS MANY NAMES AS THEY COULD.
You can't take the sky from me...
Fact check:
wikileaks did not facilitate the theft of a large number of confidential military documents.
wikileaks facilitated the distribution of a large number of confidential military documents that had been stolen.
This is what the source of the information should have done. Instead of burning a CD and sneaking it out, he should have gone to the Inspector General at the level above the unit that had the illegally classified information and reported its existence.
You are so, so very naive: After word leaked that one soldier (presumably Winfield) had spoken to military police, several platoon members retaliated. They confronted the informant and beat him severely - punching, kicking and choking him, then dragging him across the ground. As a last warning, Gibbs menacingly waved finger bones he had collected from Afghan corpses.
You can't take the sky from me...
Dream on. Did you realize that there is still stuff from the frelling Spanish-American war that is classified? If I had ten grand in spare change lying around I might spend it on a lawyer for a FOIA query to see what's there, but let's face it, I don't so it's just going to stay that way.
Have you seen the process for a FOIA request? You need to know the exact title and location of the document that you want. You can't just ask for documents relating to the cover-up of the bombing of a wedding party, you need to ask for US Army Action Report 172047a, CIA Predator Flight 2491 Operator Transcripts, and NATO After Action Report 1772-Q42. If the information that you actually need is in Flight 2490 Operator Transcript instead you need to start the process all over again (if you ever find out where it really is). Making things worse, generally the indexes themselves are classified, and if you manage to get access to one it will be so highly redacted as to be useless.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin