Big Brother Wikileaks is watching
I’ve got a new article up at RightNetwork. It’s about Wikileaks, Assange, and privacy.
Feel free to comment here or at RightNetwork.
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
I’ve got a new article up at RightNetwork. It’s about Wikileaks, Assange, and privacy.
Feel free to comment here or at RightNetwork.
Hah! Got in the first comment!
Why do people keep calling him a journalist? He is a web site operator fed by a group of stupid jerks who want to be important. A real journalist who gathers information should try to give it context and should try to determine the significant details. There is no way this guy is qualified to evaluate a quarter million items. He doesn’t care who gets hurt. That’s what leads to the danger of eliminating privacy and making people afraid to speak.
I hope some of his supporters are secretly filming him with women, on the toilet, and dyeing his hair for cover. All in the interest of the Assange Transparency Project. Someday, one of the really bad guys is going to get to him. I hope that gets filmed too.
BTW, there seem to be quite a few transparency advocates here in Germany, which is not surprising given the supermoralistic attitudes favored by the media. Michael Moore sold more books here than in the US, and the idiots believed him.
Watching the histronics about this is amusing.
Once again, they want to see me in my underwear when I’m freaking traveling inside what USED to be a free country. And you want me to feel sorry for our government?
It looks like Wikileaks is ahead in the game so far. Mirror sites popping up everywhere…think Whack a Mole.
I’d like to point out something I have not yet seen anyone else write: all cables leaving the Department of State are signed by the Secretary (or next in line if the Secretary is out of the country), and all cables leaving an embassy do so over the signature of the chief of mission.
Thus the cables tasking our UN officers with collecting information about other diplomats came from the Department — probably INR (the Bureau of Intelligence and Research) and not from Hillary herself.
So despite what people as knowledgeable as Dick Morris are saying, Hillary is not collecting personal dirt on other diplomats. It is part of the usual biographic collection on workers at other embassies, sometimes collected by INR and sometimes by the country desk as part of their effort to know the people we’re dealing with.
I’ll admit the tasking for collection of DNA samples and credit card numbers surprised me, but I’ve been away from the Department for 13 years and maybe this is normal nowadays. F
The commenters at Market Ticker are not at all upset with Wikileaks. They’re especially excited about the prospect of revelations concerning major U.S. banks.
In fact, “excited” doesn’t describe it. “Orgasmic” is more accurate.
We will be well served to read Wretchard’s thoughts on the matter. It is very widely assumed that all the Wikileaks stuff is authentic. Must that be so? Why?
What did he/colleagues decide not to leak? Why?
The most troubling aspect of Assange is that he is the ultimate anarchist, answerable only to himself and his highly personalized code of ethics and morals.
But he will want and need State protection (ugh, says Assange!), which may be why he apparently plans to surrender himself to the British police.
Wretchard makes a pretty good case at “Belmont Club” that Assange is better off turning himself in to the British police than waiting for his enemies to find him. Many of his enemies have far less compunction about respecting due process than the British justice system. F
Iowahawk on Assange http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2010/12/great-satan-lauds-assange-as-infidel-of-the-year.html
Enjoy.
I’ll share a bit about events in Germany. One cable was an assessment of Foreign Minister Westerwelle based on conversations with a Westerwelle’s administrator. The cable from our ambassador said that he was arrogant, uninformed, and anti-American. These are true. The man became Foreign Minister because he saw the job as his right as leader of coalition partner FDP, not because he knows anything about foreign affairs. He has mainly travelled the world saying little new and trying to bolster his business community creds by pushing trade issues (this week in Iraq, which rather ticks me off because I don’t like Germans making money off our soldiers blood).
As a result of the cable, some other FDP members are trying to boost their tough guy creds by calling for the replacement of Ambassador Murphy and questioning westerwelle’s leadership. This will not happen; it is all political theater by a party that is sinking in the polls. Today’s throwaway advertising “newspaper” has two little articles about this, which means it is a big enough “scandal” to attract attention. The problem is that the FDP has sunk in the polls, and losing a few more votes because of a chaotic image might take them below the 5% hurdle to get into parliament. Should this happen, Merkel’s CDU wouldn’t be able to form a coalition after he next election, and America might have to deal with a Social Democrat/Green/Left Party coalition German government. When you think of Russia and Iran, this would be significant for us.
I know these are minor details, but they are illustrative of what happens when a group of ignoramuses try to overthrow diplomatic traditions. Of course Ambassador Murphy needed to send info about Westerwelle back to DC. This info could prevent a single line in a speech or press release that ripples far beyond its intents. Assange’s leak goes further than these specific revelations; it empowers the ignorant and arrogant of the world to seek their moment of fame by leaking more. And no one knows where that will take us.
One last thing for your amusement: Westerwelle made a big stink about getting the US to remove its nukes from German soil. This was a blatant thoughtless attempt to win some support from the kumbaya crowd here. It is almost as pressing and significant as a proposal to improve international trade by setting up a commission to standardize shoe sizes wordwide. We should be grateful that no one has talked about this yet, but who knows what the future will bring.
Just saw this about PayPal dumping Assange:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/dec/4/paypal-cuts-wikileaks-money-flow/
Of course, when the story was all about hacked e-mails concerning climatology, the usual conservative knuckleheads were focused on discussing the merits of the find, rather than the demerits of the crime.
So, bubo . . .
What do you think the merits of the find will be?
[i]…he’s an activist whose cause is no less than “the accurate historical record of our time.”[/i]
I find this rationale to be nearly compelling.
The possibilities for evil are strong. But somehow I am glad that the things were heard are now known. Most of them we knew or could have suspected anyway.
Still, the Big Brother thing, no matter who Big Brother is, is very disturbing.
My guess: If there is a way to spy on individuals and know all their secrets and dirty laundry and hold them under threat of exposure; there will come in response to that a techno-wall/moat/defense. There will appear, for a fee, a web-scrubber or cleaner or cloaking device.
In the meantime, the states of the world will have to redouble their efforts to be more secret, and this will cause the people of the world to be more and more Tea Partyish.
There is a new great struggle for freedom coming.
What will evolve are overloads of misinformation on a scale that whatever you read cannot be trusted. All kernels of truth will become needles in a haystack and moral relativist will insist those kernels are no different from lies anyway.
We see it in our friend Bubo comparing fraud of a massive scale like global warming being no more morally obligated to get exposed than Hillary’s personal feelings about another head of state.
SteveH,
That is only making the Tower of babel higher and shakier.
It cannot be done much more than it is already.
It will fall spectacularly. That is its lesson. The fools who build it are fools who build it.
The truth is stable, strong, free, unshakable. It will win.
OffTop:
Neo, it just occur to me: could the author of Up and down the staricase be a relation of yours?
OnTop: I agree that possibility of sudden exposure is a “new reality”. I can only welcome that that possibility is now pointed at the government – I think the government’ octopus has spread its tentacles too far and vast and it needed some worthy opposition. To the fears of “Big Brother” of private initiative…as long as two Big Brothers are busy sniping at each other, normal people are in relative safety.
The less power for the government against individual, the better.
bubonicplacebo mentions the “hacked e-mails” and “the demerits of the crime”. Have any proof that the e-mails were stolen by a wicked hacker rather than being released by a praiseworthy, whistle-blowing insider?
From reading the ‘climate-gate’ e-mails, it is clear that alleged scientists in the US and the UK tried to withhold their manufactured data (a scientific crime), and those supposed scientists also feloniously conspired to breach FOI statutes.
Is the answer to the Wikileaks info dumps to somehow inundate the files with false information? So when this nihilist Assange gets a file from the State Dept or wherever, he cannot be sure what is truth and what is fiction.
That might not even be necessary. It might even suffice to simply *say* that false information has been included, which had been made to look plausible. Therefore, there’s no way for an outsider to know what is fact and what is fiction. That just might be enough to give everyone the plausible deniability they need to save their hide.
And then we need someone to make sure Assange falls down an empty elevator shaft or send him to Gitmo for eternity to send the message to future Assange’s what awaits them.
As much as many prognosticators and so-called experts are saying President Obama is going to have a tough time getting re-elected, the reality of the situation is that President Obama will get re-elected against almost any potential GOP challenger.
However, one candidate cannot be over-looked. If we learned anything from 2008, we should’ve learned that organization and social media skills are paramount to a campaign. No one is actually going to “come out of nowhere”. To become the most powerful person in the world, you have to build quite an organization. That’s why only one person has a chance to beat President Obama in 2012.
This will make it all clear:
http://mittromneycentral.com/2010/05/07/no-apology-song-the-case-for-american-greatness/
Dan:
Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
To quote:
“The main reason the political system focuses on candidate selection to the relative exclusion of political education and policy formulation is that there can be only two main parties due to the structure of the government and the nature of the electoral rules. The fact that Americans select a president instead of a parliament, and elect legislators from “single-member” geographical areas (states for the Senate, districts for the House) leads to a two-party system because in these “winner-take-all” elections a vote for a third party is a vote for the person’s least desired choice. A vote for a very liberal party instead of the Democrats, for example, actually helps the Republicans. Under these rules, the most sensible strategy for both the Democrats and Republicans is to blur their policy differences in order to compete for the voters with middle-of-the-road policy views, or no policy views at all.
Contrary to what many believe, then, American political parties are not very responsive to voter preferences. Their candidates are fairly free to say one thing to get elected and to do another once in office. This contributes to confusion and apathy in the electorate. It leads to campaigns where there are no “issues” except “images” and “personalities” even when polls show that voters are extremely concerned about certain policy issues. You don’t raise unnecessary issues during a campaign, one successful presidential candidate once said. ”
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig11/domhoff1.1.1.html
And this is why our government no longer responds much to voters.
Here is more on Assange’s motivation:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703989004575653113548361870.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_carousel_1
Transparency is just an excuse.
Or in other words, expat:
WAAAAAAAH!
It’s not as if Wikileaks didn’t offer to do what it had done before at the behest of the US government and censor certain names from the cables.
And though it will put him in grave danger, I’m sure that Assange will be releasing the Russian documents in a few months because he hates the US so much.
I think the reality is that he hates corruption by governments around the world. Our is merely one of the biggest, one of the stupidest, and one of the most corrupt , and one even our erstwhile allies find a bit overbearing.
I find our intervention to stop Spain from prosecuting our CIA for accidentally killing a Spanish civilian journalist disgusting, and a stain on our national reputation.
Tatyana: nope, not a relation. Very common name.
Brad, you really need to get out of the house more, and see the rest of the world as it really is.
Claudia Rosett weighs in on the difference between Assange and a journalist:
http://pajamasmedia.com/claudiarosett/wikileaks-fishing-with-dynamite/
Assange is a nasty man with a desire to create chaos as an end in and of itself.
Brad:
Believe it or not publishing other people’s private correspondence is not a brave thing to do, it is no different than a peeping tom taking pictures of you through your window and then publishing them on the internet after you refuse to pay the ransom.
He is in hiding, he is not out there in the open living like a normal person blowing whistles and speaking truth to power, he is publishing stuff that may or may not be true and may or may not be putting the lives of other people in danger…I listened to the left wail hysterically over the socalled outing of Plame, and here we have someone who is actually outing real people and what does he get from much of the left? An atta boy..so while you slobber in hero worship over the power seeking moron there is someone else whose life is in real danger.
And Brad, just what happened to all those people who were picked up in Spain after the bombing right before their election? Does anyone really know? Maybe Assange needs to talk about that.
Neo: too bad!
I already constructed beautiful theory genetically connecting your writing talent with that of Classic of Yiddish Literature …
ex-pat:
I modestly point out your WSJ/Crovitz link terms Assange an anarchist in its title.
Tom, the article quotes Assange as saying his goal is not a more transparent society but a more just society. I’m glad he has determined himself to be the ultimate arbiter of justice.
Exactly my 12/5 points. I feel supported!
Brad says “Our is merely one of the biggest, one of the stupidest, and one of the most corrupt , and one even our erstwhile allies find a bit overbearing.”
really?- “most corrupt”-ever heard of Mexico? Ever travelled in the third world?