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UK Asks News Outlets Not To Publish WikiLeaks Bombshell, US Prepares For Fallout
Stoobalou writes "The UK government has issued Defense Advisory Notices to editors of UK news outlets in an attempt to hush up the latest bombshell from whistle-blowing web site WikiLeaks. DA Notices, the last of which was issued in April 2009 after sensitive defense documents were photographed using a telephoto lens in the hand of Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick as he arrived at No 10 Downing Street for a briefing, are requests not to publish, and therefore not legally enforceable."
This news comes alongside a raft of articles detailing the US government's preparations for the release. Officials are warning allies that the documents will be more damaging than previous releases, to the point of potentially damaging diplomatic relations with countries like Turkey. The Vancouver Sun wonders if this will lead to a change in the way diplomats communicate.
Don't let Faux News and other television channels with their ORLY commentators trick you into think that they're doing anything close to resembling reporting.
I'll be very interested to see how the BBC and Channel 4 handle this one, actually. Despite what many seem to think, the BBC are not 'state run' in the sense that the state has any say in their editorial process, and they are perfectly happy being pretty brutally critical of the government. They even make quite admirably even-handed (IMO) coverage of issues that portray the BBC themselves in a bad light.
That said, both organisations pretty much always obey voluntary blackouts. The difference is, those are usually temporary and for a well defined reason related to the direct safety of individuals (modern examples include the military deployments prince Harry while he was on active duty, and the movements of two civilians recently released by Somali pirates). This seems more like nebulous and indeterminate censorship for political reasons - the BBC are already quite publicly discussing the existence of the leak, and it will be interesting to see how far they go in discussing its specifics.
Wikileaks used to feature leaks from all over the world, big and small. Truth and transparency for their own sake motivated the organization. In this capacity, Wikileaks might have been a force for good.
But a few years ago, Julian Assange (who is as autocratic as the rumors indicate) and his ilk abandoned the original goals of the organization to wage a political war against the United States. Wikileaks launched a massive fundraising effort, then started to ignore documents from the general public. Most telling is that the operators let the submission system stay broken for months at a time: if your leak doesn't harm the United States, Wikileaks isn't interested.
Today's Wikileaks uses methods that the old Wikileaks would have found deplorable: these include a strict internal hierarchy, deceptive video editing, spin-heavy public statements, marketing-driven timing, purity tests, and blackmail. Whereas idealism drove the old Wikileaks, every action taken by its present incarnation is informed by malice aforethought. It's no longer about the truth. Now, it's a vendetta.
Speaking as someone who was formerly involved with the organization, I cannot support today's Wikileaks or its leadership. They've been captured by their vanity and pride[1] and as far as I'm concerned, they can hang, then burn.
Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.
[1] That some prominent members of the organization consider this wretched document the "obvious truth" illuminates their mindset.
From the poison pen of xmas past.
Colby Cosh: Some apparently unwelcome candour on Canada
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/radio4/transcripts/Lord-Moran.pdf
As a Canadian with a reasonably good recollection of 1984, all I can say is "ouch" and "damn straight". I've lived in five provinces (BC, Alberta, Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia). He has a point about the fetish in Toronto/Ottawa for loading the international penis ruler onto their iPhones. It's a bit of a culture shock for a Canadian to show up in Toronto and discover other Canadians taking themselves seriously.
Back when I was in eastern Canada, there was a lot of talk about changing the rules to allow mergers among our five large banks, so that bankers in Toronto could have bigger international wieners, and then after the party, collect state welfare like the big American banks they so bitterly envied.
On the flip side, Toronto does have a kick ass film festival, so I didn't totally feel like I was living in a foreign country.
Well dammit, tell him to get the telephoto lens out of his hand...
You jest in grammar. But, as I recall a lot of people thinking that he had deliberately displayed that document.
The first odd thing was that he was walking into the building using the very public front entrance used almost exclusively for photo-ops.
The second odd thing was that the document's cover sheet was removed - anyone who has ever seen a classified document knows they have cover sheets to officially label them and prevent accidental disclosure.
The third odd thing was that the event was used to justify pulling in the timetable on a bunch of terrorism raids (the document was apparently part of the investigation) - it's pure speculation but perhaps there had been hesitation on making the raids and this event was a internal political move to force someone's hand. I haven't been able to find out what success, if any, there has been with respect to prosecuting the people raided (even then, the standard of evidence in the UK (and the USA) for such things has been lowered to such a point of ridiculousness that a successful prosecution isn't as meaningful as it once was)
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Or maybe people in those countries don't send Wikileaks stuff to publish? They're not an investigation organization, they just publish them protecting the identity of the source.
Uh... Question here:
Is Wikileaks able to properly process documents written in a language other than English?
Remember the BBC took a pretty bad hammering when they ridiculed the lie about Saddam being capable of bombing London in minutes, and that was from the party that thinks the BBC should have a right to exist. The UK government can (and has) hurt the BBC badly.
When Scott McNeally of SUN told the public "You have no privacy, get over it!" our politicians didn't give a damn. When Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the public not to do anything they wouldn't like the world to know, politicians were similarly uninterested. Well now the shoe is on the other foot. The dirty deeds of the US and UK governments come to life, and all of a sudden they care about privacy... *their* privacy... not ours. Screw them. We're the public. We pay for the government. We're entitled to know what it's up to. More often than not 'National Security' is just a smokescreen for covering up incompetence and law breaking by government fat cats and politicians.
Not really, parts of the truth can paint a picture entirely different then the whole truth.
That much is true, and therefore releasing part of the truth invites the potentially negatively affected party to release the rest of it (or at least as much as they need to repair their image), which means more truth released overall. Which is a good thing.
And timing the release to impact certain events can have a far more negative consequence then the documents on their own might at any other given time.
Also true, but not really relevant to the usefulness of leaked information.
IT might even have consequences that cost human lives.
It might, but this is a fallacious argument in general, since it's exactly the one used by totalitarian regimes historically to justify any oppressive measures and crackdowns - "The enemies are out there! The dissidents are conspiring to destroy our society and kill us all! They must be silenced before their treacherous lies subvert our cause!".
So, in any particular case, you have to actually look at the cost/benefit of releasing such documents. Of particular interest is what damage was made by making them secret in the first place (thereby affecting public opinion etc). You also have to look at the benefit of teaching a lesson to those who would perpetrate crimes, thinking that evidence is secured away, and then seeing it subjected to public scrutiny to their horror - which would hopefully mean less such crimes in the future.
Overall, I'm not aware of any leak coming from WL where the cost/benefit ratio (in my subjective opinion, of course) was not advantageous for release.
Or did you not think about it and just believe they are the good guys no matter what happens?
I don't believe that WikiLeaks are the "good guys". They can knowingly be on al-Qaeda and DPRK payroll simultaneously for all I care. What matters is whether they deliver factual information. Similarly, any other party is also invited to deliver such information. If CIA wants to set up a WL-like front org to "leak" interesting stuff on China, Iran or Russia, they're more than welcome to do so as well. As a Russian citizen, I would of course be particularly interested in any stuff on my country (though there has already been plenty of "bombs" from elsewhere - but, alas, they do not have effect of the same magnitude in an authoritarian, sham-democracy society).