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.
Total reversal of intent, there. I can get an office chair anywhere. I'd love a bobcat. I'd buy from that dude until he started sending bags of poop instead of plasma globes.
In most countries, inciting a riot, no matter the goal, is illegal, and for good reason, because, well, 1300 people died.
In the case of what Wikileaks has been releasing that belongs to America, there's things in there that should be released, and things that should not. Assange has proved he doesn't care about the difference, and he's used that fact to extort the government into not doing all it could to prevent him from continuing to endanger people.
There are ways to get things declassified if they were not supposed to be classified. He's not interested in them nearly as much as he's interested in the publicity to be gained from just releasing the information himself.
The tradeoff in this case isn't complicated at all, since the documents can be redacted so as to expose any criminal activity without endangering lives. In fact, American law demands it. By not following the law that would reach his stated goals Assange shows that his stated goals are not his real goals.
Next time he wants to start a war, he should ensure he's in the middle of it, like a normal revolutionary.
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.
2. If nobody ever reads those things, that goes both ways, so enforcement is unlikely to be possible.
3. It's not legal to enter into a contract to commit illegal activity. So when he discovered you were putting illegal material on his server, he was released from any sense of contractual obligation, and put into a position of being obligated to report a crime.
4. How do you enter into a contract under a pseudonym giving a fake email address as your contact info? (Hint: you can't.)
5. Contracts require compensatory value in both directions. You'd have to be paying for the service or giving some service in trade. No indication such was the case here.
6. It's not 100% clear that the cops didn't have a warrant, and if they did have one, it likely accused the owner of the server (therefore the nominal owner of every file on the server) of doing the crimes his users were committing.
If you do ever do business with me, keep it legal. It's not that I stick my neck out for no man, but he'd better be doing something I agree with to get that honor.
People were conducting those "personal conversations" on a party line involving every employee of the server site.
If the owner of the server site was, as I suggested above, the FBI itself, acting under cover, how would that be any different?
It's not even illegal for them to lie to you and say "sure, you can put your kiddie porn here, we won't tell anyone". It would be entrapment if they said "find some kiddie porn and put it here or we'll put some in your folders and tell the cops it's yours."
It's also not completely clear that the agents had no warrants for the things they were doing. They didn't need a warrant, since they had the server owner's permission to look at every file on the server, but they may originally have contacted the server owner with a warrant in hand suggesting they were accusing him of owning illegal material they'd already observed on the server without admin access.
Then you'll have to get appointed to the Supreme Court and reverse all those rulings showing that free speech isn't a defense for any number of illegal acts that are performed via speech.
There's a difference between free speech and putting people's lives in danger.
While you may be informing the public of abuses by an institution, you may also be violating the rights and security of people identified in those documents. Wikileaks has been sloppy and arrogant about that, and deserves nobody's support. Several of its own members are demonstrating the right action in that situation: distance yourself from the criminals and do the same job properly elsewhere.
The feds having access to everybodies data means that everybody is guilty until proven innocent.
1. They don't have access to everybody's data. They have access to data posted by individuals on a third-party's server, granted by the owner of that server. They have access, in otherwords, to data freely handed to them.
2. They don't need a warrant to get your neighbors or employer to spy on you, they just need their cooperation. They need a warrant to search you or your home.
3. There is no pornographer-website privilege. Any protection your website promises you is something it takes upon itself.
4. You could post anything you want, here, and the feds could ask CdrTaco for my identifying information and he could give it to them. They'd have to find a salient link from me to the things you posted, since I don't come here looking for pictures of your children. They're not indicting everyone who logged into the website. They're tracking people who actually interact with the child-porn portion of the website in ways that break the law.
If the FBI had set up the site as a sting operation, would that be overstepping? No.
If the FBI walked in on the server room, cuffed the sysadmin, and started installing logging software on the server, would that be overstepping? Yes, if they didn't have a warrant.
In this case, they asked for assistance, the operators decided they liked the idea, and the FBI and the operators joined forces in a sting operation.
There's nothing wrong with that at all. Except the part where the child pornographers thought they could traffic child-pr0n and nobody would turn them in.
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.
Anyone in gitmo was taken from a battlefield. I don't agree with much of the way anyone was treated under THE PREVIOUS ADMINISTRATION but so far the legality of their treatment has been upheld. Many of them have already been released. The rest are people even you wouldn't like living in your neighborhood. And they all have defense lawyers.
You pay for those with your attention. You pay for internet content with your attention and your identity and a record of your online behavior and the identities of your friends and maybe some information on your hard drive and you give the internet a shot at pwning your computer or taking all the stuff you own in your name.
Radio is free. TV is free. The Internet is savage.
No, fake reviews are allowed for all products because nobody is regulating the provenance of a review except the community itself through the review rating buttons.
Fake products attract obviously fake reviews because it's fun.
Real products attract non-obviously fake reviews because the reviewer is getting reviewer-grade points, or has a financial or social benefit to gain from astroturfing the product.
My internet is provided by my cable company (Cox, but Comcast is basically the same). They're already delivering full-bandwidth HDTV to every one of my N televisions, each of which can be recording two channels 24/7/365.25. I actually pay more for the link to my computer than I would if it were just charged as another TV. By a disturbingly large multiple, come to think of it.
Slashdot Mirror
So we put it in a room with the broken-window theory and let them fight it out.
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.
Total reversal of intent, there. I can get an office chair anywhere. I'd love a bobcat. I'd buy from that dude until he started sending bags of poop instead of plasma globes.
In most countries, inciting a riot, no matter the goal, is illegal, and for good reason, because, well, 1300 people died.
In the case of what Wikileaks has been releasing that belongs to America, there's things in there that should be released, and things that should not. Assange has proved he doesn't care about the difference, and he's used that fact to extort the government into not doing all it could to prevent him from continuing to endanger people.
There are ways to get things declassified if they were not supposed to be classified. He's not interested in them nearly as much as he's interested in the publicity to be gained from just releasing the information himself.
The tradeoff in this case isn't complicated at all, since the documents can be redacted so as to expose any criminal activity without endangering lives. In fact, American law demands it. By not following the law that would reach his stated goals Assange shows that his stated goals are not his real goals.
Next time he wants to start a war, he should ensure he's in the middle of it, like a normal revolutionary.
On the Internet, it's a brand-name for a class of software that allows open editing. Or do you think Facebook is a book full of actual faces?
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.
1. Was there such language in the agreement.
2. If nobody ever reads those things, that goes both ways, so enforcement is unlikely to be possible.
3. It's not legal to enter into a contract to commit illegal activity. So when he discovered you were putting illegal material on his server, he was released from any sense of contractual obligation, and put into a position of being obligated to report a crime.
4. How do you enter into a contract under a pseudonym giving a fake email address as your contact info? (Hint: you can't.)
5. Contracts require compensatory value in both directions. You'd have to be paying for the service or giving some service in trade. No indication such was the case here.
6. It's not 100% clear that the cops didn't have a warrant, and if they did have one, it likely accused the owner of the server (therefore the nominal owner of every file on the server) of doing the crimes his users were committing.
If you do ever do business with me, keep it legal. It's not that I stick my neck out for no man, but he'd better be doing something I agree with to get that honor.
People were conducting those "personal conversations" on a party line involving every employee of the server site.
If the owner of the server site was, as I suggested above, the FBI itself, acting under cover, how would that be any different?
It's not even illegal for them to lie to you and say "sure, you can put your kiddie porn here, we won't tell anyone". It would be entrapment if they said "find some kiddie porn and put it here or we'll put some in your folders and tell the cops it's yours."
It's also not completely clear that the agents had no warrants for the things they were doing. They didn't need a warrant, since they had the server owner's permission to look at every file on the server, but they may originally have contacted the server owner with a warrant in hand suggesting they were accusing him of owning illegal material they'd already observed on the server without admin access.
No, it's only a snuff film if the death in it is the fault of the people making the movie and is the reason they had the camera rolling.
For instance, John Landis' film of Vic Morrow being decapitated by a helicopter is not a snuff film, even if it is evidence of somebody's negligence.
Then you'll have to get appointed to the Supreme Court and reverse all those rulings showing that free speech isn't a defense for any number of illegal acts that are performed via speech.
http://www.anorak.co.uk/267106/politicians/wikileaks-killed-1300-people-and-counting.html
Assange thinks that because Malaria exists he's not culpable for starting a war.
And they aren't really a wiki. Not any more.
There's a difference between free speech and putting people's lives in danger.
While you may be informing the public of abuses by an institution, you may also be violating the rights and security of people identified in those documents. Wikileaks has been sloppy and arrogant about that, and deserves nobody's support. Several of its own members are demonstrating the right action in that situation: distance yourself from the criminals and do the same job properly elsewhere.
Those who think they have any sort of righteous "liberty" when posting their information on someone else's server are out of their fucking minds.
The feds having access to everybodies data means that everybody is guilty until proven innocent.
1. They don't have access to everybody's data. They have access to data posted by individuals on a third-party's server, granted by the owner of that server. They have access, in otherwords, to data freely handed to them.
2. They don't need a warrant to get your neighbors or employer to spy on you, they just need their cooperation. They need a warrant to search you or your home.
3. There is no pornographer-website privilege. Any protection your website promises you is something it takes upon itself.
4. You could post anything you want, here, and the feds could ask CdrTaco for my identifying information and he could give it to them. They'd have to find a salient link from me to the things you posted, since I don't come here looking for pictures of your children. They're not indicting everyone who logged into the website. They're tracking people who actually interact with the child-porn portion of the website in ways that break the law.
The FBI overstepped.
How?
If the FBI had set up the site as a sting operation, would that be overstepping? No.
If the FBI walked in on the server room, cuffed the sysadmin, and started installing logging software on the server, would that be overstepping? Yes, if they didn't have a warrant.
In this case, they asked for assistance, the operators decided they liked the idea, and the FBI and the operators joined forces in a sting operation.
There's nothing wrong with that at all. Except the part where the child pornographers thought they could traffic child-pr0n and nobody would turn them in.
Films of poeple dying in accidents aren't snuff films. Films with scripted killings are snuff films.
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.
Anyone in gitmo was taken from a battlefield. I don't agree with much of the way anyone was treated under THE PREVIOUS ADMINISTRATION but so far the legality of their treatment has been upheld. Many of them have already been released. The rest are people even you wouldn't like living in your neighborhood. And they all have defense lawyers.
Radio is free. TV is free.
You pay for those with your attention. You pay for internet content with your attention and your identity and a record of your online behavior and the identities of your friends and maybe some information on your hard drive and you give the internet a shot at pwning your computer or taking all the stuff you own in your name.
Radio is free. TV is free. The Internet is savage.
Of course, Amazon.Com bought Woot.Com last year. Probably because of the business model. I see a pattern emerging.
Oh wait. That's their business model.
Never mind.
No, fake reviews are allowed for all products because nobody is regulating the provenance of a review except the community itself through the review rating buttons.
Fake products attract obviously fake reviews because it's fun.
Real products attract non-obviously fake reviews because the reviewer is getting reviewer-grade points, or has a financial or social benefit to gain from astroturfing the product.
The cable companies compete with the satellite and DSL companies. The phone company now delivers HDTV if you want it.
The only thing the cable companies have a monopoly on is cables, and you can't free that market up or your neighborhood will look like this:
http://www.indiamike.com/photopost/data/502/India-new_delhi_goa_001.jpg
If you want to live with that to maybe save a dollar a month by choosing the least-competent provider in the market segment, go for it.
My internet is provided by my cable company (Cox, but Comcast is basically the same). They're already delivering full-bandwidth HDTV to every one of my N televisions, each of which can be recording two channels 24/7/365.25. I actually pay more for the link to my computer than I would if it were just charged as another TV. By a disturbingly large multiple, come to think of it.
So you go get over yourself.