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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 :-)
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).
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.