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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.
I'm of two minds on this one. Private communications from diplomats to their masters at home are often rather brutally honest, as they have to be. To leak, intentionally, such communications is a risky venture. Think Franco-Prussian War here for a good example of just that sort of thing.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Hello Censorship, my old friend,
You used to be suppressed by Free Media. But now I think you're needed again. People shouldn't know everything - especially if the truth will hurt them. In fact, people knowing things is stopping us from doing whatever we want - without any bad reprecussions.
Lots of Love
Me.
Don't be daft. The USA is a strong ally to those countries that are strategically important to it.
Sorry if that breaks your worldview where everyone ought to get along in peace.
That's kind of backwards. He's part of an organisation which doesn't think certain stuff should be covered up. This latest release is a case it point. It's going to embarass governments by showing them lying, trying to outdo each other etc. People are trying to shut him up by engaging him in pointless lawsuits. It'll make no difference; wikileaks is bigger than him.
I can't see the Guardian agreeing to this.
If Wikileaks can get this stuff, imagine what foreign intelligence agencies can do. The U.S. government needs security proportional to the value of the data.
Releasing the facts, unaltered and un-commentated, in their original context and form, without any interpretation - THAT is real journalism. 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.
Wikileaks is an interesting and important information outlet to pay attention to. So rarely does fact reach anyone anymore in our opaque modern governments, only carefully-filtered truthiness.
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
Awwww. We still love him because he's exposing whatever they are that you're defending so valiantly. Guess what? People are tired from deceitful governments, and if a government is so scared of having something exposed; chances are it needs to be exposed.
Is that still a question? I thought that we'd settled that years ago...
That's insane... What is there to hide people?
This made me think about how funny it is that they tell us only criminals have something to hide when they screw our privacy. Now when we screw their privacy, they turn it all the way around and we are the criminals again.
And I'm not saying the question isn't valid. But I think a great deal of care has to be taken. Let's take, for instance, a key ally, say the UK. Maybe the US Ambassador has some rather nasty, but truthful things to say about the Prime Minister, observations that suggest a man of lesser wits or perhaps of an unreliable nature. This informs the State Department, and ultimately the President, of how to proceed with certain topics of discussion.
To have such frank dispatches suddenly outed within the lifetime of the Prime Minister's ministry could create enormous rifts between two key allies. The kind of language used in these dispatches is extremely frank. What good would it do the citizens of either nation to have these observations broadcast for the world to see? Will it help American interests abroad? What exactly will American citizens be able to decide based on it? That the British Prime Minister is an ass? That the US Embassy is populated by people who say nasty things?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Here's an idea, radical as it may be:
"It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world, so far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it; for let me not be understood as capable of patronizing infidelity to existing engagements. I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs that honesty is always the best policy. I repeat, therefore, let those engagements be observed in their genuine sense, but in my opinion it is unnecessary and would be unwise to extend them."
The US always acts in its own best interests. It never acts in the best interests of others.
So explain the invasion of Iraq.
It's one thing to complain about the rule of law being followed, but do you really give a damn about what some guys who were born 300 years ago thought?
Personally, I thought they were damn good ideas, but "sticking to founding ideals" for its own sake personally sounds like a horrible idea to me. The founding fathers were innovative politicans...not prophets.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
This is exactly the point that needs to be made:
Assange? He could be a pedophile rapist who is completely self centered and arrogant and a total douchebag about it all - or he could be a living saint ---
Point is, it has no bearing on whats going on. He is simply doing his job as a journalist - and it has nothing to do with him. Could he be doing it for personal gains? Yes. Could he just be inflating his ego by doing all this? Absolutely.
None of it matters. What matters is that the story is getting out. If the government is going to ensure that YOU can't keep secrets, by harmful body scanners, deep packet inspection, warrant-less searches - why on Earth should we listen to a "Defense Advisory Notice" to keep THEIR secrets? If we have nothing to hide, they should have nothing to hide, simple as that.
I am perfectly fine with the government controlling the media, as long as they respect my privacy and stay the eff out of my life.
An agency such as yours must treat all the information it has with equal priority -- it is the only way to be neutral and unbiased. Otherwise you risk undermining the confidence of people everywhere -- the same people you rely on to effect the tangible changes that we all desire. Herein now lies the current problem with wikileaks.org. You have at some point taken your previous database entirely offline. Before you became well known you were a nexus of information on nations around the globe. Now, there is access only to Iraq Diaries and Afghan Logs. A google search on wikileaks for Asia, Africa, and Europe reveals thousands of documents previously linked to that are now inaccessible. These must be restored immediately.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Although this is possible, there are other bigger issues. For example, with regard to Turkey, there is fear that it will be revealed that both the U.S. and Turkey are secretly doing things that they publicly say they are not -- Turkey helping Al-Qaeda militants in Iraq, and the United States helping Iraq-based Kurdish rebels fighting Turkey. Which is exactly why these things need to be exposed.
The people in the US and UK are routinely subjected to various kinds of surveillance and scrutiny - like the US warrant-less wiretaps and TSA peep-shows - and told by our governments and pundits, "If you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide." I say that what's good for the goose is good for the gander. I suspect our governments have been very bad at times and indeed have things to hide - not only from others, but from their own people.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
To put it bluntly: if that's enough to cause an incident then people on both sides need to grow the fuck up.
These are mature adults, world leaders no less, so if (to take your example) it turns out that the US ambassador thinks the UK prime minister is an ass, the prime minister should be more than capable of realising the difference between personal feelings and an appraisal of one's technical ability, not to mention understanding that interactions that affect millions are not to be decided on the say of one official.
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.
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Such as the video they labeled "Collateral Murder"?
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.
And that's the problem our government has brought upon itself. I completely understand the need to keep some things secret; however, by abusing that privilege to cover up things which are only embarassing/illegal/whatever else, the government has decreased our trust in them. Now, we don't trust them to make public the things we need to know, so we sit cheering on folks like Wikileaks, because they may well be uncovering actions our government has taken that we need to be aware of. Yes, of course that's dangerous due to the risk of revealing the wrong things, and I don't know if I entirely condone the actions of Wikileaks as a result. That does not mean, however, that I sympathize with the government on this one. Fuckers brought this on themselves, now they're reaping the consequences. Even if Wikileaks is wrong, that just makes both parties wrong, it doesn't make the US government right.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Do you know what the word "pretext" means?
I'll type it slowly: if you go to war ostensibly over a memo, then you were already going to war. The memo just came along at a convenient time.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
If you are smart enough to quote Jefferson you should be smart enough to know how the US defines treason and why it wouldn't apply in this particular case....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The last release was marketed as definitive proof that the US military actively practiced murder.
No. The last release was definitive proof that the US military condoned torture. You're thinking of the Collateral Murder video, which was about four releases ago (you know... BEFORE the two largest military leaks in history).
Particularly they do not want it known to their own voting citizenry, or more likely, their despotic royal subjects...
I say kudos to Wikileaks, if just for getting all of these phony US "freedom" and "democracy" "defenders" to show their true, heavily fascist-tinged, imperial colors!
But then again outfits like the TSA are already doing a splendid job of rubbing off all of the thin veneer of pretend "liberties" from the true, viciously authoritarian nature of the majority of the modern US populace. Sometimes I think that all those veterans of WWII must be better off already dead because this belated victory of the Axis ideology that the US (and many of its "allies") succumbed to would have been too much for them to bear.
Actually, if Russia were going to "plug" a leak, Assange wouldn't be the target, the person who leaked the information in the first place would. Meaning, if someone in the Russian government had, say, documents about Vladimir Putin doing something illegal/immoral/embarrassing a decade ago, they'd be disinclined to share them with wikileaks for fear of being given a 9mm retirement present.
I can well believe that Assange has nothing in his files that could embarrass Russia or any similarly scary governments, because nothing has been given to him. Especially since nobody in their right mind would submit information to wikileaks and assume that the information in question would be scrubbed of anything that could leak back to the informant before being published.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
a) "war" is strictly legally defined (or at least used to be) and the real definition did not involve phrases like "whenever we say it is" or "all the time" or "perpetual" or "always" or "endless" or "Eurasia" ...
b) "secret military information" is in the eye of the beholder. If the governments could be trusted to label as "secret" only the things that actually affect immediate operations: names of spies, access codes to nuclear silos, etc, then you would perhaps have a point. But today's governments label as "secret" anything even remotely likely to cause some kind of embarrassment or threat to the hold on power to one of the stooges of the aristocratic political dynasties that run these "republics", or possibly to one of their business associates.
c) "the enemy" is defined here as "the unwashed peon masses" who are apparently much better off not knowing what their "betters" do in their name. Another one of those shining towers of noble principles that the western "democracies" are supposedly perched on.
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.
Funny...
I find it MORE offensive when a person claims to do good, but is instead a total dick with a dashing smile-- than the person that is a total dick, but is openly public about such dickery.
Examples: A television evangelist, VS somebody like George Carlin (not necessarily him personally, but somebody like him personality wise). The former swears seven ways to sunday that they are good, wholesome, and beholden to a higher purpose/power, The latter openly admits to doing his shtick solely for the money, and openly says that they don't give a flying fuck about any such hogwash.
As such, the shenanigans of the first are more distasteful, disgusting, and reprehensible than those of the latter. At least the later isn't trying to lie to you.
Same thing with world governments. If the US wants to claim to be a defender of democracy, freedom, personal liberty, and all that "wholesome goodness", then they SHOULDNT engage in secret deals, military actions that destroy freedom, erect puppet dictatorships, etc-- like the television evangelist shouldn't swindle money out of little old women, then spend it on hookers and blow. Not if they want to be taken seriously, and not be seen as the dirty swindlers that they are.
That is to say, I personally am of the opinion that this is needed EXACTLY because they claim to be democratic governments. We as citizens are indeed ultimately responsible for the actions of our governments, BECAUSE they are democracies, and we NEED to know when our leaders are engaging in secret super-dickery like this.
Basically, it's no secret that these non-democratic countries you are railing against violate personal liberties. They make no claims to the contrary. Some even proudly proclaim their stances on such issues. It is the ones that claim otherwise that are in need of being exposed. Their's is the more reprehensible crime.
Is that really what you want? You are cheering on Wikileaks even when its actions are going to do no good at all, and might even lead to you personally being hurt?
I don't see you doing anything better.
It just doesn't get any worse than a government that is no longer accountable to the citizenry.
Nothing trumps that because it circumvents the democratic process - we can't vote on what we don't know.
Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of americans have died to prevent that from happening.
Wikileaks is doing their damndest to fix it. Your opinion may be that it doesn't work, their opinion differs and they are doing something about it.
So yeah, even if it does lead to me personally being hurt, that's the price of freedom.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I change my mind as I learn more and my general outlook evolves. I've watched the video and it clearly shows acts that break international law.
As for the rifles, you think it's uncommon for journalists to have an armed escort in many parts of the world? You think it's illegal to own a rifle in Iraq? You shoot anybody carrying a gun as a matter of principle?
Your attempts to justify a deliberate, callous and at times juvenile act of violence discredit you, albeit not as much as your apparent defense of torture.
Torture is wrong[tm] and counter-productive (in a number of dimensions) which is why even the CIA handbook said not to use it.
If you're a former marine then you've been trained badly and should be assumed to have no fucking clue how to operate in a hostile civilian population. That specific issue was identified prior to the Iraq invasion and was a clear cause of much of the subsequent civil unrest.
Try putting your own life on the line and stop shooting fucking civilians you cowardly piece of shit. Or get the fuck out of a country you have no legitimate purpose in and stop trying to justify your illegal acts there.
You do realize that what you are describing here is a government that acts in ways contrary to the wishes of it's population and then punishing the population in increasingly severe ways when the population tries to put a stop to it.
That's basically a tyranny.
The day our governments become tyrannies, then I hope we'll fight them by force at any cost rather than stay quiet and let ourselves be dominated by a government we do not want and which acts contrary to our wishes.
Oh, and don't think that NOT having Wikileaks will stop governments from becoming tyrannies. Wikileaks tells us what is going on behind our backs. Without Wikileaks, we simply don't know what is going on, but it does not mean it's not happening. At least if we know we can do something about it.
So yes, Wikileaks is what I want. It's what we should all want until something better comes up. Better Wikileaks than nothing. And if a government does anything to stop Wikileaks, it will just make me even more angry and thus more likely to try and stop my own government.
Doubtful with the amount of corruption present in Russia that they wouldn't have dirt on them. I think they're just on a high horse against the US, UK, and other countries because they'll avoid Po-210 poisoning better that way. Doesn't make Assange sound like the white knight he attempts to portray
This is a straw man and an ill conceived ad hominem attack (i.e - "Assange is a coward because he's afraid of assassination!"). You could just as well say "Amnesty International does nothing to stop famine" or "Oxfam does nothing to stop the genocide in Sudan" and blame them for trying to portray themselves as charitable organizations. You do not criticize a person or an organization for the good work they didn't do. There will always be the next worthwhile cause.
I personally don't mind if he does focus his efforts on the US/UK. They do enough highly questionable things to keep a small organization such as WL busy for decades to come. It is not his job nor prerogative to publish information in a manner which would be equally embarrassing to all countries . He runs a site on the internet, not a UN/governmental organization. If he so wishes he can focus exclusively on uncovering 4chan users identities.
Also, given your own stated opinion on the way that Russia/China/EvilCountryX deal with leaks, it is entirely conceivable that there are far less potential sources who are willing to risk their lives in order to expose such information.
Russia has great many people ready to risk their safety to provide access to variety of information on government corruption and other practices. That information exists and is known even outside Wikileaks.
I have no doubt that Wikileaks has access to such information, in fact Assange claimed to have it just recently.
I also have little doubt that the reason Assange won't release such information is its risk/reward ratio. The rewards of talking about Russia are slim - it's just not fashionable to bash on Russian nowadays, and it won't get anywhere near the news time. The risks are huge - I am ready to make a bet with anyone that, should Wikileaks publish anything that makes Russian powers that be unhappy, mr. Assange will very shortly get a chance to drink some tea with polonium, dioxin or another similarly fun chemical agent added. Russian security services made it known quite publicly that should he do something like that - he *will* be eliminated.
Much easier to release information on US - lots of publicity and little danger to his life.
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.
That's bullshit. It's not because of the "freedom we enjoy in America", it's because of an accident called "the Internet", a technology that got away from the powers that be before they had a chance to lock it down and now the genie is out of the bottle.
Believe me, if it happened any other way, if it had been in the hands of "private enterprise" there would never be the kind of free exchange of information on the Internet that has created Wikileaks. If it had been in the hands of private enterprise, the Internet would be cable television. And if there aren't strict net neutrality laws, the Internet will become cable television.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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).
Respectfully, Wikileaks simply does the kind of job that used to be performed by guys like Woodward and Bernstein back in the days when the word "journalism" still meant something and newspapers did that job.
Leaks are not new. Government's dirty secrets were leaking with regularity long before the Internet existed. Guys like Julian Assange are just filling a gap that newspapers created when they collectively decided to stop doing journalism.
There is no failure of "private enterprise"; The Washington Post was a "private enterprise" when they exposed Nixon's administration, and the Internet is mostly run and built by "private enterprise", moreover, "private enterprise" isn't trying to cover up these leaks, GOVERNMENTS are, I don't see how you make the leap from that to "private enterprise". If anything the 'ordinary folk' that run private enterprises are just as interested in seeing government's dirty secrets exposed, not least of the reasons being that private enterprise requires accurate information on what's happening in the world to make sound business decisions.