In brief terms how laws in the US pass? I thought it started from the senate, and the president has veto rights.
But now Judges can mess with the laws?
Thanks in advance.
Ok, very briefly...
In general, lobbyists write the laws, Congress argues about the laws, possibly eventually passing them, at which point the president either signs it into law or vetoes it. If it becomes a law, then judges decide how it will be applied in practice based on their interpretation of the law. If they decide that it should not be applied due to a conflict with the Constitution, then it will likely be appealed up the court chain until it reaches the Supreme Court. The USSC will then either allow the lower court ruling to stand, or they will take up the case and become the final arbiter of whatever the dispute is about. They may rule on all or part of the case, possibly striking it down entirely in cases where the law directly conflicts with the Constitution. If only a certain aspect is at issue, they may rule on that and send the case back to a lower court with that clarification.
You really believe that people who can't afford or can't get insurance (due to pre-existing condition, etc) wouldn't seek health care if it was available to them? That's a pretty bold claim, not to mention a pretty dismal outlook on people in general. Got any evidence to back it up?
I offer as evidence the millions of people who DO have insurance who STILL do not go to the doctor. Everyone forgets about them.
You offer what as evidence? You haven't given any evidence of anything.
We're making generalizations here, to be sure, but typically the kind of person who can't get group insurance doesn't have a lot of money. This will mean that they can't pay their counter fees, or where they can, it will hurt to do so. They're not going to voluntarily elect to do so unless they absolutely have to. That's just basic humanity. Everyone assumes that if only they had insurance they would go to the doctor instead of the emergency room. I ask you WHY this would be necessarily so?
Most people can afford a $20 co-pay. If you actually have insurance, whether you pay the full monthly costs or not, why wouldn't you use it? Some things they might let slide. I've put things off before if they were minor issues, like hip pain or a nerve problem in my elbow. They weren't getting any worse and I'd learned to deal with them, so I waited until it was convenient for me. When it comes to other issues, I don't wait. Neither does anyone I know. Maybe it's the media exposure or all the medical dramas on TV, but people seem to get pretty concerned when they start having some symptoms, and they go to the doctor, because if there's one thing that's been drilled into us, it's that catching things early is better.
The bottom line is that while not everyone may go to the doctor when they should, a whole lot more people will have the ability to do so now, and I don't see any evidence or reason why they wouldn't do so given the fact that they're paying for the insurance and that they usually know that it's better to go sooner than later. If you have evidence to the contrary, please present it.
You did ask that the Republican answer is, and as I'm not familiar enough with them to provide it, I can give you my own instead. We need to select ONE of the following options:
A) The Federal government takes over all medical care at every level for every citizen, period. Any licensed medical professional is now a state employee. Everyone's care is free, paid for by the tax rolls.
B) The government allows market forces to decide where medical care winds up. This includes things like pricing, treatment types, insurance plans, etc, etc, etc.
Obama's option is to prop up the greedy hospitals while assassinating the insurance industry. It doesn't make sense to corrupt one organization at the expense of another.
First of all, assassinating the insurance industry? They got what they really wanted, the mandatory participation. They got concessions left and right, and hardly any restrictions, which is how they've been allowed to continue raising premiums to milk people until the new law takes effect.
I think you're presenting a false dichotomy. I don't see any reason why a middle-ground solution like the health care exchanges wouldn't work. I don't think any solution is going to be all that great, mostly due to the corrupting influence of special interests in Congress and state governments. Even if a good solution was put in place, it would soon be corrupted. I don't see how it can possibly be left to insurance companies and the market either, since when you look at the policy offerings out there, even insurance professionals can't tell you what you're really buying in terms of coverage. They're written in ways that are impossible to decipher with any degree of certainty, but since it's health care, we can't go without it either, so they have us rather trapped.
The best way to combat leaks is to offer misinformation. All they have to do is flood the gates with garbage, taint certain portions of it to close down in where it came from, and let it go.
In this type of handling leaks, it won't take long to find out where they are coming from and put a stop to that but more importantly, it would prove the information wasn't reliable and it wouldn't gain that much attention.
I mean seriously, how serious would the Iraq war leaks been taken if scattered all throughout them was documents pertaining to assistance receive in battle from the justice league and Superman? How about payment vouchers to mickey mouse and Pluto? How about the diplomat cables if there was realistic looking communications to an embassy office on mars pertaining to a military base on pluto and the categorizing of pluto to something other then a planet was just a cover to take attention away from the base?
I mean what would you think if you saw crap like that in a document dump claimed to be secret communications and files stolen from the US government? You probably already think there is something wrong in the government, but would you trust the information claimed to be secret when it talks about Superman flying over metropolis and noticing Wonder Woman sunbathing nude on her balcony?
How would that impact the ability of people who have legitimate access to this information to do their jobs? Are you going to dump a bunch of crap like that into their databases? Will they have to sift through that stuff as well? The leak came from a person who had legitimate access to the data for operational needs. Why would he leak a bunch of garbage? That makes no sense.
The Pentagon has few options: 1. help the person get the information released properly; 2. hunt down and arrest the person; 3. hunt down and kill the person.
So if that's how they were supposed to protect their informant's identities, Assange hasn't really given them a chance to accomplish their mission. He's either ignorant of the options or doesn't care and intends to cause harm to gain fame.
2 is only an option if the person has actually broken the law, and it's not at all clear that any law was broken. 3 is even less justifiable for the same reason. That leaves 1. I don't understand your reluctance to make sure the information gets released properly. They're already on record vehemently opposing the release, but the information was already leaked and it's Wikileaks stated mission to publish this kind of information. They want to do it in a way that will minimize the harm that will come to people such as those informants. Presumably the Pentagon would also want that, given that the information is going to come out.
Even if they want to pursue option 2 or 3, they certainly weren't going to be able to do so before the information was released, so again, you'd think they'd at least take the necessary action to protect those informants and others identified in the documents.
That hasn't been tested, and it still sounds like it would be on shaky ground. I still think the Pentagon was wrong in deciding not to review the documents before their release.
They probably knew what he had. They may have informed him that if he had issues with the propriety of classifying some of those documents there was a procedure to declassify them. His next step should have been to the President or the AG, not the Internet.
And they knew that was not going to happen, so they should have done what they could to protect the identities of their informants, but that was apparently not important enough to them.
Like I said, this isn't 1971. The rules have changed. The executive order delegating classification authority spells them out.
The NY Times now will go to the pentagon, show what it has, and ask for a redaction and declassification. It will get it. If it disagrees with the effects, it may or may not argue over it. But it knows that if it decides to publish something that should have remained classified, according to the court that the Pentagon will then bring into play, its 1st Amendment defense may not work.
That hasn't been tested, and it still sounds like it would be on shaky ground. I still think the Pentagon was wrong in deciding not to review the documents before their release.
SIlenced? Nobody would print his story? Are you paying any attention here, or maybe this whole Wikileaks thing is a figment of the collective human imagination?
I think he's referring to Americans, and attempting to work through the mainstream media rather than something like Wikileaks.
Clinton was impeached, but not removed from office.
Obama ran for President on a platform that included letting the Bush tax cuts expire. This week, he gave a speech wherein he explained that allowing them to be renewed would be stimulating to the economy, and therefore he's reached a "compromise".
True, he said that, but he obviously doesn't believe that it's an efficient or sensible way to spend that money, as we can get much more economic stimulus from using it in more efficient ways, like he did with the other tax cuts he got as part of the deal or the unemployment benefits extension. While it was one of his campaign promises, he's not the only one that gets a say in it, and Congress certainly wasn't willing to let it happen. I think he made the right decision, even though I'm not sure he really got the best deal he could have gotten. I don't have much faith in his negotiation skills, and the Democrats in general suck at getting their message across.
I'm going to have to punt, here, as I'm one of those people who won't actually read the releases on the grounds that I believe they're still legally classified.
I have seen excerpts inadvertently in previous threads on slashdot that include names and/or enough specifics to directly identify people who are spying for us. I've also seen reports that we have had to scramble to protect a number of people because of it. Not so much in the recent state department release, but quite a few in the Afghanistan/Iraq military intel release earlier.
This was the predictable and inevitable result of releasing the information and is the reason we need to classify information.
I don't agree with classifying information merely to prevent prosecution or embarassment. Those are illegal acts, and the laws for classifying information state as much explicitly, and provide specific methods for declassifying such information to be sure that properly classified information is not declassified. But Wikileaks ignores that and acts as though it's alright to put people in danger as long as you're getting a lot of press throwing secrets around.
I agree that some things should not be released, but the Pentagon was given the opportunity to protect those names and identifying information and they declined to do so, taking an all or nothing stance. That was, in my opinion, the wrong thing to do. They could have protected those people and they chose not to do so for political reasons. Wikileaks doesn't act as though it's ok to put people in danger. They are there to release information that allows people to know what's going on in the government and what their representatives are doing in their name. They have tried to ensure that they don't put people in imminent danger through these releases, which is why they have been releasing only a relatively small number of documents at a time rather than dumping all 250K+ documents out there, and why they've been working with journalists from major newspapers to redact information that could do that kind of damage.
It looks like they failed to do so in some cases with the previous Afghanistan-related documents. They seem to have done better with this latest group. In both cases the US government had the opportunity to protect critical information, assuming they actually consider it to be critical. It seems like they decided it would be politically more profitable to allow that information to be revealed so that it could be used against Wikileaks, regardless of what happens to those people.
Oh I understand the US government's refusal to redact perfectly. They probably asked themselves the next questions and came up with similar answers:
You're forgetting to add that by delineating between what should be released and what shouldn't, they would in effect be admitting that the things they say are OK to release were improperly classified.
I don't see that they would be admitting that anything is OK to release by cooperating to redact parts of the documents. They would be limited to redacting information that would directly put lives in danger, such as the names of informants and such, rather than just redacting anything that they find embarassing. Essentially they would have to decide to put the lives of those involved ahead of the politics, which is why it didn't happen.
Assume a police detective investigating a gang of robbers. Then one day, the robbers prevent another gang from robbing a store. The police detective might not know much about that specific incident, but they could still say with some certanity that the robbers didn't act out of altruism, but that the action can be explained as part of a bigger picture (e.g. gang war).
So who are the "robbers" in the Pentagon Papers case? I'm still not clear on that. Is it just anyone who supported the leak, and he apparently has "studied" all those people and knows their motivations? Please explain.
And no, US citizens don't have a right to know all of the specifics of on-going military operations, or specific confidential arrangements with other governments. That is what the executive branch and elected representatives do, it is part of life in a republic. You don't decide everything that happens about our military operations any more than you do about the level of ozone in parts per million that a car is permitted to emit, or the distribution of radio frequencies, the funding for cream corn in the public school lunch program, or if the black spotted jack rabbit will be on the endangered list.
You do have a say - write your representatives or the President. Vote. Run for office yourself. Write the heads of agencies. Check the Federal Register to see what agency is looking for input, and write them. Have your say, but don't fool yourself about what power or influence you have. And, again, no, you don't have what is defined as a "need to know" for classified covert operations. Want and need are two separate things.
That sounds rather ridiculous. Your examples prove the point. If we know what the representatives are doing, then we can vote for or against them based on that information. If we think it's stupid to put the black spotted jack rabbit on the endangered species list, we can vote for someone who will let us kill the little bastards. We have no such ability when it comes to covert operations, because we don't even know they're happening! How can we cast an informed vote when we don't even know what these representatives are doing in our name?
It was specifically NOT being done in the name of Americans. Yes, t was being done by the US, but in Yemen's name. The Yemenites even said something along the lines of "we will continue saying they are our bombs."
Targeting American citizens in such a way would be illegal, I agree, but issue was not his point.
If we're doing it, then it's being done in our name, regardless of whatever lies the governments involved are telling.
I was referring to the recent release of the diplomatic cables, which were redacted by journalists. I agree that the release of identities of informants in the Afghan cables was wrong, and if reports are true, has cost lives and may reduce the willingness of Afghanis and others to cooperate with us. However, I think Wikileaks and the Pentagon share the blame on that one. The Pentagon was given the opportunity to review the release to ensure that no names were exposed and they declined to do so. That was a political choice for them that shows that they put the politics of the situation ahead of concern for the lives of those involved and concern for maintaining faith with those informants. I do think Wikileaks learned something from that and have been more careful about releasing this latest info. The Pentagon doesn't seem to have learned anything though, as they did the same thing this time around.
Think of it as freedom to whirl your arms around. You're free to do that until you hit someone on the nose, at which point you're prosecuted for assault, not for whirling your arms around. You're free to whirl you arms as much as you want, the government will not stop you. Whirl away. But if you hit someone, you're done for assault.
Is that clear enough for you, or do you want a car analogy as well?
You've still failed to explain the difference you're trying to claim exists between the fire in a theater example and defamation. Let's focus on that instead of silly analogies.
There are well known exceptions to the Free Speech rules - "Fire in a theater" is one of them, and universally accepted as punishable due to the mayhem that will no doubt ensue.
Stop splitting hairs. Nobody is stopping you from saying "Obama kills puppies", but if you can't back that statement up with fact then the defamation laws kick in, not the freedom of speech laws.
How is defamation law not a freedom of speech law? How is being prosecuted for defamation different than being prosecuted for yelling fire in a theater? Both occur after the fact. Both punish you for your speech.
4. I'm about the farthest thing from a right-wing anything you could find wearing shoes, and I think that parts of the Pentagon Papers release suffer from the same problem that parts of the Wikileaks releases do. The information that shouldn't have been classified certainly should have been released, but the endangerment of the lives of people due to the release of information that was justifiably classified verges on negligent homicide.
What endangerment are you referring to, specifically? Is there some particular information that you believe has put lives in imminent danger?
The Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment did protect the New York Times' right to print said materials.
- New York Times v United States [wikipedia.org]
In this case, I don't think Julian Assange is protected under the United States First Amendment.
I have not studied the issue, but I have seen credible arguments that the leak of the Pentagon Papers was ultimately destructive of the best interests of the American people. I do not have an opinion one way or the other at this point and the event happened far enough in the past that I am not going to do the study needed to decide. I will say that those who at that time promoted the idea that publishing the Pentagon Papers was a good idea were pushing a destructive political agenda.
Eh? You haven't studied the issue, you don't intend to study the issue, but you'll go ahead and declare that those who supported the release were pushing a destructive agenda. Why doesn't that surprise me? Seems like the sort of thing that people do when they can't be bothered to actually get informed on a subject. Just find some source that agrees with their pre-conceived notions and declare their verdict on the issue.
That may establish precedence but only for cases where prior restraint isn't justified. Depending on what all these cables contain, it may be justified.
Justice Brennan reasoned that since publication would not cause an inevitable, direct, and immediate event imperiling the safety of American forces, prior restraint was unjustified..
Considering that they only released a tiny fraction of the cables, and those were redacted by professional journalists from several major newspapers, I don't think there's anything in there that would even remotely qualify it under that description.
I'm not American, but even I know you are wrong. The right to free speech does not allow censorship in any shape or form. You are free to say what you like. What happens AFTER that is a different matter entirely, and nothing whatsoever to do with your right to free speech.
Your definition is meaningless. It's like saying I'm free to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater even though I'll be arrested immediately afterward, in which case my speech was certainly not free.
You're blaming INTERPOL? Really? Swedish police issued an arrest warrant, and forwarded it on to INTERPOL. Should INTERPOL ignore warrants they don't like? Or I guess what you're really saying is INTERPOL should ignore warrants you don't like.
Really? That's what you got from reading that comment? That he was blaming INTERPOL? I don't see anything in there blaming INTERPOL at all, but only the politics that lead to a warrant like that being sent to INTERPOL in the first place.
Isn't it naive to assume that exposing this information is better than keeping it secret? I don't know where this list is, but if some of these targets are owned by allies, the United States won't control the timeframe in which a fix for this security hole is implemented. Take for instance, a story I heard this morning on the radio where they mentioned that medical imaging for oncology tests are heavily dependant on Molybdenum-99 - the production of which requires highly enriched uranium - weapons grade in fact. The source of all the Molybdenum-99 in the US comes from two civillian facilities - one in Canada and one in the Netherlands. Exposing security vulnerabilities at these installations would be highly irresponsible.
Nobody exposed any security vulnerabilities anywhere though. It's just a laundry list of potential targets that seems to include pretty much everything including the kitchen sink. Nothing that you couldn't also find by reading discussions and articles about potential terrorism targets all over the web over the past decade. I really don't see this making a whit of difference. I don't see any real value in publishing it either, as it is basically rather uninteresting. I guess they just published it because it was leaked to them and they verified as authentic and not something that was likely to cause any real damage.
Write a letter? They light up their fat cigars they got as a present from the MAFIAA. So all that is left is the EFF, although that would mean a battle between lawyers and then they will change the law.
So as long as the majority of people does not show any interest, I would say we are doomed.
Letters = showing interest? If everyone would write to them rather than just bitch about it here, then maybe we'd start getting somewhere. I know it's frustrating now. I've written several letters to my various congresscritters, and I don't expect to get much response aside from a form letter that shows that they either hadn't read my letter at all, or just didn't care in the slightest. But, if they started getting these letters every day, then maybe they'd start paying more attention. It would have to be a grass-roots sort of thing though, as the mainstream media will be actively opposed to this and will either not report on it at all, or do so in a negative way.
Slashdot Mirror
In brief terms how laws in the US pass? I thought it started from the senate, and the president has veto rights. But now Judges can mess with the laws? Thanks in advance.
Ok, very briefly...
In general, lobbyists write the laws, Congress argues about the laws, possibly eventually passing them, at which point the president either signs it into law or vetoes it. If it becomes a law, then judges decide how it will be applied in practice based on their interpretation of the law. If they decide that it should not be applied due to a conflict with the Constitution, then it will likely be appealed up the court chain until it reaches the Supreme Court. The USSC will then either allow the lower court ruling to stand, or they will take up the case and become the final arbiter of whatever the dispute is about. They may rule on all or part of the case, possibly striking it down entirely in cases where the law directly conflicts with the Constitution. If only a certain aspect is at issue, they may rule on that and send the case back to a lower court with that clarification.
You really believe that people who can't afford or can't get insurance (due to pre-existing condition, etc) wouldn't seek health care if it was available to them? That's a pretty bold claim, not to mention a pretty dismal outlook on people in general. Got any evidence to back it up?
I offer as evidence the millions of people who DO have insurance who STILL do not go to the doctor. Everyone forgets about them.
You offer what as evidence? You haven't given any evidence of anything.
We're making generalizations here, to be sure, but typically the kind of person who can't get group insurance doesn't have a lot of money. This will mean that they can't pay their counter fees, or where they can, it will hurt to do so. They're not going to voluntarily elect to do so unless they absolutely have to. That's just basic humanity. Everyone assumes that if only they had insurance they would go to the doctor instead of the emergency room. I ask you WHY this would be necessarily so?
Most people can afford a $20 co-pay. If you actually have insurance, whether you pay the full monthly costs or not, why wouldn't you use it? Some things they might let slide. I've put things off before if they were minor issues, like hip pain or a nerve problem in my elbow. They weren't getting any worse and I'd learned to deal with them, so I waited until it was convenient for me. When it comes to other issues, I don't wait. Neither does anyone I know. Maybe it's the media exposure or all the medical dramas on TV, but people seem to get pretty concerned when they start having some symptoms, and they go to the doctor, because if there's one thing that's been drilled into us, it's that catching things early is better.
The bottom line is that while not everyone may go to the doctor when they should, a whole lot more people will have the ability to do so now, and I don't see any evidence or reason why they wouldn't do so given the fact that they're paying for the insurance and that they usually know that it's better to go sooner than later. If you have evidence to the contrary, please present it.
You did ask that the Republican answer is, and as I'm not familiar enough with them to provide it, I can give you my own instead. We need to select ONE of the following options:
A) The Federal government takes over all medical care at every level for every citizen, period. Any licensed medical professional is now a state employee. Everyone's care is free, paid for by the tax rolls.
B) The government allows market forces to decide where medical care winds up. This includes things like pricing, treatment types, insurance plans, etc, etc, etc.
Obama's option is to prop up the greedy hospitals while assassinating the insurance industry. It doesn't make sense to corrupt one organization at the expense of another.
First of all, assassinating the insurance industry? They got what they really wanted, the mandatory participation. They got concessions left and right, and hardly any restrictions, which is how they've been allowed to continue raising premiums to milk people until the new law takes effect.
I think you're presenting a false dichotomy. I don't see any reason why a middle-ground solution like the health care exchanges wouldn't work. I don't think any solution is going to be all that great, mostly due to the corrupting influence of special interests in Congress and state governments. Even if a good solution was put in place, it would soon be corrupted. I don't see how it can possibly be left to insurance companies and the market either, since when you look at the policy offerings out there, even insurance professionals can't tell you what you're really buying in terms of coverage. They're written in ways that are impossible to decipher with any degree of certainty, but since it's health care, we can't go without it either, so they have us rather trapped.
Wit
Not really.
The best way to combat leaks is to offer misinformation. All they have to do is flood the gates with garbage, taint certain portions of it to close down in where it came from, and let it go.
In this type of handling leaks, it won't take long to find out where they are coming from and put a stop to that but more importantly, it would prove the information wasn't reliable and it wouldn't gain that much attention.
I mean seriously, how serious would the Iraq war leaks been taken if scattered all throughout them was documents pertaining to assistance receive in battle from the justice league and Superman? How about payment vouchers to mickey mouse and Pluto? How about the diplomat cables if there was realistic looking communications to an embassy office on mars pertaining to a military base on pluto and the categorizing of pluto to something other then a planet was just a cover to take attention away from the base?
I mean what would you think if you saw crap like that in a document dump claimed to be secret communications and files stolen from the US government? You probably already think there is something wrong in the government, but would you trust the information claimed to be secret when it talks about Superman flying over metropolis and noticing Wonder Woman sunbathing nude on her balcony?
How would that impact the ability of people who have legitimate access to this information to do their jobs? Are you going to dump a bunch of crap like that into their databases? Will they have to sift through that stuff as well? The leak came from a person who had legitimate access to the data for operational needs. Why would he leak a bunch of garbage? That makes no sense.
Not sure I follow your pronouns.
The Pentagon has few options: 1. help the person get the information released properly; 2. hunt down and arrest the person; 3. hunt down and kill the person.
So if that's how they were supposed to protect their informant's identities, Assange hasn't really given them a chance to accomplish their mission. He's either ignorant of the options or doesn't care and intends to cause harm to gain fame.
2 is only an option if the person has actually broken the law, and it's not at all clear that any law was broken. 3 is even less justifiable for the same reason. That leaves 1. I don't understand your reluctance to make sure the information gets released properly. They're already on record vehemently opposing the release, but the information was already leaked and it's Wikileaks stated mission to publish this kind of information. They want to do it in a way that will minimize the harm that will come to people such as those informants. Presumably the Pentagon would also want that, given that the information is going to come out.
Even if they want to pursue option 2 or 3, they certainly weren't going to be able to do so before the information was released, so again, you'd think they'd at least take the necessary action to protect those informants and others identified in the documents.
That hasn't been tested, and it still sounds like it would be on shaky ground. I still think the Pentagon was wrong in deciding not to review the documents before their release.
They probably knew what he had. They may have informed him that if he had issues with the propriety of classifying some of those documents there was a procedure to declassify them. His next step should have been to the President or the AG, not the Internet.
And they knew that was not going to happen, so they should have done what they could to protect the identities of their informants, but that was apparently not important enough to them.
Like I said, this isn't 1971. The rules have changed. The executive order delegating classification authority spells them out.
The NY Times now will go to the pentagon, show what it has, and ask for a redaction and declassification. It will get it. If it disagrees with the effects, it may or may not argue over it. But it knows that if it decides to publish something that should have remained classified, according to the court that the Pentagon will then bring into play, its 1st Amendment defense may not work.
That hasn't been tested, and it still sounds like it would be on shaky ground. I still think the Pentagon was wrong in deciding not to review the documents before their release.
SIlenced? Nobody would print his story? Are you paying any attention here, or maybe this whole Wikileaks thing is a figment of the collective human imagination?
I think he's referring to Americans, and attempting to work through the mainstream media rather than something like Wikileaks.
Clinton was impeached, but not removed from office.
Obama ran for President on a platform that included letting the Bush tax cuts expire. This week, he gave a speech wherein he explained that allowing them to be renewed would be stimulating to the economy, and therefore he's reached a "compromise".
See this site: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/
True, he said that, but he obviously doesn't believe that it's an efficient or sensible way to spend that money, as we can get much more economic stimulus from using it in more efficient ways, like he did with the other tax cuts he got as part of the deal or the unemployment benefits extension. While it was one of his campaign promises, he's not the only one that gets a say in it, and Congress certainly wasn't willing to let it happen. I think he made the right decision, even though I'm not sure he really got the best deal he could have gotten. I don't have much faith in his negotiation skills, and the Democrats in general suck at getting their message across.
I'm going to have to punt, here, as I'm one of those people who won't actually read the releases on the grounds that I believe they're still legally classified.
I have seen excerpts inadvertently in previous threads on slashdot that include names and/or enough specifics to directly identify people who are spying for us. I've also seen reports that we have had to scramble to protect a number of people because of it. Not so much in the recent state department release, but quite a few in the Afghanistan/Iraq military intel release earlier.
This was the predictable and inevitable result of releasing the information and is the reason we need to classify information.
I don't agree with classifying information merely to prevent prosecution or embarassment. Those are illegal acts, and the laws for classifying information state as much explicitly, and provide specific methods for declassifying such information to be sure that properly classified information is not declassified. But Wikileaks ignores that and acts as though it's alright to put people in danger as long as you're getting a lot of press throwing secrets around.
I agree that some things should not be released, but the Pentagon was given the opportunity to protect those names and identifying information and they declined to do so, taking an all or nothing stance. That was, in my opinion, the wrong thing to do. They could have protected those people and they chose not to do so for political reasons. Wikileaks doesn't act as though it's ok to put people in danger. They are there to release information that allows people to know what's going on in the government and what their representatives are doing in their name. They have tried to ensure that they don't put people in imminent danger through these releases, which is why they have been releasing only a relatively small number of documents at a time rather than dumping all 250K+ documents out there, and why they've been working with journalists from major newspapers to redact information that could do that kind of damage.
It looks like they failed to do so in some cases with the previous Afghanistan-related documents. They seem to have done better with this latest group. In both cases the US government had the opportunity to protect critical information, assuming they actually consider it to be critical. It seems like they decided it would be politically more profitable to allow that information to be revealed so that it could be used against Wikileaks, regardless of what happens to those people.
Oh I understand the US government's refusal to redact perfectly. They probably asked themselves the next questions and came up with similar answers:
You're forgetting to add that by delineating between what should be released and what shouldn't, they would in effect be admitting that the things they say are OK to release were improperly classified.
I don't see that they would be admitting that anything is OK to release by cooperating to redact parts of the documents. They would be limited to redacting information that would directly put lives in danger, such as the names of informants and such, rather than just redacting anything that they find embarassing. Essentially they would have to decide to put the lives of those involved ahead of the politics, which is why it didn't happen.
Assume a police detective investigating a gang of robbers. Then one day, the robbers prevent another gang from robbing a store. The police detective might not know much about that specific incident, but they could still say with some certanity that the robbers didn't act out of altruism, but that the action can be explained as part of a bigger picture (e.g. gang war).
So who are the "robbers" in the Pentagon Papers case? I'm still not clear on that. Is it just anyone who supported the leak, and he apparently has "studied" all those people and knows their motivations? Please explain.
And no, US citizens don't have a right to know all of the specifics of on-going military operations, or specific confidential arrangements with other governments. That is what the executive branch and elected representatives do, it is part of life in a republic. You don't decide everything that happens about our military operations any more than you do about the level of ozone in parts per million that a car is permitted to emit, or the distribution of radio frequencies, the funding for cream corn in the public school lunch program, or if the black spotted jack rabbit will be on the endangered list.
You do have a say - write your representatives or the President. Vote. Run for office yourself. Write the heads of agencies. Check the Federal Register to see what agency is looking for input, and write them. Have your say, but don't fool yourself about what power or influence you have. And, again, no, you don't have what is defined as a "need to know" for classified covert operations. Want and need are two separate things.
That sounds rather ridiculous. Your examples prove the point. If we know what the representatives are doing, then we can vote for or against them based on that information. If we think it's stupid to put the black spotted jack rabbit on the endangered species list, we can vote for someone who will let us kill the little bastards. We have no such ability when it comes to covert operations, because we don't even know they're happening! How can we cast an informed vote when we don't even know what these representatives are doing in our name?
It was specifically NOT being done in the name of Americans. Yes, t was being done by the US, but in Yemen's name. The Yemenites even said something along the lines of "we will continue saying they are our bombs." Targeting American citizens in such a way would be illegal, I agree, but issue was not his point.
If we're doing it, then it's being done in our name, regardless of whatever lies the governments involved are telling.
I was referring to the recent release of the diplomatic cables, which were redacted by journalists. I agree that the release of identities of informants in the Afghan cables was wrong, and if reports are true, has cost lives and may reduce the willingness of Afghanis and others to cooperate with us. However, I think Wikileaks and the Pentagon share the blame on that one. The Pentagon was given the opportunity to review the release to ensure that no names were exposed and they declined to do so. That was a political choice for them that shows that they put the politics of the situation ahead of concern for the lives of those involved and concern for maintaining faith with those informants. I do think Wikileaks learned something from that and have been more careful about releasing this latest info. The Pentagon doesn't seem to have learned anything though, as they did the same thing this time around.
Think of it as freedom to whirl your arms around. You're free to do that until you hit someone on the nose, at which point you're prosecuted for assault, not for whirling your arms around. You're free to whirl you arms as much as you want, the government will not stop you. Whirl away. But if you hit someone, you're done for assault.
Is that clear enough for you, or do you want a car analogy as well?
You've still failed to explain the difference you're trying to claim exists between the fire in a theater example and defamation. Let's focus on that instead of silly analogies.
Because I have studied those people.
Who, precisely, are "those people"?
There are well known exceptions to the Free Speech rules - "Fire in a theater" is one of them, and universally accepted as punishable due to the mayhem that will no doubt ensue.
Stop splitting hairs. Nobody is stopping you from saying "Obama kills puppies", but if you can't back that statement up with fact then the defamation laws kick in, not the freedom of speech laws.
How is defamation law not a freedom of speech law? How is being prosecuted for defamation different than being prosecuted for yelling fire in a theater? Both occur after the fact. Both punish you for your speech.
4. I'm about the farthest thing from a right-wing anything you could find wearing shoes, and I think that parts of the Pentagon Papers release suffer from the same problem that parts of the Wikileaks releases do. The information that shouldn't have been classified certainly should have been released, but the endangerment of the lives of people due to the release of information that was justifiably classified verges on negligent homicide.
What endangerment are you referring to, specifically? Is there some particular information that you believe has put lives in imminent danger?
The Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment did protect the New York Times' right to print said materials. - New York Times v United States [wikipedia.org]
In this case, I don't think Julian Assange is protected under the United States First Amendment.
Not sure why he would need to be. The NYTimes and others published the documents first anyway.
I have not studied the issue, but I have seen credible arguments that the leak of the Pentagon Papers was ultimately destructive of the best interests of the American people. I do not have an opinion one way or the other at this point and the event happened far enough in the past that I am not going to do the study needed to decide. I will say that those who at that time promoted the idea that publishing the Pentagon Papers was a good idea were pushing a destructive political agenda.
Eh? You haven't studied the issue, you don't intend to study the issue, but you'll go ahead and declare that those who supported the release were pushing a destructive agenda. Why doesn't that surprise me? Seems like the sort of thing that people do when they can't be bothered to actually get informed on a subject. Just find some source that agrees with their pre-conceived notions and declare their verdict on the issue.
That may establish precedence but only for cases where prior restraint isn't justified. Depending on what all these cables contain, it may be justified.
Justice Brennan reasoned that since publication would not cause an inevitable, direct, and immediate event imperiling the safety of American forces, prior restraint was unjustified..
Considering that they only released a tiny fraction of the cables, and those were redacted by professional journalists from several major newspapers, I don't think there's anything in there that would even remotely qualify it under that description.
I'm not American, but even I know you are wrong. The right to free speech does not allow censorship in any shape or form. You are free to say what you like. What happens AFTER that is a different matter entirely, and nothing whatsoever to do with your right to free speech.
Your definition is meaningless. It's like saying I'm free to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater even though I'll be arrested immediately afterward, in which case my speech was certainly not free.
You're blaming INTERPOL? Really? Swedish police issued an arrest warrant, and forwarded it on to INTERPOL. Should INTERPOL ignore warrants they don't like? Or I guess what you're really saying is INTERPOL should ignore warrants you don't like.
Really? That's what you got from reading that comment? That he was blaming INTERPOL? I don't see anything in there blaming INTERPOL at all, but only the politics that lead to a warrant like that being sent to INTERPOL in the first place.
Isn't it naive to assume that exposing this information is better than keeping it secret? I don't know where this list is, but if some of these targets are owned by allies, the United States won't control the timeframe in which a fix for this security hole is implemented. Take for instance, a story I heard this morning on the radio where they mentioned that medical imaging for oncology tests are heavily dependant on Molybdenum-99 - the production of which requires highly enriched uranium - weapons grade in fact. The source of all the Molybdenum-99 in the US comes from two civillian facilities - one in Canada and one in the Netherlands. Exposing security vulnerabilities at these installations would be highly irresponsible.
Nobody exposed any security vulnerabilities anywhere though. It's just a laundry list of potential targets that seems to include pretty much everything including the kitchen sink. Nothing that you couldn't also find by reading discussions and articles about potential terrorism targets all over the web over the past decade. I really don't see this making a whit of difference. I don't see any real value in publishing it either, as it is basically rather uninteresting. I guess they just published it because it was leaked to them and they verified as authentic and not something that was likely to cause any real damage.
Write a letter? They light up their fat cigars they got as a present from the MAFIAA. So all that is left is the EFF, although that would mean a battle between lawyers and then they will change the law.
So as long as the majority of people does not show any interest, I would say we are doomed.
Letters = showing interest? If everyone would write to them rather than just bitch about it here, then maybe we'd start getting somewhere. I know it's frustrating now. I've written several letters to my various congresscritters, and I don't expect to get much response aside from a form letter that shows that they either hadn't read my letter at all, or just didn't care in the slightest. But, if they started getting these letters every day, then maybe they'd start paying more attention. It would have to be a grass-roots sort of thing though, as the mainstream media will be actively opposed to this and will either not report on it at all, or do so in a negative way.