There was Dick Cheney outing a CIA operative out of petty revenge directed at her husband; there was Rumsfeld letting slip publicly who was the whistle blower in Abu Ghrab a few days after he passed on those graphic photos we all know by now to the authorities. Ironically if he had passed them to Wikileaks instead his identity would still be safe. And of course there are government secrets being misplaced and sensitive laptops being stolen with depressing regularity.
More and more often, I keep seeing Julian Assange as a Bond villain trying to over throw governments.. It'd be more surprising to me if there wasn't this kind of chatter happening, to be honest.
I disagree. I think more journalism will be done by Assange and co than has been done by any (or all) media organisations in the last decade. A journalist is someone who is meant to find out the truth and then tell people about it. The journalistic culture that has developed is so focused towards taking a tiny amount of truth and then bending, twisting, and reprocessing it for mass consumption that the news these days rarely actually tells us anything. Clearly it does, you've got Hillary Clinton and Condi Rice breaking international law by ordering people to spy on UN leaders and representatives, you've got the Afghan Vice president travelling around with 50 million USD just sitting a brief case which he can't account for. There's plenty of very damning things in these info releases which citizens of countries should know about in order that they can hold their government accountable. The truth does not harm us, people acting badly harms us. Yeah, but they gotta be accountable for those decisions, if your government is breaking international law then someone who represents you is breaking international law. We are collectively responsible for the sins of our government, and so we need to be collectively aware of the actions of our government. About 1.3 Billion. Safety in numbers an' all that. Of course the Chinese people won't question their government about this, because either they'll never find out this information was even released, or if they do it'll be so strongly notched down as western propaganda by every single (state run) media organisation in China that no-one will even stop and question the fact. It saddens, but doesn't surprise me that already there are calls by at least one US republican senator to have wikileaks designated as a terrorist organisation. Presumably he fails to understand that they're actually doing nothing illegal and that US jurisdiction ends at US borders (but that wouldn't be the first time US politicians haven't understood that US law only applies to the US). The whole thing strikes me as a massively good move for individuals in society, and civil government in general, even if bad for the current scum bag incumbents. I can't help but feel like we've gotten to the stage where we either have to start holding politicans and state officials accountable or we just need to give up on accountability altogether and enter into some sort of horrible semi-plutocracy. In a similar vein I couldn't help but notice recently that the Metropolitan police explicitly denied using horse-mounted officers against student protesters, until hundreds of camera-phone videos and pictures came out showing they clearly had, at which point they just changed their statement to say that horses had been used proportionately and responsibly. I imagine few who read that get instantly outraged, but you should! We are lied to by our government, by our police, by civil authority in general - and when the lies get found out, be it by camera phone citizen journalism or by massive intelligence leaks to real journalists, they get amended without apology for the fact that the people who are supposed to serve us explicitly lied to us. It's time for non state actors to exist and start using information and other types of power to change the world. In conclusion of this rant: Go Go Wikileaks!
Yup: "We are at war with Eurasia. We we've always been at war with Eurasia." The antidote to Big Brother watching us is millions of Little Brothers looking right back at Big Brother. All of a sudden, that 5Mp camera/camcorder built into my wireless internet-connected smart phone is starting to make good sense. "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" --Juvenal
Right, except that Big Bruvver doesn't want this. If you release information in a completely legal manner that shows it's been behaving badly and breaking the law, it trumps up rape charges, breaks out the new-speak, and sends it's agents after you. If you snap a camera phone kodak moment of police officer charging at you on horseback because you had the gall to peacefully protest the government in the nation's capital, you break the law by doing so. Of course in the current case the police aren't having all the photographers of police arrested, because in this case they've calculated that it would make them look even worse. But if they thought they could punish those who expose their lies without making themselves look bad, you can be sure they'd do it. Why? Because they've done it before. My solution? CCTV everywhere that isn't a private residence, accessible to anyone and everyone in the world. We the people have already lost our rights to privacy completely when outside the home and lost almost all of them when inside the home. Finish the job - the only people who aren't being watched constantly are the *******s who're watching us and telling us we're not allowed to watch them back because..well..security an' terrorists and stuff... Maximum information! Maximum openness! All information available to all people, information is power, empower the world! Educate everyone, tell everyone everything. No more secrets, no more lies!
trumped up rape charges.. reacharounds? I didn't know kadafi had a blonde ukrainian nurse I don't like it.. but I'm sure this will lead to changes in the way information is handled.. ah who am I kidding, too many people have access to this stuff.. one don't ask and I'll tell and it's all over the internet
All this talk has got me thinking. PS Eye; XBox 360 Kinect; webcams integrated into every laptop and cell phone. How long do you think it will take for the Minipax to activate all these convenient telescreens? We have the perpetual war, and Fox News Minitrue is almost fully operational, so the next step can't be too far off. I'm joking, of course. Or am I?
A decently substantial new revelation: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/29/wikileaks-cables-china-reunified-korea "Wikileaks cables reveal China 'ready to abandon North Korea'" Naturally only a small number of prominent China officials are mentioned in the leak, but if this view is relatively common place amongst China officials then it could lead to relatively substantial movements in the Korea situation.
I've just written an article on this for my blog: http://www.the-reading-list.co.uk/?p=127 Please feel free to critique the crap out of it!
I spent a fair bit of today reading these at work between phone calls and found them pretty interesting, if not exactly earthshattering. The majority of it is "I met with <name> and we talked about so and so". In many cases names of sources have been redacted (good for you, wikileaks). Al lot of the documents marked "Top secret - NOFORN" (No Foriegners) are briefing documents for officials visiting the region. A lot of it is chatter about Iran and Afganistan, as surprising amount of it, actually. There is also a lot of "<politician A> blames <Politician B> for the lack of progress on <subject>". One of the things I get a kick out of is the message on the bottom of some of the cables that sayd "Visit the Turkey homepage page on SIPRnet at www.....". Everybody's gotta be pimpin their site!
It is strangely reassuring to see that what has been going on is pretty close to what I've been thinking has been going on. It's nice to have your low opinion of humanity confirmed. Nice article, which makes a good point. Well written with a good turn of phrase, but some of the early sentences go on a bit. I would also hold back a bit on the long words where simpler ones will do otherwise writer and reader may end up losing the forest for the trees a bit (for instance "amicable" should be "admirable"; "cautiousness" should be "caution"). Good English is clear English. Still, I've read worse in even "respectable" papers.
The more I read what's come out of it the more I appreciate this. More so than the Iraq docs, because we already know that's an 'illegal war' fuelled money anyway. Yes, but by classifying it as a terrorist organisation it means an 'official' stamp that US allies will have to abide by. Of course the problem is that many Senators/Politicians like to throw around the terror word around at anything they don't like. The spin they are putting on it is that Assinage is not a US citizen so it's seen as an attack on the US government by a foreigner, which means a lot of patriots are defending everything that's come out - regardless of the content. We've been at that stage for how long?? The establishment is called the establishment for a reason regardless of country and people it's aimed at. It's not 'an attack' from within its own country so people tend to get defensive about their 'culture' and who they voted for.
lol - you can almost see them busting down someones door because of that can't you? WE'RE AMERICA AND YOUR UNDER ARREST BECAUSE YOU DID SOMETHING WE DIDN'T WANT YOU TO!. Sorry it's just the mental image I got.
That doesn't suprise me, but hey... didn't they basically nuke bits of London to get rid of Lit...Vin... That Russian spy?
The poisoned him with radioactive polonium. Russian agents also used a poison pellet injected into someone's leg on the bus in London iirc. Can't remember the date. Also, I like this interpretation of cablegate:
Indeed, the US does it to innocent foreign citizens on foreign soil, and then gets shirty if the government of the victim decides to apprehend it's state-hired kidnappers.
New Scientist posts the argument for leaking : You could accuse him of being naive if he didn't make such good sense.
