there are some SWR articles i could have linked to, i should have done that. thanks for pointing this out, i will try to remember your comment in the future if i can...
I generally avoid linking to wikipedia articles that I wrote from slashdot articles that I wrote, to avoid perceived conflict of interest, and prevent 'one source' circular errors and hidden bias. In this/. story, I did not originally link to the wikipedia Silent Witness Rule article. The link to wikipedia was made by the slashdot editors and not by me, and they had no reason to suspect that the article author and wikipedia author were the same person.
The first article you linked to discusses a lot of allegations in the wikileaks info - it doesnt go into much detail about the disruption caused.
The second article you linked to says this: "The repercussions for US diplomats, some of whom have written colourful descriptions of their host countries and leaders, have so far been relatively minor."
"It said officials believed the disclosure of the cables had affected contacts in some countries between US diplomats and human rights activists, who were now wary lest their names and views emerge in the future."
The third article says this:"We're going to have to pull out some of our best people – the diplomats who best represented the United States and were the most thoughtful in their analysis – because they dared to report back the truth about the nations in which they serve."
As for the first article - a lot of that was known before wikileaks dumped it, by old fashioned reporting. As for the second article - that is troubling. however after reading "Dirty Diplomacy" by Craig Murray, i do not automatically assume that US ambassadors care about human rights or report the truth back home. Especially after allying with people like Karamov of Uzbekistan, who has somehow managed to make life more repressive than it was during Soviet times but got US support because of the airbase at K2 for a number of years. (we no longer are so friendly with him)
As for the third article... diplomats are shuffled around all the time. In fact every time there is a new president, a bunch of his campaign contributors and cronies are posted as diplomatic staff. It is the 'spoils system' in the modern era, is it not?
Maybe it is more 'disruptive' than, say, the Iraq War, which outraged almost the entire world against us. But 'disruption' is not a crime is it?
because the media has painted him as the 'worst leaker in history' when the charges do not justify this portrayal
because the anger against wikileaks and Manning, stoked by illogical and incorrect assertions regarding his actions and the legality or illegality of them, will result in bad legal precedent, if he is convicted on all counts
because that precedent will then be used to target many, many other people for things like leaking embarassing videos.
If Manning's precedent stands on the Collateral Murder video for example, then the Abu Grahib photo leaks would be prosecutable under the Espionage Act.
subparagraph (e) Whoever having unauthorized possession of, access to, or control over any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully communicates, delivers, transmits or causes to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted, or attempts to communicate, deliver, transmit or cause to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted the same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it;
i.e. if you have 'national defense' information on your computer, that you downloaded with your web browser, you are 'retaining' it.
You can also look at 18 USC 1030(a)(1), the "Computer Espionage" act, which broadens the language even further.
The recent Jane Mayer story on the Thomas Drake case flat out says that his 5 espionage charges, if successfully prosecuted by the government, would set a precedent that makes a lot of reporting a criminal activity, because reporters have to take notes about sensitive information and keep it on their persons to write their stories.
How does Mayer know? She wrote the book (The Dark Side) on the government's torture program - where it came from, how it made it's way from the Korean war to the Navy Seal survivial training (SERE), and from there to a couple of psychologists, and directly into Bybee's torture memos... which directly influenced activities at Guantanamo, Abu Grahib, and in the 'black prisons' across the world.
she discovered all this by asking a lot of government officials a lot of questions and taking a lot of notes. notes that she wont be able to if the current spate of 6 non-spying Espionage Act prosecutions set precedent
they are things like 'moving information from a classified system to an unclassified system', or 'using a computer for its non-intended purpose'. it doesnt have anything about 'passing classified information to wikileaks'. it might say a lot of things, but thats one thing it doesnt say.
you have also mentioned 'stolen' information. this i find very hard to understand. all US government work is uncopyrightable, it is in the public domain. where does the 'value' then derive? that is the langauge of 18 USC 641, 'theft of government property'. how can you steal something that is free? is the information only valuable because nobody knows it? if so, then how can passing it to wikileaks be considered stealing, since it has lost all of its 'scarcity' by being posted on the internet? the last Espionage case that involved Theft of Government property that i know of (the Amerasia case) resulted in a slap on the wrist of the defendants for 641 violations.. they had ver batim put classified government reports into a magazine.
As for 'aiding the enemy', this UCMJ law doesn't mention the word 'classified', at all. yes it is a potentially capital crime, but the prosecution has indicated they will not pursue this.
this brings me to another question - why hasn't he been charged with the UCMJ Espionage law? Why did they use the much less harsh civilian Espionage law, and subparagraph (e) to boot? That paragraph is usually reserved for people like the AIPAC case, the Pentagon Papers case, guys who take home boxes of stuff (Ford), the Morison case, etc. If Manning truly 'aided the enemy' why dont they charge him with the full gamut of UCMJ violations?
He is not charged with Treason either. Why not? Could it be that the 'worst leaker in US military history' didnt leak anything all that important? Could it be that the state department over-classifies most of its material for political reasons?
Could it be the 'collateral murder' video is merely embarassing, and not vital national defense information?
If you chop away at the 34 counts against him, you will find there are only a handful of charges actually related to battlefield information. The rest of it is... what? If he gets convicted on every last count, then it sets a precedent that makes a large percentage of current war reporting basically illegal and punishable by felonies. it also makes communicating with reporters a crime. is that really what we want our future to be?
doesn't that make you a criminal too, technically, since you are 'retaining national defense information', which is covered by 18 USC 793 subparagraph (e) ?
there is no law banning the 'leaking' of classified information.
there are several different laws that ban specific types of information, some of it classified, in certain situations, by certain people.
the truth is that the vast majority of the documents that Manning released do not fall under any law simply becasue they are classified.
read his charge sheet, then look up the actual laws and read them. the civilian laws that he broke do not use the word 'classified'. at all. the Espionage Act (he has about 5 or so charges on this) is regarding 'national defense information'.
please tell me how information about Gadhafi's "hot nurses" are information vital to the national defense.
congress has been unwilling or unable to pass any law making a blanket ban on passing classified information. or the Collateral Murder video. how does that rise to the level of the Espionage Act?
why is there no blanket anti-classified leaking law? because congress itself leaks classified information all the time, in order to fight political battles in the media. thats where all the 'senior officials who did not wish to be named' comments come from in news stories. you can read about Ollie North's experience in the 80s, the whitehouse leaked, congress leaked, everyone leaked. it was part of their media strategy.
There is a great paper from the 1973 Columbia Law Journal by Schmidt and Edgar about this, you can read it online at
Essentially, the American nation has put more faith in open debate and discussion than in government secrecy and its associated blatant lying and corruption (see Reynolds v. United States for a classic example).
this principle is slowly being chipped away by various underhanded tactics over the years, but the spirit of openness is like an unquenchable flame or some kind of endemic weed... the human condition is to ask questions and demand accounability from authority.
the 20th century should have been the end of legitimate arguments for overreaching state power, govrment secrecy, and police states, with (at least) 50 million people directly killed in concentration & labor camps for the benefit of a bureaucracy.
compare that to a few thousand people killed by terrorism, it doesnt even begin to compare. we should be locking up anyone who even approaches moving in a dictator-ship like direction, because the threat of terrorism is just about as dangerous as the threat of perscription medication or tornados, while the threat of overreaching government is as real as the bricks at auschwitz.
information about bio, chem, and nuke weapons is not rocket science. building a nuclear bomb is not rocket science. its nuclear science and its not that hard. the only hard part is gathering enough fissile material.
but governments are paying more attention to frisking babies than to keeping tight controls on uranium mines.
there was a whole warehouse full of yellowcake sitting in Iraq before the war - the us barely even tried to secure it.
i just was futzing around with the wikipedia article about it.
they can't read your memory but they can tell your skin temperature, pitch of voice, eye movements, etc, and plug it into a computer to 'analyze' your veracity.
all they have to do is to have a good relationship in someone whose own country runs satellites (or other SIGINT) spying on shortwave signals and then they basically track the internet back to the home station
we were basically paying whats-his-name, head of HB Gary, to go around running script kiddie stuff and fantasize about quitting his job and building an MMO.
In On the Brink by Henry Paulson he clearly describes his relationship with Chinese leaders while he was CEO of Goldman Sachs.
When he became secretary of terasury in 2006 he was constantly on the phone with them. They get more mention in his book on the crisis of 2008 than Dick Cheney does.
China bought hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Treasury bonds, as well as Fannie and Freddie bonds, through the 1990s and in the 2000s they really ramped up.
I.E., during all of the years when the 'Anti-Clintons' were in the whitehouse and/or congress, 2000-2008, China basically bought a massive, ginormous chunk of the US housing market. When you pay your mortgage, part of it goes directly to the Red Army.
It has nothing to do with Clinton, Bush, the GOP, the Democrats, etc. We don't even have words to describe how the system has changed over the past 20 or so years.
Slashdot Mirror
there are some SWR articles i could have linked to, i should have done that. thanks for pointing this out, i will try to remember your comment in the future if i can...
I generally avoid linking to wikipedia articles that I wrote from slashdot articles that I wrote, to avoid perceived conflict of interest, and prevent 'one source' circular errors and hidden bias. In this /. story, I did not originally link to the wikipedia Silent Witness Rule article. The link to wikipedia was made by the slashdot editors and not by me, and they had no reason to suspect that the article author and wikipedia author were the same person.
The first article you linked to discusses a lot of allegations in the wikileaks info - it doesnt go into much detail about the disruption caused.
The second article you linked to says this: "The repercussions for US diplomats, some of whom have written colourful descriptions of their host countries and leaders, have so far been relatively minor."
"It said officials believed the disclosure of the cables had affected contacts in some countries between US diplomats and human rights activists, who were now wary lest their names and views emerge in the future."
The third article says this:"We're going to have to pull out some of our best people – the diplomats who best represented the United States and were the most thoughtful in their analysis – because they dared to report back the truth about the nations in which they serve."
As for the first article - a lot of that was known before wikileaks dumped it, by old fashioned reporting.
As for the second article - that is troubling. however after reading "Dirty Diplomacy" by Craig Murray, i do not automatically assume that US ambassadors care about human rights or report the truth back home. Especially after allying with people like Karamov of Uzbekistan, who has somehow managed to make life more repressive than it was during Soviet times but got US support because of the airbase at K2 for a number of years. (we no longer are so friendly with him)
As for the third article ... diplomats are shuffled around all the time. In fact every time there is a new president, a bunch of his campaign contributors and cronies are posted as diplomatic staff. It is the 'spoils system' in the modern era, is it not?
Maybe it is more 'disruptive' than, say, the Iraq War, which outraged almost the entire world against us. But 'disruption' is not a crime is it?
because the media has painted him as the 'worst leaker in history' when the charges do not justify this portrayal
because the anger against wikileaks and Manning, stoked by illogical and incorrect assertions regarding his actions and the legality or illegality of them, will result in bad legal precedent, if he is convicted on all counts
because that precedent will then be used to target many, many other people for things like leaking embarassing videos.
If Manning's precedent stands on the Collateral Murder video for example, then the Abu Grahib photo leaks would be prosecutable under the Espionage Act.
18 USC 793 (Espionage Act)
subparagraph (e) Whoever having unauthorized possession of, access to, or
control over any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch,
photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model,
instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or
information relating to the national defense which information the
possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the
United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully
communicates, delivers, transmits or causes to be communicated,
delivered, or transmitted, or attempts to communicate, deliver,
transmit or cause to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted the
same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully retains
the same and fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the
United States entitled to receive it;
i.e. if you have 'national defense' information on your computer, that you downloaded with your web browser, you are 'retaining' it.
You can also look at 18 USC 1030(a)(1), the "Computer Espionage" act, which broadens the language even further.
The recent Jane Mayer story on the Thomas Drake case flat out says that his 5 espionage charges, if successfully prosecuted by the government, would set a precedent that makes a lot of reporting a criminal activity, because reporters have to take notes about sensitive information and keep it on their persons to write their stories.
How does Mayer know? She wrote the book (The Dark Side) on the government's torture program - where it came from, how it made it's way from the Korean war to the Navy Seal survivial training (SERE), and from there to a couple of psychologists, and directly into Bybee's torture memos ... which directly influenced activities at Guantanamo, Abu Grahib, and in the 'black prisons' across the world.
she discovered all this by asking a lot of government officials a lot of questions and taking a lot of notes. notes that she wont be able to if the current spate of 6 non-spying Espionage Act prosecutions set precedent
even if you look at the military charges...
they are things like 'moving information from a classified system to an unclassified system', or 'using a computer for its non-intended purpose'. it doesnt have anything about 'passing classified information to wikileaks'. it might say a lot of things, but thats one thing it doesnt say.
you have also mentioned 'stolen' information. this i find very hard to understand. all US government work is uncopyrightable, it is in the public domain. where does the 'value' then derive? that is the langauge of 18 USC 641, 'theft of government property'. how can you steal something that is free? is the information only valuable because nobody knows it? if so, then how can passing it to wikileaks be considered stealing, since it has lost all of its 'scarcity' by being posted on the internet? the last Espionage case that involved Theft of Government property that i know of (the Amerasia case) resulted in a slap on the wrist of the defendants for 641 violations.. they had ver batim put classified government reports into a magazine.
As for 'aiding the enemy', this UCMJ law doesn't mention the word 'classified', at all. yes it is a potentially capital crime, but the prosecution has indicated they will not pursue this.
this brings me to another question - why hasn't he been charged with the UCMJ Espionage law? Why did they use the much less harsh civilian Espionage law, and subparagraph (e) to boot? That paragraph is usually reserved for people like the AIPAC case, the Pentagon Papers case, guys who take home boxes of stuff (Ford), the Morison case, etc. If Manning truly 'aided the enemy' why dont they charge him with the full gamut of UCMJ violations?
He is not charged with Treason either. Why not? Could it be that the 'worst leaker in US military history' didnt leak anything all that important? Could it be that the state department over-classifies most of its material for political reasons?
Could it be the 'collateral murder' video is merely embarassing, and not vital national defense information?
If you chop away at the 34 counts against him, you will find there are only a handful of charges actually related to battlefield information. The rest of it is... what? If he gets convicted on every last count, then it sets a precedent that makes a large percentage of current war reporting basically illegal and punishable by felonies. it also makes communicating with reporters a crime. is that really what we want our future to be?
have you been reading about it?
doesn't that make you a criminal too, technically, since you are 'retaining national defense information', which is covered by 18 USC 793 subparagraph (e) ?
sir, with all due respect, don't you have better things to do than post on slashdot?
because you can't.
there is no law banning the 'leaking' of classified information.
there are several different laws that ban specific types of information, some of it classified, in certain situations, by certain people.
the truth is that the vast majority of the documents that Manning released do not fall under any law simply becasue they are classified.
read his charge sheet, then look up the actual laws and read them. the civilian laws that he broke do not use the word 'classified'. at all. the Espionage Act (he has about 5 or so charges on this) is regarding 'national defense information'.
please tell me how information about Gadhafi's "hot nurses" are information vital to the national defense.
congress has been unwilling or unable to pass any law making a blanket ban on passing classified information.
or the Collateral Murder video. how does that rise to the level of the Espionage Act?
why is there no blanket anti-classified leaking law? because congress itself leaks classified information all the time, in order to fight political battles in the media. thats where all the 'senior officials who did not wish to be named' comments come from in news stories.
you can read about Ollie North's experience in the 80s, the whitehouse leaked, congress leaked, everyone leaked. it was part of their media strategy.
There is a great paper from the 1973 Columbia Law Journal by Schmidt and Edgar about this, you can read it online at
http://www.fas.org/sgp/library/index.html
Essentially, the American nation has put more faith in open debate and discussion than in government secrecy and its associated blatant lying and corruption (see Reynolds v. United States for a classic example).
this principle is slowly being chipped away by various underhanded tactics over the years, but the spirit of openness is like an unquenchable flame or some kind of endemic weed... the human condition is to ask questions and demand accounability from authority.
did you know there is.... a slashdot japan?
clearly, they are in with the 'globalist banksters'
the 20th century should have been the end of legitimate arguments for overreaching state power, govrment secrecy, and police states, with (at least) 50 million people directly killed in concentration & labor camps for the benefit of a bureaucracy.
compare that to a few thousand people killed by terrorism, it doesnt even begin to compare. we should be locking up anyone who even approaches moving in a dictator-ship like direction, because the threat of terrorism is just about as dangerous as the threat of perscription medication or tornados, while the threat of overreaching government is as real as the bricks at auschwitz.
information about bio, chem, and nuke weapons is not rocket science. building a nuclear bomb is not rocket science. its nuclear science and its not that hard. the only hard part is gathering enough fissile material.
but governments are paying more attention to frisking babies than to keeping tight controls on uranium mines.
there was a whole warehouse full of yellowcake sitting in Iraq before the war - the us barely even tried to secure it.
i just was futzing around with the wikipedia article about it.
they can't read your memory but they can tell your skin temperature, pitch of voice, eye movements, etc, and plug it into a computer to 'analyze' your veracity.
i can see them doing something like this.
maybe the government cannot tell what information you are sending, but they can tell who you are sending it to, and how much you are sending.
even if they cant tell how much you are sending, they can tell this fact:
you are sending information out over an encrypted network, using tools designed to circumvent surveillance.
how do you work around that problem? if they can track the source of the electromagnetic transmission..... won't they investigate it?
the question is this. what if there were a worldwide sort of police state?
the internet architecture depends on certain nodes being up, and all of them are run by big corporations and/or government authorities.
if you go back to paper, or back further, to spoken word and oral history, you decentralize.
all they have to do is to have a good relationship in someone whose own country runs satellites (or other SIGINT) spying on shortwave signals and then they basically track the internet back to the home station
we were basically paying whats-his-name, head of HB Gary, to go around running script kiddie stuff and fantasize about quitting his job and building an MMO.
you can read about it in the anonymous dumps.
very interesting... i wonder what other old machines used punch cards?
the player piano surely can't have been the only thing between the jacquard loom and the Census machine in the 1890s.
you could sue Microsoft for a billion million dollars
the real 'pioneers of computers' were the Census machines, and the vast bureaucracies like the Social Security Administration.
and yes, even the machines in the Nazi concentration camps, which IBM Germany worked on.
dare i mention that the Soviet Union was a huge punch card customer through the 1930s?
and that punch card machines are, well, basically, like gigantic electromechanical SQL devices?
oh, and the Japanese fascists were pretty good customers too.
ahhh
but of course, lets forget about all that. everyone knows the first computers were codebreakers built to help stop hitler. yay us.
what do you think of the mass of people on this comment board saying that ceritifications are worthless?
In On the Brink by Henry Paulson he clearly describes his relationship with Chinese leaders while he was CEO of Goldman Sachs.
When he became secretary of terasury in 2006 he was constantly on the phone with them. They get more mention in his book on the crisis of 2008 than Dick Cheney does.
China bought hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Treasury bonds, as well as Fannie and Freddie bonds, through the 1990s and in the 2000s they really ramped up.
I.E., during all of the years when the 'Anti-Clintons' were in the whitehouse and/or congress, 2000-2008, China basically bought a massive, ginormous chunk of the US housing market. When you pay your mortgage, part of it goes directly to the Red Army.
It has nothing to do with Clinton, Bush, the GOP, the Democrats, etc. We don't even have words to describe how the system has changed over the past 20 or so years.
in general, making a sarcastic comment about the government on twitter will not get you a year in jail in a labor camp in the US. not yet anyways.
it happened to a girl in china though.
you can get famous lawyers to help you out and basically get very light punishment. see Jeffrey Epstein
industry continues to churn out product after product, the hedge funds and big banks making billions of dollars.
even as many industry experts say it is exactly the same thing as gambling.