New Wikileaks Dump is Unconscionable

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I can read, and when I called you on it before you provided THIS LINK:

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/dec2010/wiki-d01.shtml

Except that's just the ravings of the writer Patrick Marvin for the friggin World Socialist Web Site because it turns out that all King did was write a letter asking if WikiLeaks could be considered a terrorist organization, which is clearly not the same as asking for his assassination.

SO

If you have some actual PROOF that an American member of Congress actually called for his assassination, then post that link

or

STFU.

Arthur

 

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I was replying to your post, in which you compared Assange's actions with the US government's policies:

I, not Assange, am pointing out that such a comparison is not obviously valid - people are not large organizations, and have many legitimate rights or privileges in self defense that no government can be allowed safely - secrecy among them, possibly; that's not hypocrisy.

You need to make some kind of a case for a comparison across such a huge disparity of scale in power.

"Secrecy as such" is hardly the issue here - governments and corporations need not, should not, be allowed the kinds of secrecy and privacy and leverage accorded individuals. There is no necessary hypocrisy in a person defending themself against overwhelming power by means they oppose allowing governments and other powerful organizations.

?

 

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A couple of very interesting commentaries on WikiLeaks/Cablegate, from authors with hacker credentials:

The Hazards of Nerd Supremacy

This one deals with how trends in transparency and organizational secrecy affect relations between various spheres of information privilege (private, state, commercial, etc.). A juicy excerpt:

"The Wikileaks method punishes a nation -- or any human undertaking -- that falls short of absolute, total transparency, which is all human undertakings, but perversely rewards an absolute lack of transparency. Thus an iron-shut government doesn't have leaks to the site, but a mostly-open government does.

If the political world becomes a mirror of the Internet as we know it today, then the world will be restructured around opaque, digitally delineated power centers surrounded by a sea of chaotic, underachieving openness. Wikileaks is one prototype of a digital power center, but others include hedge funds and social networking sites."

Next up, we have:


The Blast Shack

This one is more an examination of the key figures in the scandal (Manning and Assange) in terms of hacker archtypes. Say what you will about such a program, but at any rate he's the right author for it. More salient, probably, is the analysis of the NSA/BlackNet dialectic:

"[...] Wikileaks is a manifestation of something that this has been growing all around us, for decades, with volcanic inexorability. The NSA is the world’s most public unknown secret agency. And for four years now, its twisted sister Wikileaks has been the world’s most blatant, most publicly praised, encrypted underground site.

Wikileaks is “underground” in the way that the NSA is “covert”; not because it’s inherently obscure, but because it’s discreetly not spoken about.

The NSA is “discreet,” so, somehow, people tolerate it. Wikileaks is “transparent,” like a cardboard blast shack full of kitchen-sink nitroglycerine in a vacant lot."

 

Thanks for those links Quad.

 

Nope, you're still LYING as you have now been asked repeatedly to provide a link to a congressman callling for his assassination and can't do so.

NOT ONE

As for your latest, no to that as well: Biden simply says: “I would argue that it’s closer to being a high-tech terrorist than, than the Pentagon Papers,”

Which is NOT calling for his assassination, since we put high-tech terrorists in jail, we don't execute them.

Arthur

 

You're full of shit, claiming the exception is the rule in order to make a dubious point. It's a bit like saying everyone who commits homicide in the US ends up on death row and dies by the electric chair.

You miss my point.

I am not defending the Swedes or arguing rape cases should be transparent, I am saying that privacy and secrecy play an important role in official acts. You seem to agree. Assange is on record as being a advocate for something like absolute transparency and he has consistently guffawed at the notion that governments need privacy and secrecy.

Now when some official information about him -- information that is as "true" as the wikileaks and should have remained just as private -- is released, he suddenly is upset? I call BS on that.

You miss the point, again.

I don't care about the rape allegations in the slightest.

And my riposte would be that plenty of other people have gotten fair trials with worse leaks, and many of them got off (OJ being a very obvious example).

 

I don't mind the leak either but Bells, if you look at Assange's words and actions since the leak, it seems that he is in this for fame and notoriety, hence the paranoic "everyone's out to get me" statements. For the record, I'm American and I don't oppose the leak. However, every day that passes since the leak seems to reveal more and more that Assange's intentions were not as noble as people previously believed.

If you're going to condemn the intention of the exposure the rape allegations against Assange as being ignoble, you need to hold Assange's intention of the exposure of those cables to the same standard. Either stick to your principles or don't.

 

Well there has already been splits:

Openleaks

However it seems the split wasn't so much to do with Assange's case, but more to the fact that overall ideologies shouldn't be overshadowed by persona's.

Like I mentioned somewhere else an "Open Leak Drop box" should be employed by a third-party group that is not under the jurisdiction of governments. That's because governments should be held accountable on occasion and not have the ability to "sweep things away" when they don't want the general public to see what they've done wrong.

The reason for this is a number of points, for instance:

• Learning from mistakes. You can't learn from a mistake unless you are willing to admit a mistake has been made. That mistake could teach not just your own government from not making the same mistake but potentially that of another.
• Transparency is Mature. If you can output what's been done transparently for whoever to look at, then obviously you aren't going to be attempting to hide things up, you aren't going to have to constantly invent a new string of lies or spend fortunes maintaining a charade. (Charades are what have previously undermined various Governments economies, and if we "Can't learn from those mistakes" then the current downturn of the economy is just a tip of the proverbial iceberg.)
• Up-to-date. In a world of damage control, you need to be up-to-date, this is no good if people are sneaking around dropping the information off at one consul or other because if the information happens to be damaging to a particular country they aren't going to find out until it's too late. So it's best to have the leak occur as a third party, while other countries might attempt to use the data obtained, proportion of the damaging effectiveness is lost by it's publication. After all you can't blackmail over a public secret, you can't manipulate a country to veto through something you've learned about them because everybody would have learnt the same thing.

It could be implied that I'm a "Political Big Brother Evangelist", I think that politicians should pretty much take the job with the understanding that during their term they have no privacy, every word of every discussion they have should be recorded and published within minutes. (The only reason for a time delay is if they suddenly had a heart attack and it would be stopped from being publicly viewed by their family, after all freedom and transparency shouldn't equal "snuff".) After their term, they can have their privacy back.

It's a rewrite of "Damocles Sword" where the sword hanging over the head and being a visual aid of the judgement over a politicians decision making being the sum of their peers perception and peers potential power.

I guess I have a Politics 2.0 in revision.

 

This is a great article that articulates many of my misgivings about the hacker ethos and what it hopes to inflict on the rest of us better than anything I could have written.

Not as impressive. The author repeats a lot of myths and bullshit about the NSA. Clearly, he does not understand that google routinely does thing the NSA has to get wiretaps for...

 

The US quite frequently hits them with cruise missiles, drone missiles, sniper attacks, and other forms of lethal violence. The US waterboards and otherwise tortures them under the pretext of interrogation - at least, until very recently, maybe. The US also "renditions" them to other entities willing and able to torture them, including to death on occasion.

I still haven't seen a reasonable justification for balancing Assange's actions and US government policies on the same ethical scale. The irresponsibility or manipulative secrecy of the essentially powerless individual and that of the world's most powerful entities just doesn't seem so directly comparable, to me.

There are all kinds of things we allow people, especially in self defense when under serious assault, that we do not allow national governments in their ordinary business - from moral, ethical, and practical perspectives alike.

And in the relevant cases here, where the governmental secrecy apparently was used to enable actual lies and betrayals of trust, not even the abstract outline of the ethical situation seems comparable to Assange's behavior.

 

The comparison is between Wikileaks rhetoric and Wikileaks policies.

Yes, I know. If I wanted to pursue the question of how your rhetoric squares with Assange's policies, I already would have. Unless you can demonstrate that Assange's rhetoric squares with yours (a position you've just explicitly disclaimed, as it happens), I'm not seeing much relevance to my point.

I don't particularly care if you want to try to change the subject, but do me the courtesy of not misrepresenting my disinterest in such as incomprehension, or otherwise attempting to browbeat me into playing along. And while you're at it, note that I haven't ventured any opinion on the question of whether WikiLeaks (or government, or corporate, or whatever) secrecy is appropriate, as such. What I am doing is examining the tension between WikiLeaks ideology as preached, and WikiLeaks ideology as practiced.

WikiLeaks is an organization with something like 1000 regular participants, an annual operating budget near a half million dollars, infrastructure spread out over several continents, a formal charter, an advisory board, etc. "Assange" here is not simply some private individual, but a public figure representing a secretive organization. There are no vanilla private individuals at issue here.

Only if some such sensitivity to power disparity is shown to figure into Assange/WikiLeaks' rhetoric. Which is to say that you should be telling them this stuff, not me.

Or if I somehow develop an inclination to convince you that secrecy at WikiLeaks is inappropriate as such, I suppose. In the meantime, you need to recognize what I am (and am not) talking about.

Which is that the salient distinction in WikiLeaks policies looks more like "transparency for everyone except us." I.e., pretty much the exact same view that governments, corporations, etc. all take on the issue. If they're premising this stuff on some kind of careful differentiation of power scales, well, I sure haven't heard anything about it.

Says you - at pointed variance with the rhetoric I have actually been addressing.

You're welcome to your pet point and all, but I suggest you advance it by just addressing the thread directly, instead of dressing it up as if it's some kind of response to something I've said and so expecting me to be answerable to that. Are you just spoiling for a fight on this particular question, or what?

 

No one in the government has suggested we fire a cruise missle at Assange, or take him out with a sniper etc etc.

Arthur

 

The comparison was between Wikileak's behavior - withholding stuff, keeping secrets - and the behavior Wikileaks demands of governments and corporations.

I have seen no argument yet that Wikileaks rhetoric applies to Wikileaks itself, or any similar entity. I haven't even seen a justification of the assumption that the secrets Wikileaks is keeping are the same kind of thing, ethically, as the secrets it demands not be kept by organizations structurally unable to avoid intending to enable lies and exploitation thereby.

You are not criticizing Assange's rhetoric - you are making a judgment about that rhetoric's applicability to Wikileaks itself.

I haven't seen a justification of that judgment. I see plenty of reason for doubting it.

Why would that matter?

We are not Assange. He is not accusing himself of hypocrisy.

You are not describing much of an organization - I see maybe two levels of hierarchy, at most, and no designed irresponsibility of role, etc ( Assange is personally at risk for "Wikileak" behavior). The irrelevancy about "1000 participants" and "infrastructure spread out over several continents" is pathetic enough to reveal an approach, here - along with the general and by now routine tendency toward personal attack.

Several people high up in the US government, including Congressman Peter King and Republican Party honcho Sarah Palin, have explicitly called for treating Assange as a foreign terrorist, enemy combatant, Al Qaida operative, etc.

So how do we treat people as foreign terrorists, enemy combatants, and AQ operatives? We kill them, torture them. subject them to rendition, etc.

 

Why should the two be any different,if it's absolute morality this man is after?

To borrow a tired metaphor, isn't the pastor expected to live what he preaches?

If we're after an absolute moral here then the scale you desperately are trying to assert is irrelevant: IE - Killing a bum is as immoral as killing a president. But if context matters and exceptions are allowable, then it seems some of Assange's claims for transparency are debatable, and in that world, I am fairly certainly national security and diplomatic imperative will triumph over what little we learned from the cables.

(Consider that in Holbrooke's, for example, the Economist essentially opined that Dayton never could have happened if wikileaks were publishing the attendees diplomatic cables).

As for Assange, there is nothing less "true" in the uncomfortable disclosures about his sex life than there is the uncomfortable disclosure of private DOS correspondence. Both pieces of information were initially privileged to protect a person and uphold their largely unspoken their right to live their lives, professionally and otherwise, free from harm. That DOS employees have their memorandums kept in confidence is both a personal matter and a collective one, as they are individuals part of a govt. collective that has an interest in confidential internal communication, much the same way Coke does.

 

Let's say Wikileaks is an Albanian website and posting French government secrets. Do we care or do we get upset about it???

 

Don't you read the news lately?

Is a guy who is running for president wanting to execute Assange close enough?

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http://www.thestatecolumn.com/articles/mike-huckabee-calls-for-execution-of-julian-assange/

I think Sarah Palin made similar statements....

For extra:

"This week, Senators Joe Lieberman and Dianne Feinstein engaged in acts of serious aggression against their own constituents, and the American people in general. They both invoked the 1917 Espionage Act and urged its use in going after Julian Assange. For good measure, Lieberman extended his invocation of the Espionage Act to include a call to use it to investigate the New York Times, which published WikiLeaks' diplomatic cables. Reports yesterday suggest that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder may seek to invoke the Espionage Act against Assange."

 

No it's not.

Almost anyone can RUN for president, but Huckabee is NOT a US congressman, he reports for Fox news.

None of the others you mentioned have called for his assassination either, which was the specific charge made by Bells that I'm saying is unsubstantiated.

Arthur

 

Huckabee is and has been for many years a powerful figure high up in the Republican Party.

He, along with several other prominent politicians with national influence (Congressman Peter King and major Party VP candidate Sarah Palin have been mentioned), have called for Assange to be treated as Al Qaida members and other foreign terrorists are treated.

This is how the US treats Al Qaida members and other foreign terrorists: http://www.examiner.com/world-news-...jihadists-behind-u-s-terror-plot-europe-video

A pastor might easily be expected to keep certain confidences of his parishioners or privacy for himself, while calling for openness and transparency in the workings of his government and exposing the lies or manipulations of powerful officialdom - even from the pulpit.

That kind of leverage against the seats of power is kind of routine in the realm of clerical persuasion, actually. People don't normally accuse clerics of hypocrisy, in such circumstances. Most people with any sense recognize that large and powerful organizations and their designated role-playing agents are not at all the same kinds of entities, ethically, as individual people acting in their own or their community's behalf.

If that's the metaphor you find enlightening.