Posts by Sacha
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Paul Williams,
But Paul, proper oversight means just the boys club in charge. Daddy knows best, after all.
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Ta, Craig. Saw the lawyers stuff, wondered if there were any direct statements I'd missed.
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I read that second statement as an opinion ("I think") but the first seems like a declaration of fact, so I can only presume it's based on something more than speculation or wishful thinking.
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to Neil Morrison,
Assange himself has decided it suits his case to conflate the sexual assault allegations and the cable leaks
References?
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to Paul Williams,
principle was/ought to be privacy for individuals and transparency for organisations
Yes - personalising any of this misses that crucial point. And who benefits from it?
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to Tim Hannah,
Giovanni’s piece on Bat Bean Beam is definitely well worth reading
Certainly is (and please add links to mentions like that).
I want to single out above all Aaron Bady, who this time last week did the thing that wasn’t sexy and examined two of Assange’s own critical essays from 2006 in which the aims of the organization are laid out. It is a remarkably lucid and helpful piece of writing that I urge you to make the time to read. At a juncture when it is difficult to cultivate one’s optimism, it gives me a glimmer of hope that we might find ways to have the debate that Manning asked for, that we might give this thing the attention it deserves, because the topic is not trivial, but goes to heart of the functioning of contemporary democracies and international institutions; and in fact that looking, as Bady and Assange do, at the formal characteristics of the communication – who is allowed to talk to whom and in what voice, under what level of scrutiny – is fundamental to understanding how the debate can be framed in the first place, how we can make it about those topics that seem so often unspeakable except amongst the converted: the reforms, a critique of imperialism that connects with a broad enough public to make a difference, how to restrict the capacity of our nations to wage wars, be they economic or military.
But then of course that glimmer is extinguished as soon as you let your mind wander back to the source of the information and to private Manning, who at this moment is isolated and allowed to speak to exactly no-one except his interrogators. We’d do well to ask what kind of society allows for people who aspire to be elected to the highest office in the land to suggest that such a person is the villain and ought to be executed; how is that public conversation framed, and how did it get that way?
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to Islander,
a nation that - despite extraordinary people who have a much wider view of how the world is, and works, and could be, *and*have a deep sense of history-is run by ...very limited self-concerned people by and large
Sounds familiar..
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The Economist on what drives US reactions to WikiLeaks.
Sturdy conviction in the cause of democracy and human rights, the belief that America is exceptional in its embodiment of these values, and the confidence that American power is generally applied on the side of justice make an almost ideal ideological basis for assuming the role of freedom's global steward, of the kindly superindentant of the world's lesser powers.
I propose that this sort of exceptionalism helps explain the well-meaning earnestness of America's diplomats, the ubiquity of American surveillance and intervention, as well as the widespread American hostility toward WikiLeaks. Americans by and large trust their military, their foreign service, and even their spy agencies basically because all of them are full of Americans. If the good patriots keeping the world safe for democracy feel they need to keep certain things secret, then they need to keep certain things secret. To splash those secrets all over the internet is simply to interfere with America's attempt to carry its noble burden, to perform its urgent and necessary task, to make the world a little less safe for democracy. What kind of person would do that?
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Cables reveal Shell's infiltration of the Nigerian government.
The oil giant Shell claimed it had inserted staff into all the main ministries of the Nigerian government, giving it access to politicians' every move in the oil-rich Niger Delta, according to a leaked US diplomatic cable.
The company's top executive in Nigeria told US diplomats that Shell had seconded employees to every relevant department and so knew "everything that was being done in those ministries". She boasted that the Nigerian government had "forgotten" about the extent of Shell's infiltration and was unaware of how much the company knew about its deliberations.
The cache of secret dispatches from Washington's embassies in Africa also revealed that the Anglo-Dutch oil firm swapped intelligence with the US, in one case providing US diplomats with the names of Nigerian politicians it suspected of supporting militant activity, and requesting information from the US on whether the militants had acquired anti-aircraft missiles.
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Some leads: http://twitter.com/#!/search/wikileaks