Wikileaks and Anonymous Join Forces Against US Intelligence Community

pigrabbitbear writes "The most recent bombshell of confidential documents dropped by infamous watchdog organization Wikileaks is already looking to have an enormous impact on our understanding of government security practices. Specifically, intimate details on the long-suspected fact that the U.S. has been paying a whole lot of money to have private corporations spy on citizens, activists and other groups and individuals on their ever-expanding, McCarthy-style naughty list. But perhaps more importantly, the docs demonstrate something very interesting about the nature of U.S. government intelligence: They haven't really got much of it."

Comments

logic from an anoymous coward? Heh.

[ClioCJS]

"The fact that they "spy" on activists or whatever their corporate clients pay them to do has ZERO to do with US intelligence agencies."

If US intelligence has access to the results of their spying, OR pays for it, then it has WAY MORE THAN ZERO to do with it.

Nice try at 2 + 2 = 5, though. It would be commendable if you had the balls to not be anonymous about it.

Re:logic from an anoymous coward? Heh.

[Antique Geekmeister]

You've raised some fascinating legal points. Unfortunately, in practice, the entire set of legal restrictions are and have been worked around for years.

For illegal political or industrial espionage, the records and data from existing monitoring are never exposed to judicial review. There's no trustworthy way to verify that the monitoring is _only_ done legally, due to the secrecy of the raw data. This makes it far, far too easy to abuse in extra-legal fashions: the law can be, and is, treated as a meaningless scrap of paper because the courts and Congress at large _are not informed_ of the extent of the monitoring. The best recent case of this is the fiber optic taps on AT&T's core data lines, for which immunity was granted after the taps were publicly revealed by a whistleblower. (This is what whistleblowers are _for_.)

Another obvious issue is that the US security forces trade internationally for information. We don't need a warrant to obtain US communications that were monitored by UK, German, Turkish, or other allied security forces. We just need to swap data they are interested in that we gathered legally under the very laws you mention. This sort of jurisdictional horse-trading is precisely how the US conducts illegal torture of "terrorist" suspects and ignores international treaties on treatment of prisoners: we simply find a partner who can do it legally, or illegally, in their own country.

Re:Is this article some kind of a joke?

[martin-boundary]

Mundane stuff is how you catch the existence of secret stuff. By sifting through a lot of boring sounding data and making connections, things that don't add up are seen, and the right questions to ask are found. That's data mining, and it's not about submarine cars and bullets shooting out of a cigar.

The reason governments go after Wikileaks is that they know this, and by the time Wikileaks or someone else finds a juicy secret, it's much too late to cover up.

Re:so you think they should free bradley manning?

[realityimpaired]

or bradley manning was a traitor to the country and endangered the lives of the troops because wikileaks had such sensitive important information.

The effect of the information he released has nothing to do with whether he's a traitor. It's the fact that he released the information in the first place, violating the oaths and vows that he took upon joining the military. Deciding whether that material was classified was well above his pay grade, and there were/are procedures in place for him to have challenged the information if he had ethical objections. He decided to release the information anyway.

Treason is in the intent, at least as much as it is the effect. Guy Fawkes still committed treason, even though he never succeeded at blowing up the parliament.

Re:so you think they should free bradley manning?

[rtb61]

You obviously have no understanding of the law at all. Obeying an order is no excuse, ever. The individual is always bound to obeying the law, it is always their decision what should be kept secret and what should be exposed.

Only a gutless coward sells out their honour and integrity, with pathetic excuse of they told me too.

Your lie is a lie, it is always the individuals honour, duty, and legal responsibility to decide what is the appropriate response and what is not.

If the material released contained evidence of crimes that were not being prosecuted then he adhered to the law. In fact all those others who failed to submit that evidence to the authorities by what ever means necessary should be charged with being accessories after the fact for all the crimes contained within the material they kept secret.

Your view of the law, you must obey you superiors regardless, is the law of the Nazis, is the law of Stalin and Mao, it is not the law of any democracy and publicly stipulated at the Nuremberg trials http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_trials.