The latest Wikileaks drop

Post Reply New Topic

yeah its gonna be kind of embarrassing for us Americans if this guy gets lynched, which if things continue as they are with no other country interfering he will be.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange wanted to expose China's and Russia's secrets as much as those of the US, and believes Hillary Clinton should resign if she ordered diplomats to engage in espionage.

"[Clinton] should resign if it could be shown that she was responsible for ordering US diplomatic figures to engage in espionage of UN activities, in violation of the international covenants to which the US signed up," he said in an interview with Time magazine, published yesterday following the leak of secret US diplomatic cables that have caused huge embarrassment for the country.

Assange gave the interview via Skype from an undisclosed location after a warrant was issued by Interpol following rape allegations in Sweden, which his lawyer said amounted to persecution and a smear campaign.

While Assange has been accused by former members of the WikiLeaks project of obsessively focusing on the US, he said countries with less transparency, such as China and Russia, had the most potential to be reformed by whistleblowers.

"We believe it is the most closed societies that have the most reform potential," he said. Assange said that while parts of the Chinese government and security services "appear terrified of free speech" he believed it was "an optimistic sign because it means speech can still cause reform."

He added: "Journalism and writing is capable of achieving change which is why Chinese authorities are so scared of it."

Assange argued that countries like China could be easier to reform than countries like the US and the UK, which "have been so heavily fiscalised through contractual obligations that political change doesn't seem to result in economic change, which in other words means that political change doesn't result in change."

While secrecy was important, Assange said, in keeping the identity of sources hidden, secrecy "shouldn't be used to cover up abuses."

He said that revealing abuses could lead to positive changes in countries and organisations. "They have one of two choices … to reform in such a way that they can be proud of their endeavours, and proud to display them to the public" or "to lock down internally and to balkanise, and as a result, of course, cease to be as efficient as they were. To me, that is a very good outcome, because organizations can either be efficient, open and honest, or they can be closed, conspiratorial and inefficient."

Turning back to the US, Assange said he believed American society was "becoming more closed" and its "relative degree of openness … probably peaked in about 1978, and has been on the way down, unfortunately, since."

Speaking about accusations that he had singled out the US as a force for harm in the world, Assange said the view lacked "the necessary subtlety".

"I don't think the US is, by world standards, an exception; rather it is a very interesting case both for its abuses and for some of its founding principles."

Assange said the media interest in the WikiLeaks cables had been tremendous.

"The media scrutiny and the reaction are so tremendous that it actually eclipses our ability to understand it," he said, with "a tremendous rearrangement of viewings about many different countries".

Assange also gave a glimpse into why WikiLeaks had chosen to partner with traditional media organisations to release the files, rather than, as might have been expected, amateur bloggers. In 2006, "we thought we would have the analytical work done by bloggers and people who wrote Wikipedia articles and so on," he said.

But "when people write political commentary on blogs or other social media, it is my experience that it is not, with some exceptions, their goal to expose the truth.

"Rather, it is their goal to position themselves amongst their peers on whatever the issue of the day is. The most effective, the most economical way to do that, is simply to take the story that's going around, [which] has already created a marketable audience for itself, and say whether they're in favour of that interpretation or not."

Now, he said, the analytical work was "done by professional journalists we work with and by professional human rights activists. It is not done by the broader community." Social networks acted as amplifiers, he added – and, as WikiLeaks gained more publicity, an important supplier of source material.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*cue all conservatives now LIKING Wikileaks since they're saying a Clinton did something wrong and should be impeached for it*

"The founder of WikiLeaks should be hunted down just like Al Qaeda, according to Sarah Palin"

So that would be unsuccessfully then?

Government cannot function if public servants are not in a position to provide their political leaders with full, frank and confidential advice. But government accountability to the electorate cannot be given effect without providing public access to information held by government.

The essential issue, then, is to find the balance between those two competing interests.

In Canada, we have two primary means for citizens to access government information: the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act (the latter deals with a person's right to see and correct information held by government about that person).

Now, ATI legislation is limited, in so far as the government gets to decide what information it is going to release, but we have an officer of Parliament, the Information Commissioner, who is responsible to Parliament, not the Government, and who has the authority to review the government refusal to disclose records, and to investigate whether or not Government has complied with its obligations under the Act.

The system is far from perfect, as our Government lamentable record on the Afghan detainees issue has clearly demonstrated. But even flawed, I prefer a legislated program of access, with in built accountability structures to the slapdash approach of wikileaks.

Wikileaks is flawed in a number of ways:

1) It relies on insiders who will leak as much or as little material as they have access to, and that they feel merits release.

2) It has no access to those records with the leakers have no access to. No top secret material was included in this latest dump which suggests that there is more information out there.

3) It relies on people combing through material, and inevitably focussing on the, "juicy bits."

4) Perhaps most importantly, it puts a chill on the advice that public servants provide to Ministers. If I am preparing a briefing note for the Minister, I know that it may be subject to an ATI request, and that it will be vetted for impact before release. But if I have to be concerned with someone along the line emailing it out without vetting, then I may hold back on some types of information. This does not serve the Minister well.

Governments who try too assiduously to manage the message, and who interfere with Access to Information applications invite the public and the media to seek alternative sources of information. Governments who respect their obligations under Access legislation will generally find that the public is more trusting of them keeping some things secret.

Can someone give me some examples of what is said in these leaks? I don't feel like reading all of it.

Let's take a practical example.

My public service function is to be a subject matter expert in self-government negotiations between Canada, the province and First Nations. As a result I am in possession of Canada's negotiation mandate. I know how much Canada is prepared to put on the table and what the upper limit of the negotiating team's authority is.

Does the public have any right to know this information? I say most assuredly not. There is no bargaining in good faith if one side has access to the other side's negotiation mandate. These things can be excluded from disclosure under access to information legislation, and most certainly should be excluded.

In a previous job I was in the foreign service and privy to a great deal of personal information about applicants for immigration. Furthermore, I was privy to a great deal of information about people who were determined to be inadmissible to Canada on a variety of security, medical and criminal grounds. Does the public have any right to know this information? Again, I say, surely not. If a person knows that the government of Canada has determined him to be inadmissible on security grounds, and knows the information that led to that finding, that might put the source of that information in danger.

Sometimes the blacked out bits are blacked out for a very good reason.

Ron Paul sticking up for Julian Assange

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1210/45930.html

any other politicians out there supporting Wikileaks? Everyone else I've heard from want them killed and or labeled terrorists.

unsurprisingly in possibly related news, GOP leadership looking for ways to stop Paul from getting his subcommittee chairmanship.

I'm starting to wonder if this leak was deliberate...

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... t-freedom/

Granted it's an editorial and it doesn't draw this conclusion, but I was thinking. How could they potentially justify censorship on the net? Then I thought about wikileaks, I honestly don't believe a Private in the military would have access to all this information, I think the leak came somewhere way up the chain. If my supposition is correct, what would be the motive? Then I considered that people are calling for the site to be shut down, let's see the FCC sneak in their control of the net while all this is going on, and before anyone knows what has happened we will have lost free speech on the net.

The people that stand to benefit from this are: Liberals (far-left variety, the sane ones will get shut out soon enough), Obama White House (being able to control the flow of information (no more Drudge Report)), Politicians in Congress (specifically Democrats and RINOs).

I'm just hoping this is me being abnormally cynical today, but I'm scared to death that I'm actually on to something.