He had evidence of espionage and turned over that evidence to authorities who could act on it. Why does he need to justify that?
And they are calling him that unfairly I might add. And not only that but the US government isn't morally defending him either. So they are basically letting him get called a snitch and traitor etc.
Where are all those Congressmen to defend Lamo? Where is Obama? Where is FoxNews now?
The things that really sticks out in this saga are 1) Manning had legal resources available to him to expose wrong doing in the classified world. He chose to ignore that route and used the media instead. 2) Lamo looked at the shear number of documents and had to make a choice to either do nothing with the possibility of many people being killed, or turn Manning in with the possibility of facing the death penalty. Damned if you do and damned if you don't.
This saga has parallels in history. Think back to the first atomic bombs dropped on Japan. There were those in the program that had to come to grips with the fact that the work they did led to 250,000+ dead. They had basically two choices. Accept the notion that dropping those bombs led the the end of the war and ultimately reduce the total number of dead, or go crazy thinking otherwise, since we can never know for sure.
Right or wrong, Lamo chose his path and I will not fault him for it. Manning on the other hand choose poorly.
If what you say is correct then why is Lamo receiving full vitriol and hate from the media, from the hacker community, etc? And instead of being morally defended by people in government he's completely ignored? If he saved the world or did the right thing then where is his meeting and photo op with Obama? Where is his cash reward if people think he's a snitch? Not only did he not gain anything, but he's lost a lot from this.
And the government doesn't morally defend him. They used him and seem to have thrown him to the wolves. Now he has to deal with death threats, look over his shoulder for life, deal with being labeled a snitch, and no one in the US government will speak out and say otherwise?
Lamo was arrested in 2003 for breaking into the NY Times website along with Yahoo, Microsoft and other. Before that he broke into various corporate networks, Lexis-Nexis, etc. Facing a possible 15 year prison sentence he took a plea bargain with reduced it to 6 month to be spent under house arrest at his parent's home. How did he get such a sweet deal? Was part of the deal an agreement to become an FBI informant possibly? Because if the Anonymous arrests have proven one thing, when hackers are faced with serving serious jail time, they will rat their own mothers out to cut a deal.
1. He's not an informant. 2. The US government isn't treating him all that good right now. They wont even defend him morally.
What are you talking about? Diplomatic relations were extremely strained and are still being rebuilt.
Yes it may have made sense to release critical information regarding military abuses. However the information was not read or sifted through in advance, instead it was dumped wholesale even though the vast majority of it was diplomatic gossip.
If Adrian Lamo really is a hero who saved lives why isn't Obama, Biden, Senators, Congressmen, or the establishment itself thanking him? Rewarding him? Calling him brave? The way he's being treated should reveal a lot about how he is truly viewed by them.
Think about it. Bradley Manning is allegedly being tortured. Adrian Lamo is being completely ignored by the powers that be and not receiving any moral support. What is going on with that?
So does an attention seeking narcissist deserves death threats, which he has gotten? I hope you say no. Does an attention seeking narcissist deserve the immense amount of gut level hate that's being thrown at him? Seriously, Donald Trump has a better image than Adrian Lamo does to some of these guys.
I agree. The amount of hate Adrian Lamo is receiving is bizarre. What is even more bizarre is that the US government isn't defending him. Why isn't Obama thanking him or speaking on what he did calling him a hero? Why isn't the media and establishment telling his side of the story from the point of view of hero? Or just that of a confused person who acted on his conscience?
They are treating Adrian Lamo like he's a throwaway. The way Adrian AND Bradley are being treated by the government should concern EVERYBODY no matter what your politics. The government is treating them both like throwaways.
I think that the options of him shooting up his fellow soldiers was a concern in Lamo's mind, if you read around.
For me, a big part of the problem is that this is Adrian Lamo, and he has always seemed like an attention-seeking narcissist, even before any of this Bradley Manning stuff came up. Don't you remember when he was "the homeless hacker," and he spent his days sponging off of online acquaintances, trashing websites, and telling his story to any reporter who came along? I just have a hard time believing that his decision to turn in Manning was motivated by anything other than his pathological need for attention.
Another part of the problem is that whatever the ethics of what Manning did, it should be clear to any rational person that his treatment by the military has been totally egregious, way beyond the pale of any logical mode of incarceration. The man was not arrested for any violent offense. He's not a rapist or a murderer (whether you think his disclosure of information indirectly cost lives is irrelevant here). After so many years locked in solitary confinement, just what do they think he could be smuggling under his ball sack that they have to strip search him and force him to sleep on the floor naked every single day? Do gang lords have to do that? Did Jeffrey Dahmer?
It's hard to have any sympathy for the government's position when their opening move in the affair was to strip Manning of his basic human rights -- not just civil, but human -- and announce that they planned to keep him that way indefinitely. How can any American justify that, given the circumstances?
Sure -- if Manning did something wrong, put him on trial and lock him up. In a prison. Like a criminal. But what kind of society are we if our government can choose when and where it feels like following our most basic moral principles? I think it's this that pisses most people off about the situation -- not that Manning is some kind of hero, which is clearly questionable.
Despite Adrian's flaws, he does have a conscience, morals, and tries to do what he thinks is right. I don't think it's fair that he is labeled a snitch but at the same time he was definitely a liar, a bad friend, and did seem from the logs to be acting as a sort of honey trap. I think the truth is that he wasn't completely innocent but wasn't a snitch either.
A snitch is someone who was on a side and betrays their side for another. Bradley Manning actually is the snitch in this scenario because he swore his oath to defend the US Constitution putting him clearly on the side of the military with a uniform and everything. The military trusted him with it's secrets. And what did he do? He started leaking.
Whistleblowing is when there is a crime taking place such as if innocent people are being murdered, tortured, etc. In the Cablegate leak there weren't any instances of human rights abuses that I could see. The leak wasn't worth the risk and to leak to Julian Assange, a foreign national??!
Mod this guy up! I don't understand how people can be so pissed off about this. It's not Lamo's fault for how Manning was/is treated. If you read the chat logs and everything, Manning seemed really unstable mentally - I think that the options of him shooting up his fellow soldiers was a concern in Lamo's mind, if you read around. On top of all that, Manning's life in exchange for whoever was mentioned in the dumped files is a worthy exchange IMO.
If he'd come to Lamo and said something like "I'm uncomfortable because I've seen how our government is handling things, and I need to find a proper way to voice and prove this without further threatening anyone's life," I have a feeling Lamo would've actually helped him.
If it were a situation where Manning were putting the lives of sources at risk then his life should not be considered more valuable than theirs. It's a messed up decision to have to make but I can understand it. There is no way Lamo had the time to review all those documents to know sources would or wouldn't be compromised and if he's going on probability then the probability is high/unacceptable when you're talking about a leak that big.
Either way, this goes to show that if you're going to release stolen/hacked documents, it's best you do it anonymously and don't brag about it."
Manning never "bragged" about anything. He was reaching out to a fellow hacker (who claimed to be a priest that Manning could confess to without consequence).
Manning was in a hostile environment with NO friends and with leaders who were corrupt and untrustworthy. His own father hated him for his homosexuality. He had nobody and was under an extreme amount of stress while trying to expose the corruption of his government. Almost ANYBODY would have made the mistake of trying to seek out a person that would be like-minded.
If this Adrian Lamo were honest and not just trying to save what is left of his "journalism" career, then he would be doing everything in his power to try and free Manning for standing by his principles.
Since when was it considered smart to reach out to a hacker? Why not ask a professional con-artist for spiritual advice?
He's not a respected hacker or computer expert or whatever the fuck he thinks he is. He's just a shit heel troll who should be ignored.
He's a human being. It's another case of people being people. He did what he thought was right just like Bradley Manning.
In fact Bradley Manning is the one who betrayed his oath. He broke his word after swearing to protect the Constitution. Julian Assange doesn't give a shit about the Constitution, he's not a US citizen and never swore an oath to protect the US Constitution. Stop defending a foreign national.
Mr. Manning -- and Mr. Assange -- helped bring about the uprisings of the "Arab Spring." Here's hoping to more information coming out to make our American masters ever more embarrassed and fearful for their position. Manning did great honor to the spirits of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson.
So the entire middle east is unstable and you're crediting Assange? What if it led to WW3?
Amazing, someone advocates making Lamo a "project" and is modded up (I can only assume "project" is a threat for either bodily or economic harm). Someone else defends the common sense and is modded down.
I agree with you. Lamo did the best he could with the information he had. Anons do the same with the information they have. Anon does not belong to Julian Assange. Julian Assange has a vendetta against the US government and it's as simple as that. Where are Julilan Assanges leaks on the Australian, Chinese or Russian government?
It'd be nice to see Anonymous take on Lamo as a new "project." Someone ought to teach him that there's a price that comes with being a paid informant, even in a police state.
There is no indication that he has been paid or that he is being paid. Do you see him in a brand new car? A brand new house? What payment? They didn't even keep his identity a secret. He's known as "the snitch". I think you should do your research, because I can tell you based on mine he has not been paid.
Claiming Manning committed treason is like saying copyright infringement is theft.
Manning saw all the innocents whose lives were taken, and did the best thing he knew how to save more lives. If any lives were put at risk by the leak, they are far outweighed by the lives endangered by the military continuing to kill in secrecy, without consequence. Manning didn't commit treason. The US Military commits far more treacherous acts daily.
You can't directly tie the leaks to any particular case of harm for the same reason that you can't tie cigarette smoking to any particular lung cancer death of a smoker. You can, however, determine that the chances are very high that smoking has killed people--you just can't name any particular individual.
It's the same situation with the leaks. The Taliban has a long history of seeking out and killing people that they suspect are informants. When some random informant is killed, we have no idea how the Taliban got information on that informant. It's possible the Taliban decided to go completely against all of their past behavior, and decide to not target any of the leaked informants unless they found independent corroborating evidence--and that is about as likely as every lung cancer death of a smoker being due to causes unrelated to their smoking.
It's also possible that certain informants might not actually die in a way which would allow us to think they were killed. Accidents, illnesses, natural causes.
He also could not know that there would be fallout from the release. What he did was purely speculative. It seems like the prudent thing to do for someone who has genuine concerns about taking an action that would get someone locked up for the rest of the person's life, Lamo could have reviewed the documents himself or inquired about what precautions were being taken. Instead, he seems to have based his decision on what he reads in the newspapers and without contacting any of the parties involved.
Reviewed the documents himself? Do you know how many documents it was ? We haven't even read all the cables and we haven't been able to review it. It was from the 1970s to 2010 or something.
Lamo's concerns regarding disclosure of Afgahan informants from Wikileaks are thus far unfounded, and his claim that "WikiLeaks has a history of hand-waving away the consequences of their disclosures" doesn't seem to jive with the facts in this case. Below is a quote from the relevant section of the Wikipedia article.
Some, including Barack Obama and Hamid Karzai, raised concerns that the detailed logs had exposed the names of Afghan informants, thus endangering their lives. Partially in response to this criticism, Wikileaks announced that it has sought the help of the Pentagon in reviewing a further 15,000 documents before releasing them. The Pentagon said it had not been contacted by Wikileaks. However, blogger Glenn Greenwald presented evidence that the Pentagon had, in fact, been contacted, and that it had refused the request.
On 11 August, a spokesman for the Pentagon told the Washington Post that "We have yet to see any harm come to anyone in Afghanistan that we can directly tie to exposure in the WikiLeaks documents", although the spokesman asserted "there is in all likelihood a lag between exposure of these documents and jeopardy in the field." On 17 August, the Associated Press reported that "so far there is no evidence that any Afghans named in the leaked documents as defectors or informants from the Taliban insurgency have been harmed in retaliation."
In October, the Pentagon concluded that the leak "did not disclose any sensitive intelligence sources or methods", and that furthermore "there has not been a single case of Afghans needing protection or to be moved because of the leak." Both Wikileaks and Greenwald pointed to this report as clear evidence that the danger caused by the leak had been vastly overstated.
Yes, I know I'm threadjacking an FP, but the issue that is often made of this so far non-issue I find annoying, particularly because it tends to overshadow the facts that were revealed.
When you're talking about a leak that big there is no way to know what it could expose. Adrian had no choice, and Bradley Manning betrayed his oath.
By the same logic, I should keep buying expensive home furnishings and electronics, so that I don't put the workers all along that supply chain out of business. There are no excuses that, ultimately, save us from having to tighten the belt. That is, if we give a shit about balancing the budget or paying off the debt. Quite simply, we have to stop spending. This isn't rocket science. You tell a fat person to consume fewer calories than their body burns to lose weight and you tell someone with debt problems to STOP SPENDING. Yes, it hurts. That's irrelevant.
On the other hand, we could also just determine that we have such massive debt and that our money actually doesn't mean a fucking thing, so let's just print an endless supply of it (after all, I believe most of our debt is actually owed TO OURSELVES, so we could just wipe that out if we really felt like it).
Either one -- fine. I don't really give a fuck. But for fuck's sake, let's stop going around talking about how important it is to have fiscal responsibility and to be concerned with the budget, if we're never actually going to do a god damn thing about it.
It's not a problem to tighten our belt it's a matter of what we cut. I think we should cut the salaries of the highest paid workers because they make more money than they can possibly hope to spend in their life. That lack of spending slows the economy down. The best way to spend the economy up is to spend and shop as much as possible and to balance the salaries a bit so everyone has either enough money from their labor to shop more, or give them money from the government to spend so everyone can buy our products and pay for our jobs.
It's great that McAfee Labs has published this report on Anonymous, but isn't this only a distraction from the search for better bath salts and pills to seduce young women?
How many of these claims Mcaffee corporation's professional prognosticators have actually been remotely true? Tabloid psychics run the same routine every year too.
McAffee is right about Anon. Anon does have major structure problems, a leadership vacuum, and a brain drain situation. It's not hard to predict that Anon is losing popularity.
Meanwhile, patriot groups self-organized into cyberarmies and spreading their extremist views will flourish.
Love the juxtaposition of "patriot" and "extremist".
Because clearly, not wanting to live in a corporate dystopia is an "extremist" viewpoint.
But even if that is the case, if they are more well organized and better designed than Anon was then they'll probably last a bit longer. They wont last but they'll last longer because they at least pretend to follow the Constitution while breaking the law.
Slashdot Mirror
He had evidence of espionage and turned over that evidence to authorities who could act on it. Why does he need to justify that?
And they are calling him that unfairly I might add. And not only that but the US government isn't morally defending him either. So they are basically letting him get called a snitch and traitor etc.
Where are all those Congressmen to defend Lamo? Where is Obama? Where is FoxNews now?
One has to pick their path.
The things that really sticks out in this saga are 1) Manning had legal resources available to him to expose wrong doing in the classified world. He chose to ignore that route and used the media instead. 2) Lamo looked at the shear number of documents and had to make a choice to either do nothing with the possibility of many people being killed, or turn Manning in with the possibility of facing the death penalty. Damned if you do and damned if you don't.
This saga has parallels in history. Think back to the first atomic bombs dropped on Japan. There were those in the program that had to come to grips with the fact that the work they did led to 250,000+ dead. They had basically two choices. Accept the notion that dropping those bombs led the the end of the war and ultimately reduce the total number of dead, or go crazy thinking otherwise, since we can never know for sure.
Right or wrong, Lamo chose his path and I will not fault him for it. Manning on the other hand choose poorly.
If what you say is correct then why is Lamo receiving full vitriol and hate from the media, from the hacker community, etc? And instead of being morally defended by people in government he's completely ignored? If he saved the world or did the right thing then where is his meeting and photo op with Obama? Where is his cash reward if people think he's a snitch? Not only did he not gain anything, but he's lost a lot from this.
And the government doesn't morally defend him. They used him and seem to have thrown him to the wolves. Now he has to deal with death threats, look over his shoulder for life, deal with being labeled a snitch, and no one in the US government will speak out and say otherwise?
That is the tragedy.
Lamo was arrested in 2003 for breaking into the NY Times website along with Yahoo, Microsoft and other. Before that he broke into various corporate networks, Lexis-Nexis, etc. Facing a possible 15 year prison sentence he took a plea bargain with reduced it to 6 month to be spent under house arrest at his parent's home. How did he get such a sweet deal? Was part of the deal an agreement to become an FBI informant possibly? Because if the Anonymous arrests have proven one thing, when hackers are faced with serving serious jail time, they will rat their own mothers out to cut a deal.
1. He's not an informant.
2. The US government isn't treating him all that good right now. They wont even defend him morally.
What are you talking about? Diplomatic relations were extremely strained and are still being rebuilt.
Yes it may have made sense to release critical information regarding military abuses. However the information was not read or sifted through in advance, instead it was dumped wholesale even though the vast majority of it was diplomatic gossip.
If Adrian Lamo really is a hero who saved lives why isn't Obama, Biden, Senators, Congressmen, or the establishment itself thanking him? Rewarding him? Calling him brave? The way he's being treated should reveal a lot about how he is truly viewed by them.
Think about it. Bradley Manning is allegedly being tortured. Adrian Lamo is being completely ignored by the powers that be and not receiving any moral support. What is going on with that?
So does an attention seeking narcissist deserves death threats, which he has gotten? I hope you say no. Does an attention seeking narcissist deserve the immense amount of gut level hate that's being thrown at him? Seriously, Donald Trump has a better image than Adrian Lamo does to some of these guys.
I agree. The amount of hate Adrian Lamo is receiving is bizarre. What is even more bizarre is that the US government isn't defending him. Why isn't Obama thanking him or speaking on what he did calling him a hero? Why isn't the media and establishment telling his side of the story from the point of view of hero? Or just that of a confused person who acted on his conscience?
They are treating Adrian Lamo like he's a throwaway. The way Adrian AND Bradley are being treated by the government should concern EVERYBODY no matter what your politics. The government is treating them both like throwaways.
I think that the options of him shooting up his fellow soldiers was a concern in Lamo's mind, if you read around.
For me, a big part of the problem is that this is Adrian Lamo, and he has always seemed like an attention-seeking narcissist, even before any of this Bradley Manning stuff came up. Don't you remember when he was "the homeless hacker," and he spent his days sponging off of online acquaintances, trashing websites, and telling his story to any reporter who came along? I just have a hard time believing that his decision to turn in Manning was motivated by anything other than his pathological need for attention.
Another part of the problem is that whatever the ethics of what Manning did, it should be clear to any rational person that his treatment by the military has been totally egregious, way beyond the pale of any logical mode of incarceration. The man was not arrested for any violent offense. He's not a rapist or a murderer (whether you think his disclosure of information indirectly cost lives is irrelevant here). After so many years locked in solitary confinement, just what do they think he could be smuggling under his ball sack that they have to strip search him and force him to sleep on the floor naked every single day? Do gang lords have to do that? Did Jeffrey Dahmer?
It's hard to have any sympathy for the government's position when their opening move in the affair was to strip Manning of his basic human rights -- not just civil, but human -- and announce that they planned to keep him that way indefinitely. How can any American justify that, given the circumstances?
Sure -- if Manning did something wrong, put him on trial and lock him up. In a prison. Like a criminal. But what kind of society are we if our government can choose when and where it feels like following our most basic moral principles? I think it's this that pisses most people off about the situation -- not that Manning is some kind of hero, which is clearly questionable.
Despite Adrian's flaws, he does have a conscience, morals, and tries to do what he thinks is right. I don't think it's fair that he is labeled a snitch but at the same time he was definitely a liar, a bad friend, and did seem from the logs to be acting as a sort of honey trap. I think the truth is that he wasn't completely innocent but wasn't a snitch either.
A snitch is someone who was on a side and betrays their side for another. Bradley Manning actually is the snitch in this scenario because he swore his oath to defend the US Constitution putting him clearly on the side of the military with a uniform and everything. The military trusted him with it's secrets. And what did he do? He started leaking.
Whistleblowing is when there is a crime taking place such as if innocent people are being murdered, tortured, etc. In the Cablegate leak there weren't any instances of human rights abuses that I could see. The leak wasn't worth the risk and to leak to Julian Assange, a foreign national??!
Mod this guy up! I don't understand how people can be so pissed off about this. It's not Lamo's fault for how Manning was/is treated. If you read the chat logs and everything, Manning seemed really unstable mentally - I think that the options of him shooting up his fellow soldiers was a concern in Lamo's mind, if you read around. On top of all that, Manning's life in exchange for whoever was mentioned in the dumped files is a worthy exchange IMO.
If he'd come to Lamo and said something like "I'm uncomfortable because I've seen how our government is handling things, and I need to find a proper way to voice and prove this without further threatening anyone's life," I have a feeling Lamo would've actually helped him.
If it were a situation where Manning were putting the lives of sources at risk then his life should not be considered more valuable than theirs. It's a messed up decision to have to make but I can understand it. There is no way Lamo had the time to review all those documents to know sources would or wouldn't be compromised and if he's going on probability then the probability is high/unacceptable when you're talking about a leak that big.
You know what you're talking about. That is exactly the problem.
Either way, this goes to show that if you're going to release stolen/hacked documents, it's best you do it anonymously and don't brag about it."
Manning never "bragged" about anything. He was reaching out to a fellow hacker (who claimed to be a priest that Manning could confess to without consequence).
Manning was in a hostile environment with NO friends and with leaders who were corrupt and untrustworthy. His own father hated him for his homosexuality. He had nobody and was under an extreme amount of stress while trying to expose the corruption of his government. Almost ANYBODY would have made the mistake of trying to seek out a person that would be like-minded.
If this Adrian Lamo were honest and not just trying to save what is left of his "journalism" career, then he would be doing everything in his power to try and free Manning for standing by his principles.
Since when was it considered smart to reach out to a hacker? Why not ask a professional con-artist for spiritual advice?
1. used their real name w the accounts they used to commit their crime
2. told somebody what they're doing
3. don't understand enough about computers to not get caught
4. used their home IP
Missing anything? There's a trend forming here...
Yeah, fingerprints, timestamps, metadata, and I could go on.
Hasn't he milked enough fame out of this already?
He's not a respected hacker or computer expert or whatever the fuck he thinks he is. He's just a shit heel troll who should be ignored.
He's a human being. It's another case of people being people. He did what he thought was right just like Bradley Manning.
In fact Bradley Manning is the one who betrayed his oath. He broke his word after swearing to protect the Constitution. Julian Assange doesn't give a shit about the Constitution, he's not a US citizen and never swore an oath to protect the US Constitution. Stop defending a foreign national.
Adrian Lamo is a human being. People forget that. Whether we agree or disagree with what he did he still is a person.
Mr. Manning -- and Mr. Assange -- helped bring about the uprisings of the "Arab Spring." Here's hoping to more information coming out to make our American masters ever more embarrassed and fearful for their position. Manning did great honor to the spirits of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson.
So the entire middle east is unstable and you're crediting Assange? What if it led to WW3?
Amazing, someone advocates making Lamo a "project" and is modded up (I can only assume "project" is a threat for either bodily or economic harm). Someone else defends the common sense and is modded down.
I agree with you. Lamo did the best he could with the information he had. Anons do the same with the information they have. Anon does not belong to Julian Assange. Julian Assange has a vendetta against the US government and it's as simple as that. Where are Julilan Assanges leaks on the Australian, Chinese or Russian government?
It'd be nice to see Anonymous take on Lamo as a new "project." Someone ought to teach him that there's a price that comes with being a paid informant, even in a police state.
There is no indication that he has been paid or that he is being paid. Do you see him in a brand new car? A brand new house? What payment? They didn't even keep his identity a secret. He's known as "the snitch". I think you should do your research, because I can tell you based on mine he has not been paid.
Claiming Manning committed treason is like saying copyright infringement is theft.
Manning saw all the innocents whose lives were taken, and did the best thing he knew how to save more lives. If any lives were put at risk by the leak, they are far outweighed by the lives endangered by the military continuing to kill in secrecy, without consequence. Manning didn't commit treason. The US Military commits far more treacherous acts daily.
It is treason if sources get killed over it.
You can't directly tie the leaks to any particular case of harm for the same reason that you can't tie cigarette smoking to any particular lung cancer death of a smoker. You can, however, determine that the chances are very high that smoking has killed people--you just can't name any particular individual.
It's the same situation with the leaks. The Taliban has a long history of seeking out and killing people that they suspect are informants. When some random informant is killed, we have no idea how the Taliban got information on that informant. It's possible the Taliban decided to go completely against all of their past behavior, and decide to not target any of the leaked informants unless they found independent corroborating evidence--and that is about as likely as every lung cancer death of a smoker being due to causes unrelated to their smoking.
It's also possible that certain informants might not actually die in a way which would allow us to think they were killed. Accidents, illnesses, natural causes.
I saw nothing unconstitutional with State Dept cables. You're talking about a different leak.
He also could not know that there would be fallout from the release. What he did was purely speculative. It seems like the prudent thing to do for someone who has genuine concerns about taking an action that would get someone locked up for the rest of the person's life, Lamo could have reviewed the documents himself or inquired about what precautions were being taken. Instead, he seems to have based his decision on what he reads in the newspapers and without contacting any of the parties involved.
Reviewed the documents himself? Do you know how many documents it was ? We haven't even read all the cables and we haven't been able to review it. It was from the 1970s to 2010 or something.
Lamo's concerns regarding disclosure of Afgahan informants from Wikileaks are thus far unfounded, and his claim that "WikiLeaks has a history of hand-waving away the consequences of their disclosures" doesn't seem to jive with the facts in this case. Below is a quote from the relevant section of the Wikipedia article.
Informants named
Some, including Barack Obama and Hamid Karzai, raised concerns that the detailed logs had exposed the names of Afghan informants, thus endangering their lives. Partially in response to this criticism, Wikileaks announced that it has sought the help of the Pentagon in reviewing a further 15,000 documents before releasing them. The Pentagon said it had not been contacted by Wikileaks. However, blogger Glenn Greenwald presented evidence that the Pentagon had, in fact, been contacted, and that it had refused the request.
On 11 August, a spokesman for the Pentagon told the Washington Post that "We have yet to see any harm come to anyone in Afghanistan that we can directly tie to exposure in the WikiLeaks documents", although the spokesman asserted "there is in all likelihood a lag between exposure of these documents and jeopardy in the field." On 17 August, the Associated Press reported that "so far there is no evidence that any Afghans named in the leaked documents as defectors or informants from the Taliban insurgency have been harmed in retaliation."
In October, the Pentagon concluded that the leak "did not disclose any sensitive intelligence sources or methods", and that furthermore "there has not been a single case of Afghans needing protection or to be moved because of the leak." Both Wikileaks and Greenwald pointed to this report as clear evidence that the danger caused by the leak had been vastly overstated.
Yes, I know I'm threadjacking an FP, but the issue that is often made of this so far non-issue I find annoying, particularly because it tends to overshadow the facts that were revealed.
When you're talking about a leak that big there is no way to know what it could expose. Adrian had no choice, and Bradley Manning betrayed his oath.
By the same logic, I should keep buying expensive home furnishings and electronics, so that I don't put the workers all along that supply chain out of business. There are no excuses that, ultimately, save us from having to tighten the belt. That is, if we give a shit about balancing the budget or paying off the debt. Quite simply, we have to stop spending. This isn't rocket science. You tell a fat person to consume fewer calories than their body burns to lose weight and you tell someone with debt problems to STOP SPENDING. Yes, it hurts. That's irrelevant.
On the other hand, we could also just determine that we have such massive debt and that our money actually doesn't mean a fucking thing, so let's just print an endless supply of it (after all, I believe most of our debt is actually owed TO OURSELVES, so we could just wipe that out if we really felt like it).
Either one -- fine. I don't really give a fuck. But for fuck's sake, let's stop going around talking about how important it is to have fiscal responsibility and to be concerned with the budget, if we're never actually going to do a god damn thing about it.
It's not a problem to tighten our belt it's a matter of what we cut. I think we should cut the salaries of the highest paid workers because they make more money than they can possibly hope to spend in their life. That lack of spending slows the economy down. The best way to spend the economy up is to spend and shop as much as possible and to balance the salaries a bit so everyone has either enough money from their labor to shop more, or give them money from the government to spend so everyone can buy our products and pay for our jobs.
And with the population increasing we can't afford either spending or job cuts.
It's great that McAfee Labs has published this report on Anonymous, but isn't this only a distraction from the search for better bath salts and pills to seduce young women?
That is an ad hominem attack. Shame on you.
How many of these claims Mcaffee corporation's professional prognosticators have actually been remotely true? Tabloid psychics run the same routine every year too.
McAffee is right about Anon. Anon does have major structure problems, a leadership vacuum, and a brain drain situation. It's not hard to predict that Anon is losing popularity.
Love the juxtaposition of "patriot" and "extremist".
Because clearly, not wanting to live in a corporate dystopia is an "extremist" viewpoint.
But even if that is the case, if they are more well organized and better designed than Anon was then they'll probably last a bit longer. They wont last but they'll last longer because they at least pretend to follow the Constitution while breaking the law.