P.S. The webcast he linked to was provided by the rights holders themselves. t wasn't a pirated webcast - it was the rightsholders' own pay-per-view webcast which they didn't bother to protect.
A Swedish court has already ruled that a man linking to a non-password-protected video webcast committed copyright violation because he "published" the webcast. It'll be interesting to see if it holds in the appeals court.
No, you don't lose your advantage in wealth and firepower because you utilise cyber warfare. The other side is likely to use cyber warfare whether you do or not.
That's just one of 1000's of items that were released that are not crimes, are not important for the American people to know, and still undermine our government's ability to operate on the world stage.
Perhaps not, but Assange is a private citizen of Australia, and has no particular reason to be loyal to the United States of America, If he believes the public is served by finding out what goes on behind the scenes of world politics, the potential damage to just one foreign nation, USA, is not likely to be his top priority.
The USA isn't the topmost concern of every human being in the world, you know.
In doing so he signed the death warrants of those people.
If you're thinking of the Afghanistan papers, even your own military intelligence admitted there was no evidence anyone had died because of the information Wikileaks released. Even the cases where there has been suscpicion that the leak contributed to someone's death, number in the single digits. But some of your politicians keep spewing out rhetoric as if the "hundreds of death warrants" were a fact. They're misleading you.
Correct, the Swedish laws on sex crimes are very flexible. Both of the allaged victims admit they had voluntary sex with Assange; the rape accusation is based on Assange not stopping to put on a condom when one of the women asked him to. This may or may not be a judged a crime by a Swedish court. A couple of days after the event, the two women Assange had had sex with met each other and talked, and decided what happened might be rape/molestation. They weren't sure, though, so they went to the police for "advice" on how to proceed. And so the whole circus started.
It's ironic that pirates would be so stuck into the old, pre-Internet thinking. "They shut down the site, so let's move it to a physical location they can't reach."
A more modern, technology-friendly approach would be to decentralise the distribution and listing of torrent files so it becomes impossible to shut them down without shutting down every last freaking BitTorrent client in the world.
Most likely you are flamebaiting, but for the sake of argument... the Roman empire fell while their emperors excelled at greed, war and cruelty. Money, power and status seem to be sufficient motivators for quite a lot of people.
Corporate power is, by nature, less powerful than a tyrannical, omnipotent state. Without a powerful state to back it up, a corporation -has- no power not given to it by its citizens, and citizens can reduce the power of a corporation in a blink of an eye compared to power of a government.
It's not as simple as you make it out. Even in a minimal state, a powerful corporation can oppress citizens through lawsuits and by buying legislation, much in the same way they do today. An individual can't protect themselves against that by choosing another corporation to buy from.
Reducing the power of a corporation by boycotting them only works if a very large number of people decide to do it at the same time, and may put those participating in the boycott at a substantial disadvantage until they succeed or give up.
I do, however, agree that it is vital to withdraw government support to private corporations, since it's probably the most important reason they become inefficient and oppressive monopolies.
Look at countries with high voter turnout, almost all of them use the solution I'm proposing, for example, the US only has a 54% voter turnout, on the other hand, look at Sweden with 86% voter turnout because they use proportional voting.
Yes, the Swedish system gives the voters a decent chance to start a new party and get it elected into the national parliament. It happened just a few days ago with the Swedish Democratic Party, and it happened in the 90's with the Environmental (Green) Party.
The Swedish system isn't perfectly proportional, though. It works by awarding a mandate (seat) in parliament to any candidate who gains a certain number of votes in the municipal elections. Then "equalisation mandates" are awarded to each party to make the number of mandates proportional to the number of party votes nation-wide. But with the increasing number of parties in the parliament, there are too few equalisation mandates.
Most of those crimes can be fought without regulating the Internet. Breaking into someone's e-mail account and making offensive statements on their behalf is a form of slander. Breaking into someone's bank account to steal their money is a form of fraud. They are fought by tracking down the individual criminal and apprehending them, with the help of the bank's own logs and security measures. There's no need to shut down websites.
They have a history of killing informants, and there's every reason to believe that the informants will be killed. Since the documents weren't sanitized, they obviously contain information that can identify informants.
Wikileaks only released the least sensitive documents, and withheld the 15000 most sensitive. They are now working on sanitising the latter line by line, so they can safely release a second batch.
I don't doubt the Talibans will try to kill as many informants they can, I just doubt the documents contain enough information for them to succeed.
Still, Wikileaks has been criticised by many parties for the first batch of documents, including human rights-groups, so it's possible that this particular leak has not been handled well.
If the documents actually showed more military or civilian personnel dying than has been reported already in the media, it might influence public opinion. But that's not what I've seen -- at least in what the NY Times released.
According to Wikipedia, the documents revealed many previously unknown cases of civilian and friendly fire casualties, and also that terrorist activity was increasing in Afghanistan. They're indications that the war is failing.
Since the documents differ from the official reports, they also reveal that the military is lying. That probably doesn't come as a surprise to most people, but it can still be a good idea to remind them of it.
There's absolutely evidence [nydailynews.com] that the release of the papers has put people at risk.
It may have put people at risk. But as I said, there is no evidence it has actually hurt anyone.
The article you are referencing only proves the Taliban are using the leaked documents to scare Afghan informants. Of course they are threatening to kill anyone hinted at in the documents; it's in their interest to make being an informant to the US military seem as dangerous as possible.
There is, however, no evidence the Taliban will actually be able to identify any informant thanks to the leaked documents.
Okay, I'll bite. Where is there any evidence that any lives were lost from the public not knowing who informants were, or any other details revealed in the papers?
I didn't write "lives were lost". I wrote there is a risk that lives will be lost if information is withheld from the public.
If the government withholds information that shows how badly the war is going, or how many innocents are killed in it, the war may be unnecessarily prolonged, and even more lives lost. The public needs to know the truth to make an informed decision about whether to support the war.
You are aware that Wikilekas has offered the US government to sanitise the documents before they release any more, but that the US government has declined, aren't you? (Voice of America)
There is so much misinformation and propaganda floating around, so I'm just checking.
Actually, I would object severely to murdering someone who broke into your house. The word "murder" seems to imply that it is done in cold blood, not in panic or as a response to a direct threat.
A question for you: If the cyberattack targeted a server which hosted both legal and illegal services, and my legal business was among them, would I be in my rights to launch a counter-attack against Aiplex? Against the film industry?
You're right. It was wrong of the Swedish police to leak the info. I misunderstood your initial statement (the grand-grandparent post).
According to Swedish law, the police may decide to leak information to the press if it will help an ongoing investigation, but they are also obligated to consider the privacy of the involved parties.
In this case, it's hard to see how leaking the info helped the investigation. Quite to the contrary, by leaking before Assange was apprehended, they risked him fleeing to another country.
Hm, maybe it is a conspiracy... maybe they were trying to scare Assange to leave the country so he would seem suspicious, and when he instead announced that he would turn himself over to the police, they decided to withdraw the arrest order.
I don't think Assange should use Wikileaks for anything more than a short and comprehensive statement about his innocence (if he still has the confidence of the rest of the Wikileaks organisation).
If he uses the Wikileaks web site to promote the idea of a government conspiracy against himself. it may backfire and hurt the credibility of the entire organisation.
That places Assange in a conflict of interest; it's in his own interest to promote the idea of a conspiracy against him, but probably not in the organisation's interest.
Unfortunately, it's unlikely there are documents to leak. All government records are public unless explicitly classified in Sweden, which makes officials careful not to document anything compromising.
If we are lucky there will be some sort of written communication from the USA, though.
There is no evidence the release of the Afghan documents has hurt anyone; even the Pentagon admits so.
There is a possibility that an informant may be killed because of the leak, but that has to be weighed against how many lives are risked by keeping the truth about the war from the public.
Slashdot Mirror
I still don't get it... why would each child need their own sheet music? Can they all read notes?
I think the OP (OCatenac) is just trolling. This has nothing to do with collateral damage.
P.S. The webcast he linked to was provided by the rights holders themselves. t wasn't a pirated webcast - it was the rightsholders' own pay-per-view webcast which they didn't bother to protect.
A Swedish court has already ruled that a man linking to a non-password-protected video webcast committed copyright violation because he "published" the webcast. It'll be interesting to see if it holds in the appeals court.
Please mod parent up. I think this captures the point excellently.
Good point.
No, you don't lose your advantage in wealth and firepower because you utilise cyber warfare. The other side is likely to use cyber warfare whether you do or not.
Don't you think the relatives of Afghani civilians who have been killed by US soldiers would rather the truth come out?
That's just one of 1000's of items that were released that are not crimes, are not important for the American people to know, and still undermine our government's ability to operate on the world stage.
Perhaps not, but Assange is a private citizen of Australia, and has no particular reason to be loyal to the United States of America, If he believes the public is served by finding out what goes on behind the scenes of world politics, the potential damage to just one foreign nation, USA, is not likely to be his top priority.
The USA isn't the topmost concern of every human being in the world, you know.
In doing so he signed the death warrants of those people.
If you're thinking of the Afghanistan papers, even your own military intelligence admitted there was no evidence anyone had died because of the information Wikileaks released. Even the cases where there has been suscpicion that the leak contributed to someone's death, number in the single digits. But some of your politicians keep spewing out rhetoric as if the "hundreds of death warrants" were a fact. They're misleading you.
Correct, the Swedish laws on sex crimes are very flexible. Both of the allaged victims admit they had voluntary sex with Assange; the rape accusation is based on Assange not stopping to put on a condom when one of the women asked him to. This may or may not be a judged a crime by a Swedish court. A couple of days after the event, the two women Assange had had sex with met each other and talked, and decided what happened might be rape/molestation. They weren't sure, though, so they went to the police for "advice" on how to proceed. And so the whole circus started.
It's ironic that pirates would be so stuck into the old, pre-Internet thinking. "They shut down the site, so let's move it to a physical location they can't reach."
A more modern, technology-friendly approach would be to decentralise the distribution and listing of torrent files so it becomes impossible to shut them down without shutting down every last freaking BitTorrent client in the world.
Because their mission is to help people in their communities get better access to books, not make a profit.
First, they're not really making a profit, they're only recovering some of the initial purchase cost of the books.
Second, if the libraries recovered more of their book costs, the extra money would go to buy new books, not into the librarians' pockets.
Most likely you are flamebaiting, but for the sake of argument... the Roman empire fell while their emperors excelled at greed, war and cruelty. Money, power and status seem to be sufficient motivators for quite a lot of people.
Corporate power is, by nature, less powerful than a tyrannical, omnipotent state. Without a powerful state to back it up, a corporation -has- no power not given to it by its citizens, and citizens can reduce the power of a corporation in a blink of an eye compared to power of a government.
It's not as simple as you make it out. Even in a minimal state, a powerful corporation can oppress citizens through lawsuits and by buying legislation, much in the same way they do today. An individual can't protect themselves against that by choosing another corporation to buy from.
Reducing the power of a corporation by boycotting them only works if a very large number of people decide to do it at the same time, and may put those participating in the boycott at a substantial disadvantage until they succeed or give up.
I do, however, agree that it is vital to withdraw government support to private corporations, since it's probably the most important reason they become inefficient and oppressive monopolies.
Look at countries with high voter turnout, almost all of them use the solution I'm proposing, for example, the US only has a 54% voter turnout, on the other hand, look at Sweden with 86% voter turnout because they use proportional voting.
Yes, the Swedish system gives the voters a decent chance to start a new party and get it elected into the national parliament. It happened just a few days ago with the Swedish Democratic Party, and it happened in the 90's with the Environmental (Green) Party.
The Swedish system isn't perfectly proportional, though. It works by awarding a mandate (seat) in parliament to any candidate who gains a certain number of votes in the municipal elections. Then "equalisation mandates" are awarded to each party to make the number of mandates proportional to the number of party votes nation-wide. But with the increasing number of parties in the parliament, there are too few equalisation mandates.
Pls mod parent up for Insightful
Most of those crimes can be fought without regulating the Internet. Breaking into someone's e-mail account and making offensive statements on their behalf is a form of slander. Breaking into someone's bank account to steal their money is a form of fraud. They are fought by tracking down the individual criminal and apprehending them, with the help of the bank's own logs and security measures. There's no need to shut down websites.
They have a history of killing informants, and there's every reason to believe that the informants will be killed. Since the documents weren't sanitized, they obviously contain information that can identify informants.
Wikileaks only released the least sensitive documents, and withheld the 15000 most sensitive. They are now working on sanitising the latter line by line, so they can safely release a second batch.
I don't doubt the Talibans will try to kill as many informants they can, I just doubt the documents contain enough information for them to succeed.
Still, Wikileaks has been criticised by many parties for the first batch of documents, including human rights-groups, so it's possible that this particular leak has not been handled well.
If the documents actually showed more military or civilian personnel dying than has been reported already in the media, it might influence public opinion. But that's not what I've seen -- at least in what the NY Times released.
According to Wikipedia, the documents revealed many previously unknown cases of civilian and friendly fire casualties, and also that terrorist activity was increasing in Afghanistan. They're indications that the war is failing.
Since the documents differ from the official reports, they also reveal that the military is lying. That probably doesn't come as a surprise to most people, but it can still be a good idea to remind them of it.
I didn't write (or imply) that. I was just pointing out that there are likely no documents to see. That doesn't prove anything either way.
There's absolutely evidence [nydailynews.com] that the release of the papers has put people at risk.
It may have put people at risk. But as I said, there is no evidence it has actually hurt anyone.
The article you are referencing only proves the Taliban are using the leaked documents to scare Afghan informants. Of course they are threatening to kill anyone hinted at in the documents; it's in their interest to make being an informant to the US military seem as dangerous as possible.
There is, however, no evidence the Taliban will actually be able to identify any informant thanks to the leaked documents.
Okay, I'll bite. Where is there any evidence that any lives were lost from the public not knowing who informants were, or any other details revealed in the papers?
I didn't write "lives were lost". I wrote there is a risk that lives will be lost if information is withheld from the public.
If the government withholds information that shows how badly the war is going, or how many innocents are killed in it, the war may be unnecessarily prolonged, and even more lives lost. The public needs to know the truth to make an informed decision about whether to support the war.
You are aware that Wikilekas has offered the US government to sanitise the documents before they release any more, but that the US government has declined, aren't you? (Voice of America)
There is so much misinformation and propaganda floating around, so I'm just checking.
If you believe I'm mistaken, just provide a link which supports your contention.
Actually, I would object severely to murdering someone who broke into your house. The word "murder" seems to imply that it is done in cold blood, not in panic or as a response to a direct threat.
A question for you: If the cyberattack targeted a server which hosted both legal and illegal services, and my legal business was among them, would I be in my rights to launch a counter-attack against Aiplex? Against the film industry?
You're right. It was wrong of the Swedish police to leak the info. I misunderstood your initial statement (the grand-grandparent post).
According to Swedish law, the police may decide to leak information to the press if it will help an ongoing investigation, but they are also obligated to consider the privacy of the involved parties.
In this case, it's hard to see how leaking the info helped the investigation. Quite to the contrary, by leaking before Assange was apprehended, they risked him fleeing to another country.
Hm, maybe it is a conspiracy... maybe they were trying to scare Assange to leave the country so he would seem suspicious, and when he instead announced that he would turn himself over to the police, they decided to withdraw the arrest order.
You never know.
I don't think Assange should use Wikileaks for anything more than a short and comprehensive statement about his innocence (if he still has the confidence of the rest of the Wikileaks organisation).
If he uses the Wikileaks web site to promote the idea of a government conspiracy against himself. it may backfire and hurt the credibility of the entire organisation.
That places Assange in a conflict of interest; it's in his own interest to promote the idea of a conspiracy against him, but probably not in the organisation's interest.
Unfortunately, it's unlikely there are documents to leak. All government records are public unless explicitly classified in Sweden, which makes officials careful not to document anything compromising.
If we are lucky there will be some sort of written communication from the USA, though.
There is no evidence the release of the Afghan documents has hurt anyone; even the Pentagon admits so.
There is a possibility that an informant may be killed because of the leak, but that has to be weighed against how many lives are risked by keeping the truth about the war from the public.