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I support WikiLeaks
It bothers me that the US government is trying to wipe WikiLeaks off the face of the internet. It's true that Julian Assange is insufferably arrogant, monomaniacal, dogmatic, reckless, and too focused on the United States, but I don't want to live in a world in which information embarrassing to the government is so actively suppressed.
In case you're not following along... the state department has pushed at least one college to warn its students not to even *mention* wikileaks online (even in a negative way) if they ever want a job in the federal government, and the military is promising to criminally prosecute US soldiers who read about it. This is a great way of filtering for a lack of curiosity and information-seeking among appplicants, which is not a great way of choosing who to hire. (Of course people will argue that someone who reads WikiLeaks cannot be trusted with secret information, but I think there is a big difference between being the one to leak information and reading about it once it already has made headlines around the world.) Basically, our government has been as stupid in its response to WikiLeaks as it was in response to 9/11.
All of this makes me more likely to want to stand up to a new emerging McCarthyism.
This sort of information suppression needs to be stopped, and I applaud the efforts of the various people involved in mirroring the data so that it does not disappear even if wikileaks goes down.
For now, Wikileaks still has a presence on Facebook and Twitter, and the evolution of this story can be followed there.
On a somewhat parallel concern, it bothers me that the Chinese government appears to be so much more successful at hacking our government's servers than we are at hacking theirs. China has been repeatedly attacking us, essentially declaring cyber-war, and we've simply been sitting there taking hits. If we wanted to level the playing field a bit, our government should secretly hire a team to hack into Chinese government servers and release the contents of those messages anonymously to WikiLeaks. I wouldn't even mind if the US government hacked into WikiLeaks and published the organization's internal email. (Unfortunately, the US government would likely not publish the information and would instead use it to hunt down its members) Turnabout is fair play, and more transparency on all sides will help make the world a better place.
In case you're not following along... the state department has pushed at least one college to warn its students not to even *mention* wikileaks online (even in a negative way) if they ever want a job in the federal government, and the military is promising to criminally prosecute US soldiers who read about it. This is a great way of filtering for a lack of curiosity and information-seeking among appplicants, which is not a great way of choosing who to hire. (Of course people will argue that someone who reads WikiLeaks cannot be trusted with secret information, but I think there is a big difference between being the one to leak information and reading about it once it already has made headlines around the world.) Basically, our government has been as stupid in its response to WikiLeaks as it was in response to 9/11.
All of this makes me more likely to want to stand up to a new emerging McCarthyism.
This sort of information suppression needs to be stopped, and I applaud the efforts of the various people involved in mirroring the data so that it does not disappear even if wikileaks goes down.
For now, Wikileaks still has a presence on Facebook and Twitter, and the evolution of this story can be followed there.
On a somewhat parallel concern, it bothers me that the Chinese government appears to be so much more successful at hacking our government's servers than we are at hacking theirs. China has been repeatedly attacking us, essentially declaring cyber-war, and we've simply been sitting there taking hits. If we wanted to level the playing field a bit, our government should secretly hire a team to hack into Chinese government servers and release the contents of those messages anonymously to WikiLeaks. I wouldn't even mind if the US government hacked into WikiLeaks and published the organization's internal email. (Unfortunately, the US government would likely not publish the information and would instead use it to hunt down its members) Turnabout is fair play, and more transparency on all sides will help make the world a better place.
Hmm
Re: Hmm
However, at this point, the US is starting to look very weak internationally, and a cyber-counterattack on China would show that the US government is not a sitting duck. Plus, China is even better at self-destructive witch hunts than the US is, so the release of news that China's government servers had been hacked would cause them a lot of internal strife. It would also lay bare a lot of their human rights abuses, which are far worse than the US's.
Re: Hmm
The US *is* counterattacking, though much more quietly. But when dealing with feisty opponents like China you have to be willing to look a bit stupid.
Any US-positive PR of this nature would have quite serious blowback, and this time not from a decentralized organization but a major state actor.
Re: Hmm
Do you have evidence for this? I'd be curious to see it.
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Whoever wrote the brilliant Stuxnet worm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet (probably Israel) has a great cyberwarfare program.
American hackers generally hate oppressive governments, so I'm surprised there aren't more freelance, independent, pro-bono efforts of the sort.
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Although, just to play devil's advocate, while this guy "proclaims" to want to tear down the evil empire that is U.S.; what if, by publishing things that support our policies, he is actually strengthening the U.S? Could he perhaps be out to make certain people look like bumbling idiots?
What I think we are going to start seeing (between this sort fo thing and asshats like the Westboro Baptist Church) is a more clear and defined 1st Ammendment.
Although, I will say, that by crying a new McCarthyism is a bit like crying wolf, and overreactionary. I don't think State Secrets, as a general rule, are any more unreasonable than the proprietary rules of Google, Microsoft, Apple, Sony, etc, etc, etc (if anything those piss me off more, because while my phone can all but blow me, it seems to take and act of all Gods, Congress, and the U.N to get things to merge from phone to computer and such)
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A lot of the wikileaks releases are consistent with public US foreign policy, but the revelations for me include:
- The depth of the hypocrisy in several Middle East nations, who privately implore the US to attack Iran while publicly denouncing their presence in the region.
- The videos and coverups of the US helicopter killings of reporters in Iraq
- The quid-pro-quo deals to get other countries to take Guantanamo hostages
- The US paying for child sex for Afghan warlords via an American military contractor
I don't think I'm overreacting, but I am reacting strongly, because I don't want us to end up in another McCarthyist era.
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In order of listing: 1) let me get my surprised face; 2) would be curious about the bigger story on that, it seems a bit like the Rodney King tape, there's some hella footage of him getting the crap beat out of him, but how many saw him out of control and violent before that?; 3) Been going on for centuries and U.S. ain't the only one playing that game. Not right, but tell me something I don't already know; 4) I have little good to say about military contractors... and that's all I will say on that matter in this type of forum.
Perhaps it is just a strong reaction... and perhaps I am just tired of all the overractionary tirades (the most common seems to be "_________ is Hilter!" ) which are meant to invoke an empassioned reaction, and frankly inspire the masses to froth into a thoughtless frenzied bandwagon, but actually just desensitize the masses to the atrocities ordered by the like. McCarthy was hungry for the spotlight and his own personal agenda and used the means that garnered him that priviledge to the extreme, which became his downfall and ruin... I could think of a dozen people off the top of my head right now doing the exact same.
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With regard to the specifics
(1) I'm no middle east expert, but I think outing the uncomfortable truth about everyone's opinions of Iran will help Iran get dealt with.
(2) You can read more of the background info here:
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6344FW20100406
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007_Baghdad_airstrike
(3) True, but there's a big difference between what the Obama administration said they were going to do and what they're actually doing. They're basically skirting around their own ethical restrictions, and should confront the prisoner issues directly.
One of the other big revelations is that Hamid Karzai is essentially the world's biggest drug lord and is personally taking in huge revenues from opium production in the country. Given the billions of dollars we're spending and the lives that are being lost to prop up his regime, this needs to be stopped now. (I could go into a separate debate about whether opium should be legalized, but that's a different story)
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2) I am going to refrain from comment until I speak w/ my "source"...
3) A president said something to get them elected? Where did my surprised face go? Here is an prime example of my problem with him, this is one of his platforms that was horribly naive. I said at the time, and I feel confident that it kinda went down something like, "I wanna make it better!" "Okay Mr. Pres., but here's the info you didn't have 6 months ago." "Oh shit, if I do _____, I am going to REALLY screw the pooch!!" "Uuuummm... yeeeeaaaaah..." "Okay, focus on healthcare."
That actually starts into my "What kind of new hell do you think will rain down, if we go toe to toe w/ drug lords/ legalize x-drug?" counter point... but like you said, that's a different Oprah :)
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I guess it's too much to ask for our government to not be evil.
I honestly didn't give a crap about the leaks until the U. S. started trying to shut them down.
There's a big difference between a secret information source and an independent journalist organization.
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http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenberg/2010/12/09/how-openleaks-the-first-wikileaks-spinoff-will-work/
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I guess I have a pretty different opinion on this than most people I'm seeing comment on it.
My take is
1.) nothing that was leaked was all that surprising, although it is a bit embarrassing and the US government should have done a better job of keeping it secret.
2.) I am outraged by the fact that they do seem to be going after Wikileaks instead of the government employees who actually broke the law and uploaded the information to the site. I don't see the point in trying to take down Wikileaks, as something like that is going to be up no matter what you do.
3.) The rape charges look pretty bogus, although Julian Assange has some serious issues with women, and is clearly a sexist, into himself, creepy, delusional, etc. I wouldn't go so far as to suspect that the US government had a hand in framing him for rape though, I think it was more that he pissed off one too many woman and they came back to haunt him by playing a bit loose with the facts.
Also--while nothing that was leaked in this recent batch seems to put anyone's lives in danger, I do think that the stuff from a while back about Afghanistan potentially puts innocent people's lives in danger. But as I say, I don't really blame Wikileaks for that, I blame the incompetency of our government's security and personnel.
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Also, even if information is not too shocking, having explicit records of certain facts that are usually danced around forces the government to acknowledge them, which likely has an effect on their behavior.
As for the last bit, Wikileaks has worked with media sources to black out potentially sensitive information that would put informants' lives in danger. Also Wikileaks has only released about 1% of the diplomatic cables. I'm guessing their media partners advised them to slow-roll the news releases so individual stories get more coverage.
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I like the idea of a site where whistleblowers can go if they find something truly shocking and disturbing that's going on behind the scenes. And perhaps in the rest of that 99% you mention (interesting that there's still that much left, I hadn't realized that aspect of it) there will be something like that, but so far it's not looking like it to me. It looks more like most of the leaks are about stuff that was told to US diplomats in confidence for various reasons.
Let's say they do a good job of censoring stuff that could directly endanger the lives of informants. Even then, there are a lot more subtle cases where telling all of our secrets could ruin things. Let's say hypothetically, China makes a deal with us to do something about the North Korea situation. We don't exactly want whatever they are discussing with us to be leaked all over the press so North Korea knows exactly what's been said. I guess that's still an extreme example of something I wouldn't want leaked... but surely there is a whole lot of stuff that is better kept secret. Transparency is good sometimes, but Wikileaks seems to have a somewhat extreme take on when it is good.
Also, don't forget the Climategate emails that Wikileaks released... what a huge waste of time that conspiracy investigation turned out to be. (And that was potentially damaging in that it gave more fodder to Glen Beck and others who were looking for any way to keep the whole "global warming is a hoax" thing going for as long as possible.