Irresponsibly revealing this information is having exactly the effect that it was classified to prevent. The value of releasing it is minimal, while the cost of releasing it will be very large.
There are means for dealing with crimes that have been hidden behind security classification. In fact, everyone trained in securing information for the U. S. Government is taught not to do that, and to report it if it's happening. Nobody at any level is authorized to do it. Not even the President. So reporting that someone has done it, and bringing an investigation that has the authority to examine the data while it's still classified, is the right thing to do. If the information was illegally classified, the person who did that will be removed from authority to classify it, and the information will be declassified. If the information was hiding a crime, that will be dealt with as well.
Throwing the information out on the street and justifying it with paranoid fantasies of secret governments is most assuredly the wrong thing to do.
And while any number of lard-assed wannabe code monkeys here on/. may disagree, those people being dragged from their homes by the Taliban right now would not.
I have a weird hobby of collecting pre-1950 textbooks, and frankly I think kids learned "more" back then from their textbooks than they do today.
Go back farther and it's even more pronounced.
But, consider that as you go back in time you find fewer people in school as a proportion of the population. Which means that (a) they were probably the smarter ones, a tranche we would now label as A or B students; and (b) the teachers were a smaller and probably a smarter subset of the population as well, as opportunities to use bookish intelligence as an adult are rare in agrarian economies and teaching would be the obvious job. And the schools were deliberately more selective and demanding. Requiring better performance and gearing your lessons to attain it from the beginning means the students remaining later on will be higher on the scale. Resting on adequate performance and spending the time making students with the least learning capacity achieve average results will not have that effect.
So he spends a minute changing the name of the base font and the whole book becomes redlines.
Trust me, every kid sees every book as "new", and every school has to buy books continuously as they wear out, get lost, etc. Adding information isn't the reason textbooks are expensive. Politicizing the purchasing process is.
The WaPo long ago ceased to be about facts and justice. Now it's just another big-media mouthpiece.
But you're right. There should be bumpers for this sort of op-ed piece. Like "Advertisement" if it was from a product manufacturer. But it's from a troll for the Republican party. So the bumper should be "Propaganda". In bold letters, in a box, at the top and bottom of the text.
But Wikileaks? Hasn't anyone ever explained to you that two wrongs don't make a right?
Committing a crime to expose a crime is still a crime. Getting a lot of people killed because you want to publicize how a few people got killed is still getting a lot of people killed.
Wikileaks aren't good guys. They're irrational, self-serving, criminal idiots.
It's likely the leakers wouldn't know to whom to leak or how if wikileaks didn't make it easy.
It's also likely they wouldn't do it so carelessly even if they knew how. They might limit it to the parts that are relevant to a valid complaint that secrecy is being used to hide criminal activity.
Instead, they turn over everything in a filesystem, and wikileaks dumps it all into the world with barely a glance. Given the sheer volume of this, there's no way they analyzed all those documents for information dangerous to people who don't deserve to be outed.
So while wikileaks isn't the source of the information, their actions are contributing to the crime of releasing it. If wikileaks were really interested in the law or in stopping the crimes being perpetrated in secrecy, they'd be doing something legal to stop those crimes, not committing a crime to aggrandize themselves in a way that does nothing to stop the crimes.
Hmm...we're talking about a WAR between a country and a faction of an international organization in another country, which has at one time or another involved every nation signatory to NATO or whatever ANZUS is calling itself these days. We're talking about people hiding in one country tearing down the intelligence apparatus of one of the participants in that war, moreso the participant who is likely to let everyone live in peace if they win, not the participant who is likely to come to your town, beat your women for walking around with their eyes and mouths visible, and force your sons to learn their bible by rote. Believe it or not there are worse things than this self-imposed arbiter of secrecy being tried for his crime against humanity, and those things are right now being perpetrated against the people this guy carelessly tossed into the wind to make his point (things like torture and killing, not rendition and trial).
So if he's threatening to release even more sensitive information and reveal the names of people in even greater danger (yes, it can get worse, in number of people put in danger and damage to the overall chances of stopping the enemy) then he's putting himself in the role of antagonist; enemy combatant; target for those who wish to do the world good and don't mind getting dirty doing it.
If he cares about the rule of law he'll render himself and take his chances in court.
We sent doctors. We said we'd compensate those who helped us, including by getting them medical care. DWB's resources are limited. Giving people more medical care is not a bad thing, it's a good thing.
The only bad thing here is your bogus characterization of this as politicization of doctors by America. The people who politicized doctors are the Taliban. The people who drove DWB out are the Taliban.
Your sense of cause and effect is completely confused.
"Let's keep it straight just who has blood on their hands."
That's what he said.
How does sending doctors to Afghanistan put blood on America's hands?
Do you want to keep straight who has blood on their hands?
The Taliban are reported to be killing people whose names are in the documents wikileaks released. That means there is blood on the Taliban's hands and on wikileaks'.
So what I used wasn't a strawman. It was simple logic. His pretense that sending doctors is somehow a bad thing, that's the strawman.
If you can't tell who the good guys and bad guys are in this conflict, then you're not operating in a context where the stuff that's classified can tell you the truth.
The American military is capable of being embarassed by this release of information precisely because it works hard not to be trigger happy or uncaring.
Meanwhile, in return for embarassing the American military, wikileaks is arming the Taliban with a wealth of intelligence that it can now use to impede efforts to create a peaceful environment in Afghanistan.
Maybe you should reign in your jerking knee and think of who's going to die if wikileaks releases more information. Good guys or bad guys? Choose your side.
The information wikileaks has released is already reported to be leading the Taliban to our allies within their community. The Taliban are killing those people for wanting to be rid of the Taliban.
There are litigious questions of jurisdiction and scope, but in the end, while wikileaks was short-sightedly satisfying its narrow-minded purpose of "exposing"...something...they were purely giving bad people information that is leading directly to the painful and ugly deaths of good people.
If you think that's poetic, you misunderstand the term, and if it makes you euphoric, you may be a psychotic yourself.
That might be enough to put them all in jail on a charge of extortion.
They're threatening to commit a crime if the feds don't stop applying the law to them. So even if they were innocent of the crime the feds want to try them for, the feds now have them dead to rights for extortion.
Define the "they", there. Because that they is not all of them. Some of them are like us, concerned about something other than their own bank accounts.
The "they" that fits your description can be identified as politically active individuals aligning themselves with the Republican Party.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you counting my posts? If so, you can't count. I'm spamming nothing. I'm replying to people who can't tell right from wrong.
I'm seriously suggesting that in 1830 if you didn't have aptitude you didn't go past a couple of years of school no matter what your class.
Your misunderstanding of that makes you the fucking twerp, you fucking twerp.
Irresponsibly revealing this information is having exactly the effect that it was classified to prevent. The value of releasing it is minimal, while the cost of releasing it will be very large.
There are means for dealing with crimes that have been hidden behind security classification. In fact, everyone trained in securing information for the U. S. Government is taught not to do that, and to report it if it's happening. Nobody at any level is authorized to do it. Not even the President. So reporting that someone has done it, and bringing an investigation that has the authority to examine the data while it's still classified, is the right thing to do. If the information was illegally classified, the person who did that will be removed from authority to classify it, and the information will be declassified. If the information was hiding a crime, that will be dealt with as well.
Throwing the information out on the street and justifying it with paranoid fantasies of secret governments is most assuredly the wrong thing to do.
And while any number of lard-assed wannabe code monkeys here on /. may disagree, those people being dragged from their homes by the Taliban right now would not.
I have a weird hobby of collecting pre-1950 textbooks, and frankly I think kids learned "more" back then from their textbooks than they do today.
Go back farther and it's even more pronounced.
But, consider that as you go back in time you find fewer people in school as a proportion of the population. Which means that (a) they were probably the smarter ones, a tranche we would now label as A or B students; and (b) the teachers were a smaller and probably a smarter subset of the population as well, as opportunities to use bookish intelligence as an adult are rare in agrarian economies and teaching would be the obvious job. And the schools were deliberately more selective and demanding. Requiring better performance and gearing your lessons to attain it from the beginning means the students remaining later on will be higher on the scale. Resting on adequate performance and spending the time making students with the least learning capacity achieve average results will not have that effect.
Um, if before the pictures were all of middle-class white people walking home from church, then yes, something significant was changed.
So he spends a minute changing the name of the base font and the whole book becomes redlines.
Trust me, every kid sees every book as "new", and every school has to buy books continuously as they wear out, get lost, etc. Adding information isn't the reason textbooks are expensive. Politicizing the purchasing process is.
The WaPo long ago ceased to be about facts and justice. Now it's just another big-media mouthpiece.
But you're right. There should be bumpers for this sort of op-ed piece. Like "Advertisement" if it was from a product manufacturer. But it's from a troll for the Republican party. So the bumper should be "Propaganda". In bold letters, in a box, at the top and bottom of the text.
EFF and ACLU, sure.
But Wikileaks? Hasn't anyone ever explained to you that two wrongs don't make a right?
Committing a crime to expose a crime is still a crime. Getting a lot of people killed because you want to publicize how a few people got killed is still getting a lot of people killed.
Wikileaks aren't good guys. They're irrational, self-serving, criminal idiots.
It's likely the leakers wouldn't know to whom to leak or how if wikileaks didn't make it easy.
It's also likely they wouldn't do it so carelessly even if they knew how. They might limit it to the parts that are relevant to a valid complaint that secrecy is being used to hide criminal activity.
Instead, they turn over everything in a filesystem, and wikileaks dumps it all into the world with barely a glance. Given the sheer volume of this, there's no way they analyzed all those documents for information dangerous to people who don't deserve to be outed.
So while wikileaks isn't the source of the information, their actions are contributing to the crime of releasing it. If wikileaks were really interested in the law or in stopping the crimes being perpetrated in secrecy, they'd be doing something legal to stop those crimes, not committing a crime to aggrandize themselves in a way that does nothing to stop the crimes.
Hmm...we're talking about a WAR between a country and a faction of an international organization in another country, which has at one time or another involved every nation signatory to NATO or whatever ANZUS is calling itself these days. We're talking about people hiding in one country tearing down the intelligence apparatus of one of the participants in that war, moreso the participant who is likely to let everyone live in peace if they win, not the participant who is likely to come to your town, beat your women for walking around with their eyes and mouths visible, and force your sons to learn their bible by rote. Believe it or not there are worse things than this self-imposed arbiter of secrecy being tried for his crime against humanity, and those things are right now being perpetrated against the people this guy carelessly tossed into the wind to make his point (things like torture and killing, not rendition and trial).
So if he's threatening to release even more sensitive information and reveal the names of people in even greater danger (yes, it can get worse, in number of people put in danger and damage to the overall chances of stopping the enemy) then he's putting himself in the role of antagonist; enemy combatant; target for those who wish to do the world good and don't mind getting dirty doing it.
If he cares about the rule of law he'll render himself and take his chances in court.
I read what he posted here before posting my completely relevant, honest, and true statement about what he posted here.
I don't need to read or care what he said about anything else to determine that he's being a retard about this.
BTW, you have his spooge on your neck.
"or else you won't get medical care."
You made that up. #fail
We sent doctors. We said we'd compensate those who helped us, including by getting them medical care. DWB's resources are limited. Giving people more medical care is not a bad thing, it's a good thing.
The only bad thing here is your bogus characterization of this as politicization of doctors by America. The people who politicized doctors are the Taliban. The people who drove DWB out are the Taliban.
Your sense of cause and effect is completely confused.
Yes, straw man arguments are lies.
"Let's keep it straight just who has blood on their hands."
That's what he said.
How does sending doctors to Afghanistan put blood on America's hands?
Do you want to keep straight who has blood on their hands?
The Taliban are reported to be killing people whose names are in the documents wikileaks released. That means there is blood on the Taliban's hands and on wikileaks'.
So what I used wasn't a strawman. It was simple logic. His pretense that sending doctors is somehow a bad thing, that's the strawman.
He's hiding behind international law.
Has he read it? Because fomenting terrorism is probably not on its list of nice things to do.
I'm pretty sure that aiding and abetting terrorists is a crime in Australia.
And you don't have to say what's in that file. It's pretty clear to anyone that it's a threat, and not a homeowner's policy.
If you can't tell who the good guys and bad guys are in this conflict, then you're not operating in a context where the stuff that's classified can tell you the truth.
Given the byzantine nature of the case, I have little doubt it will be appealed until his lawyers realize he's run out of money.
"the US is above the law"
Seems wikileaks is the first one who decided that killing people for ego was a good idea, here.
Got it. America bad for sending doctors to Afghanistan.
Taliban good for threatening doctors because America send doctors to Afghanistan.
Seriously, do you have to wear a helmet to walk down the street? Because you're fucking retarded.
He and Anne Coulter are traitors, trolls, shills for the people who want America to be their personal piggy bank.
Your sophistry is no better than the polticians'.
The American military is capable of being embarassed by this release of information precisely because it works hard not to be trigger happy or uncaring.
Meanwhile, in return for embarassing the American military, wikileaks is arming the Taliban with a wealth of intelligence that it can now use to impede efforts to create a peaceful environment in Afghanistan.
Maybe you should reign in your jerking knee and think of who's going to die if wikileaks releases more information. Good guys or bad guys? Choose your side.
What poetic justice?
The information wikileaks has released is already reported to be leading the Taliban to our allies within their community. The Taliban are killing those people for wanting to be rid of the Taliban.
There are litigious questions of jurisdiction and scope, but in the end, while wikileaks was short-sightedly satisfying its narrow-minded purpose of "exposing"...something...they were purely giving bad people information that is leading directly to the painful and ugly deaths of good people.
If you think that's poetic, you misunderstand the term, and if it makes you euphoric, you may be a psychotic yourself.
That might be enough to put them all in jail on a charge of extortion.
They're threatening to commit a crime if the feds don't stop applying the law to them. So even if they were innocent of the crime the feds want to try them for, the feds now have them dead to rights for extortion.
Santa is no longer supported.
You need to upgrade to Santa 3.5 if you want your kids to believe.
Humorously
Whatever it was meant to be, it wasn't funny.
they describe it...
Define the "they", there. Because that they is not all of them. Some of them are like us, concerned about something other than their own bank accounts.
The "they" that fits your description can be identified as politically active individuals aligning themselves with the Republican Party.