• Claims of inappropriate behaviour by a member of the British royal family.The Guardian doesn't actually specify what the behavior was or even which member of the royal family.
These docs include names of people such as a Chinese contact who informed American Embassy personnel that the Chinese government was hacking into Google in China. The result of that will be a bullet in the back of the head.Cite?
Yes, it means that guy in China is almost certainly gonna get killed, and he's not going to be the only person. But as when the Nazis march in Skokie, sometimes sticking to your ideals means doing so even when it's not comfortable.Nobody actually died when the Nazis marched in Skokie. The Nazis in Skokie episode was indeed about sticking to your principles even when they make you uncomfortable. But dead is a very different thing from uncomfortable.
Oh, nonsense, Delmoi. Simplistic exaggeration and you know it is.Well, no one has seen how well the names have been redacted in these latest releases. I thought we were talking about the old releases about information in Afghanistan. Some of the critics here are being lazy by conflating stuff that was released about countries we are at war in (Iraq and Afghanistan) with something that hasn't even happened yet.
If vladimir Putin causes someone to be poisoned because that unfortunate soul leaked info to the US, an got named in these cables, the US being "overseas killing people in the first place." isn't the cause.
But how does it help the safety and freedom of anyone on earth to publicize the fact that some US diplomat compared a Russian official to Robin the Boy Wonder? Unless you hold that embarrassing the US, and making Russian leaders feel personally insulted is good in and of itself, what good does it do the world to expose that comment?I can't imagine that any Russian leader is naive enough to feel personally insulted by that comment. There may be some bombshells here, but that ain't one of them.
Robert Mugabe has survived for so long because he is moreNow isn't that a rather frank assessment of what politics is often about?
clever and more ruthless than any other politician in
Zimbabwe. To give the devil his due, he is a brilliant
tactitian and has long thrived on his ability to abruptly
change the rules of the game, radicalize the political
dynamic and force everyone else to react to his agenda.
Or, more sinisterly, the new Congress will be able to come in and do what they will largely unexamined because everyone's having a field day with the equivalent of a geopolitical slam book instead?Or people will pay attention to the first couple of days and then move on and totally ignore any subsequent revelations, because it's seen as old news. Didn't we already hear the wikilinks diplomatic story? That's so last week. I suspect that's what will happen, at least until the inappropriate behavior by the member of the British royal family is revealed, at which point Americans will pay attention again for a few minutes until they go back to acting like it's an old story.
The current release is of leaked dispatches from more than 250 US embassies and consulates worldwide. The documents range from unclassified to "secret". The latter is two rungs below the most confidential ranking of information: more than three million US citizens are cleared to see "secret" material.Wha? 3 million? That's 1 in 100 U.S. Citizen ? Now ok that leaves a few billions people out of this loop, but as noted above in some link, a piece of news knowable by 3M people is hardly a secret, it will be leaked out and it was. (Nonetheless, I wonder how and from who did The Guardian obtain that number.)
"The long-expected release of the documents — scheduled to be published simultaneously at around 4:30 p.m. EST by The New York Times, Germany's Der Spiegel, Spain’s El Pais, France’s Le Monde and Britain’s Guardian — was accelerated by a few hours after a German Twitter user obtained an early copy of Der Spiegel and began posting tidbits online."*posted by ericb at 3:22 PM on November 28, 2010
"The three rounds of WikiLeaks releases pose an extraordinary, and novel, challenge for the American government.posted by ericb at 3:24 PM on November 28, 2010 [2 favorites]
On one hand, they've produced a moment of remarkable impotence: The administration has proved unable to stop a band of hackers from the fever swamps from obtaining and posting thousands of its secrets.
But this is also a moment when President Barack Obama's work restoring relations with allies, and his relative international popularity, pay off: The leaks offer endless opportunities for foreign governments to gin up — or play down — diplomatic conflict, and they'll be less inclined to score points off Obama than they would have off his predecessor.
And of course, the specifics matter. In the area I've been covering most closely, the Times reports that the leaks put on the record something U.S. and Israeli officials have said privately for years: There's a real and rare shared interest in stopping the Iranian nuclear program between Israel and its Arab antagonists, led by the Saudis; that's a leak that will undoubtedly affect policy, even if it's not entirely clear how."
American diplomats were also asked to compile a profile of Alan Duncan, the homosexual former oil trader who is now the international development minister.In other words, "Please supply information that can be used to blackmail the British Prime Minister and his Foreign Secretary." Stay classy, USA.
The Americans particularly asked for information on the relationship between Mr Duncan and William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, with whom he used to share a flat, and also Mr Cameron.
I don't know how you can make this [no casualties caused by wikileaks] statement with any kind of certainty. Most western journalists can't report from AfghanistanThere have been no reported casualties. On the other hand, the American forces have caused a lot of casualties, which I don't see any of the wikileaks haters complaining about. So the question is, why is a small number of speculative, hypothetical deaths (of which zero are known to have occurred) so much worse then the thousands and thousands of people who have actually died due to our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan.
To defend Ironmouth, I do not see his contributions as any more or less 'ax-grindy' than the contributions of many others in the thread. "Ax-grindy' has an implication of not arguing in good faith. Why not respond to his arguments?Because I spent several days doing that in the last WikiLeaks thread, and the one before that, and I've just bowed out of subsequent threads rather than have an extended back-and-forth fight with him about whether Julian Assange is a bad, bad man who is nothing like the Good Leakers that Ironmouth defends. I understand what he's saying, and there is no new information to be found there: it's like asking, "What will Blazecock Pileon think of this new Microsoft product?" or "Will Joe Beese applaud, or condemn the latest attack on liberal bloggers by the White House press secretary?" Or, if I'm being self-deprecating, "Will verb work a self-indulgent observation about evangelical kitsch of the 90s into this conversation?"
Because I spent several days doing that in the last WikiLeaks threadTo the extent that I feel any obligation to answer a statement someone puts forward on the Internet, yeah, I do. I don't want to suggest that I feel Ironmouth is in some way deluded or "not listening to reason" or something along those lines. I and a number of others (though by no means everyone) disagree with him, but it's a complex subject: I don't think a statement of position really matters much when issues like this are being discussed.
Perhaps you should consider your obligation satisfied.
New York Times editors said Sunday that although the paper's reporters had been digging through WikiLeaks trove of 250,000 State Department cables for "several weeks," the online whistleblower wasn't the source of the documents.posted by lullaby at 7:21 PM on November 28, 2010 [2 favorites]
But if WikiLeaks—which allegedly obtained the cables from a 22-year-old army private—wasn't the Times source, than who was? Apparently, The Guardian—one of the five newspapers that had an advanced look at the cables—supplied a copy of the cables to The Times.
If I used these wikileaks threads as my paradigm...That's silly.
Of those quarter million documents, they have released 219. Those documents have had names redacted to prevent informants from being targeted. Several media organizations have said they are working with Wikileaks to review the documents before their release.Of course, that only opens them up to the accusation that they're cherry-picking documents to further an agenda. That's the problem with the current system we have in western nations: agressive classification of everything remotely embarrassing, with politically motivated leaks forming pores in the classification membrane.
Indeed, my point is that the analogues are so direct that most of us have worked them out already within the domain of traditional journalism, and perhaps needn't spend so very much time -- as a percentage of all time spent -- on the ethical issues inherent in the publication of the wikileaks documents, as opposed to time spent on the substantive news items revealed.There's a traditional journalism analog to 250,000 secret diplomatic documents eventually being made available in full-text format to the general public? I'd be super curious to know what you think that traditional journalism analog is. That'd be a pretty expensive newspaper to publish! Not to mention that the delivery guys would have a hard time carrying it!
Can you name one person who's been endangered by this current leak?There's a similar problem in trying to identify at least one person whose life may be saved as a result of Wikileaks activities: I trust that it will happen eventually, especially if these document dumps encourage people to be less willing to permit their leaders the latitude allowed up to now.
This is pretty much the tuffet that Wikileaks has been sitting on.
But the Law of Averages isn't on their side. It will happen eventually.
Why, yes, the person who released his or her name to the ENTIRE WORLD has nothing to do with it.Again dude, cite? WTF are you talking about? I havn't seen that mentioned ANYWHERE, except in this thread, by you.
Obviously the Pentagon Papers most famously, but the Times and many other newspapers routinely publish the (redacted) entire texts of secret documents that they have obtained.I don't think the Pentagon Papers are even the slightest bit analogous, actually. Ellsberg and the Times knew the contents of the Pentagon Papers, and they came to the conclusion that the specific contents of the documents were so important and revealed such vital information that they had an ethical obligation to publish them. Assange didn't read the 250,000 documents and decide that there was a compelling need for the world to know their specific contents. He couldn't have read all of the documents, he doesn't know what's in them, and his decision to leak them isn't based on the principle that they contain specific newsworthy information. It's based on whee! information wants to be free!, which is stupid, and on the idea that the US is a very bad government and that anything that hurts the American government is good. And there's a difference between the journalistic ethics of publishing things because they're newsworthy and the journalistic ethics of publishing things because you can and because you think they'll hurt a government that you think deserves hurting.
Anything said or done in the name of a democracy is, prima facie, of public interest. When that democracy purports to be "world policeman" – an assumption that runs ghostlike through these cables – that interest is global. Nonetheless, the Guardian had to consider two things in abetting disclosure, irrespective of what is anyway published by WikiLeaks. It could not be party to putting the lives of individuals or sources at risk, nor reveal material that might compromise ongoing military operations or the location of special forces.posted by verb at 6:09 AM on November 29, 2010 [9 favorites]
In this light, two backup checks were applied. The US government was told in advance the areas or themes covered, and "representations" were invited in return. These were considered. Details of "redactions" were then shared with the other four media recipients of the material and sent to WikiLeaks itself, to establish, albeit voluntarily, some common standard.
The state department knew of the leak several months ago and had ample time to alert staff in sensitive locations. Its pre-emptive scaremongering over the weekend stupidly contrived to hint at material not in fact being published.
"According to a computer chat log published in June by Wired News, soldier Bradley Manning bragged to Adrian Lamo, the hacker who turned him in, that he was going to unleash 'worldwide anarchy in CSV [comma separated value] format.' 'Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public,' Manning said. 'Everywhere there's a US post, there's a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed.' Manning, 22, has been in solitary confinement for the past seven months."More on Manning's past:
"But it was around two years ago, when Pfc. Bradley Manning came here to visit a man he had fallen in love with, that he finally seemed to have found a place where he fit in, part of a social circle that included politically motivated computer hackers and his boyfriend, a self-described drag queen. So when his military career seemed headed nowhere good, Private Manning, 22, turned increasingly to those friends for moral support. And now some of those friends say they wonder whether his desperation for acceptance — or delusions of grandeur — may have led him to disclose the largest trove of government secrets since the Pentagon Papers.posted by ericb at 7:21 AM on November 29, 2010 [5 favorites]
... Former students at his school [in Haverfordwest, Wales], Tasker Milward, remembered Private Manning being teased for all sort of reasons. His American accent. His love of Dr Pepper. The amount of time he spent huddled before a computer. And then, students began to suspect he was gay. Sometimes, former classmates said, he reacted to the teasing by idly boasting about stealing other students’ girlfriends. At other times, he openly flirted with boys. Often, with only the slightest provocation, he would launch into fits of rage. 'It was probably the worst experience anybody could go through,' said Rowan John, a former classmate who was openly gay in high school. 'Being different like me, or Bradley, in the middle of nowhere is like going back in time to the Dark Ages.' But life ahead did not immediately brighten for Private Manning. After his troubled high school years, his mother sent him back to Oklahoma to live with his father and his older sister.
... Before being deployed to Iraq, Private Manning met Tyler Watkins, who described himself on his blog as a classical musician, singer and drag queen. A friend said the two had little in common, but Private Manning fell head over heels. Mr. Watkins, who did not respond to interview requests for this article, was a student at Brandeis University. On trips to visit him here in Cambridge, Private Manning got to know many in Mr. Watkins’ wide network of friends, including some who were part of this university town’s tight-knit hacker community. Friends said Private Manning found the atmosphere here to be everything the Army was not: openly accepting of his geeky side, his liberal political opinions, his relationship with Mr. Watkins and his ambition to do something that would get attention...And as he faces the possibility of a lifetime in prison, some of Private Manning’s remarks now seem somewhat prophetic. 'I wouldn’t mind going to prison for the rest of my life, or being executed so much,' he wrote, 'if it wasn’t for the possibility of having pictures of me plastered all over the world press.'”
You may want to read The Road to Hanoi or Conspiracy as Governance ; an obscure motivational document, almost useless in light of its decontextualization and perhaps even then. But if you read this latter document while thinking about how different structures of power are differentially affected by leaks (the defection of the inner to the outer) its motivations may become clearer.posted by nasreddin at 9:06 AM on November 29, 2010 [4 favorites]
The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive "secrecy tax") and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption.
Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.
Only revealed injustice can be answered; for man to do anything intelligent he has to know what's actually going on.
It has been frequently noted that many corporations exceed nation states in GDP. It has been less frequently noted that some also exceed them in population (employees).Seems pretty on point to me.
But it is odd that the comparison hasn't been taken further. Since so many live in the state of the corporation, let us take the comparison seriously and ask the following question. What kind of states are giant corporations? ...
- Suffrage (the right to vote) does not exist except for land holders ("share holders") and even there voting power is in proportion to land ownership.
- All executive power flows from a central committee. Female representation is almost unknown.
- There is no division of powers. There is no forth estate. There are no juries and innocence is not presumed.
- Failure to submit to any order can result in instant exile.
- There is no freedom of speech. There is no right of association. Love is forbidden without state approval.
- The economy is centrally planned.
- There is pervasive surveillance of movement and electronic communication.
- The society is heavily regulated and this regulation is enforced, to the degree many employees are told when, where and how many times a day they can goto the toilet.
- There is almost no transparency and something like the FOIA is unimaginable.
- The state has one party. Opposition groups (unions) are banned, surveilled or marginalized whenever and wherever possible.
7. (S) HOW TO TRACK DETAINEES: "I've just thought of something," the King [Abdullah] added, and proposed implanting detainees with an electronic chip containing information about them and allowing their movements to be tracked with Bluetooth. This was done with horses and falcons, the King said. Brennan replied, "horses don't have good lawyers," and that such a proposal would face legal hurdles in the U.S., but agreed that keeping track of detainees was an extremely important issue that he would review with appropriate officials when he returned to the United States.posted by saulgoodman at 9:13 AM on November 29, 2010
The UN has previously asserted that bugging the secretary general is illegal, citing the 1946 UN convention on privileges and immunities which states: "The premises of the United Nations shall be inviolable. The property and assets of the United Nations, wherever located and by whomsoever held, shall be immune from search, requisition, confiscation, expropriation and any other form of interference, whether by executive, administrative, judicial or legislative action".And actually, I would disagree when it comes to specifically asking diplomats to attempt to collect foreign official's credit card numbers. That specific directive seems to go a little beyond the normal sorts of information gathering efforts one would expect to see as part of ordinary diplomacy. But regardless, it definitely undercuts the credibility of US diplomatic efforts, since the most frequent charge against the US state department is that diplomats are essentially just spies by another name.
The 1961 Vienna convention on diplomatic relations, which covers the UN, also states that "the official correspondence of the mission shall be inviolable".
7. (S) HOW TO TRACK DETAINEES: "I've just thought of something," the King [Abdullah] added, and proposed implanting detainees with an electronic chip containing information about them and allowing their movements to be tracked with Bluetooth. This was done with horses and falcons, the King said. Brennan replied, "horses don't have good lawyers," and that such a proposal would face legal hurdles in the U.S., but agreed that keeping track of detainees was an extremely important issue that he would review with appropriate officials when he returned to the United States.Note the Saudi King wanted to chip and release, while the US Government wanted to keep them in prison forever.
arab countries aside from Iraq want us to bomb Iran may increase pressure on the US to do just thatUh, won't happen.
A group of human-rights organizations is pressing WikiLeaks to do a better job of redacting names from thousands of war documents it is publishing, joining the list of critics that claim the Web site's actions could jeopardize the safety of Afghans who aided the U.S. military.
The letter from five human-rights groups sparked a tense exchange in which WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange issued a tart challenge for the organizations to help with the massive task of removing names from thousands of documents, according to several of the organizations that signed the letter. The exchange shows how WikiLeaks and Mr. Assange risk being isolated from some of their most natural allies in the wake of the documents' publication.
"We have seen the negative, sometimes deadly ramifications for those Afghans identified as working for or sympathizing with international forces," the human-rights groups wrote in their letter, according to a person familiar with it. "We strongly urge your volunteers and staff to analyze all documents to ensure that those containing identifying information are taken down or redacted."Here's a key quote from the story:
CIVIC, OSI and ICG also confirmed that they signed the letter. Erica Gaston, program officer for OSI's Afghanistan-Pakistan regional policy initiative, said: "Our concern was that the Taliban had announced it was going through the data looking for names and that it would begin targeting that. It's a very real threat that they're making. They have demonstrated over and over that if they have the name of someone that has in any way been affiliated with the international community, they will find them, they will kill them in most cases."
"Amnesty International spokesman Susanna Flood said that while other human rights groups had also sent a joint letter to WikiLeaks, Amnesty was not among its signatories.This was widely reported in response to the WSJ article that you seem to be relying on as your only source for your repeated accusations.
Instead, she said that the London-based campaigners had communicated with Mr Assange's group over the issue of the disclosure of identities of Afghans who've worked alongside international forces." link
When contacted by TIME, most of the groups refused to comment on the letter. But in a brief phone interview, Sarah Holewinski, the executive director of CIVIC, the Washington-based NGO that advocates for war victims, told TIME that the letter was sent last week and was meant to foster cooperation between aid agencies and WikiLeaks in an effort to protect Afghan sources.Ironmouth: "Read that article. Read the terrible and childish response from Assange."
"We are unsure who leaked [the letter], but it stalled the conversation," she says. "We are now back in conversation and discussing the best way to move forward. In the media it's been played up as a fight, but that wasn't our intent. [...] We simply want to caution — as we would our own people or journalists — about putting the names out there." link
"Mr. Assange then replied: "I'm very busy and have no time to deal with people who prefer to do nothing but cover their asses. If Amnesty does nothing I shall issue a press release highlighting its refusal," according to people familiar with the exchange."I've also seen Mr. Assange speak seriously and eloquently about his activities. I'll stick with my very different impression of his demeanor unless someone more credible than "people familiar with the exchange" comes forward.
"Instead, she said that the London-based campaigners had communicated with Mr Assange's group over the issue of the disclosure of identities of Afghans who've worked alongside international forces."posted by Manjusri at 2:40 PM on November 29, 2010 [1 favorite]
With a team of more than 50 reporters and researchers, SPIEGEL has viewed, analyzed and vetted the mass of documents. In most cases, the magazine has sought to protect the identities of the Americans' informants, unless the person who served as the informant was senior enough to be politically relevant. In some cases, the US government expressed security concerns and SPIEGEL accepted a number of such objections. In other cases, however, SPIEGEL felt the public interest in reporting the news was greater than the threat to security. Throughout our research, SPIEGEL reporters and editors weighed the public interest against the justified interest of countries in security and confidentiality.That's pretty damned thorough and careful, I think, especially since the work was duplicated by The New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, and El Pais. Note that they explicitly took into account US government concerns.
One example: It began with something we released last year, quite an interesting case that wasn’t really picked up by anyone. There’s a Texas Canadian oil company whose name escapes me. And they had these wells in Albania that had been blowing. Quite serious. We got this report from a consultant engineer into what was happening, saying vans were turning up in the middle of the night doing something to them. They were being sabotaged. The Albanian government was involved with another company; There were two rival producers and one was government-owned and the other was privately owned.Confidential to kaspen: Hee hee. Sorry, but those precious moments to add a bit of personal context are sometimes telling...
So when we got this report; It didn’t have a header. It didn’t say the name of the firm, or even who the wells belonged to.
So it wasn’t picked up because it was missing key data.
At the time, yeah. So I said, what the hell do we do with this thing? It’s impossible to verify if we don’t even know who it came from. It could have been one company trying to frame the other one. So we did something very unusual, and published it and said “We’ve got this thing, looks like it could have been written by a rival company aiming to defame the other, but we can’t verify it. We want more information.” [Google's cache of the page in question; WikiLeaks, of course, is a bit flittery these days.] Whether it’s a fake document or real one, something was going on. Either one company is trying to frame the other, which is interesting, or it’s true, which is also very interesting.
That’s where the matter sat until we got a letter of inquiry from an engineering consulting company asking how to get rid of it. We demanded that they first prove that they were the owner.
It sounds like when Apple confirmed that the lost iPhone 4 was real, by demanding that Gizmodo return it.
Yes, like Apple and the iPhone. They sent us a screen capture with the missing header and other information.
What were they thinking?
I don’t know.
Early next year, Julian Assange says, a major American bank will suddenly find itself turned inside out. Tens of thousands of its internal documents will be exposed on Wikileaks.org with no polite requests for executives’ response or other forewarnings. The data dump will lay bare the finance firm’s secrets on the Web for every customer, every competitor, every regulator to examine and pass judgment on.(From Forbes WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange Wants To Spill Your Corporate Secrets)
WikiLeaks' primary purpose is to make information available to everyone. Each one of us can make our own judgments as to what should be done with that information, if anything, and what course of action might be indicated or not. But the kind of complaint conveyed by this Corrente post is precisely the issue I previously addressed: the complaint is that providing vast amounts of information freely to everyone isn't a good idea and might even be a very bad idea -- unless a particular outcome can be assured.posted by Joe Beese at 4:24 PM on November 29, 2010 [6 favorites]
... this completely misses what is most fundamental about WikiLeaks and why its work challenges established authority so profoundly. This particular Corrente poster may want authority to prevent rather than enable further war -- but he still wants some authority to guarantee the result he prefers.
But the WikiLeaks revolution goes far beyond that, and much deeper. The precision of its aim is revealed by the great discomfort experienced even by many of those one might have expected to be sympathetic to WikiLeaks' efforts. A closely related aspect of our training to rely on authority and obey is that we are taught to value control.
Calling Ironmouth a troll for stating an opinion is out of line. -- KokuRyuHe's not a troll, he's just a very dishonest person. Case in point:
no, no--OK I get it, it was Delmoi who claimed that:How did you manage to read "UN" as "Iran"? here is an article about the US spying on the UN leadership, including attempting to acquire DNA.Maybe you should read some of the stuff in the guardian? In particular the stuff about spying on top UN people, and trying to get their DNA and stuff.
I haven't seen a link saying we are trying to get Iranian diplomats DNA. -- Ironmouth
Of course not. That is why 219 cables have been release, not 250 thousand. Less then 1/10th of one percent.
No, he hasn't. No one has reviewed 250,000 documents in the short time he has had them. Sure, some documents were looked through, but 250,000? And how could he? He has no context, no files, no understanding of this. If they took 10 minutes to review all 250,000, it would require 4,160 man hours. He doesn't have the resources to do this.
Oh my god, that woman is SO FUCKING STUPID. It isn't just that she can't understand why wikileaks couldn't be stopped but that she doesn't even seem to understand that she didn't stop her own book from being leaked. She got them to take the page down post-facto, but the leak had already happened.
Sarah Palin: I Stopped My Book From Being Leaked, Why Can't Govt. Stop Wikileaks ?,
A dangerous standoff with Pakistan over nuclear fuel: Since 2007, the United States has mounted a highly secret effort, so far unsuccessful, to remove from a Pakistani research reactor highly enriched uranium that American officials fear could be diverted for use in an illicit nuclear device. In May 2009, Ambassador Anne W. Patterson reported that Pakistan was refusing to schedule a visit by American technical experts because, as a Pakistani official said, “if the local media got word of the fuel removal, ‘they certainly would portray it as the United States taking Pakistan’s nuclear weapons,’ he argued.”I guess the local media knows about it now.
Haven't seen this posted yet:
Bomb, Bomb Iran: The Top 5 Most Shocking Things About The Wikileaks
...
3. North Korea supplied Iran with long-range missiles.
I wanted to ask you about [Peiter Zatko, a legendary hacker and security researcher who also goes by] “Mudge.”IRC #hack continues its plan of world domination.
Yeah, I know Mudge. He’s a very sharp guy.
Mudge is now leading a project at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to find a technology that can stop leaks, which seems pretty relative to your organization. Can you tell me about your past relationship with Mudge?
Well, I…no comment.
Were you part of the same scene of hackers? When you were a computer hacker, you must have known him well.
We were in the same milieu. I spoke with everyone in that milieu.
What do you think of his current work to prevent digital leaks inside of organizations, a project called Cyber Insider Threat or Cinder?
I know nothing about it.
But what do you of the potential of any technology designed to prevent leaks?
Marginal.
What do you mean?
New formats and new ways of communicating are constantly cropping up. Stopping leaks is a new form of censorship. And in the same manner that very significant resources spent on China’s firewall, the result is that anyone who’s motivated can work around it. Not just the small fraction of users, but anyone who really wants to can work around it.
Censorship circumvention tools [like the program Tor] also focus on leaks. They facilitate leaking.
Airgapped networks are different. Where there’s literally no connection between the network and the internet. You may need a human being to carry something. But they don’t have to intentionally carry it. It could be a virus on a USB stick, as the Stuxnet worm showed, though it went in the other direction. You could pass the information out via someone who doesn’t know they’re a mule.
Back to Mudge and Cinder: Do you think, knowing his intelligence personally, that he can solve the problem of leaks?
No, but that doesn’t mean that the difficulty can’t be increased. But I think it’s a very difficult case, and the reason I suggest it’s an impossible case to solve completely is that most people do not leak. And the various threats and penalties already mean they have to be highly motivated to deal with those threats and penalties. These are highly motivated people. Censoring might work for the average person, but not for highly motivated people. And our people are highly motivated.
Mudge is a clever guy, and he’s also highly ethical. I suspect he would have concerns about creating a system to conceal genuine abuses.
But his goal of preventing leaks doesn’t differentiate among different types of content. It would stop whistleblowers just as much as it stops exfiltration of data by foreign hackers.
I’m sure he’ll tell you China spies on the U.S., Russia, France. There are genuine concerns about those powers exfiltrating data. And it’s possibly ethical to combat that process. But spying is also stabilizing to relationships. Your fears about where a country is or is not are always worse than the reality. If you only have a black box, you can put all your fears into it, particularly opportunists in government or private industry who want to address a problem that may not exist. If you know what a government is doing, that can reduce tensions.
And back here within the U.S., you can count upon the opponents of progressive policies to use the Wikileaks dumps to advance their agenda. They'll take items out of context and use them to justify ideas like bombing Iran, rejecting the START treaty, and god-knows-what to North Korea. The Wikileakers claim to promote the politics of peace and moderation. But this latest dump could very easily have the opposite effect, by giving the absolutists a chance to spread their stereotypes and illusions of a black and white world.Meanwhile, one can easily imagine operatives in the Guoanbu or SVR or SNSC or EGID, etc., etc. watching the fallout from Wikileaks' increasingly unwieldy releases and contemplating how best to feed them decontextualized disinformation.
"This is however, not where Assange’s reasoning leads him. He decides, instead, that the most effective way to attack this kind of organization would be to make “leaks” a fundamental part of the conspiracy’s information environment. Which is why the point is not that particular leaks are specifically effective. Wikileaks does not leak something like the “Collateral Murder” video as a way of putting an end to that particular military tactic; that would be to target a specific leg of the hydra even as it grows two more. Instead, the idea is that increasing the porousness of the conspiracy’s information system will impede its functioning, that the conspiracy will turn against itself in self-defense, clamping down on its own information flows in ways that will then impede its own cognitive function. You destroy the conspiracy, in other words, by making it so paranoid of itself that it can no longer conspire."posted by verb at 4:05 PM on November 30, 2010 [3 favorites]
"Why do you rob banks, Willie?"posted by kipmanley at 6:34 AM on December 1, 2010 [3 favorites]
"Because that's where the money is."
When diagnosing, one should first consider the obvious.When focussed on attacking hegemonic power, one should, y'know, attack the hegemony. —I quoted the Sutton legend because witty.
It called for detailed biometric information "on key UN officials, to include undersecretaries, heads of specialised agencies and their chief advisers, top SYG [secretary general] aides, heads of peace operations and political field missions, including force commanders" as well as intelligence on Ban's "management and decision-making style and his influence on the secretariat". A parallel intelligence directive sent to diplomats in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi said biometric data included DNA, fingerprints and iris scans.
The basic question is not whether we think Julian Assange is a terrorist or a hero. The basic question certainly is not whether we think exposing the chatter of the diplomatic corps helps or hinders their efforts, and whether this is a good or bad thing. To continue to focus on these questions is to miss the forest for the texture of the bark on a single elm. If we take the inevitability of future large leaks for granted, then I think the debate must eventually centre on the things that will determine the supply of leakers and leaks. Some of us wish to encourage in individuals the sense of justice which would embolden them to challenge the institutions that control our fate by bringing their secrets to light. Some of us wish to encourage in individuals ever greater fealty and submission to corporations and the state in order to protect the privileges and prerogatives of the powerful, lest their erosion threaten what David Brooks calls "the fragile community"—our current, comfortable dispensation.posted by verb at 4:33 PM on December 1, 2010 [2 favorites]
Is there any evidence that somehow, Assange leaking this info will stop even one person from getting killed ever?There is no evidence that it will cause anyone to get killed, either. You've boldly asserted that it will, while others boldly assert that it will save lives in the long run. Both statements appear to be based on nothing more than a strong opinion about the goodness and/or badness of Assange's goals. Repetition of your assertions does not make them any more factual.
In accordance with INTERPOL’s rules, the General Secretariat can only publish a notice if it is satisfied that all the conditions for processing the information have been fulfilled. For example, a notice will not be published if it violates Article 3 of the Constitution, which forbids the Organization from undertaking any intervention or activities of a political, military, religious or racial character. In addition, the General Secretariat retains the right to refuse to publish a notice that it considers unadvisable, or a risk to international police co-operation, the Organization, its staff, or its member countries.posted by scalefree at 5:46 PM on December 1, 2010
But in any case the United States is the centre of a global empire, a state with a military presence in most countries which arrogates to itself the role of world leader and policeman.posted by adamvasco at 1:08 AM on December 2, 2010 [1 favorite]
When genuine checks on how it exercises that entirely undemocratic power are so weak at home, let alone in the rest of the world it still dominates, it's both inevitable and right that people everywhere will try to find ways to challenge and hold it to account.
What I would want to do is to have my Justice Department and my Attorney General immediately review the information that's already there and to find out are there inquiries that need to be pursued.
That Joe Lieberman is abusing his position as Homeland Security Chairman to thuggishly dictate to private companies which websites they should and should not host -- and, more important, what you can and cannot read on the Internet -- is one of the most pernicious acts by a U.S. Senator in quite some time. ...posted by Joe Beese at 1:27 PM on December 2, 2010 [3 favorites]
Note that Lieberman here is desperate to prevent American citizens -- not The Terrorists -- from reading the WikiLeaks documents which shed light on what the U.S. Government is doing. His concern is domestic consumption. By his own account, he did this to "send a message to other companies that might host WikiLeaks" not to do so. No matter what you think of WikiLeaks, they have never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime; Lieberman literally wants to dictate -- unilaterally -- what you can and cannot read on the Internet, to prevent Americans from accessing documents that much of the rest of the world is freely reading.
High-level US representatives - almost certainly acting at the direction of the President - threatened an ally into stopping prosecution of torture, in violation of the Geneva Convention.Yeah, but you can't prove that leaking that information directly prevented any deaths.
"Vice President Biden described the complex nature of the security problem in Afghanistan, commenting that besides the demography, geography and history of the region, we have a lot going for us."
Dear Mr Assangehttp://www.guardian.co.uk/discussion/comment-permalink/8632453
Isn't it time you looked into the treatment Celtic Football Club have been receiving at the hands of their bigoted oppressors in Scotland?
For too long Celtic Football Club have been held back by these dark forces, only winning around a hundred league titles, (including nine of them in a row), one European Cup, over thirty Scottish cups, and several Glasgow Cups. This clearly points to a masonic conspiracy against us, I'm sure you'd agree.
Also, would you be available to referee the old firm new year's day game? (If you think you're getting stick now, this would be an eye-opener).
With your help I'm sure we could do better. Change is coming!
Say hello to Osama and Elvis for me!!http://www.guardian.co.uk/discussion/comment-permalink/8632371
We're here in the UK; the majority of our class think that what you are doing is right.There's lots and lots of serious questions too. But I'm heartened to see that when major world events are centred around the internet, the internet still keeps its unique and relentless focus on the search for lulz.
Nial wants to know when you are releasing documents about the aliens (Roswell).
We will be looking for you on FB.
Regards and good luck,
Mrs Neale and the annoying students.
The cables we have release correspond to stories released by our main stream media partners and ourselves. They have been redacted by the journalists working on the stories, as these people must know the material well in order to write about it. The redactions are then reviewed by at least one other journalist or editor, and we review samples supplied by the other organisations to make sure the process is working.On free speech:
The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be "free" because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free. In states like China, there is pervasive censorship, because speech still has power and power is scared of it. We should always look at censorship as an economic signal that reveals the potential power of speech in that jurisdiction. The attacks against us by the US point to a great hope, speech powerful enough to break the fiscal blockade.Also, UFOs, death threats and an explanation of why Wikileaks went from being faceless to having people, faces and names,
The Cable Gate archive has been spread, along with significant material from the US and other countries to over 100,000 people in encrypted form. If something happens to us, the key parts will be released automatically.posted by memebake at 7:11 AM on December 3, 2010
The Cable Gate archive has been spread, along with significant material from the US and other countries to over 100,000 people in encrypted form. If something happens to us, the key parts will be released automatically.From this I suspect that the insurance file is probably everything exciting that they had at the time, so it probably includes the Bank of America stuff too. Its interesting that he said the keys will be released automatically - I'm guessing they have some sort of dead-mans-server set up that will release the codes if they feed it the appropriate input at regular intervals.
I don't like to be shrill, but this is a nonsensical argument and exceeds any plausible let alone reasonable understanding of what it means to protect classified information.posted by Joe Beese at 1:22 PM on December 3, 2010 [3 favorites]
By the LOC's logic, it should have blocked the Washington Post when Dana Priest blew the lid off the CIA's secret prison system and the New York Times when James Risen exposed warrantless wiretapping.
We've now taken the protection of classified information -- a legitimate goal in many instances -- and stretched it to impose on the government an obligation to close normally open public channels of communication because they might contain classified information that's already in the public domain. We're unnecessarily starting down a very slippery slope.
If the bill becomes law, even firms like Apple, Microsoft and Google could come under DHS's thumb, says Michael Gregg, chief operating officer of the cybersecurity firm Superior Solutions. "They are stepping forward to regulate a potentially huge amount of the Internet," Gregg told FoxNews.com.This bill this refers to is HR 6423. Ostensibly this is about terrorism (of course), but it's worth noting first, that:
The power to regulate private networks comes from Homeland Security Presidential Directive 7, which was established in 2003 to identify and prioritize critical infrastructure and to protect it from terrorist attacks.And second, the text of that Directive 7 contains some disturbing wording (emphasis mine):
Homeland Security Presidential Directive 7Link to Directive 7 at DHS site not provided - I don't want to be responsible for sending anyone there - but if you really want it, you can find it in the Fox news article linked above.
Purpose
1.This directive establishes a national policy for Federal departments and agencies to identify and prioritize United States critical infrastructure and key resources and to protect them from terrorist attacks.
Background
2.Terrorists seek to destroy, incapacitate, or exploit critical infrastructure and key resources across the United States to threaten national security, cause mass casualties, weaken our economy, and damage public morale and confidence.
[...]
Policy
7. It is the policy of the United States to enhance the protection of our Nation's critical infrastructure and key resources against terrorist acts that could:
[...]
f. undermine the public's morale and confidence in our national economic and political institutions.
The rule that says secret files must only contain news that is already common knowledge is essential to the dynamic of secret services, and not only in the present century. Go to an esoteric book shop and you’ll find that every book on the shelf (on the Holy Grail, the “mystery” of Rennes-le-Château [a hoax theory concocted to draw tourists to a French town], on the Templars or the Rosicrucians) is a point-by-point rehash of what is already written in older books. And it’s not just because occult authors are averse to doing original research (or don’t know where to look for news about the non-existent), but because those given to the occult only believe what they already know and what corroborates what they’ve already heard. That happens to be Dan Brown’s success formula.posted by kipmanley at 3:01 PM on December 5, 2010 [3 favorites]
The same goes for secret files. The informant is lazy. So is the head of the secret service (or at least he’s limited – otherwise he could be, what do I know, an editor at Libération): he only regards as true what he recognises. The top-secret dope on Berlusconi that the US embassy in Rome beamed to the Department of State was the same story that had come out in Newsweek the week before.
"Mr. Assange has repeatedly sought meetings with the Prosecutrix - both in Sweden and subsequently - in order to answer her questions and clear his name. It is relevant that Mr. Assange sought permission from the Prosecutrix to leave Sweden and she gave him her permission. Since leaving Sweden Mr. Assange has continued to seek meetings with the Prosecutrix, but his requests have either been ignored or met with a refusal."Obviously Assange's lawyer is going to paint this in the best way he can. But if he's right about the original charges being dropped, and the warrant not being seen by anyone, then it looks increasingly like the whole arrest warrant thing is FUD. Its interesting that Assange is consistently reported as facing assault charges in Sweden, while his lawyer claims that the charges were dropped.
"Bizarrely, the Prosecutrix - having ignored or rejected those offers of voluntary cooperation - instead sought an arrest warrant to have Mr. Assange held incommunicado without giving his Swedish lawyer sufficient notice, access to evidence or information to take proper instructions from Mr. Assange. This action is all the more peculiar as she has not even issued a formal summons for his interrogation or brought charges against Mr. Assange," the statement added.
"Since the rape charge has been dropped, the current allegation he faces does not - as a matter of Swedish law - justify an arrest warrant for Mr. Assange. The sole ground for the warrant is the Prosecutor's blatantly false allegation that he is on the run from justice: he left Sweden lawfully and has offered himself for questioning," Stephens said.
WikiLeaks and Julian have lost 100Keur in assets this week.Even now, still sounding a bit jaunty rather than hassled.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the Cablegate exposure is how it is throwing into relief the power dynamics between supposedly independent states like Switzerland, Sweden and Australia.
"the only easy way to donate electronically would be with a Visa credit card through a Web page hosted by Iceland-based DataCell.com. Representatives of Visa did not respond to requests for comment from CNET today. (WikiLeaks also solicits payments sent through the U.S. mail.)"The way this thing's been rolling I expect Visa is meeting right now, and on Tuesday WikiLeaks will be cut off from internet moneys altogether.
[T]he new iconic infrastructure of our age is the internet.
Instead of division, it stands for connection. But even as networks spread to nations around the globe, virtual walls are cropping up in place of visible walls.
Some countries have erected electronic barriers that prevent their people from accessing portions of the world's networks. They have expunged words, names and phrases from search engine results. They have violated the privacy of citizens who engage in non-violent political speech. These actions contravene the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which tells us that all people have the right "to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." With the spread of these restrictive practices, a new information curtain is descending across much of the world. Beyond this partition, viral videos and blog posts are becoming the samizdat of our day.
[...]
I'm proud that the State Department is already working in more than 40 countries to help individuals silenced by oppressive governments. We are making this issue a priority in at the United Nations as well, and included internet freedom as a component in the first resolution we introduced after returning to the UN Human Rights Council.
A classified memo sent by Mrs. Clinton last December made it clear that residents of Saudi Arabia and its neighbors, all allies of the United States, are the chief financial supporters of many extremist activities. “It has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority,” the cable said, concluding that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.” (NYT)Here's a wacky idea: Stop sending stuff to the Middle East. That's not to suggest, mind you, that the material support the US gives to the region is directly converted into the same "financial support" that goes to those unspecified "extremist activities," but it does give purpose to those extremist activities.
And in London, Stephens told AOL News on Thursday that the offense under investigation isn’t rape at all, but rather something called “sex by surprise,” which he described as a minor — and uniquely Swedish — offense that carries a 5,000 kroner fine — about $715.--Wired Threat Level Blog
One of the two Swedish women who have filed sex complaints against the founder of WikiLeaks has reportedly left Sweden and may no longer be cooperating with the criminal investigation.posted by uncanny hengeman at 8:27 AM on December 12, 2010
According to a report at Australian news site Crikey.com, Anna Ardin has moved to the Palestinian territories to volunteer with a Christian group working to reconcile Arabs and Israelis.
Crikey.com reports:
One source from Ardin’s old university of Uppsala reported rumors that she had stopped co-operating with the prosecution service several weeks ago, and that this was part of the reason for the long delay in proceeding with charges — and what still appears to be an absence of charges.
Ardin's blog shows that she has recently posted from the Palestinian territories. Her most recent blog posts make no mention of WikiLeaks or its founder, Julian Assange.
Some of Ardin's most recent Tweets suggest sympathy for WikiLeaks.
"MasterCard, Visa and PayPal -- belt them now!" Ardin urged in a Tweet Wednesday
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posted by Chichibio at 10:57 AM on November 28, 2010