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Wikileaks Vows Release '7x the Size' of Iraq Leak
CWmike writes "WikiLeaks has promised to release a load of information seven times bigger than the Iraq War Logs, which raised the Internet group's profile around the world and caused some nations to take notice of the issue of leaks of top-secret documents online. In a note on Twitter, WikiLeaks said, 'Next release is 7x the size of the Iraq War Logs. Intense pressure over it for months,' and asked supporters to continue donating to the cause. WikiLeaks did not say what the new release of information would be about."
Just reading up on Wikileaks, I found this stating that their main host is PRQ, a Swedish ISP infamous for hosting The Pirate Bay. So they must be the good guys :-)
In the US, the justice department has this handy legal billy club called RICO...
Probably not if you're donating $5 or $10, but if you were donating a large sum of money, say $10,000, then....
Other countries have Security Services...some of which are known for their ruthless efficiency.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
which raised the Internet group's profile around the world and caused some nations to take notice of the issue of leaks of top-secret documents online
Have any of the documents leaked been Top Secret? According the reports I've read, the highest level of classification in these leaks has been Secret.
I think this is a distraction. Wikileaks is about more than just the 'US v. *' set of conflicts; if you look back at the past several years you can see a number of reports they've made that have entirely to do with individual non-US corporate concerns, domestic issues in a host of countries, etc.
The stuff you hear now is largely due to the size (both of the apparatus and the leak) and that the bloodied nose is the US, and therefor important.
Not entirely true, Wikileaks scope of work goes far beyond the war. Most of their initial leaks were targeted against organized crime and regimes that most of us would consider to be the bad guys.
Wrong. They care about doing what they think is good. What they don't care about is if you agree with what they think is good.
Practically no one ever considers themselves "the bad guy" even guys like saddam hussein, idi amin and the khmer rouge all rationalized their actions as somehow being for the greater good.
Personally, I think wikileaks is well over the line into the territory of "good" -- I'm just saying the argument that someone thinks they are doing good doesn't necessarily make it so.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Careful, it is important to discriminate the Aljazeeras on the internet.
There is "english.aljazeera.net", which is a more or less factual, reliable news source from an arab perspective (think arab CNN). This is the "real" Aljazeera with the global TV channel.
Then there is "aljazeera.com", which is a trashy islamist/extremist propaganda website disguised as a news outlet (think FoxNews).
That is, if you compare them to real-world standards (private industry and other governments), instead of an idealized standard of perfection. (E.g. people who carp about medicare fraud without ever considering that insurance fraud affects all insurers).
For FY2009 Military is 23%
Military budget and total US federal spending:
"Including non-DOD expenditures, defense spending was approximately 28–38% of budgeted expenditures and 42–57% of estimated tax revenues."
To say that around half of your tax is spent on the military is about right. And then there is the Department of Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security etc. which are don't appear in the military budget.
Of the defense budget, some of that is paying off debt from previous wars, and things like pensions.
Not true; these are not part of the military budget. Military budget of the United States:
"This does not include many military-related items that are outside of the Defense Department budget, such as nuclear weapons research, maintenance, cleanup, and production, which is in the Department of Energy budget, Veterans Affairs, the Treasury Department's payments in pensions to military retirees and widows and their families, interest on debt incurred in past wars, or State Department financing of foreign arms sales and militarily-related development assistance. Neither does it include defense spending that is not military in nature, such as the Department of Homeland Security, counter-terrorism spending by the FBI, and intelligence-gathering spending by NASA."
I served in Iraq twice and found many of the documents I wrote on Wikileaks, just check for Haditha from August 2006 to April 2007 or Karmah from Jan 2008 to August 2008. I wrote most of those. The funny thing is that all of these documents already actually available in unclassified form from the Marine Corps Historical Society in Quantico Virginia. The unclassified version from the Historical Society have the names, places, and weapons capabilities redacted. Which are the exact same redactions made by Wikileaks. So my question to the media is why haven't you been taking advantage of these documents from the archive? Why is this news when Wikileaks releases them? I think most journalists simply are too lazy to go through archives and just latch on to a story when it has some entertainment value. For all of the low-level documents Mr. Assange released, he has broken very little new ground. That is probably because most of it was already available from the military.