Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys
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Cryptome is the I.B.M. to Wikileaks' Apple. Which is to say, among the parallels, that anyone who knows anything professionally about computer security has heard of Cryptome, but leisure users of computers are more familiar with Wikileaks.
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It's an epic event, so I'm not surprised if Assange occasionally sees himself in something of a heroic light. Frankly I don't care whether he sees himself as Hamlet or Homer Simpson, just as long as he stays sane and free enough to continue.
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giovanni tiso, in reply to
QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES
Trevor. I remember we took a vote and he was okay with it.
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Classic reason we need WikiLeaks - the Herald's perenially-confused John Roughan thinks the cables are only trivial gossip (and Prince William's life is far more important for us to know about anyway).
The latest dump from the WikiLeaks website contained next to nothing we didn't know. It was almost entirely gossip and titbits. We were reading them only because we were not supposed to be reading them.
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Diplomats are supposed to find out everything they can about countries and people of interest to their governments.
The slightly salacious observations they make or pass on about leading personalities would not be classified, and it really doesn't matter very much they they have got out.
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Just about everything we have read from diplomatic email boxes this week accords with what we have been reading from honest correspondents covering the same subjects. But nobody is content to file this stuff for corroboration, it is given a new and lurid gloss. It was, after all, "leaked".
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Simon Grigg, in reply to
It was a bizarre one - especially the way he wrote all 250,000 cables off after the first 200 or so were released.
I'm out of touch with Herald journalists (intentionally) but is he always so fucking hopeless?
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Alex Cockburn is also in top form this week http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn12032010.html :
The irony is that the thousands of diplomatic communications released by WikiLeaks contain no earth-shaking disclosures that undermine the security of the American empire. The bulk of them merely illustrate the well-known fact that in every capital city round the world there is a building known as the U.S. Embassy inhabited by people whose prime function is to vanquish informed assessment of local conditions with swaddling cloths of ignorance and prejudice instilled in them by what passes for higher education in the United States, whose governing elites are now more ignorant of what is really happening in the outside world that at any time in the nation’s history. . .
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This is not to downplay the great importance of this latest batch of WikiLeaks. Millions in America and around the world have been given a quick introductory course in international relations and the true arts of diplomacy – not least the third-rate, gossipy prose with which the diplomats rehearse the arch romans à clef they will write when they head into retirement.Years ago Rebecca West wrote in her novel The Thinking Reed of a British diplomat who, "even when he was peering down a woman's dress at her breasts managed to look as though he was thinking about India." In the updated version, given Hillary Clinton's orders to the State Department, the US envoy, pretending to admire the figure of the charming French cultural attaché, would actually be thinking how to steal her credit card information, obtain a retinal scan, her email passwords and frequent flier number. . .
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last week Gareth Porter identified a diplomatic cable from last February released by WikiLeaks which provides a detailed account of how Russian specialists on the Iranian ballistic missile program refuted the US suggestion that Iran has missiles that could target European capitals or that Iran intends to develop such a capability. Porter points out that:"Readers of the two leading US newspapers never learned those key facts about the document. The New York Times and Washington Post reported only that the United States believed Iran had acquired such missiles - supposedly called the BM-25 - from North Korea. Neither newspaper reported the detailed Russian refutation of the US view on the issue or the lack of hard evidence for the BM-25 from the US side.
"The Times, which had obtained the diplomatic cables not from WikiLeaks but from the Guardian, according to a Washington Post story Monday, did not publish the text of the cable. The Times story said the newspaper had made the decision not to publish 'at the request of the Obama administration'. That meant that its readers could not compare the highly distorted account of the document in the Times story against the original document without searching the Wikileaks website."
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Official advice from Columbia University's careers office to any students planning on a US public service job in future not to access or discuss WikiLeaks content.
The documents released during the past few months through Wikileaks are still considered classified documents. He recommends that you DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter. Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government.
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Steve Parks, in reply to
Egads. That really is ridiculous. I hope basically everyone links to, or comments on, these documents in some way, so they have to make a choice: either they can't employ anyone new, or they have to stop being idiots.
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Steve Parks, in reply to
The air is thick with journalist-envy. So he’s famous, he has ‘groupies’ (RB), he’s done something that none of the rest you will ever have the skill or the courage to do
Yeah. If RB could’ve invented WikiLeaks, he would’ve invented WikiLeaks!
Come on girls!
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Danielle, in reply to
I'm so glad I'm not the only one who started thinking 'do you believe in love? Well, I've got something to say about it, and it goes something like this...'
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Ah. Tze Ming mentioned this one a few days ago, but I couldn't find it.
The hacking of Google in China was triggered by an unhappy bout of self-googling by a senior Chinese politician. The actual cable is here.
It's interesting how firmly alongside Google the US government was. Hillary Clinton might wish to revisit her own remarks:
The documents reveal a close relationship between Google and the US authorities in China. In January, a few days after Google made the hacking public – without specifying who it believed was responsible – Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, made a speech in Washington entitled "remarks on internet freedom".
Clinton weighed in heavily on the side of Google, warning that "countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century".
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giovanni tiso, in reply to
countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century
Irony, thy maiden name is "Rodham".
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recordari, in reply to
Yeah. If RB could’ve invented WikiLeaks, he would’ve invented WikiLeaks!
Up until seeing that excerpt, I wanted to see The Social Network, now I need to see it.
"Did I adequately answer your condescending question?"
T-shirt, stat.
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An interesting response from Reporters Without Borders: Wikileaks hounded?
We are shocked to find countries such as France and the United States suddenly bringing their policies on freedom of expression into line with those of China.
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Recordari, I'm not sure RB would have invented Wikileaks; I'm not sure he quite gets it, after all 'Cryptome' is his preferred outfit it seems. But what is the point of a whistleblowing site that no one has ever heard of? Doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose?
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The most likely effect of this, as Yglesias (forgive me) put it, was that US diplomats will communicate confidential stuff over the phone from now on.
I doubt it. 99% of these communications are fairly standard, and need to be available to hundreds of people so that they can analyse them later on and write reports. Writing them down is the only way to do that. Even when they happen over the phone they normally get written down to get into the system.
Recordari, I'm not sure RB would have invented Wikileaks; I'm not sure he quite gets it, after all 'Cryptome' is his preferred outfit it seems.
Christ, Wikileaks isn't a complex idea. The fact that Russell expresses some concerns about the organisation and its founder doesn't mean he is stupid.
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recordari, in reply to
Recordari, I'm not sure RB would have invented Wikileaks;
I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have. I was merely commenting on the link to the Social Network trailer.
[Redacted]
This is not about RB. Making it so is entirely unwarranted and unnecessary. And to suggest he 'doesn't quite get it', well, got a mirror?
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I think the Obama administration has done more for democracy and human rights than Assange will ever achieve.
Having Obama as president and Assange a rather strange self-promoter is a division of labour in complete agreement with their skills, intelligence and morals.
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Absolutely no offence was meant, especially to RB; and I think my point is quite valid. The point of a 'whistle' is that it's piercingly loud, after all.
Wikileaks may not be a complex idea but keeping it functioning and staying safe at the same time is hardly a walk in the park. -
nzlemming, in reply to
But what is the point of a whistleblowing site that no one has ever heard of? Doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose?
I hate to feed a troll but, just because you haven't heard of something, does not mean no one has.
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just because you haven’t heard of something, does not mean no one has.
A comparative google trends search for wikileaks and cryptome returns the result ‘cryptome does not have enough search volume for ranking’.
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There seems to be a slow rousing of the intellectual right in defence of WL. This from a former Bush advisor in Texas:
Everyone in Washington claims to support transparency and government openness during campaign season and when it’s popular to do so. They castigate the other side when it does things in secret and suggest that its intentions must be nefarious if it is unwilling to make its deliberations public. But when an organization discloses how our foreign policy is conducted, some of these same people claim that the release will endanger lives or threaten national security, or that the founder of WikiLeaks is a criminal.
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SteveH, in reply to
A comparative google trends search for wikileaks and cryptome returns the result ‘cryptome does not have enough search volume for ranking’.
It didn't say that when I tried it. I'm not sure what that comparison proves anyhow; I don't think anyone is arguing that Cryptome is better know than Wikileaks. The fact that it is searched for far less than something else still doesn't mean that it isn't known of at all.
I did get that message for Wikileaks when I compared it to Google. Based on that would you argue that no one has heard of Wikileaks?
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tussock, in reply to
Uh, what has the Obama administration done for human rights? We still have the secret prisons, indefinite detention without charge or trial, arbitrary murders carried out by remote machines, the kidnapping and torture of suspects on flimsy evidence, the wars against abstract concepts fought with real bombs on real people, more troops, bases, and "surges" (and more careful removal of internal dissent). The continued spread of the "War on Drugs" through the Americas, to the toll of thousands more lives. The hundred billion plus "black budget" of the CIA and their mission to fuck over everyone who isn't sucking the US's dick?
Nothing on the climate change, still channelling trillions through the military contracts and arms exports, siding with supplicant dictators and against restive democracies. Business as usual with an earnest looking guy up front, such is the Democratic face of the US government (as compared to the Republican face, which is slightly more honest).
Christ, the new copyright treaties alone. Criminal liability for reading things without permission. For reals. I mean, yeh, China sucks too, with the human rights thing, but what has Obama actually done to make it better?
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