I'm impressed by the amount of comments here that point out some (perceived) hypocrisy in the actions of Wikileaks or Assange. This isn't the point.
I myself don't really know what to think of Wikileaks. I, however, do know that major banks and financial institutions find it perfectly okay for you to send money to all kinds of horrible organisations (say, the Ku Klux Klan, clubs that campaign for underage sex, Westboro Baptist Church, whatever you can come up with, and they probably have a bank account), but not to Wikileaks.
I can't imagine how Wikileaks can be considered a so much more evil organisation than Stormfront (http://www.stormfront.org/forum/announcement.php?a=63, all cards accepted) that the first needs to be blocked and the latter does not.
It can only be that at least this part of what Wikileaks is saying is true: Major banks and businesses, a scarily small number of organisations that control a large part of the world's financial transactions, want to control to who you give your money. This means that they want to control who gets money and what they do with it. This shit is NONE of their business, and the fact that they can do this without serious legal issues scares the shit out of me.
I like to believe that western governments are out to serve their citizens and protect their freedoms, but I cannot explain how that fits with what these banks are doing and how the governments just let it happen. This has absolutely nothing to do with the nature of Wikileaks as an organisation.
Really, this fact alone makes me want to send money in an envelope to Wikileaks, despite how ridiculous I thought Cablegate was.
Edit: If Wikileaks were a terrorist organisation (blowing up buildings and people and whatnot), I'd understand governments to force a ban. Not banks banning them on their own initiatives, but governments forcing it. If you genuinely feel that Wikileaks is as bad as Al Qaeda and Hamas and the alikes, then I'll understand if you disagree with me, although even then I hope you agree that it should've been a government decree, and not banks solo-piloting their sense of morality. In all other cases, really, I can't wrap my mind around it.
I am just explaining the reasoning. Don't hate/downvote me for saying it ...
Silencing people's political opinions (even horrible evil people) is considered bad. This is why donations to these evil organizations is tolerated.
Wikileaks is being blacklisted not because of their political opinions, but because these organizations, rightly or wrongly, believe Wikileaks is threatening security of the nation, causing deaths of informers and collaborators in the Middle East. And last but not least, Wikileaks seems to be actively perusing leaks in banks and financial organizations. If you bite the hand that feeds you ...
> You can't very well make a healthy profit if the nation in question is burning down around your ears, now can you?
Except that's exactly what they've been doing for about the entire world history of banking.
They're not protecting the nations, they don't care. They're protecting their own hides. You know Wikileaks got dirt on the banks too, right?
Funny thing is, when they release it (and they already have, parts of it), everybody will be like "everybody already knows this". Tickles me mad, that :-D
Unfortunately, you can. There is money in nearly any societal state. The ruination of a country just presents different opportunities, not necessarily fewer.
It'd be better to say that there is potential value (as opposed to 'money', which is a term with overloaded definitions), but yes - as long as there is scarcity, opportunities for trade will exist.
It wouldn't seem so in this case. The people may very well feed wikileaks, but only with the permission of the banks, and if the banks feel that it is not in their best interest to allow it, they won't abide. I would like to say, however, that I don't think this is right, I just believe that it this is how it is. In truth, Wikileaks (whether you agree with them or not) being silenced by world powers makes any sort of change/revolution seem a remote possibility.
I would guess so too, but if you don't make that claim, even the most hardcore non-conspiracy-theorist can't debunk the argument. This is my whole point, and what makes me so angry/afraid: sticking only to the plain facts, the ones that are out there in the open, that everybody agrees on, you can still show that something is horribly wrong with what our governments are doing, without assuming anything beyond those plain facts. That's pretty unique, I believe.
you said: I like to believe that western governments are out to serve their citizens and protect their freedoms, but I cannot explain how that fits with what these banks are doing and how the governments just let it happen...
well, the problem that bankers find with Wikileaks is probably that its not censored enough for them,
look for example what Wikileaks says about the Rothschilds banking family, informing us that the family is trillionaires , while referring to totally credible sources.
While The Independent describes "an even older tradition - the ability of the family to sustain their secretive fortune, which industry insiders count not in billions but in trillions, and keep it within the family. Secrecy has been a hallmark of the Rothschilds from the outset."[56]
>I can't imagine how Wikileaks can be considered a so much more evil organisation than Stormfront
I can, in spirit, though I wouldn't necessarily use the term "evil" as the comparator. Stormfront generates bigotry and hate speech. Distasteful and contempible. But Wikileaks spreads as widely as possible information which can pose real security risks to people (such as US soldiers). As a Jew, I'd rather see people support offensive but peaceful organizations like Stormfront (I'm assuming they're all talk) than organizations which may actually contribute to getting people killed.
You obviously have no idea what you're talking about. Stormfront is not all talk and their actions have easily endangered more lives than Wikileaks has. This is the largest online community of neo-nazis on the web, for fuck's sake! What do you think they do, drum circles and interpretive dance??
I'm glad for you that you obviously live in a part of the world where hate-crimes are not much of an issue, but take a look at North East-Germany for instance. There's whole villages occupied by neo-nazis after they chased away the population that wouldn't salute the swastika flag. Yes, in the 21st century. And yes, they do assault and/or kill Jews, Gypsies, Muslims, Blacks, you name it (the ones not in those villages, obviously nobody goes there willingly).
They just don't happen to affect the lives of the super-rich and powerful very much.
Stormfront is quite objectively more evil than Wikileaks no matter how you spin it, unless you're ignorant or have neo-nazi tendencies yourself.
Skrebbel is pretty much spot-on in his assessment.
>Stormfront is not all talk and their actions have easily endangered more lives than Wikileaks has.
How? What violent or dangerous actions have they taken?
>This is the largest online community of neo-nazis on the web, for fuck's sake! What do you think they do, drum circles and interpretive dance??
No, I think they make posts on the internet about Jews controlling the world economy, sell racist bumper stickers, etc. Offensive and stupid, but not dangerous.
>Stormfront is quite objectively more evil than Wikileaks no matter how you spin it, unless you're ignorant or have neo-nazi tendencies yourself.
As I said in my original comment (which you don't appear to have read very carefully), I'm Jewish and I find Stormfront offensive. I also said that evil wasn't the relevant way to compare Stormfront with Wikileaks. But, given the information I have, I think the standard position of supporting free speech so long as it doesn't endanger people is consistent with blocking donations to Wikileaks but not to Stormfront.
> How? What violent or dangerous actions have they taken?
I'm afraid I can only relate anecdotal observations, but my corner of the Midwest does sadly host an active Neo-Nazi population. A couple of my friends in the city where I live have been violently assaulted and injured by self-professed Neo-Nazis (and strangers) venturing here from rural counties looking for trouble to start.
Likewise, I have a couple times seen Stormfront host threads by individuals who disagreed strongly enough with (usually far-left leaning) political protests in this city to seek identification of the protesters in any photos, names, and where they live. Along with not terribly subtle threats of violent retribution.
I can certainly see recklessness in Wikileak's actions, especially revealing identities of covert agents, thereby endangering them.
I would hope at my least anecdotal observation above of Stormfront's connection to violent criminal behavior makes clear both organizations do indulge in recklessness, albeit in degrees being debated here.
I don't think Stormfront are nice guys, don't get me wrong, but hosting threads by people being vaguely threatening, or sharing an ideology but no affiliation with people who happen to have been violent, doesn't seem sufficient for a bank to block donations to them.
The stuff Wikileaks has released has had all the really sensitive stuff (like, names) removed, right? So, then, isn't the threat that Wikileaks represents mostly indirect (i.e. it might incite civil unrest if people knew what their governments were actually doing)?
If that's the case, then, why defend hate speech and not Wikileaks? It seems to me that hate speech also has the very real potential of inciting violence (holocaust, pogroms, etc).
I agree with you, though, that Wikileaks probably is more dangerous (in the people-could-get-killed sense) than Stormfront, right now. It certainly seems much more likely that Wikileaks could cause violent rioting (and worse) than that Stormfront will suddenly come to power, although my observations don't extend past the US. It could well be the case that neo-nazis are a bigger problem in other parts of the world.
Personally, I find myself becoming more pro-Wikileaks as I see more interviews of Assange. The man is articulate and logically consistent (a rarity for any public figure) and I've found his arguments quite compelling. If you haven't seen him speak, I'd recommend it. He does a better job defending Wikileaks than anything that I could articulate in a post on HN.
It wouldn't be Wikileaks causing the riot, it'd be the people - disgusted with what they find out is being done in their names.
Wikileaks is doing what the press should have done years ago. What we need to know enough to look for in the future even if nobody spells it out for us.
How does Wikileaks threaten soldiers? It's not as if they have a live feed from the battlefield, or their own satellite. Also, they seem to scan stuff before they release it. This "threat" really seems to be blown out of proportion.
And what if a Jewish soldier is captured in battle and his enemies are avid readers of Stormfront?
It seems to be one of those things the media and politicians repeated so many times that people started to accept it as truth. I still haven't seen a reliable link between a release and someone dying.
If you donate through the Wau Holland Foundation [0], Wikileaks only get money if they provide a receipt for what they spent, and only for things that are in line with the foundations goals. See also this Interview [1] in Der Spiegel about donations.
I would love to see that as well, and it would make me much more comfortable with donating to them if I knew that my money was going directly towards supporting their operations(which I support), instead of Assange(whom I do not).
The real question is how many documents they've taken in.
The impression i was left with over the split between Wikileaks and OpenLeaks (and incidentally here's link to open leaks: http://openleaks.org/ ) was that WikiLeaks was left w/o any infrastructure to accept new documents, making it, effectively, useless.
I am not going to donate to Julian Assange's defense, as i think he's destroyed Wikileaks' credibility and capability to continue operating.
So the problem I have with Assange is, ultimately, that he's a terrible journalist. He's not even a good gonzo journalist.
He made the epic mistake of letting the story become about him, and worse yet, making sure that Wikileaks's fortunes (both literally and figuratively) were directly tied to his. He did that in that Wikileaks is paying directly for his legal defenses, and also in that he quite literally ransomed the wikileaks diplomatic data dump, and said, more or less, if anything happens to me, all of this data will be released publicly.
Worse yet, they've been so lax and incompetent with their data security policies that they let the password for the data dump leak out!
So, not only is he so difficult to work with that he has been abandoned even by people who have defended him previously, and agree with the major thrust of his work, but he's proven himself unable to even credibly maintain a threat as supposed leverage. He's still in legal trouble, and the worst case data release scenario has come to pass.
The problem we find ourselves in now, is that wikileaks is now proven to be incompetent, unable to manage their data, entirely occupied with Assange's legal defense, and clearly developed into a cult of martyred celebrity.
What wikileaks is clearly not, is a clearing house for future whistleblower data. Wikileaks had a chance to act as a trusted broker and exist as a non-state actor. But the key component to that was putting trust ahead of personal gain, recognition or vendetta. Instead now we're going to see a host of successors to wikileaks which will all have questionable pedigrees and histories of trustworthiness, and leakers are going to have to navigate those tenuous waters alone, as they've always done.
Your point that Wikileaks is imperfect is certainly true. But do you know of any perfect institutions?
Assange was intentionally the lightning rod. Within Wikileaks his role is similar to Rumsfeld's in the Bush administration. He takes lots of criticism, personal attacks, etc.
The strategy of those wishing to shut down Wikileaks has been to attempt to vilify Assange. This is to be expected. Yes, Assange should have been more careful about who he slept with, but can you blame him at this point for trying to clear his name and stay out of prison?
The release of the password and some of the other organizational challenges that Wikileaks has faced could be the result of a sloppily run organization, or they could be due to someone on the inside being bought off, etc. To accuse Assange of having the motive of self-aggrandizement (considering that he's the only one who has put himself at risk for assassination, prison, etc.) seems a bit of a knee-jerk reaction.
One thing to consider is that Assange is a poor judge of character -- he misjudged his publishing company, the two female accusers, and probably at least one of the core Wikileaks team members. So yes, Assange has lost a few points... but are you really ready to write him off? This is a guy with exceptionally uncommon courage and will, and he's up against professional intelligence organizations.
Wikileaks has been slowly learning how to do its own proactive PR, how to resist infiltration, etc. We're talking about a very small organization (a startup of sorts) that has had a few growing pains. I think the jury is still out on whether the organization will fizzle out or will continue to gain credibility, integrity, etc.
So far, I think the trend has been that Wikileaks has learned from its mistakes. It has been rather astonishing to me to see the extent to which companies and governments have gone into attack mode against Wikileaks and Assange. For every attack, subterfuge, and machination that has been public there have likely been dozens of others attempted. While these may have succeeded in ways we do not yet know in dealing a death blow to Wikileaks, I think it's too soon to write the organization off. Assange has inspired a lot of people that even in today's world a small number of dedicated people can make large and corrupt organizations very uncomfortable.
For very narrow values of "wide". FWIW, you're linking to Assanges own assertion that it's a smear campaign.
If this was a smear campaign orchestrated by the top echelons of the US intelligence/military complex, they would have done it better. If they're out there twisting arms and making up charges, why not make it a proper rape, not this "well, strictly he should have known she didn't really approve even though she didn't say anything at the time"-business.
>linking to Assanges own assertion that it's a smear campaign.
Good point. I read a lot about this when it was happening so my reflex was the point to the source, who I believe. Looking forward to an actual court case so some facts can become public.
Oh it's almost certainly disinformation to some extent. He's not really discussed it at all (and definitely not under oath) so it's hard to draw any real conclusions about whether or not he's a rapist.
However he's almost certainly a complete cock to people on a regular basis. There's a lot of evidence for that. Just because you are totally awesome at one level of social discourse doesn't mean you aren't also a complete bastard to people on a personal level.
Yes, agreed. I do see how it's valid that some might find Wikileaks a lost cause now. I'm hopeful the baton can be successfully been passed on to other groups, regardless of how Wikileaks fares.
The problem that I have with Assange is that he doesn't practice what he preaches. Wikileaks is an organization that promotes government transparency. Assange, on the other hand, does not seem interested in just providing sources. Wikileaks, under what I assume was his direction, has turned into more of an editorial service, cherry picking information that they present to make certain parties look even worse than the actual source does.
He preaches government transparency. He's not a government. So how can he practice what he preaches? The same happens every day with journalists who fight for media transparency. Should they also be transparent with every aspect of their lives? Of course not. And you suggest he should be transparent with his sources. If you seriously believe that, you're clearly not in favour of this movement.
"And you suggest he should be transparent with his sources. "
Reread the grandparent's comment. He's not saying Wikileaks should reveal it's sources but that it should release its source material. As opposed to editorialize. As opposed to becoming yet another dishonest filter of information.
They do. They released Collateral Murder, for instance, in an edited for TV spot and they released the full-length clip so that anyone who cared could check their accuracy.
I did. I'm satisfied. It might not be perfect but it's far better than anything I see on TV.
>And you suggest he should be transparent with his sources. If you seriously believe that, you're clearly not in favour of this movement.
No, I don't believe that Wikileaks should be transparent with the whilstlebowers who give them information. I do believe that Wikileaks should provide the information that they give as close to the originals as possible(with limits on whether or not the leak could directly endanger people), and not attempt to editorialize at all. There is a huge need for a place to view these primary sources. There are way too many places that editorialize the sources for their own purposes. It doesn't help transparency if Wikileaks refuses to release information in order to get "more press". Just release it, and let the public decide.
Wikileaks preaches transparancy in the ruling oligarchical class: governments, corporations, other organizations, and people who have acted and/or ruled with impunity.
While it's a slightly slippery argument, Wikileaks has argued that:
1: It is not of the ruling oligarchy.
2: Its own organizational requirements require a certain lack of transparency.
I can sympathize with both arguments, though a pledge, say, to release information at a time when it is no longer harmful to Wikileaks' operations, might be a class act.
As with other movements, I suspect Wikileaks is rather smaller at its core than many people realize. Assange and a few close lieutenants (some no longer quite so close).
Ah, well that's the devil in the details. It wasn't merely one guy, there was a core of wikileaks developers who departed the organization all at once.
Second, they have made assurances that the wikileaks platform is in fact inoperable, given the state that the platform was in when they departed. By their account, wikileaks was not trustworthy enough to operate the platform, so they felt no inclination to fix it.
I am not going to claim first hand knowledge of any of these facts, and I don't know how the actual departure of Daniel Domscheit-Berg and co. actually went down. Assange has made statements contrary to Domscheit-Berg, and again, having no 1st hand knowledge, i can't claim to know one way or the other.
Assange has not, in any of the statements i've seen, addressed the current state of the platform, or how documents can be uploaded. On the other hand I haven't seen any prominent publication of how leakers can get documents to Wikileaks either. (happy to stand corrected if someone could point me to links!)
It's not ironic, this was one of the points for me "writing them off". Wikileaks reponse to inquiry about their financial matters was basicaly "none of your business" and since then I see them as Assange's personal PR tool, nothing more, despite the claims.
Before jumping in quick judgement you guys should be aware that giving away such information will simply generate a lot of attack vectors by those who want to take down wikileaks.
I'm not even saying I agree or disagree with wikileaks itself, but heck, considering the amount of pressure they get from everywhere, giving away information about how they spend their money would be plain stupid and would take them down in a eyeblink. Just two cents.
The key difference of course is that they are not a government. If you knew the slightest about Assange you would realize that he has always been a campion of individual privacy, while he at the same Itime attacks the privacy of nations and nation sized organizations.
It takes some seriously warped logic to see hypocrisy in this, but hell, americas seem to think corporations are people, so I guess I shouldn't be that suprised.
You seem to think the term "privacy" (i) can be applied to large organizations such as governments, and (ii) it bears a significant resemblance with an individual's privacy. I can understand (i) (though I would prefer the word "secrecy"), but you really really need to explain (ii).
By the way, even if (ii) is correct, it makes little matter, because of the power balance. As Chomsky often points out, when the powerful obtain information about the powerless, they gain even more power over them than the powerless would have gained over the powerful from similar information. Which means that a more "open" society, with less privacy for individuals and less secrecy from trusts and governments, will inevitably tip the power balance even further.
It is just unreasonable to treat state (and corporate) secrecy and individual privacy the same way. Assange may be a hypocrite, but on this particular issue, he's clean.
Yes, yes it does. What if Wikileaks is taking especially large donations from powerful interests and chooses to censor its output as a result?
To say that transparency only applies to governments is to miss the whole point of transparency. If that is indeed Wikileaks' position as you say, then they've missed the point from the get-go.
No, it doesn't. If you don't support Wikileaks you can choose not to donate money.
You can't choose not to pay your taxes (at least without breaking the law). You can choose the kind of politicians you vote, but again, those politicians may choose to do something else with your money when they have the power.
If you do support WL, and believe in what they have achieved so far, I think that it's wise to trust them, given the amount of criticism they face from almost every government in the world. I haven't read about any government denying anything that was published, but I've read a lot about those governments trying to censor what is published. So, who's the censor here?
In his "60 Minutes" interview, Assange acknowledged that governments and corporations have privacy rights as well. His position is that Wikileaks provides a way for whistle-blowers to publicize information that they feel is being ignored or suppressed by the authorities within the organization.
In other words, he describes Wikileaks as a last-resort channel for addressing institutional wrong-doing.
It impresses me just how much combined effort is being put towards boycoting transparency, just on the grounds that the powers that be are embaressed by their ugly operations.
Also impresses me by how many posts here believe the media coverage of Assange. Just goes to show, Americans are the most naive consumers of commercial news on the planet, by a considerable margin.
I think it's very wrong for banks to disallow money transfers to WikiLeaks, and I think Americans are often naive but "Americans are the most naive consumers of commercial news on the planet" is highly exaggerated.
I can see how someone who has not spent significant time living outside of the US could be of this opinion, but every US resident I know who has lived outside of the country for any significant period of time is also of this opinion. You don't need to spend much time reading European or Asian newspapers, listening to or watching BBC, DW, then be insulted by FOX and Clearchannel to see exactly what the issue is.
I'm not an American. I've only been living in the US for the a few years.
Of course there's some poor reporting in the US, like anywhere else. I don't know of any European/Asian newspaper that does a better job than the NY Times or WaPo (or for that matter any good regional US paper), for all their faults, and those who are comparable are usually less widely read than the American ones.
Brazilian mainstream media is also very partisan-biased, though they won't ever admit it and always strive to come out as politically neutral.
While there's a left-centrist party in office, not one positive news is to be shown in mass media vehicles, even when the president receives an international award, the people are kept in the dark about it and you have to follow alternative news to be informed. This discrepancy has even been reported in international news before.
Government-bias may well be more common than not, or than commercial advertiser-biased. The difference between those countries and the US is consumer education. At least outside of the US the viewers / listeners / readers know they're not getting an unbiased perspective.
The problem with sending money via bitcoin at the moment is that it will likely be worth significantly less tomorrow than it is today, and less still the day after.
It would be nice to have a bitcoin alternative that was actually a viable currency; as of now I know of no such thing.
Do you have a citation for that? I've never visited the Wikileaks site, and now it seems to be down. Edit: oops, never mind, it is at wikileaks.org, not .com - found the BitCoin reference.
Could not make sense of their IRC thing, though. Why not generate a new BitCoin address directly on the page?
One argument is that governments, including, specifically, and particularly the US Federal Government, claim "state secrets" with little or no justification.
More tellingly, the US Supreme Court case that is the basis of the State Secrets Doctrine, United States v. Reynolds (1952), was based on deceptive and false claims on the part of the US. In that case, the government argued that it could not be compelled to introduce evidence into the court, or even disclose it in chambers to the justices of the United States Supreme Court, because it would irreparably disclose vital state secrets.
The crash documents were declassified in 2000 (and are available online). In Herring v. United States it was argued (unsuccessfully) that the documents in fact contained no such secrets. In district court an on appeals to the 3rd Circuit, "there was no fraud because the documents, read in their historical context, could have revealed secret information about the equipment being tested on the plane".
Not all are convinced of this. Nor that the case is sufficient justification for the doctrine of state secrets which has resulted from it.
I think the better question would be is why do 100% of the diplomatic cables need to be classified? The real mystery is why millions of people in the government and military have access to these documents but they are "classified". Makes no sense...
Our government has increasingly classified or made secret more and more documents in recent years and... The more the government tries to hide things the more the people become less trusting of said government.
One thought would be that the federal government shouldn't be able to own copyright to things, so once these are accessed, they don't have any intellectual property reasoning to not distribute them. In my mind, what the government owns is owned by all, and what the government knows should be known by all, because when the government speaks (in these cables) it speaks for us all.
Additionally, I feel that in general you shouldn't say something that you can't bear being repeated by others. Every child learns this. Yet, the government feels they can wheel and deal, and talk about other countries behind the backs of others and feel that the knowledge will never come out.
can you explain why they shouldn't be? i can't think of any reason why a government should expect a right to privacy from their own citizens.
the government should work for the people, and they should have a responsibility to provide full disclosure to their citizens. the only reason the government should want to keep things secret from their own people is if they aren't working in our best interests.
It's more to keep the cables from everyone else. They were intended as context-sensitive commentary from diplomats to the US. They were not intended for general release, and as such, contain information and observations that were intended to give the US an advantage over their counterparts at a later time.
That is why they're "secret". They're not supposed to be viewed by any other country. If they are freely available to citizens, there is nothing stopping them from being freely available to everyone.
This is the shell game that has been played by all diplomats since the beginning of time. There wasn't really anything all that interesting about the cables, and all it really gave was a good look at how our diplomatic services work.
A functioning democracy requires transparency. We shouldn't have to justify why we want to see government documents. That is the default position. Rather, they should justify why they want to keep them secret. Of course, in practice, if they want to keep something secret, they can't tell us why either. This little loophole allows them to abuse secret-keeping to suppress anything that is embarrassing or paints them in a negative light, and that is extremely dangerous.
They shouldn't. Everyone seems to be ignoring that, so you get my upvote.
We should be aware that wikileaks actions are indeed crimes. That said, some cables put it crystal clear, some politicians are really corrupt and are using their privileged position to their own advantage.
1) Exposing corrupt politicians.
2) Stop politicians from screwing millions of people over and over again.
And the downsides are:
1) Some politician loses his/her reputation, and the people of his/her country know who he/she really is.
2) Some frictions between countries, for example when an embassador is just a mean for creating a corporations' lobby.
I'd say yes, the means are well justified in this case. Truth can never be a bad thing.
Were there any cables discussing how big a bribe should one bring?
> 2) Stop politicians from screwing millions of people over and
over again.
Common content of the diplomatic cables, for sure.
I heard disclosing those cables let us know who do politicians nickname each other. I guess I can do without that info.
The thing is — if there is anything worth knowin in those cables it will become visible through the actions of the officials sooner or later. If it will not — I don't care.
"Employees of DynCorp, a US government contractor funded by US tax dollars, in Afghanistan paid for the services of underage "dancing boys", apparently a euphemistic reference to Bacha bazi, which is considered child prostitution.[22] The boys were auctioned off to be sexually abused by Afghan policemen, with some to be kept as sex slaves and participate in events funded by DynCorp"
"The U.S. bargained with other nations on moving prisoners from the Guantanamo Bay detention camp to other countries. In one case, U.S. officials allegedly offered Slovenia a meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama, if the country accepted one of the Guantanamo Bay detainees.[24][25] Offers to other countries include economic incentives or a visit from Obama"
"In 2009, the U.S. manipulated — via spying, threats, and bribes — the Copenhagen global climate change summit to coerce reticent participants into supporting the treaty. The U.S. punished countries such as Ecuador and Bolivia, which were deemed "unhelpful" for not signing the Copenhagen Accord, by cutting off millions of dollars in necessary funds;[27] while, the U.S. relieved Saudi Arabia, the world's second-biggest oil producer and one of the twenty-five-richest countries in the world, of any kind of obligation.[28] The U.S. used funds in millions of dollars to recruit the Maldives to sign the Copenhagen Accord, after it has relentlessly took a stand against it"
The above is a sliver of things I've personally learned, and am glad I know, from the leaks. It may not be pleasant or happy information, but I want to know what the Governments and corporations are doing. You may not care or want to know, but some of us do care what is happening.
Because the only secrets a government should be allowed to keep are the ones where a loss of secrecy would render the whole point moot. So, for example, when planning a wartime offensive against an enemy the military and by extension the government must have the privilege of keeping their plans a secret, since to do otherwise would make the plans useless. Once keeping the plans secret no longer serves that purpose they should be made public.
Diplomatic cables do not meet this standard in the general case. They are a log of a government's interactions with another government, and thus need to be public so that the people can confirm it is working in their interest, and not conspiring to implement a global copyright regime at the behest of Big Media, or aiding a foreign government in oppressing its people, or sending detainees to foreign soil with the understanding that they'll be tortured, or trying to overthrow democratically-elected leaders, or any of the other reprehensible things that the American government is doing literally while I type this, right now.
I am pretty tired of this meme (incidentally, often misattributed to Gandhi, but appears to actually come from some guy called Nicholas Klein: * First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you. And that, is what is going to happen to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.*" [1])
Anyway, the classic duelling-quotes response:
"They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." -- Carl Sagan
[1] I find it amusing that not only did Mr Klein never did get the monument he wanted, he is now remembered purely for a comment he made which has been popularly reattributed to someone more famous.
Is that what you have to say about King, Ghandi, Castro, and Mandela (amongst others)?
I am not equating Assange with these folks, but I am using their jail sentences to suggest that while going to jail is not winning, it certainly doesn’t preclude winning later on. If anything, it may indicate that they are doing something to endanger the status quo, which is a necessary precondition of winning.
Why not equating him to these ? In my opinion, Assange is well worthy of a peace Nobel prize. He after all contributed a lot to the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq [1] and for the beginning of the Tunisian uprising [2]. Such a prize would also be very useful in that the money attached would greatly help fuel his efforts.
I think his point is not that everyone who goes to jail for political reasons is good, but that you can win politically despite facing/doing jail time.
Absolutely, and thank you. Although I don’t think it has anything to do with my point, I personally have extremely mixed feelings about Castro and about the choices Mandela made before his prison years.
Wait, what? Mandela is not a murderer. It's kind of difficult to qualify Castro of being a murderer with so much certainty. You have got to be a troll.
If you apply the same conspiracy law that would be applied to you and I to Castro I'm pretty sure he's legally responsible - by our standards - for tens of thousands of deaths.
Tanks roll and bombs fall on his command and if those weren't all criminals - duly convicted by a court - his orders to use those weapons is murder.
This is what I never understood - aside from the 'insurance' file that they released ~1 year ago, it seems they haven't really taken advantage of P2P networks as much as they could. It certainly would cut down on hosting costs, and it's not like the Wikileaks guys are unaware of encryption/signing.
What is thhe status of WL mirror sites? I remember when WL went down for financial reasons, hardly any of the mirror sites seemed to function, never mind have most of the archives
I myself don't really know what to think of Wikileaks. I, however, do know that major banks and financial institutions find it perfectly okay for you to send money to all kinds of horrible organisations (say, the Ku Klux Klan, clubs that campaign for underage sex, Westboro Baptist Church, whatever you can come up with, and they probably have a bank account), but not to Wikileaks.
I can't imagine how Wikileaks can be considered a so much more evil organisation than Stormfront (http://www.stormfront.org/forum/announcement.php?a=63, all cards accepted) that the first needs to be blocked and the latter does not.
It can only be that at least this part of what Wikileaks is saying is true: Major banks and businesses, a scarily small number of organisations that control a large part of the world's financial transactions, want to control to who you give your money. This means that they want to control who gets money and what they do with it. This shit is NONE of their business, and the fact that they can do this without serious legal issues scares the shit out of me.
I like to believe that western governments are out to serve their citizens and protect their freedoms, but I cannot explain how that fits with what these banks are doing and how the governments just let it happen. This has absolutely nothing to do with the nature of Wikileaks as an organisation.
Really, this fact alone makes me want to send money in an envelope to Wikileaks, despite how ridiculous I thought Cablegate was.
Edit: If Wikileaks were a terrorist organisation (blowing up buildings and people and whatnot), I'd understand governments to force a ban. Not banks banning them on their own initiatives, but governments forcing it. If you genuinely feel that Wikileaks is as bad as Al Qaeda and Hamas and the alikes, then I'll understand if you disagree with me, although even then I hope you agree that it should've been a government decree, and not banks solo-piloting their sense of morality. In all other cases, really, I can't wrap my mind around it.