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Anonymous Hack One Gigabyte of Data From NATO
GeekTech.in writes "The AnonymousIRC hacking organization have claimed this afternoon that they have hacked into NATO servers. As one of their tweets says: ' Yes, #NATO was breached. And we have lots of restricted material. With some simple injection. In the next days, wait for interesting data :) '"
This is happening so often that better make a hack.slashdot.org and just add the site that was hacked and when... this is getting old...
Like all of them, ever. Not posting as AC because I'm not currently in jail.
Didn't sites that keep track of this retarded hacking shit disappear with the 90s?
Really if a bunch of vigilantes can do it, imagine what the gov't sponsored Chinese hackers can do!
They probably downloaded tons of non-ocrd scanned documents, stored as images
"Yes sir, it's all in the computer!"
Or maybe 100k of data has the most important info... they only have to find an EBCDIC decoder first
how long until
Of course it is! The US Govt commands such things all the time!
I certainly don't want to provoke anyone, but I wonder how long it will take until they hack gmail and other cloud-based services, and put all the data into the open?
Thanks to these guys, I'm not so sure anymore whether I like this idea of the cloud.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Everyone is hacking into government computers and learning the secrets of the government oh noes. I have government data on my computer maybe more than some of these hackers claim to have liberated here is the catch. Gov data is very boring. For example my latest gov communique was plans for a building with a rotten roof. Yes I have to look at it and bid on repairing.
I think the government is running out of terrorist and need a new batch of international terrorists with computers. You are not safe they can get the government they can get you. I think this stuff is all a ploy to try and push stricter rules concerning your rights online. And a way to make nerds everywhere potential terrorist suspects. Soon that laptop bag will be just as bad as a turban and a dynamite vest.
I know, it's a stupid question but I have to ask it. Why are government and military servers and computers that store sensitive data connected to the internet at all. Shouldn't they be on isolated local networks only?
By now, with all that happened in the last 6 months on this front, you would have though that any computer holding sensitive information was already moved behind an air gap. That IT security experts would have learned that they cannot protect their networks against attack as long as the network is opened to the outside world.
Either people do not learn, or they are really way to slow at making things change...
How is it that all these different sites keep getting hacked? I mean, NATO doesn't have access to experts in internet security that are able to defend against these attacks?
I'm not in the field, obviously, and I know that things are always evolving, but it seems to me that there needs to be more layers in web security. Also, why is there not more encryption on sensitive data? Is encryption more costly if it's more complex?
I can understand when a corporation gets hacked, they're going cheap on web security because of the costs. But one would think that truly sensitive information with major geopolitical players would be buttoned up pretty damn tight.
Makes you wonder though... what would the world be like if people were actually held responsible for their actions and were not able to do things anonymously. Wouldn't that mean that Anonymous should eventually be self exposing?
(I'm not saying it's right/wrong/etc. Just wondering.)
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
So THIS is the real reason for the FBI roundup, I didn't think it was simply because of "The Sun".
The rumor is that they have an unknown Apache exploit.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Glad to learn that the boys aren't discouraged by the arrests!
These guys probably have shares in some security company...
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Makes you wonder what would happen in the world if people in the armed forces were actually held responsible for their actions and were not able to do whatever they wanted.
http://www.collateralmurder.com/
They hack anything and everything, and essentially just demonstrate that poor security is everywhere. Whether that's what they want to prove or not, that's the point they end up making.
Don't trust anyone with your data until they are proven secure, and then always wonder if they made an update that breaks their security.
People trust the cloud, but don't think about what it actually means. Someone else has your data, and you trust them to keep it private, and not use or sell bits and pieces here and there when it suits them.
How many other corrupt nations do you see with a military presence in half the other countries in the world? I'm sure if, say Germany, was transitioning to a full fledged Corporatocracy bent on nation building in the middle east and exploiting 3rd world laborers the world over you would see them get a focus, too.
In such a world, we would neither need nor have Anonymous.
Your brave new world is, however, undesirable. Various organizations keep trying to set the clock to 1984, however.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
why does every piece of data have to be on the fucking Internet. Just because a computer or a network isn't connected to the Internet, it won't instantaneously burn or explosively self-destruct.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
For one, it would make running a government agency less fun.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Oh anonymous.
Boredom is bliss.
I know you're AC, but seriously, the US government kills innocent people every day of the week. And yet people are concerned about whether the release of a given set of information (perhaps about said killing) will get one person killed. Can I get a re-working of priorities up in here?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
It's not my "brave new world" ... I like a bit of anonymity/privacy. I read something about someone's utopia a while back and one of their requirements was total lack of anonymity. I couldn't figure out why it was a requirement for their utopia, but their only rationality for it was crime.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Or just don't start any.
...what would the world be like if people were actually held responsible for their actions and were not able to do things anonymously....
Yes, it does make you wonder
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
exploiting 3rd world laborers
Yeah, right. How dare corporations give them a job that isn't up to 1st world standards! The fact that they take these jobs just shows how badly they need work, and it is wrong to give people a job if it isn't a great one. Better to make it so expensive that it isn't worth it to have the factories there at all, leaving them without 1st world knowledge, resources or money to dig themselves out of their current wretched state. Nevermind the industrialization of 1st world countries was pretty brutal. I want to change the world without being constrained by reality! No wait, scratch that, I want the world to change by itself while decrying the people who do invoke change as evil for not doing it to my standards!
If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth it.
There are many, many handling caveats used by the governments and militaries of the world.
NATO has to deal with just about all of those, and then some - there are NATO-specific caveats and equivalents on top of whatever the host or providing countries are using.
Just because something has a caveat (those neat little stamps on the top and bottom of the piece of paper) doesn't make it classified - "FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY/FOUO" is a great example of this from the US Gov't. FOUO is used to mark unclassified documents that fall into specific categories that are immune from FOIA requests. For example, personnel rosters, social security numbers, phone number lists, etcetera.
Anonymous has said they've obtained documents that are "restricted", which almost certainly means "NATO RESTRICTED/NR", which is the direct NATO equivalent of FOUO.
But, it sounds way cooler to throw around words that the average person doesn't understand, with the deliberate intent that they will misinterpret those things.
My guess would be, it's desk phone numbers or personal information of individuals. Yep, another true blow for freedom there.
I'm sympathetic to the notion of full transparency. In a surveillance society you can see that everyone else is human too, and that they do stuff while you're not watching. As reality is even wackier than fiction, I imagine that it would pretty much kill ordinary television, too. On the other hand, I don't believe in governments that don't try to overstep their bounds, which is why I too prefer a world with privacy. Ultimately I don't believe we'd ever get to actually see what everyone was doing all the time, and without that, we ought to err in the other direction.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If governments were more open and didn't try to keep so many secret, it wouldn't be so bad if they got hacked. By definition, if there were no secrets, they'd be nothing to hack. Perhaps this a motivation behind the attacks by Anonymous: they want to show governments that keeping secrets is no longer worthwhile.
I think future governments have three choices: 1. Pay the cost of maintaining highly secure systems to keep their secrets (which can never be guaranteed) 2. endure the costs of their secrets being discovered/revealed by hackers or enemy states or 3. learn to make do without secrets.
It might seem that governments that keep secrets have an upper hand against those who do not. However, this advantage is entirely dependant on maintaining those secrets and maintaining secrets has an associated cost. The cost of maintaining secrets may very well be rising as cracking techniques become more sophisticated. However, by giving up on secrets, you are letting go of the associated costs. Perhaps in some ways you are giving up everything so that there's nothing left to loose. Though if the costs of keeping secrets becomes high enough, nations without secrets may have the overall advantage.
"Restricted", "sensitive", and "secret" material is low level. That is the level of material that everyone in the military and government bureaucracy has access to. It is the sort of stuff that is either not very sensitive (ie enemy agents could figure it out easily just from observing a base or similar) or has only a small window in which it is useful (ie by the time the enemy could react it would be too late).
These days with the adversarial government/media relationship tons of material is classified like this just to discourage the media from baking scandals, and to prevent citizens from finding out about legitimate scandals (at least in the short term).
What was accessed in this case was probably some boring inter-NATO administrative emails, with the most interesting stuff being up-coming exercises and the like.
The stuff that Wikileaks released that inspired this spate of hackings WAS from an air-gapped computer.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
Anonymous and LulzSec are really fronts for Mark Zuckerbergs push to demolish all anonymity.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
but seriously, the US government kills innocent people every day of the week.
Except the US government does not intentionally go after unarmed civilians (and no, do not bring up WW2 or Vietnam as counterexamples of that). We don't bomb crowded markets or restaurants, we use precision guided weapons to limit collateral damage as much as possible(and yes, also because 1 bomb is usually cheaper than 50). We train our soldiers to identify hostile targets and not fire indiscriminately. The people we are fighting use civilians as human shields. Our soldiers use themselves to shield civilians. They see dead civilians as political tools. We see them as a tragedy to avoid at all costs. And yes, I've seen the heavily edited "collateral murder" propaganda. Those men looked armed, and there was no way the chopper pilots could have been able to tell there were children in the van.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Plenty of people join with nothing but the best intentions; if you think the guys actually pulling the trigger in that video don't lose sleep over it I don't think you know many soldiers. If you simply must condemn someone for that video, by all means - go after the people who attempted to cover it up. Not the poor guys who had to find out after watching the news that they killed innocent men.
War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over. - William T. Sherman
Seeig as this data is probably along the lines of how many crates of dried parsley some air base is requisitioning doesn't strike me as a life or death matter.
You need to read up on Bletchley Park and Ultra. Mundane information about military units and individuals turned out to be amazingly useful.
Anonymous programmed one Gigabyte of data from NATO Huh...
"The AnonymousIRC software development organization have claimed this afternoon that they have programmed into NATO servers" Programmed into?
Hate to be a grammar Nazi but the message is a bit twisted. What did they do again?
For those of you who don't understand the military's networks. And there are a lot of you, it seems.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIPRNet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIPRNet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigint
Incompetent developers. I haven't read everything, but my impression is that Anonymous and LulzSec simply used SQL injection for many of their cracks, which is something that any competent web developer should know how to prevent without even trying.
And it's not like it's a new thing, there's a huge history of civilian deaths during EVERY invasions/wars.
Fixed that for you. Civilians have always died and suffered from war. But no government in history has gone to such lengths and measures and the US and other Western governments have in trying to prevent innocent deaths in the legal and cultural environments of their respective militaries. And remember this, for the last 70 years, these soldiers have been risking their lives to protect civilians not of their own state, but of whichever state they are fighting in. They have no connection to these people whatsoever, and yet they still try to protect them. As opposed to other people who have no qualms about blowing up their own countrymen.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
The problem with that video are the guys who insist on shooting the people, who are obviously just recovering the bodies.
"Except the US government does not intentionally go after unarmed civilians"
Just like Wikileaks ...
China is already starting to develop its own brand of imperialism. They're buying lots of dirt cheap land in Africa in order to guarantee their own food supply, for example. Not to mention the amount of stuff in the US and Europe that they already own. China is every bit as corporatist as the US.
A reasonable state should provide for decreasing levels of privacy as your power increases. For example, those with significant power to sway opinion—politicians, celebrities, etc.—should have much less right to privacy than Joe Random. Indeed, this is the way our privacy laws are structured today.
Where our privacy laws break down is when it comes to corporate privacy and government privacy—the privacy of large groups acting as a single hive mind. These groups should have almost no privacy because they have much greater power than the average citizen. Unfortunately, this is seldom the case, and this is the problem that needs to be fixed—not reducing the privacy of individuals, but rather reducing the privacy of individuals in their official capacity while working together in large groups. That's not very easy to do, though, at least without decreasing their privacy as individuals, which is why things go horribly wrong (whether because you gave them too much privacy and got corruption or too little privacy and got MonicaGate absurdity).
I tend to lean on the side of targeted laws in this area—sunshine laws, open records laws, open meetings laws, etc. When these are insufficient, the flaws should be corrected. When these are ignored, the perpetrators should do jail time to serve as an example to others. If this were happening consistently, we'd have a lot fewer problems with our democracy.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
especially illegal ones based on lies...
Of course the majority of people have nothing "but the best intentions" at heart.
However, my point was if we're going to start attempting to make these "anon" people start owning up for their actions let's start with the ones committing actual atrocities. You know the ones covering up the things Anon uncovers.
And I'm not sure if we watched the same video, but the boys in that one firing the guns didn't seem too hesitant about killing those people. I don't think they're losing any sleep.
My boyfriend is in the marines (gay), so I know a few people in the forces (now that that's out of the way).
And you cite a creatively edited propaganda piece as your sole argument?
Oh please, tell us about Loose Change next. I love seeing that hot mess of debunked conspiracy theory cited as a compelling "documentary." It's almost as funny as the assertion that "Collateral Murder" is raw, unedited war footage.
Some info on the most undemocratic organization, supposedly participated in by democratic governments.
Read radical news here
I don't see the problem with that. It's an unsecured area, where people carrying weapons have just been killed; the weapons and the scene haven't been secured, so why would they let every Tom, Dick and Osama roll up, strip the corpses of useful intelligence and weapons, and disappear off into the city?
You presume that it's possible to divine someone's intentions from a couple thousand yards away through a grainy black and white video camera mounted on a moving vehicle that's circling over the city blocks where the event occurred. That notion is either naive, or arrived at through deliberate obtuseness in an attempt to bolster your own predetermined conclusions that war is always evil and anybody who pulls a trigger is automatically a war criminal.
You claim that it's "obvious" they were "just recovering the bodies," yet what proof can you provide of that that's NOT based on knowledge available only because you know what the people arriving at the scene on foot reported after the fact, or gleaned from careful frame-by-frame reviews of the video footage? Remember, this happens in real time, there's no time to load up video footage in an advanced video analysis tool to figure out what you're looking at.
The people in the helicopter simply know that they shot some people who appeared to be carrying weapons, and some other people drove up and started trying to load those people into a van. If you see people, in a war zone, carrying what appear to be assault rifles and RPGs, and you know that they're not part of YOUR military... what conclusion, exactly, would you draw?
Classification: FOUO
Caveats: Lame
BINGO
Classification: FOUO
Caveats: Lame
Atlas Shrugged : Thematic Story
Yea, you can't do that combo ..
Atlas Shrugged : Thematic Story
That's awesome, actually. Well, thank him for /that/ particular service, has to be rough if he's open about it.
Like I said... I'm biased... I look at a lack of hesitation as good training. I heard a saying in basic - "Ready, aim, fire, yours, theirs, bodycount and regrets - in that order." and while we could argue all day about the morality of striking targets with no feasible means of fighting back (foot vs chopper) they did everything according to procedure - a procedure that's designed to protect your significant other and my friends when they've got boots on the ground, so... that's a win in my book.
It sucks... but war isn't pretty and it never will be. I would butcher 100 to save 1000 - and our ROE save lives every day - don't forget it.
1 GB from NATO. That's 3, maybe 4 powerpoints?
No they do not! Commies, brown people and the poor aren't "living", they're simply targets to be destroyed, and if you disagree you must be a commie, brown, or poor.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
i dont buy for a second anonymous is legit at all, this is a CIA front creating problems to garner a reaction from the public so legislation can be passed to further restrict internet usage. I can smell scams like this @ this point in my life from a mile away. And I know alot of people who share my opinion. You cant fool all the people all the time you fucks. As an american citizen the constitution gives us the right to revolution in the case which the government becomes corrupt. Never forget that, and question everything.
I agree on lacking hesitation: people die from hesitation.
The glee, enjoyment and frivolity displayed by these men, however, seems to add to the reasons why these incidents are covered up.
And again I agree with punishing those who covered it up, but that frivolity is sickening.
So the US government is the only government killing innocent people every day? Not that it makes any of it right, but you seem to want to paint a picture where it's only the US doing this. Truth is, the US is even close to being number one in this category by a long shot.
If war was pleasant it would be called a debate.
With all these other secrets coming out, you'd expect some of the true story to be leaked by now.
Sort of shakes my faith, it does....
It's so easy, if only they'd RTFM....
Do you shoot medic vans just because they belong to the enemy?
Of course I don't.
Now, since that question has absolutely no bearing in any way to what happened in the case of the "Collateral Murder" video, may I presume you're just trying to save face and make it look like you had a point, rather than conceding that my points have merit, and you're just knee-jerking in relation to a cleverly edited propaganda piece?
On the video I saw it was pretty obvious what the people from the second van were doing. If you see it differently that's your problem.
How exactly do you obviously tell the difference between insurgents picking up a comrade and his intelligence form a battle and evacuating him and civilians picking up a wounded person from a battlefield and evacuating him? No ones debating whether they were picking up a wounded man, but what you don't seem to be clear on is that soldiers are legitimate targets if they are trying to remove a wounded or incapacitated enemy soldier from an active battlefield to avoid surrender. So it all comes down to a matter of identifying them as insurgents or not from the gun cam video which you both cant keep your eyes locked onto 100% of the time cause you gotta do other shit too, like flying and reading instruments.
Well, it could be the local weather report / daily storm warning for the military base. Or the collected bulletins for "Generic Important Cause Awareness Day". Or the 9000 cc: All emails about the current status of the network repairs...
RESTRICTED does not mean CLASSIFIED; in fact, it specifically means UNCLASSIFIED but not for public release, aka FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY. Some of that is because it's Privacy Act information, as mentioned above. Most of it is mind-numbingly boring crap. What do you bet that Anonymous doesn't release the data because it's exactly that--privacy info or boring beyond belief?
---dragoness
Was the van marked with a red cross, or some other internationally-recognized symbol which would designate it as a protected non-combatant vehicle, which would afford your point some measure of logic?
A soldier - or in this case, an insurgent - rendering first aid and assistance to a wounded comrade is still a combatant. You don't get a special "don't shoot me, bro" immunity from being shot in a war zone because you're trying to slap a bandage on your friend's wound. There were absolutely no markings on that vehicle that would lead anybody to remotely suspect they were anything but fellow insurgents trying to evacuate wounded, weapons, and possibly actionable intelligence.
But if you want to talk discuss "atrocities," we should also include events like the killing - and subsequent mutilation, burning, and hanging - of contractors in Fallujah - remember that one? Getting killed is certainly a risk military personnel and contractors have to live with. Where's the Collateral Murder video & your outrage over that *actual* atrocity, or any of the other documented cases of Taliban or al Qaeda linked executions, torture, abduction, murder, and other assorted savagery?
Or have you unilaterally redefined the word "atrocity" and the phrase "war crime" to mean "that thing that only happens when a soldier with an American flag on his shoulder pulls a trigger, no matter what the situation, no matter what the circumstances, and no matter what the outcome?"
Hawkeye: War isn't Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse.
Father Mulcahy: How do you figure, Hawkeye?
Hawkeye: Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell?
Father Mulcahy: Sinners, I believe.
Hawkeye: Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chalk full of them - little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander
As much as I hate quoting TV, this has more truth in it than any other quote I've read.
The biggest problem in all this is that your "war zone" is in the middle of a large, densely populated city. Of course there will be civilians in the middle of such "war zone", including where you've been shooting - they fucking live there! So if you insist on making it a "war zone", you better watch out who you target - not giving due diligence to separating combatants from non-combatants is a war crime, and Geneva conventions say that you have to assume non-combatant status by default, unless there's evidence to the contrary (e.g. the people in question are armed).
If you see people, in a war zone, carrying what appear to be assault rifles and RPGs, and you know that they're not part of YOUR military... what conclusion, exactly, would you draw?
They are combatants, and you can fire at will. However, the people in the van were unarmed. That is what the fuss is about, not a bunch of guys with AKs that got killed at the very beginning.
Various insurgent factions perpetrate numerous atrocities - this is well-known, and not really disputed. Though it's bitterly ironic that US and West in general deliberately ignored all that when it was happening in e.g. Soviet-Afghan war - where Mujahideen would, on occasion, flay captives alive, and beheading was routine - or in Chechnya, before Bush suddenly became friends with Putin over the whole war on terror thing, and "freedom fighters" quickly became "terrorists".
However, Taliban and other Islamist insurgents don't claim the moral high ground of being the torch-bearers of liberty, democracy and human rights, whereas US uses precisely that rhetoric to justify its military intervention. When Taliban folk say that apostates and unbelievers will be beheaded, and actually carry out that threat when they get captives, they are evil, but not hypocritical - the evil is out there in the open for everyone to see. When US says that it is in Iraq to save lives and provide for a free and stable society, and then goes on to kill local civilians because they happened to be at the wrong place and the wrong time, it's both evil and hypocritical.
After the fact, we certainly know that they were unarmed.
At the time, they were driving up to a group of men who were armed with AK-47s and what appeared to be RPGs, and attempting to load some of them into a vehicle. They were not medical personnel, they were not in a vehicle that was marked as a medical vehicle.
This event is certainly - in hindsight, with full knowledge of the circumstance - tragic, but the decisions of the soldiers involved were also completely legitimate, given their view of the activity on the ground: unmarked, non-medical personnel driving up and attempting to load combatants (and possibly equipment) into a vehicle and drive them away minutes after they've been attacked by a gunship certainly also appear to be combatants, and thus, legitimate targets.
Your statement that it's evil assumes a deliberate intent to kill civilians who happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, and that simply isn't the nature and character of the military's behavior. In civilian life, this is why we have different punishments for manslaughter and murder.
What you're suggesting here is - to use an extreme example - Mother Theresa getting in a car accident that resulted in someone's death would make her an evil hypocrite, and invalidate every principle of charity and good works she ever espoused.
There is no inherent hypocrisy in stating that you are pro-liberty, pro-freedom, pro-democracy, and having unfortunate - even tragic - collateral civilian deaths as the result of military action prompted by those principles. The military - overwhelmingly as an institution, there are of course individual exceptions, as there are in ANY large group of people - goes to extraordinary lengths to reduce and avoid these events, and suggesting that they set out with the express intention of killing civilians in some sort of evil hypocrisy while using talk of freedom and democracy as a smoke screen is naive and fatuous.
At the time, they were driving up to a group of men who were armed with AK-47s and what appeared to be RPGs, and attempting to load some of them into a vehicle.
The key word here is "were" armed. The men were not armed by the time the van came onto the scene - they were lying around, some wounded and some dead, their weapons away from them. This, by the way, was clearly visible to the gunner, because he did focus on one guy trying to move, urging him to grab the gun so that he would became a legitimate target.
They were not medical personnel, they were not in a vehicle that was marked as a medical vehicle.
It does not matter. Per Geneva, by default, they are non-combatants, unless there's clear evidence to show otherwise. If this was a battlefield where no civilians are expected to be present, you'd have a point. In the middle of a large city? The likelihood that people on the scene are civilians is very high, and soldiers are expected to understand that when determining the combatant status.
the decisions of the soldiers involved were also completely legitimate, given their view of the activity on the ground: unmarked, non-medical personnel driving up and attempting to load combatants (and possibly equipment)
It is clear on the video that none of the people in the van attempted to pick up any weapons (if they did, the gunner could start firing without ascertaining the ROE).
In any case, the claim that decisions were "completely legitimate" is obviously hotly contested; and since neither you nor me are lawyers, much less specializing in international customary law, we normally have war crime tribunals like ICC to refer such cases to. But, of course, US does not submit its citizens to those pesky foreigner kangaroo courts, and I'm not aware of any prior examples where a US soldier was found guilty of war crimes (rather than some unrelated offense solely to make the punishment a "dishonorable discharge" at most) by a US court. So we'll probably never know the truth.
Here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saHs6J0OXVI
Unicode in Slashdot
I don't see how you got that from my post. My point is that we should be more concerned about the effects of US foreign policy than about whether releasing information about that policy and its effects would lead to someone's harm.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
So the US government is the only government killing innocent people every day? Not that it makes any of it right, but you seem to want to paint a picture where it's only the US doing this. Truth is, the US is even close to being number one in this category by a long shot.
I never said anything about that. All I said was that people seem to get upset that someone might be killed if information about US foreign adventures is released, but don't seem to be upset that many more people are killed by those very adventures. It's a matter of priorities.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
People with such opinions are exactly the problem in America (Nice name by the way).
What is this whole insurgent / soldier bullshit. When did or how does Freedom Fighter become Terrorist? What's the difference between blue coats and their "atrocities" of shooting from undercover at the red coats lined up in the open field and the "atrocities" carried out using suicide bombers or IEDs? BOTH are fighting to win a war to survive against a bigger foe, not to win some popularity contest. After you have had your little sister raped, your Dad beaten, and watched your brother and grandfather get shot do you really think that anyone gives a fly-fuck about your popularity contest and what constitutes an "atrocity".
At this point the Atrocity Boat has sailed and the gloves are off. Blue coats fighting like savage Indians from the underbrush and the local "insurgents" keeping someone from invading have something big in common. They are outgunned and doing whatever they can to get the other assholes out of their country. This all boils down to why-the-fuck-we're there in the first place. What defines who is the 'asshole' and what defines who is the 'defender of freedom'? Some of the poor soldiers sent over there don't even know they are going until they are in the air and over the Atlantic. I don't blame soldiers (unless they are grooving to Enter Sandman while they mow-down their targets) ... soldiers are underpaid, under-appreciated, ill-trained (for the most part) grunts that the government uses like pampers to populate their military industrial systems of destruction. I know plenty of them, and 99% are honorable and good guys, and many have become pretty damn jaded to the whole 'defending democracy' bullshit.
So, as I always say, "Follow the money!". Whose getting rich off the soldiers sweat and blood? The soldiers? HAHA! The American people and all their 'freedoms' that have been defended (as a TAS agent gropes you)? You tell me Americano, who? Then you can have your definition of "war crime" and "atrocity".
rm -rf ms/*