Wikileaks vs. Climategate
This comment from “bubonicplacebo” appeared on one of the recent Wikileaks threads here:
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.
An interesting statement. But while it’s true that each information dump features the exposure of correspondence that was originally meant to be secret, that’s where the similarity ends.
Whatever one’s position is on the truth of anthropomorphic global warming itself, I think we can safely say that truth-telling is of the essence in science. Yes, scientists talk amongst themselves in emails and phone calls and other communications, and those communications are ordinarily private, and should be kept that way. But if such exchanges detail a scientific deception, especially a major one that affects a great many people, then the public really does have an overwhelming right to know.
Climategate was not a generalized dumping of secret information. Nor was any generalized future dumping threatened by the Climategate leaker. The motivation seems pretty clear: to divulge the fact that in one particular instance (proof of AGW) the books seem to have been cooked in a manner antithetical to the very essence of science, and with possible dire consequences.
Whether this exposure was a crime or not is unclear, because we don’t know whether the emails were stolen or whether (as is more likely) the leaker was an insider whistleblower. At any rate, there is no protected intelligence here, no national security issue, although there are certainly privacy issues.
Wikileaks is substantially different. It is a generalized dump of classified information, with much more promised. The targets are countries such as the US, but much more than that: it is Western society as we know it and its ability to negotiate in the world and to defend itself. Later on there will be whole industries targeted, as well: for example, banks. No specific crime or even special wrongdoing is alleged, nor was one revealed—except for secrecy itself, which of course is not a crime.
What’s more, the subject matter so far—diplomacy and intelligence—are about as unlike science as they can be. If truth is of the essence of science, secrecy and deceptions are of the essence of diplomacy and intelligence. We may not like it, and we may not trust the government to do right by us in these arenas. But without secrecy, these activities cannot be successfully carried out.
So Climategate is rather the opposite of Wikileaks in a very basic way. Without truth, science cannot be successfully carried out. Science is supposed to be open and transparent and truthful. Diplomacy and intelligence are not, and although that fact is both troubling and paternalistic, most people are aware that it’s a reality that cannot be changed.
As for motives, here’s the best evidence so far (as if we needed more) of Assange as megalomanical blackmailer interested in power and chaos:
Assange warns that any government that tries to curtail his activities risks triggering a new deluge of state and commercial secrets…Assange has warned he can divulge the classified documents in the insurance file and similar backups if he is detained or the WikiLeaks website is permanently removed from the internet. He has suggested the contents are unredacted, posing a possible security risk for coalition partners around the world.
Assange warned: “We have over a long period of time distributed encrypted backups of material we have yet to release. All we have to do is release the password to that material, and it is instantly available.”
The “doomsday files” are part of a contingency plan drawn up by Assange and his supporters as they face a legal threat. He is wanted in Sweden over sexual assault allegations, and the US administration is reviewing the possibility of legal action after the release of 250,000 diplomatic cables.
He’s threatening the world with blackmail if it dares to thwart him.
Well played.
Interesting item in WAPO on why Assange has committed no crime. Still, extra-legal methods still obtain.
You didn’t notice that some of his original backers were Chinese dissidents, did you, Neo?
They are well aware of repressive governments.
Until or unless our government comes clean about what secrets “endanger” our national security, I’m going to consider them one too. For once seeing the corrupt assholes in our government screaming and hurting sure feels good.
Good compare/contrast.
As I’ve said before, though, I’d be more upset about Wikileaks if the people keeping things secret inspired some confidence in their honesty and integrity.
It’s been presumed that liberals would/should love this and conservatives not.
Seems there’s a lot to go around.
Turns out the US government has been active in trying to influence other nations’ climate policy. Bribery, etc.
Turns out the ME governments only talk about Israel to keep the masses quiet. They want us to take out Iran. That’s the real thing.
Lots of WMD found in Iraq, in addition to facilities to start making more.
Brad suffers from the Assange syndrome: He confuses secrecy with malfeasance; malfeasance, of which HE shall be the judge.
Regarding secrecy and transparency: what is the source of Assange’s funding?
Assuming for the moment that anything Wikileaks is more revelatory than what has been released thus far – this clearly illustrates why Obama’s friendship with Bill Ayers was so telling and should have disqualified him from becoming President – A President has to identify, hunt down, capture and kill people like Ayres (and Assange), and terrorists from other nations who seek to kill the President’s countrymen and threaten the nation’s security.
In this case it is even worse, this man, Assange, is endangering allies around the world, not just heads of state, but people in neighborhoods who risk their lives to help us. He is endangering our national security, possibly world security. Yet – this is where Obama’s sympathies lie.
Is it ultimately a good thing? A zero-basing of all the intrigues?
I guess we will see. So far it has been a so-what? with items that it seems we have already known or have read about on the pages of the NYT long ago.
We’ve seen James Bond, we know there are covert actions – whoo-hoo. In some cases we even HOPE so.
I’m more interesting in Assange’s ties to Soros and what the real end game is.
I’d love to pull up quotes from the left squealing about valerie Plame when they could use it to bash Bush – and contrast it with their absolute glee here, where many more, and more innocent people are going to be exposed and maybe killed. The hypocrisy is stunning.
Whaaaaaa……..?????
This asshole is actually still alive?
I figured making Hillary look ridiculous would have been tantamount to signing his own death sentence!
Mr. Assange apparently believes that EVERYTHING should be out in the open; NOTHING deserves privacy for any reason whatsoever (even national security).
Therefore, I suggest that as part of his punishment (once he’s finally caught, tried and convicted, of course) Mr. Assange should be sentenced to have cameras and microphones trained on him 24/7; and every second of his life during the period of his sentence should be broadcast for all to see/hear. No word he utters, no person he says “Hello” to, no bite of food will go unrecorded. Every times he farts, takes a leak, or what-have-you, EVERY SECOND of EVERY MINUTE of EVERY DAY, it’ll all be recorded and live-streamed right to TV for EVERYBODY to see.
He’s taken it upon himself to expose the actions of others in situations where they believed they could expect privacy; so let him find out first-hand what it’s like to have no privacy whatsoever, too. Perhaps a little tit-for-tat might encourage him to re-think his actions.
I’m trying to figure out which law they will get him under and what contortions of the Constitution will have to be justified in order to do so.
And once they do that, I’ll try to figure out the idiots that continually trade liberty for security and never speak of holding our own government accountable.
Merely based on their failures to secure our borders alone, I think Bush and Obama should be tried for treason. Instead we want to beat up on a foreign national for embarrassing us.
Disgusting.
I am imagining a James Bond movie. Assange is the most evil man in the world. Some sexy exotic woman (not Hillary, for sure) is in the mix and Bond, James Bond, and Felix Unger are charged with removing the threat. Through dalliances with the fair maid, and daring escapes, somehow it’s “mission accomplished.”
Why is this just my imagination?
Susanamantha: In my RightNetwork piece on the subject, I wrote:
Julian Assange is an information-age anarchist.
Some people think that the “internet” is a place of glorious anarchy. It is not. It is a place of spontanous and emerging order built on a technology ordered by consensus AND THEN MADE STABLE–the very opposite of anarchy. It’s actually very conservative: what works is preserved. It’s tweaked and tuned, but preserved at its core. New things are introduced carefully, not ObamaCarelessly.
Anarchism is even more damaging to a continually emerging order than it is to a well-established order. It takes time to rip down all of the established order, and the part that remains serves as a basis for the order to heal and stabilize. But Assange’s acts make impossible the trust needed to establish order in the first place, or to sustain it, especially in the accepted deep distrust and carefully limited trust of the community of nations.
Neo –
I haven’t read the article. Didn’t mean to step on your toes.
Whether or not Obama recognizes that this rises to the level of espionage or not is the most interesting part I think. For a Justice dept. that can craft a lawsuit against the state of Arizona without admittedly even reading the original legislation to appear to be stroking their chins about this is telling to say the least.
Susanamantha: You didn’t step on my toes! I was thinking along the lines of “great minds think alike.”
If someone can hack into China’s or Iran’s cables, it would be delicious to assign it to Assange whether he had anything to do with it or not. We need to know everything about our self appointed revealer. Nothing must be held back in the interest of judging his worthiness to pass judgment on others.
Leftists equate transmission of diplomatic secrets with scientific correspondence? No further proof is needed that leftists are idiots. And leftists such as “bubonicplacebo” are generally too stupid to figure out the distinction. It’s why they fail to grasp the distinction between abortion and capital punishment, and think that those opposing the former but supporting the latter are being inconsistent.
A shockingly stupid comment, coyly suggesting but not asserting a connection where no substantive one exists.
So says Assange, whose location is …uh…a secret. Along with his credit card information, etc. C’mon, Julian, step up. Information wants to be free, right? Help someone to decorate a wall behind you with “hint of brain.”
I’d thought of this too. Imagine the government had some information it wanted out there, say to embarrass or otherwise pressure a foreign government, but wanted the leak without its pawprints on it (either for PR and/or security reasons).
Enter young Julian…
Leak the information, hang it around his neck, let the enraged autocracy perform a witchhunt cum auto da fe of its bureaucracy while it smokes Assange, thereby dealing with our problem as well as theirs. Win all the way around. It’s for times like that that champagne exists.\
A_Nonny_Mouse, you have a wicked good idea there. Nothing like a little tit for tat.
OB,
Another creative thought. Were you in the SOFs perchance? Smacks of their thought processes.
For once seeing the corrupt assholes in our government screaming and hurting sure feels good.
And this helps the U.S. Government conduct its foreign policy…how, exactly? What I’ve seen in the documents is that our private discussions with foreign officials closely mirror our publicly-stated policies. The ones that should be scrambling right now are the leaders who say one thing to us behind closed doors and another thing to CNN or their own media (Arab governments, take a bow). So it’s a real cheap thrill reading some of the titillating cables about Qaddafi’s busty Ukrainian private-duty nurses and the president of Poorashellistan throwing wild parties. BFD. More important is that the officials our diplomats typically deal with will be more reluctant to speak their minds, knowing that what they say could be leaked someday. I’m anxious to have you illuminate for a poor, benighted soul such as myself how this helps our foreign policy. Take your time. I’ll be here for a while.
He’s threatening the world with blackmail if it dares to thwart him.
…if by thwart you mean garrote.
Neo – This is off topic but I’m hoping that you would have some interesting Dec. 7 stories.
I just came across Jacob DeShazer’s book about the B-25 raid that came shortly after Pearl Harbor. It’s one of those stories that wouldn’t be believed if it were not true.
On a side not – was the Japanese attack an act of terrorism? I think not. Strange times we live in.
Rupert, the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor was an act of war, not terrorism. Military forces and facilities were the targets of the Japanese Navy, in furtherance of Japanese military and political objectives. The attack was to have been preceded by a break in diplomatic relations (although the Japanese botched the timing, and the Japanese ambassador presented the note severing ties after the attack had already occurred). Even though Hawaiian civilians were killed and wounded in the attack, it was not terrorism.
Assange was arrested in London today.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8186048/WikiLeaks-founder-Julian-Assange-arrested-by-Scotland-Yard.html
A_Nonny_Mouse,
While you follow London Trader’s link, please remember that the UK is very big on surveillance cameras. May your wish come true.
Rather than a bad James Bond movie (which may be redundant, depending on your taste), the whole thing reminds me of an Austin Powers movie.
Is there a wierder/creepier “villain” than Assange? And now we’re forced to visualize his alleged crimes in Sweden.
Blech.
He’s threatening the world with blackmail if it dares to thwart him.
actually not… what he has is what is commonly called a “dead mans trigger”.
ie… if he is dead, or disabled, then negotiations are not possible, and so there is no reason to withold anything for any reason.
the real issue is that his releases, as mentioned favor one side… and he tends to be supplied by that side…
going after him is ridiculous. if we were actually serious as the other sides, this would not really be an issue, but for so long we haven’t been, our sieve like agencies now have boiled over in their practices.
not taking things seriously is the crime…
if they did THEN assanges actions are criminal, but they didnt, and are rife with holes, moles, disgruntled gay soldiers (the man that linked was a DADT person and fit the historical common thing that homosexuals tend to betray their positions more (for many reasons))
if your barn door is tight, you can complain about the man who opens i costing you a horse.
but if your barn door is wide open, the horse has been running around the town, arresting the person noting it and not ignoring it serves no real purpose until AFTER things are tight again
There are some interesting angles in this article:
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=174261
njcommter:
The dusty old dictionary defines anarchy as an absence of government. It’s not an absence of order; the word for that is chaos. That the interwebs work so well without an overarching coercive government is exactly the kind of thing anarchists desire. Order without law.
Which leaves the word to describe Assange as “terrorist”. Or possibly “revolutionary”, if one thinks his desire to reform government by betrayals is somehow motivated by genuine good intent.
But that can’t work, because order cannot be built on betrayals. If Assange is not stupid, he is evil.
You didn’t notice that some of his original backers were Chinese dissidents, did you, Neo?
So…where is the data dump on the Chinese government?
OT: re alien life form, fellow skeptics check in:
Arsenic-associated bacteria (NASA’s claims)
A summary appears here:
“This Paper Should Not Have Been Published”
Scientists see fatal flaws in the NASA study of arsenic-based life.
No time to read either of these carefully, but a quick skim suggests that Redfield has some pretty trenchant criticisms. If she’s right, she validates my earlier suspicion that the proportion of arsenic substitution in the DNA was low. Very low.
What part of the Constitution protects foreign nationals on foreign soil?
“demerits of the crime”
Hmm, seems strawman to me. I never cared about the crime issue in either case. The NYTimes cared about the crime in climategate.
I just think leaking some of this stuff is ‘the wrong thing to do’. Not just ‘bad’ but immoral. It puts innocent people’s lives in danger, it advertises our weaknesses, and as we are more a force for good than ill in the world and it harms our ability to have influence… Of course, to leftist nuts we are the world’s bad guy… so this is all ‘good’… If it gets a bunch of people killed who have helped us, we’ll they’ve convinced themselves we are responsible for a lot more deaths (when in fact, most were done by our enemies… sometimes just to raise body counts that could be cited by leftist nuts)…
I read somewhere online that the goal of the leaks was not transparancy but the opposite: to get government to reduce its information sharing. The goal of that is to hamper communication, the type of communication you need to help prevent events like 9/11.
Richard Aubrey Says:
“It’s been presumed that liberals would/should love this and conservatives not.”
Yeah, it is not playing out like that. A lot of this stuff makes the Obama admin look bad… and a lot of conservatives are still unhappy about it being released (I think they should be able to bounce ideas around; even if some sound dumb when they start… hopefully the end policy is good after working out the kinks… the leakers know this and that is their plan… to disrupt this ablity to communicate to come up with policy)…
suek Says:
December 7th, 2010 at 12:21 pm
Good one, suek. I was just reading that.
Occam’s,
A colleague of my husband, who did read the paper, was questioned by some media here. He essentially told them the paper was BS. I don’t have my husband’s reaction yet because he is on the road. The culture conditions sound fishy to me.
foxmark writes
Those who have claimed the mantle of “anarchist” to act have included the assassin who killed President McKinley and many who made use of the newly developed high explosives to kill people randomly in the years before WWI.
Yes, today we call them terrorists. But they called themselves anarchists. And, since governments exist, the only way to end up without government is to destroy government. And when the people prefer governement to none, the way to do it is to so terrorize the people that they no longer trust the government to protect them and cling instead to the terrorists, thereby taking away the legitimacy of the government.
To have no government at all is to remove two of the basic functions of government: the holder of monopoly-in-use-of force and agent power in foreign affairs and the holder of monopoly power over the used of force in domestic matters. If there is no such monopoly, then everyone can use such force; if everyone can, then everyone must be prepared to; if everyone must be prepared to use force and there is no hope of a designated agent-of-force stepping in, then you have a powder keg that can be exploited by those who seek to grab all power for themselves.
waltj – The point that I was clumsily trying to make was that today’s political class would have found a way to mitigate the brutal attack. I have sat through lectures that make the U.S. response seem overly aggressive. I hope the generation that lived through this and met the challenge will continue to pass on their wisdom. It is a brave new world.
Gotcha, Rupert. Unfortunately, there are fewer of them around every day to pass on what they learned. The Reaper comes for us all at some point, and it’s that time for a lot of WW2 vets. And I agree that FDR’s muscular response to the attack on Pearl Harbor (completely appropriate, nay, obligatory, in my view) would probably not be matched today. I hope I’m wrong, but I fear that I’m not.