Actually, I'm getting rather tired of the bias slashdot editors have shown for wikileaks.
For those of us who do have to worry about clearances sticking a god damned link straight to...one material I don't to go anywhere near.
When your government dictates that you actively avoid learning the truth, perhaps it's time to re-evaluate the demands made on you, rather than rail against others for inadvertently exposing you to it. Your life must be made very difficult by the mental gymnastics required in avoiding what are now commonplace discussions, and telling yourself that others must be 'biased' for exposing you to them.
I hope you haven't been reading the New York Times either, or other international newspapers^^^^^^^^^^^^ terrorist journals, otherwise you might be guilty of learning the truth about your government and others around the world (many of which are far worse than the US government, if perhaps less hypocritical in their actions).
Here's an apposite quote for you about attempts at censorship which I picked up on the internet, but be careful, because you never know the source of words, so you must carefully screen them for seditious content before reading:
1. (C) CDA spoke by phone with XXXXXXXXXXXXX to discuss recent pressure by the Chinese government to censor the company’s Chinese website, accelerated perhaps by the approach of significant political anniversaries.XXXXXXXXXXXXX averred that the root of the problem was China’s Politburo Standing Committee member XXXXXXXXXXXXX who wants the company to remove a link to the uncensored google.com site from its sanitized Chinese version, google.cn. XXXXXXXXXXXXX said Google China has resisted that step as against company principles, though it has taken other smaller measures to try and placate the government. Thus far that tactic has been unsuccessful, and the government has already taken commercial steps against Google, including telling the three dominant SOE telecoms to stop doing business with the company. CDA and XXXXXXXXXXXXX discussed possible USG advocacy, including having imminent visiting Codels and possible Cabinet-level officials raise this directly. For the moment, Google does not wish to go public, preferring to see if current efforts produce results. End Summary.
2. (C) XXXXXXXXXXXXX, CDA Dan Piccuta and XXXXXXXXXXXX talked XXXXXXXXXX about the increasing censorship pressure Google is facing.XXXXXXXXXXXX said Politburo Standing Committee member XXXXXXXXXXXX recently discovered that Google’s worldwide site is uncensored, and is capable of Chinese language searches and search results. XXXXXXXXXXXX allegedly entered his own name and found results critical of him. He also noticed the link from google.cn’s homepage to google.com, whichXXXXXXXXXXXX reportedly believes is an “illegal site.” XXXXXXXXXXXX asked three ministries (note: most likely the Ministry of Industry and Information Industry, State Council Information Office, and Public Security Bureau.) to write a report about Google and demand that the company cease its “illegal activities,” which include linking to google.com.
It's Assange, Wikileaks, and Manning who have broken the law, and are using unsupportable diversions to try to avoid being convicted of it.
Has the New York Times also broken the law?
Do you believe in the right to a fair trial, and when will Manning get one, or do you not care?
Do you believe those accused of a crime should be innocent until proven guilty in a court of law?
If so your statement above is false, as none of the three people/orgs you mentioned have been tried, or even formally accused, of any crime.
Re:youre on /., a geek or a nerd, and you dont car
on
Today's WikiLeaks News
·
· Score: 1
WTF? Is it just me or is[sic] half the ppl on/. a bunch of cynical twits.
Yes, it's just you and your argument I'm afraid.
There are several things wrong here - you are suggesting that we should care what our governments think and be afraid of them, you are suggesting that self-censorship is better than trying to evade censorship, you are suggesting that whistleblowing is seen by most populations as a crime, and you are suggesting that western governments can easily pull the plug on websites with no repercussions.
If governments round the world are scared of the internet, that's a good thing. If this forces governments to expose their true face by pulling the plug on wikileaks, that's also a good thing, as we can see clearly where they stand. If nothing else it gives the lie to posturing over other countries' human rights records by the US, which is often used as an excuse for invasions, and yet ignored when convenient.
If this excuse didn't exist they'd fabricate another one to try to control the internet (like child porn, as they already have), so the important thing is to fight for what you believe in, not hide behind cowardly excuses about what a government reaction might be.
But since you brought it up, honesty in government is never going to happen. Most federal politicians are lawyers and I have yet to meet a lawyer that it's even occurred to to be honest unless it gained them something.
Well, that's exactly the point at which leaks apply pressure. To restate the point above:
This is I believe the intended effect of the wikileaks disclosures - from Assange's point of view - to confront government with the choice between efficiency or security (i.e. honesty and conspiracy), and make them see that it is better to be as honest as possible - i.e. it gains them something to be honest, and makes it more dangerous for them to be dishonest, as a leak may mean the end of their career, and leaks are more likely with wikileaks around.
I don't think it's a troll, as they're certainly not lying about the input/output, however it's more probable that the base64 algorithm was engineered to have this output than SHA digests, since that's what actually produces this output based on that particular hash, and it has no pretensions to security. Here it is in ruby - same result.
Since when has honestly had any place in government?
The question is not does it, but should it. You talk as if honesty should never be required of governments and we should just accept them being corrupt and secretive.
If a government habitually lies, honest people will feel a motivation to leak when the gap between private reality and public pretension becomes too large. They may be naive, they may be punished after the fact, and they may find it difficult to work around your measures, but it will never be impossible, because security depends on the people who are overseeing it. All the security measures in the world aren't going to help if you can't trust your people, which is why the best policy is honesty.
Security is also inconvenient; at a certain level of perfect security, it makes your organisation non-functional, so it will never be total because there is always pressure to relax security to increase efficiency (as happened in this case with these cables).
This is I believe the intended effect of the wikileaks disclosures from Assange's point of view - to confront government with the choice between efficiency or security, and make them see that it is better to be as honest as possible.
The PR war has already been lost on this one. Anyone associated with Wikileaks will be branded a terrorist within days*, with the full assent of the US public.
Those who collaborated with Wikileaks will be making the perp walk and showing up on every TV channel until the message is drummed into everyone's head.
Do you enjoy living under tyranny? I ask because what you are describing with relish are the actions of a tin-pot dictatorship at the level of North Korea. Is that what you wish America to become?
That's like you are failing your driving test because you made mistakes, and I passed even though I made mistakes. There is a level that is allowed, and a level outside.
To extend your analogy, it'd be like a driving test if:
* The rules were constantly changing, subjective and ill-defined, for example - drivers who annoy other road users will be rejected, drivers who have those awful dice in the front of their car will be rejected * The rules were applied in wildly different ways to different test subjects * Your tester communicated with you purely by sending different canned email responses to your actions * You were retested every time you changed car * With every test you got a different anonymous examiner, who appeared to have different interpretations of the vague rules of the test, but refused to explain them
This is hypocrisy of the highest order from Apple, and they should learn that the hard way - I hope the company takes them to court and wins.
They should have an adult section for all this stuff (including playboy), and let it all in, along with those dangerous dictionaries and books including swearwords.
Net books are clearly better value, but not everyone is looking for the cheapest possible way to get on the Internet. Not everyone needs a laptop while they are travelling either.
Slates can be very pleasant to use for browsing the Internet, reading mail and reading books, they probably do a lot nore a you think, and they're typically lighter and get better battery life than net books. If you have disposable income and those things have value for you, you may find one worth the money. Of course, if you can only afford one computer, or wish to do a lot of writing/typing while you travel, a tablet would at present be a foolish choice. That may change as interfaces and apps improve though and Bluetooth acccessories more widespread.
I guess the lesson is that not everyone has your precise requirements or priorities. This response was typed on a tablet.
No, I think the point is to make oppressive organisations (including but not limited to the us spy agencies) retrench and not allow them to constantly expand. Either they are efficient and transparent or secretive and sclerotic. That's the argument anyway. I don't think it involves banning secrets, just restricting the number of them.
As to harm being done, get back to us when the country in question is not occupying two foreign countries, killing tens of thousands of civilians, running secret prisons, sending citizens to be tortured abroad, kidnapping civilians in peaceful countries, flouting the geneva convention, and collecting credit card details of foreign diplomats and visitors. Then perhaps we can talk about the harm releasing some diplomatic cables has done.
If the us gov had reacted sensibly, I think this release would actually show them in a good light compared to those they deal with, modulo some dirty tricks exposed. It does make me question just why the us spends so much money on patently unreliable allies from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia - allies who fund the very terrorists the us claims to be fighting - that is far more naive than assange's hopes.
I suspect that this is wrong. I have only held security clearance in the UK, so there may be some differences with the USA, but I believe that these points hold on both sides of the pond:Firstly, holding security clearance does not mean that you are allowed access to everything. There are different levels of clearance
Thanks for the cogent explanation.
Not sure how many people hold security clearance in the US, so that statement 'most people with security clearance' may have been overstepping the mark, but if a private first class could access the entire corpus of diplomatic cables, then a lot of people (apparently it could be in the millions) have access to them. My understanding of it is that they loosened up systems considerably after 9/11 and a lot of documents were available widely. Hopefully they still restrict higher level stuff on a need to know basis, or they're asking for a lot more leaks. I'm not sure exactly how a private was able to download all these files undetected and burn them to DVDs, but that's what he did. He was only discovered when he bragged about it.
All of which makes me think that the State Dept. would be better tasked tightening up their procedures (why was Manning not questioned on 'Need to know'?), than trying to scare future employees away from reading or commenting on stories which are all over the mainstream press. It would be a more effective way to stop future leaks.
That is a bad assumption. Most materials are "Need to Know" regardless of the classification level. Someone working at the State Dept. does not have "free" access to DoD materials.
Yes, but apparently millions of people had access to this information - that's insane if it is marked 'secret' and noforn. You're describing the way it should work as opposed to the way it did work. Someone low down in the DoD did have access to all diplomatic cables and the ability to access them all and copy them all on his workstation!
So it's not the US Government controlling peoples thoughts, it just a very draconian interpretation of a convoluted info sec policy.
My point is that this sort of absurdity makes the government a laughing stock, *and* it makes no sense when the information is so widely distributed. You'd have to work quite hard to avoid being exposed to wikileaks materials in the mainstream media, so to try to claim they should not exist in the public eye is absurd at this point.
It's simply too late to try to claim these documents are still secret in some way. They should accept they fucked up (the current system of distributing all diplomatic cables to a private (Manning) in the army for example, is a farce), and move on, instead of trying to crack down on thought-crime amongst their future employees.
There is a lesson to be learned here and this pronouncement from someone working in the state dept. is quite instructive as to how little has been learned.
He/she's talking about economic and political power as opposed to freedom.
You are allowed complete freedom of speech *because* you do not have the political or economic power to effect real change. In that situation free speech means very little.
While I can't entirely agree with that it is not a criticism without foundation and is not undermined by having free speech. It's not that there is no free speech, it's that free speech alone is not enough.
The individual of course. If enough individuals object to an unjust law it will be overturned.
That's exactly what is happening to pronouncements and laws banning this leaked information. insisting on continued secrecy makes the government look absurd.
According to the rules you espouse, by making the post above you just disqualified yourself from state employment, as you made a post about them on facebook, twitter etc. Congratulations.
I'd understand if they said don't join wikileaks or distribute these documents yourself but reading freely available information or talking about it should never be grounds for suspicion. This stuff is no longer secret and the governments saying it is cannot change that after the fact.
The funniest about all this is that most people with security clearance would have been able to access those cables anyway through the gov systems.
So the objection is not to the information itself, but to how it got onto that particular computer. This means (according to the above) that if a gov employee reads the nytimes or wikileaks or one of hundreds of other websites they must call their local security officer to have their computer wiped and the uninformation destroyed. Insanity.
Incidentally, there's a fine Russian word for a hierarchical system of representation, in which smaller governmental bodies choose representatives to the national government: "Soviet." Yeah, that sure helped protect the liberties of the people and the long-term interests of the republic, didn't it?
Actually if the bolsheviks had heeded their own slogan 'all power to the soviets' instead of arrogating all power to themselves and forming a dictatorial central government (the exact opposite of the tradition of village soviets) they might have ended up with a system closer to that used in western democracies. So I don't think conflating the original meaning of soviet (local gov) and the perversion/inversion of the idea by the later Leninist and Stalinist regimes is useful for this discussion. It certainly doesn't provide any indication of whether local gov works better than centralised - if anything the soviet experience is proof that large central governments typically ossify into dictatorship.
It's the embarrassing truths that are worrisome. The one that comes to mind are the various countries pushing for attack against Iran. It may be that Iran realizes it doesn't have the support it thought it did and backs down - that would be spiffy. Alternatively they may accelerate whatever they had in place in order to preempt any such attack.
If anything I think the leak you mention weakens the case for war-mongering inside Iran because it undermines the bullshit propaganda about a great satan and zionist enemy that Ahmadinejad loves so much. That's why Ahmadinejad hates wikileaks and newspapers for releasing this - his latest line is that it's a US conspiracy - and that's why it was right to do so (IMHO).
These leaks have nothing to do with whistle-blowing to protect the people from the government, but instead hurt the government's efforts to legitimately help it's people remain on good terms with allies.
Yep - so they should have published that incident. And incidents like it. What about the other 99% of the documents?
The country deserves what it gets? Even when "what it gets" may be setbacks in international relations that damage not only US and its citizens, but can also serve as the spark that sets of far worse than a diplomatic crisis between other nations? The people who supposedly "pre-deserve" are only one party among the many who will pay.
Dumping this data on the world is like that phrase, "Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out." Elsewhere you said that "responsible reporting" can't be a concern when dealing with the evil juggernaut that is the US (paraphrased). I say that you've a very narrow view of "responsible reporting"; and an interesting set of double-standards in that it seems to be OK with you that the fallout from this may be far worse among other nations than anything the US did in the last few years.
Had wikileaks provided only information such as what you saw above, that would go a long way towards justifying their actions. What they did, though, only further shows how their lack of accountability also ensures that they have no sense of responsibility.
There's a lot of may be in the above condemnation of wikileaks, but no specifics, yet somehow that turns into a many who will pay. Show us specific documents which put someone in danger please, then we'll talk. The worst I've seen is embarrassing truths aired in public.
Actually I think this release has done the US good, in that it mainly highlights US diplomats doing a competent job dealing with sometimes crazy situations and reporting back truthfully on the situation as they see it. There are some problematic releases, but then, it'll probably do the US good in the long term to be called out on unacceptable behaviour (trying to get the credit card details of UN officials for example, or trying to bully countries into accepting kidnap/assassinations as SOP). Those particular files are *exactly* the sort of releases the government least wants and would give spurious 'security' excuses for hiding, and yet they are the ones that most need to be brought to light, and the practices stopped, which would be in the long-term interests of the USA.
More FUD. Apple is developing a delivery platform for applications. If you don't like it open firefox and google for "python ide mac os x" or whatever you're looking for. They're not going to force you to use the app store. That's retarded and you're retarded for thinking it.
I'm curious, why do you feel it is a retarded idea, as you so eloquently put it?
I develop for iPhones and don't think it at all unlikely that they will at first encourage, then recommend, then coerce, their developers to supply apps via the app store. The advantages for Apple are numerous:
30% cut of all sales on the platform
Direct control over the direction of the platform
Increased security for users (if apps are sandboxed and can only run in the sandbox as in iOS)
Increased reliability for users (if all apps are tested for bugs before release)
Encourages developers to work within the Apple ecosystem and not try to make cross platform apps using tech like Java
Dramatically reduced support costs as they no longer have to support cocoa bridges, stuff like Carbon, or other UI toolkits like x11.
A huge goldmine of user info on purchase habits, behaviour, common crashes etc
Coercive control over competitors like Adobe, Microsoft and Google by delaying/denying apps like Flash for example
From Apple's point of view, there are a lot of upsides, and not very many downsides. They'd lose a few developers (including perhaps myself), a few techy users, and gain a huge number of users who really don't care what tech is used for apps on their computer, and view it more as an appliance than some kind of universal machine which they can bend to their will.
I imagine they'll choose a middle way rather than requiring the app store to install all software, and just make it difficult to run programs which have not been blessed by Apple, and impossible to make money selling software to normal users except in their store, but it is possible they'll go for full iOS style lockdown.
It's going to embarrass democratic governments. The oppressive nations of the world, meanwhile, are breaking out the popcorn and sitting back to enjoy the fun.
The USA recently funded (among others):
* The Taliban (against the russians) * Saddam Hussein's Iraq against Iran * Military dictatorship of Musharraf in pakistan * Egypt (dictatorship) * Saudia Arabia (dictatorship)
The oppressive governments of the world don't need wikileaks, they're rolling in western money with or without it. The USA is not alone in this sort of funding, no-one's hands are clean, but it gives the lie to the typical point > counterpoint that you're engaged in:
democratic : oppressive good : bad civilised : uncivilised
Additionally, wikileaks publishes what it is given, they do not go looking for leaks, so if people want to leak to them from Zimbabwe (say) they can do so.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I'm getting rather tired of the bias slashdot editors have shown for wikileaks.
For those of us who do have to worry about clearances sticking a god damned link straight to...one material I don't to go anywhere near.
When your government dictates that you actively avoid learning the truth, perhaps it's time to re-evaluate the demands made on you, rather than rail against others for inadvertently exposing you to it. Your life must be made very difficult by the mental gymnastics required in avoiding what are now commonplace discussions, and telling yourself that others must be 'biased' for exposing you to them.
I hope you haven't been reading the New York Times either, or other international newspapers^^^^^^^^^^^^ terrorist journals, otherwise you might be guilty of learning the truth about your government and others around the world (many of which are far worse than the US government, if perhaps less hypocritical in their actions).
Here's an apposite quote for you about attempts at censorship which I picked up on the internet, but be careful, because you never know the source of words, so you must carefully screen them for seditious content before reading:
1. (C) CDA spoke by phone with XXXXXXXXXXXXX to discuss recent pressure by the Chinese government to censor the company’s Chinese website, accelerated perhaps by the approach of significant political anniversaries.XXXXXXXXXXXXX averred that the root of the problem was China’s Politburo Standing Committee member XXXXXXXXXXXXX who wants the company to remove a link to the uncensored google.com site from its sanitized Chinese version, google.cn. XXXXXXXXXXXXX said Google China has resisted that step as against company principles, though it has taken other smaller measures to try and placate the government. Thus far that tactic has been unsuccessful, and the government has already taken commercial steps against Google, including telling the three dominant SOE telecoms to stop doing business with the company. CDA and XXXXXXXXXXXXX discussed possible USG advocacy, including having imminent visiting Codels and possible Cabinet-level officials raise this directly. For the moment, Google does not wish to go public, preferring to see if current efforts produce results. End Summary.
2. (C) XXXXXXXXXXXXX, CDA Dan Piccuta and XXXXXXXXXXXX talked XXXXXXXXXX about the increasing censorship pressure Google is facing.XXXXXXXXXXXX said Politburo Standing Committee member XXXXXXXXXXXX recently discovered that Google’s worldwide site is uncensored, and is capable of Chinese language searches and search results. XXXXXXXXXXXX allegedly entered his own name and found results critical of him. He also noticed the link from google.cn’s homepage to google.com, whichXXXXXXXXXXXX reportedly believes is an “illegal site.” XXXXXXXXXXXX asked three ministries (note: most likely the Ministry of Industry and Information Industry, State Council Information Office, and Public Security Bureau.) to write a report about Google and demand that the company cease its “illegal activities,” which include linking to google.com.
What could possibly go wrong.
It's Assange, Wikileaks, and Manning who have broken the law, and are using unsupportable diversions to try to avoid being convicted of it.
Has the New York Times also broken the law?
Do you believe in the right to a fair trial, and when will Manning get one, or do you not care?
Do you believe those accused of a crime should be innocent until proven guilty in a court of law?
If so your statement above is false, as none of the three people/orgs you mentioned have been tried, or even formally accused, of any crime.
WTF? Is it just me or is[sic] half the ppl on /. a bunch of cynical twits.
Yes, it's just you and your argument I'm afraid.
There are several things wrong here - you are suggesting that we should care what our governments think and be afraid of them, you are suggesting that self-censorship is better than trying to evade censorship, you are suggesting that whistleblowing is seen by most populations as a crime, and you are suggesting that western governments can easily pull the plug on websites with no repercussions.
If governments round the world are scared of the internet, that's a good thing. If this forces governments to expose their true face by pulling the plug on wikileaks, that's also a good thing, as we can see clearly where they stand. If nothing else it gives the lie to posturing over other countries' human rights records by the US, which is often used as an excuse for invasions, and yet ignored when convenient.
If this excuse didn't exist they'd fabricate another one to try to control the internet (like child porn, as they already have), so the important thing is to fight for what you believe in, not hide behind cowardly excuses about what a government reaction might be.
But since you brought it up, honesty in government is never going to happen. Most federal politicians are lawyers and I have yet to meet a lawyer that it's even occurred to to be honest unless it gained them something.
Well, that's exactly the point at which leaks apply pressure. To restate the point above:
This is I believe the intended effect of the wikileaks disclosures - from Assange's point of view - to confront government with the choice between efficiency or security (i.e. honesty and conspiracy), and make them see that it is better to be as honest as possible - i.e. it gains them something to be honest, and makes it more dangerous for them to be dishonest, as a leak may mean the end of their career, and leaks are more likely with wikileaks around.
I don't think it's a troll, as they're certainly not lying about the input/output, however it's more probable that the base64 algorithm was engineered to have this output than SHA digests, since that's what actually produces this output based on that particular hash, and it has no pretensions to security. Here it is in ruby - same result.
require 'base64'
require 'digest'
puts Base64::encode64(Digest::SHA256.digest('password'))
=> XohImNooBHFR0OVvjcYpJ3NgPQ1qq73WKhHvch0VQtg=
There's no way this is a simple coincidence, given it's three words which form a sentence.
The question is not does it, but should it. You talk as if honesty should never be required of governments and we should just accept them being corrupt and secretive.
If a government habitually lies, honest people will feel a motivation to leak when the gap between private reality and public pretension becomes too large. They may be naive, they may be punished after the fact, and they may find it difficult to work around your measures, but it will never be impossible, because security depends on the people who are overseeing it. All the security measures in the world aren't going to help if you can't trust your people, which is why the best policy is honesty.
Security is also inconvenient; at a certain level of perfect security, it makes your organisation non-functional, so it will never be total because there is always pressure to relax security to increase efficiency (as happened in this case with these cables).
This is I believe the intended effect of the wikileaks disclosures from Assange's point of view - to confront government with the choice between efficiency or security, and make them see that it is better to be as honest as possible.
Do you enjoy living under tyranny? I ask because what you are describing with relish are the actions of a tin-pot dictatorship at the level of North Korea. Is that what you wish America to become?
To extend your analogy, it'd be like a driving test if:
* The rules were constantly changing, subjective and ill-defined, for example - drivers who annoy other road users will be rejected, drivers who have those awful dice in the front of their car will be rejected
* The rules were applied in wildly different ways to different test subjects
* Your tester communicated with you purely by sending different canned email responses to your actions
* You were retested every time you changed car
* With every test you got a different anonymous examiner, who appeared to have different interpretations of the vague rules of the test, but refused to explain them
As usual, it doesn't.
There are many Apps for that. You just have to jailbreak.
No, worse than that, there is an app for that if you are powerful or rich enough to sway Apple:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/playboy/id340150554?mt=8
This is hypocrisy of the highest order from Apple, and they should learn that the hard way - I hope the company takes them to court and wins.
They should have an adult section for all this stuff (including playboy), and let it all in, along with those dangerous dictionaries and books including swearwords.
Net books are clearly better value, but not everyone is looking for the cheapest possible way to get on the Internet. Not everyone needs a laptop while they are travelling either.
Slates can be very pleasant to use for browsing the Internet, reading mail and reading books, they probably do a lot nore a you think, and they're typically lighter and get better battery life than net books. If you have disposable income and those things have value for you, you may find one worth the money. Of course, if you can only afford one computer, or wish to do a lot of writing/typing while you travel, a tablet would at present be a foolish choice. That may change as interfaces and apps improve though and Bluetooth acccessories more widespread.
I guess the lesson is that not everyone has your precise requirements or priorities. This response was typed on a tablet.
No, I think the point is to make oppressive organisations (including but not limited to the us spy agencies) retrench and not allow them to constantly expand. Either they are efficient and transparent or secretive and sclerotic. That's the argument anyway. I don't think it involves banning secrets, just restricting the number of them.
As to harm being done, get back to us when the country in question is not occupying two foreign countries, killing tens of thousands of civilians, running secret prisons, sending citizens to be tortured abroad, kidnapping civilians in peaceful countries, flouting the geneva convention, and collecting credit card details of foreign diplomats and visitors. Then perhaps we can talk about the harm releasing some diplomatic cables has done.
If the us gov had reacted sensibly, I think this release would actually show them in a good light compared to those they deal with, modulo some dirty tricks exposed. It does make me question just why the us spends so much money on patently unreliable allies from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia - allies who fund the very terrorists the us claims to be fighting - that is far more naive than assange's hopes.
I suspect that this is wrong. I have only held security clearance in the UK, so there may be some differences with the USA, but I believe that these points hold on both sides of the pond:Firstly, holding security clearance does not mean that you are allowed access to everything. There are different levels of clearance
Thanks for the cogent explanation.
Not sure how many people hold security clearance in the US, so that statement 'most people with security clearance' may have been overstepping the mark, but if a private first class could access the entire corpus of diplomatic cables, then a lot of people (apparently it could be in the millions) have access to them. My understanding of it is that they loosened up systems considerably after 9/11 and a lot of documents were available widely. Hopefully they still restrict higher level stuff on a need to know basis, or they're asking for a lot more leaks. I'm not sure exactly how a private was able to download all these files undetected and burn them to DVDs, but that's what he did. He was only discovered when he bragged about it.
All of which makes me think that the State Dept. would be better tasked tightening up their procedures (why was Manning not questioned on 'Need to know'?), than trying to scare future employees away from reading or commenting on stories which are all over the mainstream press. It would be a more effective way to stop future leaks.
That is a bad assumption. Most materials are "Need to Know" regardless of the classification level. Someone working at the State Dept. does not have "free" access to DoD materials.
Yes, but apparently millions of people had access to this information - that's insane if it is marked 'secret' and noforn. You're describing the way it should work as opposed to the way it did work. Someone low down in the DoD did have access to all diplomatic cables and the ability to access them all and copy them all on his workstation!
So it's not the US Government controlling peoples thoughts, it just a very draconian interpretation of a convoluted info sec policy.
My point is that this sort of absurdity makes the government a laughing stock, *and* it makes no sense when the information is so widely distributed. You'd have to work quite hard to avoid being exposed to wikileaks materials in the mainstream media, so to try to claim they should not exist in the public eye is absurd at this point.
It's simply too late to try to claim these documents are still secret in some way. They should accept they fucked up (the current system of distributing all diplomatic cables to a private (Manning) in the army for example, is a farce), and move on, instead of trying to crack down on thought-crime amongst their future employees.
There is a lesson to be learned here and this pronouncement from someone working in the state dept. is quite instructive as to how little has been learned.
He/she's talking about economic and political power as opposed to freedom.
You are allowed complete freedom of speech *because* you do not have the political or economic power to effect real change. In that situation free speech means very little.
While I can't entirely agree with that it is not a criticism without foundation and is not undermined by having free speech. It's not that there is no free speech, it's that free speech alone is not enough.
The individual of course. If enough individuals object to an unjust law it will be overturned.
That's exactly what is happening to pronouncements and laws banning this leaked information. insisting on continued secrecy makes the government look absurd.
According to the rules you espouse, by making the post above you just disqualified yourself from state employment, as you made a post about them on facebook, twitter etc. Congratulations.
I'd understand if they said don't join wikileaks or distribute these documents yourself but reading freely available information or talking about it should never be grounds for suspicion. This stuff is no longer secret and the governments saying it is cannot change that after the fact.
The funniest about all this is that most people with security clearance would have been able to access those cables anyway through the gov systems.
So the objection is not to the information itself, but to how it got onto that particular computer. This means (according to the above) that if a gov employee reads the nytimes or wikileaks or one of hundreds of other websites they must call their local security officer to have their computer wiped and the uninformation destroyed. Insanity.
Seriously, have you read 1984?
Actually if the bolsheviks had heeded their own slogan 'all power to the soviets' instead of arrogating all power to themselves and forming a dictatorial central government (the exact opposite of the tradition of village soviets) they might have ended up with a system closer to that used in western democracies. So I don't think conflating the original meaning of soviet (local gov) and the perversion/inversion of the idea by the later Leninist and Stalinist regimes is useful for this discussion. It certainly doesn't provide any indication of whether local gov works better than centralised - if anything the soviet experience is proof that large central governments typically ossify into dictatorship.
If anything I think the leak you mention weakens the case for war-mongering inside Iran because it undermines the bullshit propaganda about a great satan and zionist enemy that Ahmadinejad loves so much. That's why Ahmadinejad hates wikileaks and newspapers for releasing this - his latest line is that it's a US conspiracy - and that's why it was right to do so (IMHO).
Are these not examples of wrongdoing?
* Wrongly kidnapping German citizens, and then threatening Germany over it - http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=53702
* Collecting credit card data at the UN - http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/29/un-reacts-us-embassy-cables
If so then by your definition I'd say this is definitely whistle-blowing, particularly so if you include the earlier leaks about the Iraq war.
There's a lot of may be in the above condemnation of wikileaks, but no specifics, yet somehow that turns into a many who will pay. Show us specific documents which put someone in danger please, then we'll talk. The worst I've seen is embarrassing truths aired in public.
Actually I think this release has done the US good, in that it mainly highlights US diplomats doing a competent job dealing with sometimes crazy situations and reporting back truthfully on the situation as they see it. There are some problematic releases, but then, it'll probably do the US good in the long term to be called out on unacceptable behaviour (trying to get the credit card details of UN officials for example, or trying to bully countries into accepting kidnap/assassinations as SOP). Those particular files are *exactly* the sort of releases the government least wants and would give spurious 'security' excuses for hiding, and yet they are the ones that most need to be brought to light, and the practices stopped, which would be in the long-term interests of the USA.
I'm curious, why do you feel it is a retarded idea, as you so eloquently put it?
I develop for iPhones and don't think it at all unlikely that they will at first encourage, then recommend, then coerce, their developers to supply apps via the app store. The advantages for Apple are numerous:
From Apple's point of view, there are a lot of upsides, and not very many downsides. They'd lose a few developers (including perhaps myself), a few techy users, and gain a huge number of users who really don't care what tech is used for apps on their computer, and view it more as an appliance than some kind of universal machine which they can bend to their will.
I imagine they'll choose a middle way rather than requiring the app store to install all software, and just make it difficult to run programs which have not been blessed by Apple, and impossible to make money selling software to normal users except in their store, but it is possible they'll go for full iOS style lockdown.
The USA recently funded (among others):
* The Taliban (against the russians)
* Saddam Hussein's Iraq against Iran
* Military dictatorship of Musharraf in pakistan
* Egypt (dictatorship)
* Saudia Arabia (dictatorship)
The oppressive governments of the world don't need wikileaks, they're rolling in western money with or without it. The USA is not alone in this sort of funding, no-one's hands are clean, but it gives the lie to the typical point > counterpoint that you're engaged in:
democratic : oppressive
good : bad
civilised : uncivilised
Additionally, wikileaks publishes what it is given, they do not go looking for leaks, so if people want to leak to them from Zimbabwe (say) they can do so.