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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."
At this point, is US government hatred of freedom and democracy even news?
Wikileaks is a great project, but its not too clear how people can help them.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
They continue to shoot the messenger. It wouldn't surprise me if the intelligence community turned that phrase literal.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
Plenty of stories repeat this "official US watchlist" phrase, but without providing details. What watchlist? What's it called? How does it work?
Why doesn't this guy just yell "Banzai", leak out the rest of the documents, and survive for 5 minutes while hundreds of copies are made on the internet?
At this point its just pointless bickering, if this guy releases the rest of what he's got, the US will have no real interest in him anymore I would think - because even if he 'mysteriously dies when his server mysteriously explodes', the copies of the document would have still been spread around like wildfire.
get people killed by releasing it with out at least removing names
Who? Has anyone documented a case where this happened? from what I read WL were pretty careful in vetting the material.
Without names and places this is FUD.
Three Squirrels
I hear that said, but I hear politicians say these kinds of things all the time - PROVE to me that someone(s) got hurt/killed due to this release and I may feel otherwise, but for now, I believe they are being targeted for "pissing off" the powers that be.
I can get behind Wikileaks, but not Assange. He is egotistical tool.
Gone!
Probably should\n't have been baiting them. If you are going to release documents, the release them. Don't wave them around going nyner nyner, looky what I got.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The US government is keeping so many facts and events classified, it simply can not function as a democratic government anymore.
When people don't have access to important information, they can't vote correctly. And when they can't vote correctly, the government can't make the right decisions. I understand sometimes secrecy is necessary for safety, but too much simply kills a democracy. Wikileaks is the expression of that idea, as they fight the excessive secrecy of governments and try to provide citizens with information that citizens should have.
Arguably though, the best way to avoid putting Afghan civilians and US troops out of harm is to have US troops go back to the US.
It is funny (and, in a way sad) that the same country that sponsored all those radio stations I used to listen to as a young girl for (freedom-)free information during the Cold war years from behind the Iron curtain is now trying to stomp out a website that does exactly the same.
Ah, dreams of my youth, when did you wither away?
I have served as an intelligence analyst for 9 years and I know with 100% certainty that the parent post is correct.
99.9% of the time, information is classified in order to protect a source (human, etc). I am amazed by the ignorance of people's analysis of the data that wikileaked poured out -- they are completely missing the point.
Wikileaks actions WILL get innocent people killed.
Im not totally on Wikileaks side because they didn't take enough care to protect peoples names in the content they released. 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. That totally turned me off from Wikileaks.
How about the government taking care to protect innocent people by getting the fuck out of Afghanistan?
It is one thing to go after the 9/11 perps, but it another thing to try and win a ground war without any plan for victory and idiotic rules of engagement like 'patrol only where you aren't likely to encounter the enemy' and 'don't shoot back at someone if they're firing from a mosque.'
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. The fact that something is classified as Secret or Top Secret isn't enough of a reason to leak it; it should only be leaked (Again, IMAO.) if it's been classified for all the wrong reasons. 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.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Its not really treason since the owner isn't from the US. He's Australian.
If you put it that way, leaking ANY information about ANYONE should be illegal? Why should he be in prison? As far as I know, no law was broken.
The US soldier who leaked the information in the firstplace - yes, you could call that treason. And yes that's illegal.
Treason? Isn't treason an act against your own government, as apposed to someone else'? It winds me up no end that foreign governments have the power to effectively close the bank accounts of foreign companies, I think it is ridiculous, in fact, and that the big bad old U S of A should fuck off and deal with the problem at home, such as not letting this Asange fellow enter. Either the country in which he is hosted should shut him down, because they agree with America, or there shouldn't be anything done, because they don't, and are their own country and do what the fuck they want.
Puts democracy at risk, what nonsense you write
The real criminals are the ones classifying evidence of war crimes to bury the information from ever seeing the light of day.
You are just shooting the messenger.
Dude, where the hell have you been? Rich mutha fuckers and corporations, which is more rich mother fuckers and Zionists have stolen our democracy from us I'm not sure what you could possibly mean with "protecting democracy." Unless you count voting for a guy from one of two-corporation sponsored parties democracy. Many of our leaders should be in prison instead. GWB for crimes against humanity for one. Where's YOUR outrage?
The founder isn't a citizen of the US. I don't think he can commit treason against the US.
Treason: A crime that undermines the offenders government.
Espionage: The systematic use of spies to get military or political secrets.
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...
I have noticed that the US government is really taking the wrong approach to this, personally, whenever I hear about wikileaks in the news I always go and browse there for a while (and if I had the cash I'm donate), but otherwise I honestly don't even remember its there.
What did they think would happen? They released documents that put Afghan civilians and US troops at risk. This isn't protecting democracy, it's treason. Wikileaks is giving aid to the enemy. The founder should be in prison, and slashdot is whining about the donation page getting shut down?
Wikileaks is not American. US soldiers volunteered for army and war, and the US voluntarily invaded Afghanistan, therefore, both placed in conflict and danger out of their own choices. There wouldn't even be any war data to leak otherwise.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
I hear that there's previously-unknown evidence of war crimes in the Afghan War Diaries, and that's why there was such a rush to publicize them without proper redaction and editing. PROVE to me that there is by citing the data with appropriate links, and I may feel otherwise, but for now, I believe they are just trying to drum up publicity to inflate Mr. Assange's ego.
Hey! That was fun! Now, you go again!
99.9% of the time, information is classified in order to protect a source (human, etc)..
[Citation Needed]
Information is also classified when you want to perform atrocities or "its not good for morale", or its dissemination will cause the main plan not to work.
The My Lai Massacre was 'classified' for a year or so before it became public knowledge.
The names in the leaked documents aren't half as important as the actions they committed.
This would be the perfect opportunity to show the world what Bitcoin can do (or what it can't).
That's only if you believe the troops NEED to be in Afghanistan to begin with.
As far as I'm concerned - the amount of danger Wikileaks put on soldiers pales in comparison to the amount of danger Bush has put on them. They'd be far safer on US Soil protecting the actual US Borders instead of it's foreign interests;
It's like me breaking into your house and complaining that your dog pointed me out.
They released documents that put Afghan civilians and US troops at risk.
War puts lives at risk. If anything negative actually happened as a result of the release, well, [citation needed]. And if it's not a primary source, [citation needed] all the way down until it goes no farther, and then we can evaluate the legitimacy of the information.
This isn't protecting democracy, it's treason.
Do you even understand the definition of treason in the United States Constitution? Or the dictionary definition, for that matter?
Wikileaks is giving aid to the enemy.
Again, [citation needed].
The founder should be in prison, and slashdot is whining about the donation page getting shut down?
Put up hard information, or shut your authoritarian piehole.
Watchin 24 doesn't make you an "Intelligence Analyst", sonny boy.
*message redacted*
Julian, you insensitive clod! Mr. M Redacted will now be in danger of tuurist retaliation. [sic]
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
What we are doing in afghanistan has nothing to do with democracy.
The U.S. is a representative republic within our boarders and an undemocratic thug outside our borders.
It's been shown over and over.
I don't know how we got here so quickly from Eisenhower. He warned us... but it did no good.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I believe the Iraqi people can release over 100,000 names of people killed by US troops. Oh, that's not the issue here is it.
well i say this to all my friends as well. as long as the dumb assed people keep voting for 1 of the 2 sponserd shitbags are problems will never get fixed. when people wise up and toss both the fuckers and vote a new party then and only then will are leaders do there jobs. why because they will fear losing there jobs when they fuckup.
This isn't protecting democracy, it's treason.
Er, no it isn't. Assange is not a US or Afghan citizen. You can only betray your own country, you know.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I'm totally on Wikileaks side. I know it's PC to damn Wikileaks for accidentally releasing some names in the 75,000 reports that were leaked recently, but I find it's always good to keep some perspective. The wars in the middle east have cost tens of thousands of lives, and part of the reason they're still going is the tight lipped attitude of the government with regards to any kind of transparency. If the administration weren't in the habit of releasing reports that are entirely blacked out, or flat out refusing FOIP requests altogether, then the task of providing a clear picture of how the war is progressing wouldn't befall a volunteer organization like Wikileaks. And when Wikileaks requested the help of the Pentagon in redacting the names, that request was of course ignored.
Perhaps some people suffered as a result of that leak, but I find that no more tragic than the dozens of people who die to IED's and suicide bombings every other day in those same countries.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
They released documents that put Afghan civilians and US troops at risk.
No, they released documents that showed that US policy routinely massacres Afghan civilians and puts US troops at risk.
The pentagon said "releasing these documents puts the lives of the people we bomb at risk", it's transparent bullshit, but the sheeple say "baaaa". Do you remember that lil' Vietnamese girl that got napalmed and then spectacularly photographed, and the pentagon spent over a decade saying she got burned in a kitchen mishap? Did you believe their kitchen mishap cover story as much as you believe their "the truth is the enemy" cover story?
Remember how they told you Pat Tillman was shot by Taliban, and it turns out there were no Taliban there that day? Did you believe them when they told you a soldier in Afghanistan was shot by Taliban? Was it a believable lie?
How about the cute little blonde soldier that got knocked out in an attack on her convoy and the pentagon said she had fought valiantly to the last bullet of her sidearm, they attacked a hospital that had been trying to hand her over to "rescue" her, made up stories about the Iraqis treating her badly... did you believe that too?
Don't you think you should be less gullible and more informed?
This isn't protecting democracy, it's treason.
Yeah! Those Swedes are committing treason in the united states by letting that Aussie publish those documents! TREASON! And you don't sound like an idiot at all when you say that. Not at all.
You can't take the sky from me...
get people killed by releasing it with out at least removing names
Who? Has anyone documented a case where this happened? from what I read WL were pretty careful in vetting the material.
Without names and places this is FUD.
And more important, STUPID FUD. The same military asskissers that are worried about informants couldn't give two shits about the "collateral damage" that actually happens out there. Apparently it's bad to get a Taliban informant killed, but "accidentally" bombing a house full of children is OK as long as there were "reports" of "insurgent activity".
I'm sorry, that information is classified.
But it's there, trust us.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
if nobody volunteered they would just start a draft. and being in the army isn't all bad. the things you get for sighing the paper are much higher then some kid just out of highschool looking for a job. and after your stay in the army if you don't blow your money your gonna walk out 80k richer.not bad for someone whos only 20. im talking sighing bounes and 2 years of pay.
Creating a list of companies & people, and then grabbing their assets is called a "Bill of Attainder"
This is illegal under Article 1, Section 9 of the US Constitution.
I can not say more or I would be subject to such a bill.
I don't like him at all. I believe he is doing things for the wrong reason. He isn't releasing all this classified information because it is for the public good, he is doing it because it is an ego trip and makes him important, and because it hurts the US and he doesn't like the US. Now that doesn't mean that his actions are ultimately bad, you can very well feel that indeed this release DOES serve the public interest. I just don't think HIS reasons are the good ones he claims.
They really need a more moral spokesman, and they need to get some rules that they follow for what they do and don't release. If the rule is "Any and everything," ok fine but make that up front and known. Say "We release anything, without regard for what harm that it may cause or if the information is of value to the public." However if that's not what you want to do, if you want to decide if things are important enough to release and to try to not cause any harm, then that's fine too, but you need to have a policy to that effect and stick to it. In the case of the classified cables that would mean only releasing those that showed something of public interest, and redacting names and so on. Ya that's a lot of work but that is what it takes to be responsible about it.
As it stands Assange seems to want to play at being the good guy, but he's just a jackass that likes to pump his ego and get egg on teh face of those he doesn't like. That degrades Wikileaks as a whole.
Unfortunately it is his baby, so I don't really think anyone can kick him out and he's way too egotistical to realize that it would be much better off if he stepped down.
I do think the world needs things like Wikileaks, however it needs them run by people who actually care about the public good. Who release secrets only because they need to be released, not just because they happen to have gotten their hands on them.
Its not really treason since the owner isn't from the US. He's Australian.
1. By that logic, then it's wouldn't really be against the law for America to have Assange killed.
2. It's against Australian law to reveal the secrets of Australia's allies.
You are correct. If the information had no other reason to be classified, the person who classified it would be breaking the law. And there are procedures spelled out in the law for declassifying the information in a manner that maintains the secrecy of those portions that should remain classified.
However, Assange is not the messenger. He revealed classified information without following the legal procedure to do so. In the process he broke the law against declassifying information inappropriately. He also, because of his haste and lack of reasonability, allowed information that should have remained classified to be revealed.
Assange is a criminal idiot and deserves any punishment he gets.
War actions WILL get innocent people killed.
Yay! We're pulling our troops out! ...err, right?
well the war was never bought foreign interests more like us interests in there oil. people seem to forget bush is all abought big oil. 911 was just there excuse to start a useless war. if they really wanted the terrest leaders they woulda just sent in the black ops and took them out without any sort of war. not to mention we sponsor there war agenst us anyways. we feed them we give them guns to shoot us with. wanna stop the sand people from fighting us stop feeding them stop giving them guns and let there god take care of them see how long that last.
Hey,
Would you help us redact some names from these stolen classified documents?
I'm not exactly sure how they were in a position to agree and assist. Assisting, would really be acknowledging that wikileaks had a right to the information and the release of said data was approved. It's complete rubbish to assume that anyone inside the government would agree to anything like that. It's such a horse shit move to continue to cite that reasoning as why its ok to release classified data.
The documents are what they are and if you want more transparent government we have a clear system for changing things. Just because we might not agree with something does not make it ok to not comply with the current laws.
With that said... if you had an organization which possess tons of leaked classified documents you would immediately treat them as hostile and react as such. You would do anything that is within your power to condemn such an organization. It's the plain and simple truth of what is going on here.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
result in the deaths of Afghan civilians and US/coalition soldiers
Wikileaks has killed no one, the people accusing them of doing so have killed tens of thousands: Use your head, figure out the FUD.
You can't take the sky from me...
yea unlike the food and guns we give the enemy. are own government is guilty of that and any other country helping them. cut there aid and you get a country of starving half dead sand people.and if wikileaks got the documents you can bet your ass they had them long before it got leaked on the internet.
To a point I agree with you, but let's be blunt here. Part of the fault lies with NATO. Perhaps if they had been more forthright there would be less of a desire by so many in the public to try to get a more complete and truthful of the Afghan mission. The whole thing is becoming increasingly controversial throughout the NATO nations involved, and this didn't start with Wikileaks releasing these documents. So the ultimate blame for the whole thing lies with the politicians who are too cowardly or too deep in the bullshit themselves to openly admit serious issues.
Maybe politicians should think that ultimately they are servants of the public, and not masters, and the public has a right to know as full a picture as can safely be revealed. What the Iraq and Afghan leaks have shown us is that the politicians and the military have been actively pursuing a policy of hiding nasty truths, not for national security or any high-minded rationale, but because they're trying to cover their own butts. If Wikileaks and Assange are supposed to go down for their part, then there are a bunch of politicians and generals who every bit as deserving of the same treatment, and it's the height of hypocrisy to condemn Wikileaks and not to condemn those bastards on the other side of the fence.
A pox on all their houses, me'thinks.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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...
Arguably though, the best way to avoid putting Afghan civilians and US troops out of harm is to have US troops go back to the US.
Unfortunately: You break it, you bought it.
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.
Err, can you give a citation for the legislation you implicitly reference for 2. ?
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
My brother, a combat medic, was with a group that was being attacked. He was in the room when a sergeant told a soldier to stick his head out the window to see what was up. The kid stuck his head out the window and got a bullet to the face, and the sergeant turned without a word and walked into the other room. My brother had to clean the mess up.
If you google the name of the deceased soldier the reports say he was killed by an IED. His family does not know the truth of how he died.
Talk to any soldier that has seen action and ask them if they saw anything get covered up, I'm willing to bet you won't find any soldier who has been deployed that can say "no".
1. The USA can drop him out of a plane over the Atlantic Ocean. How he gets there will probably never be known.
2. If Australia wants to let the U.S. take the trouble, it can. And apparently is.
If I'm not mistaken, I believe his former "partners" recently bailed on ASSange and one of the reasons cited was poor vetting. Again not sure about this and don't have time to look it up at the moment.
Regardless of what you might think, the US law doesn't apply worldwide.
Dilbert RSS feed
there was such a rush to publicize them without proper redaction and editing. PROVE to me that
You're spreading FUD. Read this instead:
A lawyer representing the whistle-blowing Web site WikiLeaks says
U.S. government officials have been given codes and passwords granting them online access to official U.S. government documents that WikiLeaks so far has not published.
Timothy Matusheski, a lawyer from Hattiesburg, Miss., who says he represents whistle-blowers and has been in touch with both WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and at least one government official involved in investigations of WikiLeaks, said the site had set up a “secure channel” through which authorized users could access the unpublished material. He said credentials for using this channel had been forwarded to representatives of the U.S. government whom he did not identify. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
You can't take the sky from me...
Assisting, would really be acknowledging that wikileaks had a right to the information
According to their claims, assisting would have protected the lives of thousands of Afghan civilians and US troops.
Not assisting lets them say that the guys who asked for help in protecting lives are recklessly endangering lives.
You can't take the sky from me...
What laws has Wikileaks failed to comply with?
Dilbert RSS feed
Its not really treason since the owner isn't from the US. He's Australian.
It's against Australian law to reveal the secrets of Australia's allies.
Still not treason.
You can't take the sky from me...
....if not they should be.
I can get behind Wikileaks, but not Assange. He is egotistical tool.
Character assassination: Done and done!
Now instead of focusing on the issue, you will parrot out the "the spokesperson is bad, we must not listen" line every time wikileaks is mentioned. You don't even say why you believe what you say, you probably don't even know yourself that you only believe it because of a campaign of repetition in the media made you absorb this baseless meme.
You can't take the sky from me...
What law? US law? Doesn't apply. He's neither an US citizen nor was he on US soil.
Dilbert RSS feed
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.
No trial, no hearing, no law, just the same old anti American action taken by an arm of government.
And what if nobody complied?
Yes, if you only join based on financial and not moral grounds, being in the army isn't all that bad.
Dilbert RSS feed
A US Citizen is bound by US law (at least, by some laws, like murder) everywhere in the world. So it is against the law for America to have Assange killed.
Dilbert RSS feed
I guess the US is just discrete about trying to overthrow (or prop-up) governments...
The French and British mostly just sent over the troops (see the history of the middle east conflicts like the suez canal in egypt, vietnam, cambodia, ivory coast, central africa, rwanda, chad, iran, iraq, mexico, etc, etc).
Even the french provided covert aid to the US colonies to overthrow the government and install a new government...
I guess the rule is don't write things down ;^)
unlike you, I'm adult enough
Calling me "not an adult" is not the action of an adult. You now say you dislike "their actions" but those actions are fictions. Grow up and learn to admit your mistake; when you believed and repeated a lie you were told, once you've learned that it was a lie, stop defending it.
And stop being the kind of petty little shit that moves the goalposts to "what my bile was directed at", you know damn well that's irrelevant, what's important is "was wikileaks reckless or diligent". The truth is they redacted documents for review in order to avoid causing harm to innocents, the lie is that they didn't. You believed and repeated and are now defending the lie, you should be ashamed of yourself.
You can't take the sky from me...
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.
See this kind of statement doesn't make sense to me. Why is it reasonable to steal documents from the Pentagon and then go back to them and say "Hey, we stole so much that we care to look through ourselves so go redact this for us"?
That does indeed make no sense. What actually happened makes sense, though: They were given documents, they reviewed them, identified thousands and thousands of pages that they were uneasy about releasing because they contained information that could be used to harm innocent people, and they asked the one source that knows who's who in these papers to tell them who to protect.
The pentagon decided that instead of helping protect innocent people, they would lie and say that wikileaks didn't even try to protect innocent people, and that wikileaks is putting people in danger. Because the pentagon is very good at propaganda, and doesn't mind one bit if innocent people get killed, so long as they get away with killing them scott free.
You can't take the sky from me...
Did he sell US weapons to Iran while embezzling a bit on the side for a car and a house airconditioning system? Still not treason.
Playing a Russian at chess - now that's treason!
The US has a long-standing executive order against assassinations.
Every president since Gerald Ford (who initiated it) has reaffirmed this order.
G. W. Bush got a little fuzzy with it (as long as they could be classified as enemy combatants/terrorists it was a go), but he did not recind the order.
In other words, assassination (at least of folks like Assange) is currently illegal in the US, and if caught the assassins and those who ordered the assassination would face serious jail time.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Countries do not usually take light at other countries sending in agents to murder or kidnap people, even foreigners, on their soil. It's the kind of thing that usually causes huge diplomatic crisis.
- These characters were randomly selected.
I'll take it a step further. if the names named are US servicemembers, and details of their exploits infuriate civilians, or encourage their enemies, and civilians or the US's enemies use the data and kill them...
I DON'T FUCKING CARE.
Assange has NO requirement of loyalty to either side in the conflict. If Assange got information on the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden and published it, and US used it to kill him, would you complain?
Of course not.
Because you've bought into the lie that the US is the "good guys" and the Taliban are the "bad guys." Assange has no duty to buy into the "US #1 !!!" hype. He can present reality and let both sides deal with the consequences of their actions.
The truth is, there ARE NO GOOD GUYS, and if you need a bad guy, both sides qualify. The Taliban qualifies because they're theocratic sexist murdering thugs who want to take their country back into the dark ages.
The US is also the bad guy because they are murdering thugs who CREATED THE TALIBAN IN THE FIRST PLACE as a useful tool. NOT to spread freedom and democracy, NOT to "nation build," but rather as a short-sighted (and now clearly bad) tactic in a continuing grab to control everything. To "advance US interests" which has nothing to do with freedom, and everything to do with hoarding resources, being the biggest and baddest power, and protecting our wealthiest classes' sources of income.
And so we have been the ENEMY of freedom repeatedly, toppling stable governments, overthrowing DEMOCRACIES to install dictators, all at the behest of fruit companies, oil companies, whoever else, etc.
We are BOTH bad guys fighting each other, and if anything the Taliban is less of a problem because they only want to turn their OWN region into a shithole, and are just trying to get us to leave the area, whereas we are trying to run the world.
I say all of this as a person who has several relatives who are military, who have fought over there. They bought the lie, they signed on to be a pawn for the imperialistic death machine, and if they get killed it's their own damned fault.
This space available.
I don't know where you are getting all this from. There are several occasions when I would have been in the same room as Mr Assange yet never noticed him or even heard of him until wikileaks.
It's quite funny really hearing the bit about a more moral spokesman when half of the USA is listening in wonder to the deranged words of a former cocaine addict on Fox.
1. They aren't doing it because they don't like him. They're doing it because he deserves it.
2. Sure it makes it legal. Australia wants Assange's head, and says to the U.S. if you find him, lop it off. That's what military allies are for. Please don't be a dope.
you've bought into the lie that the US is the "good guys"
I really haven't.
You can't take the sky from me...
Unless the diplomacy is conducted before the operation is approved, in secret, by both sides.
Then there's a mild kerfuffle for the benefit of the press and shortly thereafter everyone gets distracted by a missing-child story, of which there are enough you don't even have to create them.
The simplest explanation usually the correct one....
The problem with your assumptions is that you assume the US government is WAY more capable and competent than it actually is.
What is closer to the truth Assange is a reckless narcisstic jackass who got put on watchlists for leaking US intelligence, along the way
he probably pissed off some women with his narcisstic jackass ways which caused them to accuse him of various misdeeds. Moneybookers cut him off because Moneybookers is a company based in Bahrain about to do an IPO and does not need the drama that his pitifully small accounts brings with them. Moneybookers wants to do things that are far less likely to bring them trouble like online gambling, international money transfers,etc,etc
http://www.ecommerce-journal.com/node/30006
2. Australia has to handle the legal matters in that case: arresting, judging and punishing him, not the USA.
IANAL, but I think Australia has to handle the legal matters if and only if the breach of law happened on Australian teritory.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Yeah, I know you haven't, I was referring more to the "yous" out there who were taking a different opinion than yours, which I was going :one step further" than.
Inartfully worded, my apologies.
This space available.
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...
You're trying to make it into a joke, but you've actually got it exactly right. The fact that you don't realize it is at the very root of the problem here. You, as someone who has no understanding of how military ops and intelligence gathering are done, have no basis for evaluating what's a threat and what's not. You're like the business-marketing major who walks into an IT shop, tells the admins that firewalls and anti-virus software are unnecessary and dumb because they slow down his computer, and then laughs when they try to explain the security implications. To anyone who understands the relevant fields you look like an ignorant, arrogant asshole, as you smugly stroll away, congratulating yourself on the clever rejoinders which you used to shut down those dumb computer dweebs.
You are right, you are always right. I'm too tired to argue.
What exactly is wrong about the US Govt putting Assange on a watch list? Seems reasonable to me.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
That if you live by the sword, expect to get cut.
Better to leak the info anonymously,
than to stand in a puddle of blood.
Rick B.
Part of the fault lies with NATO. Perhaps if they had been more forthright there would be less of a desire by so many in the public to try to get a more complete and truthful of the Afghan mission.
That is complete and utter bullshit. The Afghan / Iraq wars have been amongst the most (if not THE most) open conflicts in history. We've never had access to so much up-to-the-minute information about a war as we have in the last decade. The problem isn't that "NATO" hasn't been "open enough" - the problem is that the paranoid morons who are always demanding more information have already made up their minds about what's going on. They're convinced that there must be 700 million dead civilians in Afghanistan, all of whom have been raped, tortured, BBQ'd, and eaten by US soldiers, and they won't stop "demanding information" until they find evidence that proves they're right. And since the fringe morons are only "asking for information", even the average, rational person, is likely to nod along in agreement as long as the demands are worded correctly.
To use another example - it's like the goddamn conspiracy theorists. 9/11 was the most investigated, most documented attack in history, yet the 9/11 lunatics will continue asking for "a new investigation" for centuries to come. Why? Exactly the same damn reason - they're already convinced they know "The Truth", and will continue "asking for information" or "asking for a new investigation" as long as the data we have continues to contradict what they believe.
never heard of a country "outsourcing" justice .. .. of Russians.
Australia was hard hit in the late 1940's and the UK had to fly in Sir Percy Sillitoe to help try and work out Verona issues.
ASIO spent a lot of time following anyone with friends of friends of friends
Dec 1945 was really the last time Australia considered doing intel work alone.
The US and UK where spooked by the fact Australia might start collecting its own intel and and also been very leaky.
Australia was offered a deal, Teddy Poulden from the UK was installed to run things, with GCHQ staff, in return Australia got UK access. NSA and GCHQ have had very close relations from day one.
Nobody wants wants to the the Uk in 1973 or New Zealand in 1985 when the NSA turns off the tap.
So always good to be "outsourcing" justice, over any issue in any decade. Downlink stations do not ensure a flow of material, saying 'yes' is the only way.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
To me, this is just an organization pirating information using the digital age. While I don't condone it, I also don't condemn it, or the defense against it. I welcome responses, of course.
It's not FUD. The first round of publication was rushed, and as such, contained names of informants. The article you linked was a full month after the initial publication of the Afghan War Diaries.
Other articles have cited Wikileaks insiders expressing concern to Assange over his decision to publicize the second round this month, with the major concern being that they would not have time to fully review the documents before publication.
That they offered access to the US government a month after they published a slew of documents does not absolve them of responsibility for what they have already published, nor absolve them of responsibility for continuing to publish documents that haven't been properly edited to reduce harm.
Please let me be clear here, too - I don't dispute their right to publish the documents. I simply dislike the rush to grab headlines with such facile disregard for the harm it could cause.
I really am curious, I've only heard about one warlord who got killed because possibly he might have been indirectly implicated in the documents.
people keep talking about all the names but from reading a lot of random samples I have yet to see any informants named.
So my question:
What informants are named and where?
Well done mate for fighting the good fight throughout the comments on this story.
As humans we tend to think of those who we voluntarily associate with to be pretty much like us; it's only when you read the comments on stories like this that you realise that some of the otherwise very intelligent folks populating this site are in fact completely fucking bat-shit insane.
Two sigs seen on slashdot are apposite here (paraphrasing):
Light travels faster than sound: that's why some people appear bright until they speak.
and:
A patriot is someone who defends his country from its government.
Protecting democracy often requires treason. Certainly trying to create it did...
Ok well that's piqued my interest, never intended on donating before, now I do. How can I go about this?
Doh.
actually, the information was out already, it had to be to get into the hands of an unauthorized person (assange) even if he were a citizen he would have no obligation under the law to help the government fix their fuckups.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
If it's so damned open why is everyone running for cover and condemning Wikileaks over footage of murdering soldiers in Iraq or hiding the number of civilian deaths in Afghanistan?
I call bullshit on you. If there was nothing to hide, nobody would be freaking out. At any rate, the public overrule the politicians. The politicians are servants, nothing more and nothing less.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Exactly FUD. I love the argument though, very looney toons. It's ok to kill innocent people left and right when you were aiming at 'the bad guys' ... but if you hypothetically threaten their lives with information then that's crossing the line!
Maybe their just greedy, and don't want to share the civilian deaths with the enemy.
*DrugCheese rants*
The ground troops that coerce civillians to provide information on enemy traps/movement etc. put their lives at an infinitely greater risk. I watched a documentary last night ("Dispatches - Bravo's Deadly Mission") where US troops just took over some civillians' property at gunpoint so they could camp the night there. One of the civillians was later found beheaded. The ground troops don't care if any civillians are put in danger, as long as they can glean any information about booby traps etc. to protect themselves. The possibility that Wikileaks "could" get innocent people killed in the future is a fairly small concern compared to the constant revenge murders against US collaborators/informants since their occupation began (Which of course the US doesn't care about as long as it can be kept secret from the public).
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.
My general rule is, if you're doing something secretive that might cause people to want to kill you if they knew, chances are you probably shouldn't be doing it.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Wikileaks has conflated the public "right to know" with an imaginary "need to know,"
Considering that democratic government's are supposed to be run "by the people", the people deserve to know every last detail of what the government does. The government works for us - we do NOT work for them.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
I would like to point out that the people who originally created these documents are pretty clueless.
Who in his right mind puts real names and real locations into classified wartime documents!?!? I guess they forgot how things were done in World War II - Code names.
It's not Wikileaks who should've protect people's names in these documents. It's the people who originally wrote these documents who have been careless.
Instead of wasting your time on facebook and other stupid sites, start reading some real books. For example about this man - "Little Bill"
You may learn a thing or two from history.
Signed, GLYPTIC
I believe it. But "trying not to leak names" and "not leaking names" are not the same, and there is a real risk of death to the people trying to help save the lives not only of US troops but their own countrymen. For what? Daily incident reports that largely tell us nothing we don't know? That drone attacks are less successful than the spokesman says? That an Afghan policeman was shot by the Afghan army when he was smoking hash in the shower, got spooked and started firing at them? Does anybody in the world not know that the government of Afghanistan is weak yet? Is this "insight" really worth even the potential of getting people killed?
You make this sound like a bad thing. The Pentagon was supposed to help Assange with his goal of disseminating classified information to unauthorized sources? You think anybody involved wants to touch that with a 10 foot pole, which would be illegal for them to do in the first place? Especially anybody with the clearance to actually read the damn things without committing another crime? It was a false request, designed to paint them as uncaring when he did what he was going to do all along.
You might be right; two minutes of Google searching did not turn up any information about people who actually got killed.
As far as names? Simon Hermes, Mohammed Moubin, Gul Said. "On and on it goes, name after name of "collaborators" with the U.S. military, name after name of people whose lives are now in direct danger." -- http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/the_assange_leaks.php
Assigning some sort of moral equivalence to assassinating an informant and bombing the wrong building or shooting the wrong target makes you look like a moron. I hope you know that.
War sucks. Maybe this war should never have been started; maybe it should end tomorrow. But these are not, not nearly, the same thing.
In one of your approximately eight billion posts in this thread saying basically the exact same things over and over again you asked for reasons that Assange is an egotistical, self-centered prick. How about from human rights groups?
These are reall
Obviously not that simple, but if I was the girl, and those were the only two choices, I'd vote for the rape. Lesser of two evils and all that.
IRL, there's usually a lot of other choices involved; delaying tactics, trust building, overall harm minimisation by limited co-operation, etc. The Pentagon may or may not have considered any, but I'm guessing they refused to negotiate in any way, on policy. From Wikileaks' point of view, there's no harm in asking for help pointing out anything they may have missed, despite the expected answer - it's a life & death matter, after all.
In any case, Wikileaks clearly did make a bona fide attempt to protect the innocent. And they're not the ones actually out there killing people, either. If you're assigning blame, you could spread it a lot wider.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
After WWII Russia didn't even have enough fuel to drive their tanks home, they used Horses & Mules. Russia never was and never would be a threat to anyone. We made them a threat because Truman was afraid without a strong enemy our economy would stagnant like it is now (e.g. all the wealth gathered into the hands of 1% of the populace). In his own sick little way he was helping the average joe by creating what we call the Military Industrial Complex.
As for 'Soviet style communism', Russia never was a communist country. It was a dictatorship using Marx's Rhetoric. For Americans communism == socialism == evil stuff we learned about in school. Thing is, all that 'socialism' is the only thing between the average American and the 'nasty, brutal and short' life of the 1800s. Maybe you're one of the 'haves'. Maybe you've got a trust fund and you're set for life. But if not, you're a freakin' idiot, and you're part of the problem. The socialists want to protect you (and themselves, they're realists, not altruists). The capitalists want to grind you into hamburger. Of course, you're probably too busy planning on being they guy cranking the grinder to notice they've got your arm in it.
Moron.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Oh, wait.
The first round of publication was rushed, and as such, contained names of informants.
Really?Which ones? If it's such common knowledge, then I'm sure you can provide me with the names of the informants that were leaked. And don't worry about endangering the lives of the informants through your actions, their names have apparently already been revealed.
Of course, if you can't, then I have to assume that the names of the informants were not released.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Of course, master. Tell us plebeians how to live, as we have no understanding how to do so.
Unfortunately, you are exactly like the dumb computer dweebs who think that because they know how to configure a firewall, they know what the purpose of the firewall is.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
So what if a website decides to post the tech manuals of some counter-IED equipment that may allow an enemy to defeat it? _YOU_ are not going to be riding around Afganistan or Iraq in a vehicle that could have an EFP go tearing thru it, maybe take both your legs with it if you're lucky, or cut you clean in two if you aren't. Its someone else, or someone else's kid / husband / daugter / father / mother. YOU don't have anything to worry about. No sir, not a problem for you...
Hopefully one day you will criticize China and get a bullet in the head for it.
Don't get in a pissing match with an entity that is full of it.
Keep Doing Good.
New security update for Java today: 6u22, critical so you now get Carbonite slamware instead of Bing!
For your convenience, here's a spam-free win32 Java installer: Deep link to jre-6u22-windows-i586.exe or start clicking here for other platforms (last page before the cookiewall).
Now that Java is officially owned by pure evil , and installs quickstarters all over your OS and browser, consider it deprecated.
The fact is Wikileaks serves a good purpose. Unlike what so many people want you to believe Wikileaks doesn't have an "US agenda".
They have systematically leaked information on all sort of cases such as corporate wrong doings, political corruption and so on from all over the world and all sorts of nations.
The irony is if the leaked documents and the registered wrong doings were from other not so democratic nations those criticizing Wikileaks would probably have a different position now.
Wikileaks may be controversial but still the information they post is the truth and provides a valuable service so that the people realize what is really going on backstage.
I fail to understand why so many fail to mention other valuable information Wikileaks leaked over the time and that had such a positive impact. Stuff like the documents of "Kenya: The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances".
In this day and age people are so used to consume information in quick bursts and never get deep into what everything is really all about.
If there is a cool guy on TV that has such a good argument against Wikileaks thousands simply accept his view and don't even care about getting the facts straight.
I urge people to at least read the Wikileaks page on Wikipedia to get a grasp of what this guys have made over the years and what they had to deal with.
And please, pay the site a visit at least while its available and make your own conclusions.
Many people may not feel comfortable with the US leaked documents, but so what? It is part of history.
What you should be more worried about is in protecting your freedom, and democracy. You should not take anything for granted. "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance". Wikileaks may not be perfect, but it does help YOU in your vigilance.
Some examples.
2008 Peru Oil Scandal, Toxic dumping in Africa and so on and on and on
This is a grave day for democracy, but instead of bemoaning the known failure of the US to uphold democracy, and the known failure of WL being perfect in all that they do, what should be done on a financial level? The first obvious thing would be to spread out the finances - Send some of it to Norway, Finland, Switzerland, New Zealand, and others that have more trusted governments. An investor knows to spread the risk, and unfortunately it looks like Wikileaks will have to learn as well.
"Please stop quoting me. Not everything I say is some witty quotation." -- Mark Twain
I think we were just lucky that there wasn't any/much identifying information in the leak. Maybe that's what the rest of the documents are. You have to admit that it'd be a concern when a trove of raw data is just dumped to the public, though. Was every single line looked at? If so, why not just release the ones that clearly showed a coverup, war crime, etc. Where are those documents? Where are the leaks and the whisteblowing? All I see is a copy and paste of an operations database.
I'd find it much easier to respect wikileaks if they spent more time "leak[ing] information on all sort of cases such as corporate wrong doings, political corruption and so on" and less time just poking governments they dislike. That 'collateral murder' video is what did it for me; there wasn't even a hint of impartiality there and I'm not sure who was supposed to gain from the release of that video with that commentary. Though, on the other hand, perhaps that got them the big burst of publicity and therefore funding that they needed to carry on. But would that just make them no better than those they're 'reporting' on?
For Christ's sake all the US Govt did was put him on a watch list, which is entirely understandable, given the fact that he facilitated the theft of a large number of confidential military documents.
I call bs on that, he didn't facilitate anything! publishing the information is somewhat different from stealing it in the first place
when he starts picking on nations known to remove people who offend them. He picks on a target that cannot afford to take him down. While the US has its flaws it is far far from being the worst of the lot when it comes to the strong countries of this world. The difference is that most of the others would have no fear of dealing with him.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
They did remove names, and they got no one killed.
You might be right; two minutes of Google searching did not turn up any information about people who actually got killed.
Your dedication to the facts is awe-inspiring. Pray tell why you thought it did get people killed previously. Probably you were believing as your talking head of choice demanded.
As far as names? Simon Hermes, Mohammed Moubin, Gul Said. "On and on it goes, name after name of "collaborators" with the U.S. military, name after name of people whose lives are now in direct danger." -- http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/the_assange_leaks.php
It's clear that there will be names included. Some names are necessary to tell the story, especially where complicity is involved.
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
Assigning some sort of moral equivalence to assassinating an informant and bombing the wrong building or shooting the wrong target makes you look like a moron. I hope you know that.
Wait, how many times did we try to kill Castro? Also, the government wants us to believe that they can reliably drop smart bombs down chimneys, and they also want us to believe that bombs just fall on the entirely wrong building because of equipment failure, when they spend umpteen hojillion dollars to make sure each one goes where they want it. We all know that dropping the bomb down the chimney was a one in a million shot. What we don't know is that our troops shoot up civilians all the damned time. When you win, you end up operating the government that receives the reports of wrongdoing, so you can make lots of them just vanish. You crucify a couple of assholes and you walk away whistling while scrubbing the blood of innocents from beneath your fingernails, and you get to keep your position.
How about when he plead guilty to 25 counts of hacking computer networks in the 1990s, including a Canadian telecommunications firm and NASA, while he and his cronies monitored the police who were trying to find them and left messages for the detectives? I'm sure it was just the "pursuit of truth" at work, no egotism at all.
This is precisely what I would do were I in his position; I would mislead and antagonize my enemy while monitoring their activity to determine the effectiveness of my efforts. You are suggesting that he be less effective. Have you thought any of these arguments through or are you typing the entire comment with your knee?
Or how about when the rape charges came about and he claimed it was a CIA conspiracy. Bad enough to make those claims without any evidence, of course, but then when one of his own Wikileaks members called him on it, he tried to claim he never said it, only that he "had been warned it might happen." Now we have a repeat. With no reason to believe this is anything but a business deciding they don't want to be associated with a group on a US watchlist and an Australian blacklist, it's declared it is the victim of "financial warfare by the US government."
When you are attacked it's reasonable to assume that the attack comes from those who have the most to gain from it.
And on the possibility that it's a business protecting it's business interests? "This is likely to cause a huge backlash against Moneybookers. Craven behaviour in relation to the US government is unlikely to be seen sympathetically." Apparently they're cowards for not standing up for Wikileaks.
That is correct. Nobody including Assange said it was an irrational decision, but it is an irresponsible one if you love freedom. However, it's not called Freedombookers.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Are you for real? That doesn't make any sense. Though I appreciate they probably did so with the best intentions, it does not make any sense for WikiLeaks to ask. It is gross stupidity, of the highest fucking order, on the grounds that the answer they would get is so very very obvious. They only reason I can see, apart from stupidity, is so that they can tell the world that the Pentagon refused to help them, bolstering support. What? You think WikiLeaks incapable of playing the PRopaganda game? Similarly, it would not make any sense for the Pentagon to help. In doing so they could potentially endangering more lives.
Okay, just stop. Your last sentence is completely bugshit insane. They could have simply accepted a document from Wikileaks and returned it with the relevant names removed, plus enough other names removed to disguise relevance. Instead they elected to remove zero names, which makes them complicit for every name ultimately released, period, end of story. There is zero way in which their editing of the document could be more dangerous than permitting Wikileaks to make these decisions on their own without a full understanding. Further, by not taking this opportunity to add noise to the channel by censoring unimportant names, they left Wikileaks in a position where they will be censoring only those names which they think are relevant, and thus providing information to anyone else who has the uncensored material. This material may already be in the wild (I never trust that there is only one copy of any data) and if it is not, attempts to acquire the data to compare it to the censored documents will have been increased dramatically, potentially with some success.
So yes, there certainly is the element of being able to tell the world that the Pentagon refused to help. But unlike you, I believe that this is a valid argument. The Pentagon had the opportunity to save lives, and passed it up, because that is not their business.
Consider what would happen if the Pentagon agreed to help them, and then claimed that 75% of it must be redacted to protect "innocent" lives? Either a) Wikileaks agree, and redact that 75%, or b) they publish the whole thing, or c) they decide for themselves what they're going to leave in or redact. (Oh, options b & c are the options they have now, by the way). Now, WikiLeaks knows which 75% of the documents that the US government cares about most, who they want to protect, and who they don't. That, in itself, is very valuable information.
Any asshole who has read Cryptonomicon knows that you add false information into the channel to smooth out the bell curve. I cover this above as well, in case you missed it.
What guarantees do the U.S. government have that the names/information that they ask to be redacted won't be leaked, on top of the original documents? None. What guarantees do they have that WikiLeaks hasn't already been compromised by some nefarious third-party? None.
See above. How many fucking paragraphs will you waste belaboring the same point? We already get that you don't understand disinformation.
You don't agree? Ok, assuming WikiLeaks are on the straight and level, what guarantees do the U.S. government have that the names they tell them to redact will never find their way into "The Wrong Hands". None. No matter how secure they claim to be.
And indeed, the unredacted documents might well find their way into the wrong hands. And the further Assange is pushed towards the fringes of society (which is pretty much where he hangs out anyway) the more likely it is that will happen.
Anything else that they, the U.S. Government, do from now on is damage limitation.
And yet they passed up the chance to do that.
Now, I respect the work that WikiLeaks does, or tries to do, but if they're incapable of self-editin
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So pay for it, leave the shop and stop breaking other things.
So you haven't read any of the news coverage about the Afghan War Diaries, including press statements Mr. Assange made, where he acknowledged releasing informant names, and then tried to blame the Pentagon for not scrubbing the data for him?
Pay attention to the news coverage, and then people might take your comments seriously.
"The fact is Wikileaks serves a good purpose."
No, it doesn't, not when it publishes things like tech manuals for counter-IED jammers in use in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. It is the same as handing the enemy a bazooka to use on an approaching armored personnel carrier full of US troops. They'll use that info to tune their IED radio controlled triggers outside the frequency bands that they now know can be jammed by the jammer with its tech manual online, and possibly kill you, if you're a soldier in Iraq or Afganistan, or maybe your friend / husband / wife / father / mother / son / daughter.
Doing stuff like posting secret technical deetails of defensive weapons totally negates any other good they may be doing. It is the lowest of the low of things that they could be doing online.
Everyone is irrational. Try getting someone who thinks pot should be kept illegal to explain why. They can't; I had a discussion like that in someone's journal a few days ago. The question "why do you think it should be illegal?" was one he couldn't answer, and just because he knew one pot smoker with a screwed up life he was convinced that it was the pot that did it, despite all valid research. We're all irrational and we all rationalize.
You are entirely correct. The athiest rationalizes as much as the religious person. For example, if there's some sort of mirical, the athiest rationalizes it to be a coincidence, no matter how improbable that coincidence may be.
But, you know, the guy probably had one of those annoying Jehova's Witnesses knocking on his door. And Pat Robertson has converted more Christians to athiesm than all the athiests at slashdot combined.
Free Martian Whores!
I heard that some people still believed the Vietnam war propaganda, I just never heard anyone say it before. I could write pages here about how wrong you are but I have the feeling it is going to have to be simple. So here is a very very very simple explanation of why Vietnam was a fuckup, in the form of a very very very simple timeline.
Ho Chi Minh wrote a letter to US president Truman asking for help in their colonial independance war.
Diplomacy and foreign policy
US drops 6.7 million tons of explosives on Vietnam and its neighbours (its neighbours for god sake? Why?)
US realises that bombs are no match for a civilian population that will never give up, and pulls out.
He's an aussie, aussie guys fooling around with foreign girls when away from home is not a coincidence, its a proud tradition. However
its a tradition that perhaps Swedish women dont appreciate.
Well, they tried framing Assange for rape, and saw it didn't work.
Now, they try to harass the bank getting the donations, and once they see that doesn't work, well..
They might indeed move toward more classic methods as the poison-tipped shoe.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I mean this in all due respect. You sir, are stupid. Stupid meaning that you are not knowledgeable enough to draw the conclusions you are drawing (I know, because they are wrong.)
You claim that the pentagon could have had them remove important names, as well as enough unimportant ones. But they would also have to LEAVE some important ones, or else they are increasing the amount of sensitive information in the wild.
The end result of this line of thinking is that they would have to have them remove names COMPLETELY RANDOMLY, which is no better than removing NONE AT ALL from an information-increasing standpoint, but has the downside that IT PAINTS A BULLSEYE ON RANDOM PEOPLE.
Citrations:
Game Theory
Information Theory
Monty Hall Problem
Master all of these subjects (the last one is easy) and then shove your argument up your ass. People who argue endlessly about shit they dont know anything about make me fucking sick.
"His name was James Damore."
I think you'll need to back that up with a lot of statistics, not just an anecdote ;)
Actually, the total dead (on all sides) is far more interesting. Estimates are putting the results of our intervention at over one million dead, and counting. We've caused someone or something to poison them for generations to come, as well. More war will come from our efforts even if we pulled out today, and those should be counted as well...
You're like the business-marketing major who walks into an IT shop, tells the admins that firewalls and anti-virus software are unnecessary and dumb because they slow down his computer, and then laughs when they try to explain the security implications. To anyone who understands the relevant fields you look like an ignorant, arrogant asshole, as you smugly stroll away, congratulating yourself on the clever rejoinders which you used to shut down those dumb computer dweebs.
You know what else we are? We're the owners, because we're the ones paying the bills. We're the board of directors, because we hold all the stock. Those experts you revere so much are OUR EMPLOYEES, and they'd damn well better do what we say, or we'll fire them.
Democracy. It's as easy as that.
Arguably though, the best way to avoid putting Afghan civilians and US troops out of harm is to have US troops go back to the US.
Unfortunately: You break it, you bought it.
Yeah, well, we're broke, so I hope you accept hot-checks.
Knowingly receiving stolen property makes you accessory after the fact.
True enough in most western cultures with regard to tangible goods. However what was "stolen" and then received by Wikileaks was information and the quote does not apply to it.
I suppose you could argue that it is "intellectual property", but then you have to face the question of who is the legal owner of the leaked material when there is an established history that writings developed by USA agencies funded by taxpayer money are part of the public domain. How the courts should apply that principle in this day and age is something that no government agency wants to test. Up and down the hierarchy, each manager, drone, and workerbee wants to be able to copyright the PowerPoint presentations they produce. The USA could claim that the leaked documents were intellectual property and governed by the copyright laws... that would be farcical.
Perhaps more to the point, this situation parallels the handling of hidden information by investigative reporters and their publishers. What Wikileaks has done is fully legal under USA laws and I believe under all European laws. Otherwise arrests would certainly have already been made.
Will
The US has a long-standing executive order against assassinations.
False.
Not only has the US affirmed the ability to assassinate foreign nationals, they have recently decreed that this can be applied to American citizens without any sort of 'due process'.
What do you think those CIA drones are DOING? Do you think their missiles tickle?
And it seems that the data backs you up, particularly recently:
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/journal/docs-temp/532-osoriosullivan.pdf
You can't punch someone in the face multiple times, then call yourself a victim when they punch you back. When Wikileaks changed from a neutral harbor to an anti-American spin machine I stopped caring about them. Wikileaks should go back to neutrality and leave the sensationalism and slant to the media.
or else!
Obviously not that simple, but if I was the girl, and those were the only two choices, I'd vote for the rape.
Given the analogy at hand, you're essentially saying "if I were the information, I'd prefer to be redacted". The question is, what if you were the cop?
In any case, Wikileaks clearly did make a bona fide attempt to protect the innocent. And they're not the ones actually out there killing people, either. If you're assigning blame, you could spread it a lot wider.
It's a cost/benefit analysis. If you have the opportunity to give everyone a free lollipop, but kill 10,000 people in the process, even an "attempt to protect the innocent" which reduces the casualty rate by 90% wouldn't justify your decision to go ahead with the plan. On the ground, this translates to three groups with the following costs / goals:
1. Intentionally killing tens of thousands of civilians while attempting to impose an oppressive dictatorship.
2. Accidentally killing thousands of civilians while attempting to establish a relatively liberal theocratically-leaning democracy.
3. Accidentally killing an unknown number of civilians and military personnel while attempting to cause the failure of group 2.
So yeah, you're right, blame can be spread a lot wider if you're simply looking at the casualty figures. However, only an idiot or an ideologue (one and the same, really) would take such an approach. For all intents and purposes, you can group 1 and 3 together; their approaches might be completely different, and their impact might differ by orders of magnitude, but their goals tie them together.
Its not soldiers being killed over the leaks, its family man living in those countries that helped US forces, inniocent civilian lives at risk. Its informants that are being killed over the leaks.
Thank you for that post. It's always nice to see two sides of an argument even if one side is consistently modded up while another side is consistently modded down. You know slashdot mods, when this site claims to have the best moderation system on the internet, that's not a challenge to see if you can prove it false. Scrameustache has been asking for evidence, facts, and specific accounts of why someone might be disgruntled with Assange throughout this entire thread and Dhalka here has done his best to give him exactly that. It's an informative post with some interesting links and reads in it. It may not get everything 100% right (I don't know, I haven't read through all of the links yet), but it certainly does bring a bit of rational balance back to this thread.
In short, posts like this need to be modded up, not neglected because they don't align with a very common sentiment held on slashdot.
Thanks Dhalka.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
The revolution was (and always is) toppling of government by a small group of armed "revolutionaries". US intervened and locals are grateful that it did [1], not to mention it was sponsored by Cuba in the first place.
[1] - I asked them personally.
I vote for a black ops midnight snatch of the perpetrator at Wikileaks, the body never being found. Much better derrent than any court proceeding or prison.
Well not really. Supposing that there are civilian informants that are in danger due to the wikileaks stuff, as long as the U.S. military remains in Afghanistan, it can offer some bit of sanctuary to said civilian. If, however, the U.S. military pulls out, then those civilians are still in danger due to nothing more than the desire for vengeance. Whoever was fighting the U.S. military while it was there will just use the power vacancy as an excuse to do whatever the hell they want, including hunting down those that conspired with Americans.
Now, I want to make it clear that such an argument should never be used as a reason to keep the U.S. military in the middle east perpetually, but it's not quite as simple as, "Just leave and everything will get better."
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Hey, you'll get no disagreement there - if you want to drive your corporation into the ground, that's your call. You're still a fucking idiot, though.
"Arguably though, the best way to avoid putting Afghan civilians and US troops out of harm is to have US troops go back to the US."
You are partially correct. The best way to avoid putting US Troops in harms way is to bring them to the US. However, I suspect that would be a VERY bad thing for Afghan civilians, especially the Afghan women. Islamic philosophy is not kind to women (they are essentially pieces of property that are used for creating more people). I am not sure it would get as bad as Somalia, but I am certain it would become worse for the civilians when the US withdraws.
strike
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Hey, you'll get no disagreement there - if you want to drive your corporation into the ground, that's your call. You're still a fucking idiot, though.
If you're completely wrong, why should it matter who you think is an idiot? Indeed, it could well be an indication of going the right direction - being the opposite of what you advise.
Food for thought.
You think the phrase "you could be wrong" is food for thought?
Wow.
You must be starving.
I doubt that, but in any case it is probably beside the point. Even if it is against the law it requires someone in power in Australia to follow it through. Given that Australian intelligence warned Assange that something was up just before the rape allegations that seems unlikely at this point. http://www.nypost.com/p/news/international/australian_intelligence_warned_wikileaks_9YIoc83Fq9VyPJ2FsujU8I
That's a pretty black-and-white, for-us-or-against-us point of view. I would have said,
3. Accidentally killing an unknown number of civilians and military personnel while attempting to embarrass group 2 into reining in military excesses and reducing civilian deaths
where "unknown number" is likely significantly smaller than "thousands", especially after redaction.
I don't believe Wikileaks has any stated goals of the "failure" of any group, only the release of potentially embarrassing information, and the leaked records are highly unlikely to directly hinder the war effort, only to place political pressure on how it is conducted (in other words, accountability).
In any case, the DoD report released today confirms Wikileaks "did not disclose any sensitive intelligence sources or methods" and "there has not been a single case of Afghans needing protection or to be moved because of the leak", so it seems the number of civilians or military affected is pretty minimal.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Assigning some sort of moral equivalence to assassinating an informant and bombing the wrong building or shooting the wrong target makes you look like a moron. I hope you know that.
Defending tens of thousands of real casualties by ranting about the mere possibility that someone might die, can't really rule it out, at some point it could happen, maybe; that proves beyond a doubt that you are a soulless moron. Don't talk about morality: you have none.
You can't take the sky from me...