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Compiling the WikiLeaks Fallout
Now that the world has had some time to process the quarter million diplomatic documents published by WikiLeaks on Sunday, the media landscape is rife with reactions, threats, and warnings. Some US lawmakers have complained loudly and at length, saying that "WikiLeaks is putting at risk the lives and the freedom of countless Americans and non-Americans around the world." Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the leak "not just an attack on America's foreign policy interests, it is an attack on the international community." The Guardian points out that it's not the media's job to protect diplomats from embarrassment, and other US officials seem to agree, focusing their wrath instead on the security practices surrounding sensitive information. The Pentagon and other agencies are looking at ways to tighten security, promising increased internal auditing and banning the ability of systems containing classified information to connect to thumb drives or other removable media. Meanwhile, few officials seem to be commenting publicly on the contents of the leak, which are sure to cause diplomatic problems around the globe.
I don't know if this happened to many other people, but when I was reading through the leaks, I thought: It's good that my government knows all this stuff and keeps track of it. I think I've grown so used to thinking of the USA as being run by fools that it was actually a bit comforting to see that they actually do research and know stuff. Too bad that doesn't stop them acting foolishly!
"WikiLeaks is putting at risk the lives and the freedom of countless Americans and non-Americans around the world."
COUNTLESS they say. countless as in, a few hundred, tops. compared to 66.000+ (official no, unofficial probably higher) dead in iraq, unknown number dead in afghanistan, unknown number lost in the hands of cia, nsa and ice. (even inside usa - http://www.thenation.com/article/americas-secret-ice-castles )
.....
and they come up with long-repeated, surefire bullshit 'putting countless lives at risk' -> vague enough too, you can never calculate how many lives lost and compare it to those who got killed while chasing a wild goose under false pretenses in afghan mountains or iraq plains.
but that's all fancy talk. what they are basically saying, bluntly and in streetspeak is :
"Let us continue doing our filth behind the veil of secrecy by biting the bait of 'risk of freedom and lives'"
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Having worked for several businesses that have attempted to ban the use of portable media -- it's a pointless endeavor. Anything that connects to a USB port can emulate anything else that can connect to a USB port. I have seen USB flash drives that emulate rewritable CDROMs, etc. And with just a little bit of work, you can use standard HUD devices like mice and keyboards to stream data out at very high speeds to other devices. And nevermind Firewire and it's built-in ability to directly manipulate system memory -- if the port has power, all your memory are belong to us. -_-
There is only one security measure that works in this situation: Air gap. Everything else is window dressing.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
This reading utterly misses the fact that the Pentagon Papers were commissioned and released during the Johnson Administration. I very much doubt that LBJ or many Congressional Democrats at the time favored the release of those papers.
Dog is my co-pilot.
What I really have to wonder is that if essentially one guy with a website can get this much info, how much do the other nations with active espionage units manage to get?
that guarantees the leaks from Wikileaks are legitimate and not some delusional writing from Sarah Palin?
These were done on computer, not with paper and crayon.
That's all the proof you need.
Trolling is a art,
They only released 243 cables at this point. http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/
Is this really a case of 'holding the US to account for its crimes' or just malice, someone's personal agenda to get back at the big bad Americans? So far, it's looking more like the latter. I'm starting to question my former support for wikileaks.
You've been drinking the kool aid a bit heavily. Wikileaks has been careful not to release data that could pose an immediate threat to life or safety. They've been posting things that embarrass the government and affect its public image. And you want to stop supporting them because of this? Wikileaks didn't kill a bunch of brown people in an some country with an unpronounceable name and then pretend it didn't happen. Wikileaks didn't blow away several journalists who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They weren't making comments into the mic, laughing and acting excited that they were gunning down unarmed civilians.
They just told you it happened. Which is something your government (and mine) wouldn't do, and would never do if it had the choice. And all of this has been hidden behind the cloak of "national security". National security only goes so far -- when it is used as an excuse to violate the basic social contract and principles which the government is supposed to be supporting, it is the duty of those who know about this to spread the word far and wide and bring the democratic process into play to fix such systemic problems.
Wikileaks isn't on some quest to destroy the government: It is serving the purpose of saving it from itself, before it becomes completely unaccountable to its citizens and eventually becomes destructive of its own ends.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
"You shouldn't care unless you've got something to hide."
Isn't that line we always hear from these government agencies when it comes to privacy invasions? I can only assume from the outcry that they must have something to hide.
We hire politicians to be upfront and honest. We don't hire them to be two faced.
Huh? Whut? Diplomats have to be two faced to a certain extent. Should a diplomat tell Mugabe that he is a festering idiot who is destroying his country? Or should he be polite while keeping superiors up to date on what is going on in Zimbabwe? Should a diplomat chide Russia for how it is backing organized crime, or should he keep his ear to the ground and let superiors know what is going on.
Your "upfront and honest" policy might work in your makebelieve land, but not in reality.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
with the lack of honesty even within our country, people are understandably pissed about the lack of honesty outside of our country too.
The issue here is: if people were honest, we wouldn't have this kind of shit to deal with.
If Mugabe's government policy is a fucking joke, say it. Get it out there. Negotiations fall from it? Well, the problem isn't our diplomatics then, the problem is his country by and large. Think other countries wouldn't support us for bold-faced honesty? Think again.
It's a lot harder to spin things against someone when they're being brutally honest.
after all, we're building up Dubai as the next superpower. It's not like they're going to kiss our asses once they get there. Whose fault is it for the shit we've already stepped in? Twofacing isn't going to fix that. When people talk about the world as sunshine and rainbows while it's fire and brimstone, there is a bit of an issue with two facing.
People who are abusing their powers will suffer. People who do dirty deeds and want clean hands will suffer. People who believe that their position protects them from personal responsibility will suffer.
I wrote some of the classified documents on Wikilieaks during my time with the military. I am a civilian now. Much of what I have written is already available to researchers and journalists from the Marine Corps Historical archive in Quantico, Virginia. The Iraq dump contained many significant events from my battalion, but lacked the commanders' comments or the command chronology narrative to tie the events together and put them into perspective. This information is actually available through official sources. What is on Wikileaks has is actually quite limited.
I have two concerns about the fallout to the leak. The first concern is the U.S. may retroactively classify documents currently available to the public, or be less likely to release documents in the future. This will result in a net loss of access to information to the general public. My second concern is the military may become more compartmentalized and soldiers at the small-unit level may no longer have access to the same amount of intelligence information as they previously had. This would be unfortunate because a lot of the young Marines or Soldiers bring a fresh perspective to looking at the raw information and can often connect the dots and find things missed by back-office analysts.
The public has a right to know what the government is doing as long as it doesn't compromise operational security. Within the government there are people pushing to declassify information and make it available. There are others who would like to make everything a secret until the end of time. This latest leak will push the pendulum towards the secret squirrels. I doubt too many service members will want to follow in Pvt. Manning's footsteps, so Mr. Assange probably won't be getting too much new information. Without people sending him leaks, Mr. Assange wouldn't have much of a web site. If the U.S. were smart, they would put up an alternate web site to Wikileaks which would provide declassified versions of government documents and explain why it is important to balance the public's right to know with the need for operational security.
Diplomats are not politicians, they are not elected. They are supposed to give uncut views about their foreign circumstances. If every view is going to be made public, they won't bother telling Washington anything but what Washington wants to here and is neutered to the point of being useless.
If you think the entire populace should be aware of all the non-critical-military/intelligence-ops of the government, then you want a direct democracy.
Yes, what's your point?
The government in a representative democracy is ostensibly there to represent our interests.
FTFY.
We have a right to know whether it is doing so or not.
Agreed!
A government whose every daily operation is exposed to the public spotlight will be completely ineffective in representing anyone's interests.
First, this assertion is offered without any support whatsoever. I don't buy it.
Second, a government that is completely ineffective in representing anyone's interests is preferable to a government that is effective at representing the interests of a small powerful elite at the expense of everyone else, which is what we have today.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I think you mean "where are the leaks from China, from Germany, from Russia, etc, lately?". Check their previous leaks.
My UID is prime. Hah!
so, grabbing a foreign country's citizen in some other part of the world and kidnapping it, and possibly torturing it, and then threatening that country regarding arrest of those who did the kidnapping, and then coming up and rephrasing it in a beautified manner, wasnt illegal enough for you ?
with your mindset, i wouldnt what to know what constitutes 'illegal' for you.
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Golly, if only Manning had been treated like Alan Turing and driven to suicide... right? I bet you would have been right there with the needle for the hormone therapy, trying to force one of the most brilliant minds of his--and possibly any--generation into a neat little cubbyhole that doesn't make you feel all icky inside.
You realize that homophobic douchbags like yourself very nearly made us lose WWII, don't you? Do you have any idea how close things were? What would have happened if we hadn't broken ULTRA? ...And that a significant number of Arabic-language analysts were drummed out of the DoD in compliance with DADT, significantly weakening our ability to process and understand the vast quantity of SIGINT and HUMINT gathered on a daily basis?
Manning is a criminal, but leave his fucking sexual preference out of it, troll.
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
If this was any country on our shit list, NYT and the rest of the fawning idiots would be praising WikiLeaks for being defenders of Western civilization. Everyone up in arms is not upset that secrets were revealed; they are upset that the truth makes America look bad.
Well, sorry it takes a leak and a douchy sort of guy to make America rethink it's position as the totally incapable, laughable, and incompetent unilateral policeman of the world. If we had stuck to American jobs and trade, we wouldn't have just blown three trillion dollars on two bullshit wars that accomplished nothing except for putting Iran in prime position to run the region when we are economically incapable of projecting our influence there. We wouldn't be in deep shit because we no longer have a middle class and our living standards are dropping for the first time in our history.
The sort of hubris that led us to kill hundreds of thousands of muslims and spend trillions in response to an attack that cost us 3,000 lives and a few billion dollars (besides pussy fair weather patriots abandoning the stock market) is exactly the sort you can find in these cables. If they went back further, you'd find us saying "Hey, Saddam is better than Khomeini! Nuclear Pakistan is better than Marxist Afghanistan! The Shah is better than a sovereign Iran! Millions of dead Vietnamese are better than Marxist Vietnam! Pinochet is better than Socialist Allende!"
Our allies and the electorate need to know: there are no principles at work here. Just some people who have confused the word democracy with American Corporate Interests.
Of course the gov't has a legitimate interest in keeping certain secrets, but at the same time, letting politicians do things without even telling voters about it--let alone taking responsibility--is always going to be abused.
I wish we took a middle route. For example, things could be classified, but with the requirement that they have to be reevaluated every year. Anything the gov't does should be public as soon as it's safe. Currently, it seems like the path of least resistance is to keep anything that's classified secret indefinitely, which is dangerous and wrong.
If classified docs were actually released in a timely way, the government could build trust--if we knew that foreign policy from five years ago was reasonable, then we could be more confident that whatever is happening in secret today is reasonable. As is, we just found out through Wikileaks that Hillary Clinton ordered the state department to spy on a bunch of European diplomats (steal credit card info, frequent flyer numbers, etc). Not long ago, Wikileaks gave us video of American helicopters machine-gunning a photographer in Baghdad; he had been working for Reuters, and some soldiers mistook his camera for "a weapon".
The sad reality: Wikileaks is a necessary institution. It is a blunt instrument, but it is the only effective check we currently have on a government that often hides wrongdoing from us in the name of national security.
Consider North Korea.
Just about everyone considers NK to be a violent, unstable, despotic regime that cares nothing for its population and is run by a paranoid, incompetent and self aggrandizing blowhard that probably likes 12 year old girls (or boys) and is generally someone who would have a good time partying with Hitler.
Now, try to hold some kind of diplomatic talks with them after saying that to his face.
I would bet that if you thought your boss an ignorant jackass, you wouldn't go ahead and tell him that before you sat down for a quarterly performance review.
Your third grade sensibilities regarding truth, while quaint, if taken to heart by any administration are dangerous.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Iran isn't an arab country.