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.
Every cent might be in the direct pursuit of free information but I worry that isn't the case.