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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."
They're releasing more (7x more?), but have all the earlier pages been read, cataloged, etc? Do these people think we're just going to be sitting around during the holidays reading about US military mistakes?
Wikileaks accepts donations by mail. If you're paranoid, and you should be, buy a postal money order with cash and drop it in a mailbox. No return address!
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Where does "idiots with good intentions possibly causing harm" fall in to the Good or Bad scale?
Perhaps part of the problem making such a determination is the asymmetric nature of their leaks. They haven't been leaking any secrets from the Taliban or Al Quaida.
It's more a function of the people involved in the leaks and the amount of digital information available to send electronically than any editorial bias, but nevertheless, the benefactors of such leaks tend to be the same people rather than being evenly distributed.
That depends on your personal views.
There are those who are of the opinion that these leaks are costing lives of both Western and Middle Eastern Soldiers AND Citizens - and thus releasing this information to the public essentially gives it to our enemies who then use it against us. That these leaks are causing more deaths than necessary. Opposing that some people view that essentially partaking in this conflict, by either signing up with the army or aiding with it's intelligence you've already forfeited your right to reasonable safety. The idea being they could have stopped being an informant at any point and moved far far away - so being an informant is similar to volunteering to be a soldier.
There are those who are of the opinion that the public needs to be made aware of what our military and government are doing. That indecent acts against humanity are not justified by the goal of national security. Those who think that by exposing what is going on during the wars might bring them to an end sooner, similar to the Vietnam war. There are those who think that the safety of themselves and their family are best left up to the military, and that there are some necessary evils. They might believe that those under harm from our military are rightly deserved so based upon their previous acts of violence or terrorism.
So - evaluate it how you will, theres a reason why this contraversial issue is contraversial. Make up your own mind about it.
It essentially boils down to whether you believe in the War on Terror or not.
Free speech is causing harm!
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
It essentially boils down to whether you believe in the War on Terror or not.
In other words, it essentially boils down to whether you're an indoctrinated drone or not. All that the government has proved lately is that terrorism works. The people lose many of their freedoms in exchange for a false sense of security, and they just accept it.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Perhaps part of the problem making such a determination is the asymmetric nature of their leaks....It's more a function of the people involved in the leaks
No - it is more a function of how best to release the information to stop the organization. If you worked for the Taliban et al and were disgusted at their behaviour your best bet to stop that behaviour would be to secretly leak information to western governments who will then act to stop attacks. If you released it via Wikileaks your own organization would know that the information has been released and switch the attack to somewhere else and after an attack the information is public anyway.
Compare that to someone disgusted with the behaviour of a western government. The only people to whom these governments are somewhat accountable is their electorate. Hence, to stop the behaviour you are unhappy with the only choice you have is to leak the data publicly so that their electorate get to see it and demand an explanation and changes. So I would argue that the leaks might well be symmetric but that the terrorist leaks are more effective when kept secret and western government leaks more effective when made public.
Exposing corrupt politicians and the mobsters, war criminals and traitors that support them is causing harm!
The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money
Didn't that happen recently in the Capitalist/Corporatist world?
heya,
The KGB is the FSB these days, I believe (more or less).
And yeah, they will find a creative way of killing you - whether it's stabbing you with a poisoned umbrella, or poisoning you slowly so you die from radiation sickness, in excruciating agony...lol.
It's kind of funny, all these silly DOWN WITH THE US IMPERIALIST jokers going around about how evil the US is - if the US were actually half as evil as you say they are, and half the cock-brained conspiracies you talk about were true, then you'd probably be lying in a shallow unmarked grave somewhere instead of ranting on like you do.
Whilst I may not agree with the recent US administrations and their various actions as such, I'm hardly gullible enough to think it's part of some far-reaching global conspiracy for world domination.
Most of what they've done has been fairly reactionary:
Afghanistan: Ok, so you bomb the WTO and kill a few thousand, we'll come over and hunt you down, and oust the government that gave you sanctuary and thumbed their noses at us.
Iraq: Ok, so you've been goading us for the past decade to give you aid, and blackmailing us with alleged WMDs - now we're fed us, we're going to come over and oust you.
Whilst neither actions may have been the wisest in terms of short-term regional stability (or fidicuary duty, for that matter - the US is plouging moutains of cash into this), it's hardly a global conspiracy - it's more a case of, you keep on throwing rocks at a dog, eventually it'll get up and bite you. Idiots.
And the Wikileaks people are a bit of a joke, at the moment.
Firstly, their alleged "war diaries" were nothing more than public domain knowledge, covering a rife of friendly-fire incidents, and well-document US military screw-ups. Sorry, but this is war - and if you're going to to retarded things - like driving *into* a US vs. insurgents firefight, you can expect to cop some flak. The lengths to which people will go to defend some obvious stupidity astounds me.
And Julian Assange seems to trying to cement his reputation as an attention-seeking little boy. I (and most people) don't know what really happened with the whole "rape" allegation, but based on his antics in the press, and his past history, whilst I seriously doubt he actually raped somebody, I don't have much trouble believing he's an arrogant little twat who probably overstepped the bounds of decency with a few girls. It's hardly like he's actually denied sleeping with them, he's just denied actually outright raping them. Poetic justice, if there ever was any.
Cheers,
Victor
So with my admittedly meager research (reading Slashdot and other sites), I can't figure out if the Wikileaks people are good guys or bad guys. Which is it?
It's subjective, but in general when they reveal the cost of civilian life in the war that the government has tried to conceal that is generally viewed as them being the good guys. Conversely when they name informants/defectors within the enemy forces they would generally be viewed as bad.
Sometimes secrecy is necessary and other times it is not, it seems both sides want to for an absolute on this though.
Well I don't think they are idiots, and I'm also not sure they have good intentions. I mean what they are doing may be somewhat dangerous and certainly stirs shit up, but that doesn't make it idiotic. Doing things for the public good, even at risk to yourself, can be something very noble and necessary. So brazen perhaps, but not idiots in my opinion.
However I'm also not sure they have good intentions. To me it seems like Wikileaks is more of an ego stoke sort of things for Assanage. Leak pretty much any and everything, just to be important.
What I mean by that is it is quite clear that not all those diplomatic messages had anything to further the public good by being released, and certainly not enough to outweigh releasing classified material. There is just no way that all of them were:
1) Things people didn't already know.
2) Things they really needed to know.
3) Things that didn't have the potential to cause harm to innocents if released.
4) Things where the public's need outweighed the government's right to keep things secret.
I'm not saying some weren't I have read them, though if there were any like that in there nobody has pointed them out to me, I'm saying not all were. That Wikileaks dumped them all out says to me that it was more of an ego stoke "Look how badass we are," kind of thing more than a "Wow this is really important and the public really needs to know this," kind of thing.
So personally I think they aren't idiots, but aren't well intentioned.
Stop. Just stop now.
I'm sick and tired of rape jokes. Rape is not funny. Just don't.
The other day I overheard a 12 year old repeat a rape joke from family guy. It takes a lot to appall me but that did.
You've proved your point - the US is far from perfect.
Where "far from perfect" equals "war criminals". But this is really illustrative of the ultimate futility of what Wikileaks is doing. Most Americans don't give a shit if the military is committing atrocities, either out of sheer apathy or because they actually approve of murdering civilians who are the wrong color and religion. And of those who do care and disapprove, there are people like you, who are tired of being bothered by unpleasant facts.
At the end of the day, if it involves fewer than six million Jews, hardly anyone gives a shit. And quite likely no one would give a shit about those six million Jews if the survivors and their descendants didn't work overtime to make sure that people remembered. Do you know who the other half to two-thirds of the victims of the Holocaust were? Or that they even existed?
The fundamental misconception that Julian Assange and his supporters -- including, to some extent, myself -- have about the world is the same belief that Anne Frank might have been disabused of when she was murdered in the camps: that despite everything, people are basically good. The truth is that, despite everything, hardly anyone can be bothered to pay attention unless it's painfully obvious that it affects them. And people being murdered on the other side of the planet seldom falls into that category.
The next leak is going to be seven times as large? Great. It's still going to be outweighed by public apathy by several orders of magnitude.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
That Wikileaks dumped them all out says to me that it was more of an ego stoke "Look how badass we are," kind of thing more than a "Wow this is really important and the public really needs to know this," kind of thing.
Interesting.
Why would your gut reaction to an NGO transparently presenting facts, instead of selectively filtering and editorialising, be "an ego stroke"? For me, it's the exact opposite. I see ego stroking in media organisations to the extent which they don't reveal their raw data and instead try to present me a filtered, massaged, sexed-up commentary.
But then, perhaps you're assuming that the United States military has some kind of ethical high ground by default? Me, I look at the world since 2003 with the awareness that the US President began a major war of choice, which is a war crime, by point-blank lying to the United Nations - and the people responsible for this disaster have never been prosecuted. So my assumption is that the United States military has lost all its credible need for secrecy and the people need to know the full extent of their crimes so even if it's too late for justice to be done, at least awareness of the awfulness of what was done in our name won't be buried forever.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
> The government has no right to keep secrets.
Yes and no. Leaving aside the rather massive issue of where rights come from, there is still a little more nuance here.
First, clearly there are times when information can't or shouldn't be publicly disseminated. Perhaps the name of a teen who was raped should be withheld from the local papers; perhaps prosecutors should not tell the media everything they know about an investigation so that they will not contaminate a jury pool; perhaps police officers should withhold a lurid detail from the description of a crime so as to tell the real criminal from a copycat or imposter.
There are more controversial areas of secrecy: the placement of agents within foreign governments or industry; cryptanalysis techniques developed at NSA that make cracking certain codes easier, or the mere fact that an old code has been cracked; the exact position of every defensive emplacement in Korea; the technology used in the F-22. The public dissemination of this information at the time it is acquired will, to some extent, compromise our ability to predict or respond to threats to the nation.
That being said, I agree that the government should not be able to keep any secret indefinitely, and that in the meantime, all government secrets should be subject to civilian oversight. Anyone who legitimately encounters classified information should also be able to bring an action against the government arguing that the information should be public, if they believe it is being classified erroneously, negligently, or with reckless disregard of the people's interest in knowing the information. A jury should be used, and the procedure should be sealed unless the claimant wins, or after a default period of several decades. Some other procedural safeguards should also be employed.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Why don't you quote the rest of what he said, he explains right there in what he meant. If you have a problem with it, address that.
Firstly, their alleged "war diaries" were nothing more than public domain knowledge, covering a rife of friendly-fire incidents, and well-document US military screw-ups
Then why did US military get so upset? And why was Assange arranged to be character-assassinated while in Sweden?
"It's kind of funny, all these silly DOWN WITH THE US IMPERIALIST jokers going around about how evil the US is - if the US were actually half as evil as you say they are, and half the cock-brained conspiracies you talk about were true, then you'd probably be lying in a shallow unmarked grave somewhere instead of ranting on like you do."
Or even abducted, waterboarded at a US run facility, and then eventually chucked in a CIA plane, and flown to somewhere like Morocco to be more brutally tortured, before being chucked in another CIA plane and flown to guantanamo, where you will be held without trial for 7 years
before your abductors finally realise you're actually completely innocent of any wrongdoing, and then sent back home to the UK like Binyamin Mohammed? I like the fact you think the US is a beacon of justice or something, your naivety is like that of an innocent child.
"Iraq: Ok, so you've been goading us for the past decade to give you aid, and blackmailing us with alleged WMDs - now we're fed us, we're going to come over and oust you."
Goading for aid? Sorry what? This makes no sense, you don't give someone aid in this context because they're goading you, you do it because there's some tactical advantage in it for you - i.e. winning over the civilian population, preventing destabilisation, that sort of thing. What blackmailing was this regarding WMDs exactly? the allowing of inspections by UN weapons inspectors who were pretty certain that Iraq didn't have any WMDs just as it claimed? You didn't go over because you were fed up, you went over because Cheney wanted to see some improvements on his Halliburton shares and Bush wanted to try and finish off what daddy failed to do all coupled with a bit of believing their own bullshit about the war on terrorism. You're right it wasn't a global conspiracy, but I don't think anyone other than crazy conspiracy theorists would seriously suggest it was, but then that doesn't stop it being a conspiracy by a select few to cash in on their position of power to fulfil some personal agenda.
"Firstly, their alleged "war diaries" were nothing more than public domain knowledge, covering a rife of friendly-fire incidents, and well-document US military screw-ups."
It wasn't public domain that Taskforce 343, a US' "special" forces group in Afghanistan was such a fucking joke, that they'd launch salvos of missiles into a civilian compound in the hope they might just hit a few insurgents. It wasn't public domain the extent of civilian casualties the US actually had on record and in fact, denied having at all. The diaries (which presumably from your comments you haven't even looked at) expose hundreds of fuckups that never even made it to the media.
"Sorry, but this is war - and if you're going to to retarded things - like driving *into* a US vs. insurgents firefight, you can expect to cop some flak."
It's a war that these civilians never asked to be in, it's a war your country and my country took to Iraq, it's a war that's been forced upon their neighbourhood - they didn't drive into a warzone, you created a warzone in their back garden. If they see no current sign of gunfire (because Apache's sit at a fair distance away) when they drive into an area, but see injured people crawling around, then why the fuck wouldn't they help them? Are you so fucked up that you think if someone started a war in your back yard and you saw people dying slowly the first thing you should do is turn around and drive off leaving people who weren't even armed and were civilians themselves to die?
"The lengths to which people will go to defend some obvious stupidity astounds me."
Indeed, which is why it's quite ironic that you got a +5 insightful moderation. Your post is full of ignorance and stupidity throughout. Grow the fuck up, drop the patriotism and learn a bit about the world, maybe then you wont be so stupid as to demonstrate to thousands of internet readers just how ignorant some people actually are.
I've yet to have someone show me the information that was not previously publicly known, that came to light because of this, that was so important for the public to know.
The Iraq War leaks provided details of 15,000 previously unknown civilian killings, along with the location and circumstances. That kind of information is invaluable to the Iraq Body Count Project.
That Wikipedia article contains many more "previously unknown or unconfirmed events that took place during the war". One that stands out is:
A number of the documents, as defined by Al Jazeera English, describe how US troops killed almost 700 civilians for coming too close to checkpoints, including pregnant women and the mentally ill. At least a half-dozen incidents involved Iraqi men transporting pregnant family members to hospitals.
I can't recall the U.S. military admitting to killing 700 civilians.
And what about this leaked report:
"On May 14, 2005, an American unit “OBSERVED A BLACKWATER PSD SHOOT UP A CIV VEHICLE,” killing a father and wounding his wife and daughter, a report said, referring to a Blackwater protective security detail.
The military never publicised that soldiers had observed Blackwater contractors shooting up civilian vehicles. Or the numerous other indiscriminate killings by Blackwater that the troops observed. What about this incident report, after contractors drove into a neighborhood in the northern city of Erbil and began shooting at random, setting off a firefight with an off-duty police officer and wounding three women:
"“It is assessed that this drunken group of individuals were out having a good time and firing their weapons,”"
Did the military ever voluntarily reveal that drunken contractors had gone out to have a good time shooting in a civilian neighbourhood, resulting in women being harmed?
There have been civilian casualties and the government knows. To this I can only say: DUH! It is war, it is nasty business.
Well, it wasn't supposed to be a war. The war was supposed to have been won, and this was supposed to be a peacekeeping and nation building operation. The troops and contractors and other actors are not meant to be operating under war time rules of engagement. But the leaks show that, amongst many individuals, there is a disregard for life and the rule of law.
The gunship video. If you think that's a war crime, it only shows your ignorance of the rules of war. I see nothing in that video illegal.
I've already commented on the legal issue. It is not as clear cut as you seem to think. But here's the most important issue: it is not for you or I to determine whether these men are guilty or innocent. That is a job for judges in a military court. Where is the prosecutor in this case? In any reasonable judicial system, a prosecutor would decide whether or not to pursue a court case against these individuals, and he would have to justify this decision to the public. Consider if an identical situation happened in the United States - a group of individuals, some armed - but in a state where open-carry is legal - are shot up by a police/army helicopter. A group of passing "Good Samaritans" stop to help a few minutes later, and they also get shot up. And not only is there no prosecution, there is not even an attorney general giving a reason for not pursuing a prosecution. At the very least, that is what we would expect from a civilised society that follows the rules of law.
That's a silly definition of capitalism. Every dollar any government spends is a social service. Defense? Social service. Police? Social service. Etc.
The metric concerning money should not be percentage of the federal budget that is social services expenditures; the metric should be percent of income that is kept by private actors. As capitalism is about private ownership of the means of production and the means of production being operated for private profit. Seeing as how there is no type of income in the United States that is taxed greater than 50%, you'd be hard pressed to refer to the economy as socialist.
Instead, at best, you could call the US a capitalist-socialist hybrid, with it lying on the strong-capitalist side of the continuum (to borrow nomenclature from atheism classification). And, as it turns out, pretty much every country in the world is a capitalist-socialist hybrid lying on the strong-capitalist side. Perhaps there are a couple purely socialist countries or C-S hybrids lying on the strong-socialist side (too lazy to actually do research into exactly what %age of ownership in N. Korea, etc., is private).
But to call the US not capitalist based on the percentage government expenditures that are social services is just plain silly.