Ross Douthat had a pretty interesting take on Julian Assange and the method to his madness:
Assange, being a clever guy, is well aware of this reality; indeed, his own writings suggest that he’s counting on it. Like the Marxists of yore, he’s a heighten-the-contradictions kind of guy. Here’s his theory of what WikiLeaks might accomplish:
The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive “secrecy tax”) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption. Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.
The hyperbole of certain Republicans notwithstanding, Assange is not a terrorist. But he has this much in common with al Qaeda: In response to what they perceive as the inherent injustice of the American empire, both the jihadis and the Australian anarchist are willing to take steps that they know will make the United States more imperial in the short term — in Al Qaeda’s case, acts of terrorism that inspire American military interventions in the Muslim world; in Assange’s case, information dumps that inspire ever-greater secrecy and centralization in the federal bureaucracy — in the hopes that the system will eventually collapse under its own weight and “more open forms of governance” (or, I suppose, a global caliphate) can take its place.
The problem, though, is that the American national security state is almost certainly more resilient than either Assange or Osama bin Laden seems to think. Which means that their efforts at sabotage have little chance (by design) of prompting any actual reforms in the system they despise, a vanishingly small chance of actually bringing the whole thing to its knees — and a substantial chance of just making life worse for everybody, inside and outside the United States government alike.
It may be cathartic for critics of state power to cheer when Assange sticks an online thumb into leviathan’s eye. But WikiLeaks is at best a temporary victory for transparency, and it’s likely to spur the further insulation of the permanent state from scrutiny, accountability or even self-knowledge.
Because I am emo and pessimistic today, and because of the fact that the national security state has done nothing but gain power in the last few decades, I think Ross is right. What is unsaid, though, is what else can be done? The alternative is to do nothing.
Paula
Um, well, if that’s true, someone oughta tell Assange that unless the majority of Americans can make heads or tails out of anything that involves foreigners, he’s pissing into the wind.
LT
But I think the answer to that is in what I read yesterday I think (somewhere) about the difference between a state’s current government and a state. Bringing down an unjust regime does not at least necessarily bring down the state it occupies.
burnspbesq
Assange in effect is seeking political power without accountability. Fuck that and the horse it rode in on. And I would say the same thing if I mistakenly believed that Assange is a hero rather than a criminal.
ornery curmudgeon
Ross Douthat … really? Sully didn’t have anything to say?
freelancer
I, for one, await, with bated breath, the poetic call to action of matoko_chan imploring us all to find our beauteous youth and be haxxors. Of the mind and the brave new world. at thirteen o’clock.
LT
@Paula:
If Nixon had been exposed by ferners would it have mattered?
azlib
Of course Ross stole his thesis from here. I also think he is wrong. The power of Wikileaks will be more pernicious than people think. You can think of it as asymmetrical cyber warfare where you bleed your opponent with a lot of small cuts.
joeyess
Three words that have no business in conjunction with one another.
Never mind the conflation of Assange and al Qaeda, sprinkled with Marx.
In other words: Fuck Chunky BoBo and his “opinion”.
El Tiburon
Perhaps. Perhaps not so much.
Back in the day it was relatively simple to keep a document classified. Not anymore.
Instead of fearing Big Brother – maybe Big Brother should begin to fear all of the Assange’s out there. If Matthew Broderick can almost start WWIII, then perhaps it’s conceivable that NOTHING can be kept secret.
Facebook owns the world. We are all just looking for more friends.
LT
@burnspbesq:
I’m lost. Was that what Daniel Ellsberg was doing too?
Kaleb
what power is Assange seeking that he does not already have?
Paula
@LT:
Yeah. He would have stayed in office and avoided impeachment. Sorry, what country do you live in, again?
Captain Haddock
I just want to know what Lieberman’s staffers unearthed that prompted Joe to pounce.
General Stuck
This is precisely what I’ve been saying about Assange’s style. It is already happening that the US government is locking down with kyrpton all the secrets, and abandoning the expanded need to know relaxation first started from the 9-11 commission. Which will only empower more secret making that is much better protected. Assange needed to have a true smoking gun to generate genuine guilt of state authority over something substantial, which is the only way to get the results he says he wants. Like with the Pentagon Papers bringing major government lies out into the open. But I do believe Assange is smart and knows what he is doing, and it is nothing short burning it all down, to get his new world order, and make him a martyr in the process. It won’t work, and will hinder future leaks that matter.
I can’t believe I agree with Douthat. What a weird fucking day.
would you like a cookie senor Cole, and maybe a spot of tea to sooth our savage blogging souls. we are all emo in these new times.
freelancer
@Kaleb:
He wants Marvel-esque superpowers. Perhaps from a radioactive sandwich.
LT
So the world and all progress ends with this? Nonsense. They’ll learn to hide shit better, and people will learn to expose things better. So it goes.
edwin
Well – I see a couple of cables that will almost certainly be used in upcoming lawsuits against my government. The last one was settled for – 11 million I think. I bet the upcoming one will be more.
And to make matters even better, the government basically declared our judicial system to be the enemy.
It’s an ill wind that blows no good.
– faint hope from the colonies
Paula
@Captain Haddock:
Well, how low can you go? I mean, Jane Harman got caught in some shady phone conversations and got reelected as a California Democrat, and Eric Cantor went and spoke for the country’s Israel policy without so much as a censure from the State Dept or Obama. So if Joe found something bad, it must be REA-HE-HEALLLLY bad.
burnspbesq
@LT:
Ellsberg was a patriot trying to bring the country he loved to its senses. Assange just wants to break shit.
LT
@Paula:
Her. for a bit longer. And: Uh, well, if you say so.
AhabTRuler
Seems to me he’s saying that if you’ve done nothing wrong, you don’t have anything to hide.
Funny that.
Martin
The real question I think is how much of a transformative moment is this? Wikileaks is not happening now by accident – it’s something that is only now possible due to the incredibly low cost of bandwidth. 20 years ago how on earth would you have dumped 250,000 documents? You couldn’t have. You’d have to convince a NYTimes or WaPo to summarize that information and take the risk of blowing the company up by going up against the government – and both WaPo and NYT took that risk. But nobody needs to do that now. Zip them up, toss out a bittorrent file, and within a day you won’t even need to host the files any more – they’ll be fractionally hosted by thousands to millions of people, impossible to unplug.
But secrecy efforts (both governmental and corporate) never were designed to handle this. Nobody every considered you could, in a matter of a few hours, take *everything* silently out of an organization and send it around the world. They always counted on the sheer cost of labor and liability to protect their secrets. Little bits could get out, but mostly everything would have to go out as ‘reported’ and therefore deniable. No longer. And even individuals are starting to get it. College campuses now have a ‘cyber tattoo’ campaign going on, warning students that shit they put on facebook or twitter may haunt them forever – don’t document your bad acts.
So the risk of having bad acts documented has suddenly increased by orders of magnitude, not just for people but now for large organizations. The only real option for them is to either engage in fewer bad acts or massively reduce your documentation. I’m having a hard time not seeing this as a good thing.
LT
“Here. For a bit longer.” that should have read.
Midnight Marauder
I am pretty sure Osama bin Laden bitchmade the American national security state over the past decade. How much money has the ever resilient national security state sunk into catching him and trying to fight a fucking holy war?
FlipYrWhig
Where then shall Hope and Fear their objects find?
Must dull Suspence corrupt the stagnant mind?
Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate,
Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate?
Must no dislike alarm, no wishes rise,
No cries attempt the mercies of the skies?
Enquirer, cease, petitions yet remain.
. . . . . . . . . .
Pour forth thy fervours for a healthful mind,
Obedient passions, and a will resigned;
For love, which scarce collective man can fill;
For patience sov’reign over transmuted ill;
For faith, that panting for a happier seat,
Counts death kind Nature’s signal of retreat:
These goods for man the laws of heaven ordain,
These goods he grants, who grants the power to gain;
With these celestial wisdom calms the mind,
And makes the happiness she does not find.
Samuel Johnson, “The Vanity of Human Wishes.” Or, as George Michael would put it, you gotta have faith faith faith, you gotta have faith faith faith, baby.
arguingwithsignposts
@freelancer:
WEC cudlip.
burnspbesq
Ross isn’t going to know which end is up. Cited with approval by Cole and ripped to shreds by Sullivan, on the same day.
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/12/pwning-douthat-ctd.html
alwhite
Please rethink – there is no way on earth that Ross Asshat is ever right about anything. If he looked out the window ans said “its sunny out today” I would grab an umbrella because it sure as hell would be raining cats and dogs out.
If he is right about this it will be the first time EVER.
LT
@burnspbesq:
I’m guessing if Assange were American you’d find another reason to hate him. Am I right?
Martin
@General Stuck:
That’s effectively impossible. The problem the US government in particular has is size. Secrets do not scale. It worked for them in the past because the cost of finding a secret in the ungodly number of documents the government keeps was difficult. It was as much a security by obscurity policy as anything else. Once this information is electronic, it can grabbed in massive volume and processed in parallel.
No matter how hard they try to protect their secrets they will fail. Their only possible solution is to have fewer secrets to protect and entrust them to fewer people.
burnspbesq
@arguingwithsignposts:
You win.
bkny
too bad assange can’t wiki the current cable traffic/conversations; just imagine the pressures being brought to bear on australia, sweden and … ecuador (!!?!). like i said with his first dump, i was amazed he was still alive. i’m staggered now that he is — and what does that say about the abilities of the national security state. afterall, he’s not hiding in a fucking cave somewhere.
AhabTRuler
@Martin:
Isn’t this precisely the dynamic that has accompanied cameras in patrol cars and interview rooms? Fewer bad acts committed by police and increased evidence of bad acts by suspects and criminals.
joe from Lowell
Sometimes I think John’s journey from far-right to left consisted of consciously striving to become the stereotypical caricature of liberals he used to get so wound up railing against.
Paula
@Martin:
Yeah, but keep in mind that people’s expectations for information have evolved along with the technology. So Wikileaks exists alongside the glut of information available to everyone everywhere at any time that people quite easily take for granted.
And by “everyone”, I mean: a class of people who have money and time and education and interest to sift through thousands of documents like this. That leaves out people who may have access to this information but who are nevertheless still more interested in the Kardashian debit card drama. Never mind people who currently can’t have access to the internet.
So, you’re back to 2nd base, I guess: all this information is widely available, but unless you have a populace that can think critically about the information they receive and how it affects them, you still don’t have “awareness” and “knowledge”.
pugpapalee
Well, of course it is. But isn’t that Assange’s design? The less knowledge an authoritarian conspiracy, as he defines it, has about itself, the more disorganized and inefficient it becomes. Eventually it’s unable to function at all. Its power is, after all, derived from secrecy — and when the secret veil is pulled aside, the power to prevaricate and act against stated aims decreases, too.
Or that’s the theory, anyway.
He’s not looking to change the system by leaking things to prove one point or another. Or change this or that policy. It’s just showing he can paper the Internet with secrets — it’s that which, he hopes, will screw up the ever-present shadow corporatist-government that pretends to be a shining bastion of liberty, when underneath, mostly unseen (by design), it’s really just a corrupt shell, rife with stink and rot. Added bonus: As it shrinks from the light, it’s power grows smaller, because it’s not easy for corrupt conspiratorial cells to communicate with each other — to plan and promote bad policy.
It’s the Enron emails… but for government (and hopefully before it’s too late to save from itself?). Why is that a bad thing?
burnspbesq
@LT:
His nationality is irrelevant. I basically just don’t like megalomaniac punks who take the law into their own hands.
Zifnab
I was tempted to stop reading right there, but I continued…
… and paid the price.
Baby Bobo thinks an eleven digit deficit, a ten digit yearly military budget, and another nine digits of tax cuts are all self-sustaining now and forever. And that the national security apparatus we’ve been building up in the last decade isn’t deeply riddled with holes big enough to drive a Swedish Anarchist’s fifty foot internet penis through.
In a true national security state, what Julian accomplished shouldn’t be possible. The walls are crumbling. Assange is just the first barbarian we’ve seen make it through the gates. He’s damaging the national security state not simply by exposing this information, but by showing exactly how easily it can be exposed.
Assuming corporate raiders and free lance anarchists haven’t already sucked up dozens of data dumps just like this one, how soon until “Learn what the government is doing before they do” becomes a cottage industry?
Malron
We could try electing politicians that favor open government instead of a bunch of old weirdos we’d like to have a beer with or send starbursts through the TV screen and make our little puds flutter.
LT
@burnspbesq:
Except when it’s someone like Ellsberg.
LT
@burnspbesq: Hey, maybe the CIA should break into Assange’s psychiatrist’s office.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Can somebody clue me in as to what earthshaking revelations have come out of the wikileaks info dumps? Because I’m not seeing it. Isn’t that the real story here?
Back in 1908 the German Kaiser merely gave a spectacularly indiscreet public interview to the Daily Telegraph and nearly started WW1 six years early as a result, whereas today you can dump the dirty laundry of half the world’s diplomatic community out in plain sight and [wait for it.. wait for it..] nothing happens. It seems to me that this constitutes progress in terms of making the world a more stable and less dangerous place, but maybe I’m missing something.
Hawes
Again, Assange is not an anarchist.
He’s an anarcissist .
Kyle
@General Stuck:
But Tea Partiers hate big government! Surely they’ll address the rampant secrecy and authoritarianism of the US government?
Right after Bush is invited to join Mensa.
burnspbesq
@pugpapalee:
“Why is that a bad thing?”
Did you vote for Julian Assange?
General Stuck
@Martin:
Can’t find the article, but it said they are doing or trying to do just that. You are correct that once it is digitized in can be gotten to, but firewalls and passwords could have easily kept someone like Manning out the need to know for a particular set of classified documents. It will now more likely take some hacking, with a lot less folks in the need to know loop to get this shit from.
And you are also correct about the sheer volume of stuff that is classified, and shouldn’t be. Didn’t Obama sign a law about that recently? While I think there are instances, especially during Bush where political embarrassment, criminal behavior spawned some illicit classification, I think most of it is simply bureaucratic inertia moving in the direction of more is better by the main folks that do the bulk classification. Or, better to be safe than sorry if they made a mistake about something that should have been classified, and wasn’t/ The cables should have been classified though
joe from Lowell
Secretive and unjust are not morally-equivalent terms.
It does not make one a terrible person to want sensitive diplomatic reports to remain secret.
LT
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
You clearly don’t want to see anythign earthshaking, the same with all the others saying this. There are hundreds of thousand so documents, ferchrisake. We’;ve still got much more to learn.
For now:
azlib
@Martin:
Bingo! And with some anonymous proxies, encryption and other tricks, you can pretty much hide where the information resides from anybody. What is also interesting about this dump is he is pretty much leaving it to the readers to decipher what it all means.
I also suspect there are some big yawns among the 20 somethings about this, since as a group their sense of privacy is quite different than my own 60 year old self.
The Internet is truly subversive technology. And since you can run the TCP/IP protocol over just about any medium even efforts to shutoff sites like Wikileaks will fail. Clever people will just build their own shadow Internet or as Martin said just distribute the information across a set of bittorrent servers.
Paula
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
This is the third dump. I would call the material less consequential than the previous two given that the former were dealing directly with life-and-death decisions about combat and security strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan. And yet here we are with the same set of ignorant Americans who vote barely-functional sociopaths into office who like these damned conflicts and like funding them.
So, no, Wikileaks alone will not change things.
John Cole
@burnspbesq: Sully was right to rip him for that nonsense.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
These are unsupported assertions I’m not exactly sure how to respond, other than to call them unsupported assertions. Since we haven’t had a meaningful interlude of national self-reflection on the Security State in about 35 years, and since in that interval the Security State has grown more vast and less accountable, that would seem to contradict Douthat’s thesis.
Absent a compelling argument that Wikileaking will only make things worse what we are left with? That it might make things worse. But that’s an entirely empty thesis, since any initiative might conceivably make things worse. Myself, I default on the side of more knowledge rather than less, greater government transparency rather than less, and the compelling argument to the contrary needs to come from that direction.
freelancer
@Zifnab:
Hey kids! Look! It’s a new tag for all future WikiLeaks posts!
LT
@burnspbesq:
Strangest fucking comment. What does that mean?
Just Some Fuckhead
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Hello? Remember all the high level prosecutions that came out of the leaked Abu Ghirab photos?
Oh wait.
Nevermind.
schrodinger's cat
@John Cole: We need some Tunch pics to soothe our nerves.
Kthx.
salacious crumb
but the leaks will continue…not through Wikileaks perhaps as the government will hold on to make the information as secret as it can get.
i was watching an interview with Seymour Hersh where he basically said there were good many decent American citizens working for the Pentagon, CIA and State Dept who are disturbed by the extra judicial actions taken in their names who are more than willing to expose some of those nefarious activities to Sy and some of Pentagon’s best and smartest people have quit in disgust over what they see are morally unconscious acts committed in their names.
joe from Lowell
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Agreed. The biggest stories here seem completely harmless.
Pakistan okayed our use of strikes in their territory.
Yemen okayed our use of strikes in their territory.
Our allies in the Middle East want us to bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran, but we haven’t.
John Kerry does a lot of back-channel meetings aimed at promoting longshot peace conferences.
All in all, this latest dump tends to make our foreign policy look better.
Paula
Marxism does not equal everyone who opposes the state. A Marxist, for one thing, would probably realized that, in the context of the provincial American mind, these diplomatic cables mean nothing.
salacious crumb
@salacious crumb: i meant to say unconscionable…
LT
@joe from Lowell:
Wow. Just wow.
freelancer
If only the Balloon-juice readership could do something to Assange…Don’t tell me, gimme a minute, I’m sure it’s gonna smack me upside the head.
joe from Lowell
@LT:
Vapid. Just vapid.
I guess I don’t get to sit at the kewl kids table.
burnspbesq
@LT:
I’m guessing you weren’t around in 1971, because your lack of understanding of who Ellsberg was and what motivated him is showing.
When Ellsberg surrendered to the US Attorney’s office, he said, “I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public. I did this clearly at my own jeopardy and I am prepared to answer to all the consequences of this decision.”
If you can imagine Julian Assange saying or doing anything like that, your imagination runs in a very different direction than mine.
I think I know the difference between a hero and a punk.
burnspbesq
@John Cole:
Absobygodlutely.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Some folks are missing the 2nd half of the historical comparison I made above. The question I’m asking is: what govt.’s have fallen from power, which great power wars have started, triggered by the latest revelations? Back in 1908 the publication of this much secret diplomatic material would have had explosive results, both figuratively and literally. Today, not so much.
KCinDC
@LT:
I don’t know, but if Watergate happened today there’s no way Nixon would resign. It’s doubtful that Woodward and Bernstein would actually report the story, but if they did the right-wing noise machine would have them smeared beyond recognition in a day or two. The Very Serious People in the media would all tut-tut about the unpleasantness on both sides and say that while Nixon’s actions might be regrettable, this sort of thing happens all the time and we shouldn’t criminalize politics. IOKIYAR.
Mattminus
@burnspbesq:
Don’t criminals typically, you know, commit crimes?
joe from Lowell
@John Cole:
No kidding. Drone strikes are “arguably more troubling” than the torture practices under Bush – which he won’t call “torture,” but “enhanced interrogation.”
Nonsense indeed.
LT
@joe from Lowell:
Talk about vapid:
You’re going to get an education about that in the coming weeks.
burnspbesq
@Mattminus:
Yes. That’s sort of a tautology. But if you have a point you’re trying to make, you haven’t gotten it across yet. Care to try again?
General Stuck
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Of course Assange cannot bring down anything, other than maybe a regime in a democracy. Or, very unlikely, maybe ignite a war in some place of high tension already. But clearly, his massive ego does not compute that.
kdaug
@bkny: Killing the man doesn’t kill the new paradigm. The servers shift country to country, the new #2 takes the place, smaller outfits compete with the big guy.
Welcome to the world of the stateless actors.
edwin
Lets just say that the US relationship with Spain may not recover for a generation if not more. It might also severely damage relations with Germany – and perhaps even the rest of Europe.
I think that the US will become isolated – not because of secrets that European governments knew, but because now the people of Europe know them as well.
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/12/hbc-90007836
David Fud
1) Reducing the ability of the US to cajole, push, and browbeat our junior allies into giving us air cover for our unilateralist approach to foreign policy is a good thing.
2) Increasing the online infrastructure and thereby allowing for true protection for all kinds of leakers rather than the weak tea that our current laws and customs allow is a good thing. Citizens have a duty to understand what is going on in our country and in our world. Relying on our daddy-politicians to tell us what to think is a big mistake that is getting worse as the power of the executive branch increases over time. Wikileaks is one part of an antidote to that psychology.
3) I do not believe that any of the leaks released yet warrant their categorization as classified. The fact that these personality-oriented diplomatic leaks that are causing such a screaming fit just goes to show how like a two-year old the US is acting. Our ruling elite needs to grow up, and start treating its partners and citizens as grown-ups as well.
joe from Lowell
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Much of the difference stems from the greater level of dishonesty practiced by the German government in 1908 than the American government in 2010. Think about the Zimmerman Note – they were asserting their peaceful intentions towards the United States at the same time they were trying to form a military pact with Mexico aimed at fighting us. They were secretly ramping up for war against countries while smiling in their face.
In that batch of documents, what is there that shows that our government is so egregiously lying about its intentions? The big story out of these documents is that our secret foreign policy is pretty much the same thing as our public foreign policy.
joe from Lowell
@LT:
So, that’s two comments where you can’t back up your very strong feelings, but boy are they strong.
I see you’ve decided what you think, and are now waiting for a couple of weeks for other people to give you the talking points to back them up.
How boring.
LT
@burnspbesq:
They’re your fucking words. You said you didn’t like people who took the law into their own hands. Then you write this:
matoko_chan
@Cole, you didnt get my Brady link.
1. Douthat is a mysogynistic creeper and a graduate of the University of Wrong, like McArdle.
2. OBL succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. he destroyed our economy and our courage with one blow.
Could you please make a post about this article, and not Douthats subsapient partisan drivel?
This is what Assange wants to do:
This is how he plans to do it.
then we could actually discuss if what Assange is attempting is possible. We have a unique opportunity to see if it succeeds. Assange is a quellist i think. he seeks to redistribute power.
jg
Let the sunshine in!!!!
he is merely clever and causing rich fat-asses to squirm a bit. I’ll enjoy it while it lasts. Who knows, maybe Couric will find something interesting and make some anthill into this week’s shiny new ball for all the mouthbreathers to pearl-clutch. If it embarrasses someone who any other day thinks their farts smell like donuts?? Hoorah!
Wikileaks is turning into the one thing I can be somewhat happy abt with all the GoP bluffs and Dems panty-knots.
Plus you never know – something big MAY happen before the MSM can tell everyone to ignore it and move along. Imagine if Jim Garrison had the internet and hackers in 1967(?) when he was looking under the JFK/Dallas rocks.
US state secrets are likely hard to hack, but the corporate octopus needs some wise-ass poking with stick.
Help us Obi-Assange, you’re our only hope…
Paula
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
My comment to Martin would apply here too.
But to answer this in re to wars between countries, international alliances and global trade means that most of the conflict isn’t occurring between sovereign nation-states. By and large, sovereign nation-states want to be accepted into the global economy — not as “friends” or anything, but certainly as trading partners.
War really damages that shit, obv, so the real battle is against extremists who have no “official” national alliance. I mean, sovereign nations can use these guys as leverage (see: Al Qaeda and Pakistan), but the front of sovereign nation-states interacting peacefully with each other must prevail.
Internal coups on the other hand …. *shrug* .
General Stuck
Maybe he just wants to be a star. Then go supernova on all our asses. He is doing ok with that, so far.
LT
@joe from Lowell: Are you honestly unaware of what has been revealed already? Are you unaware that Turkey has actually filed suit against the US already?
And:
Let me predict your next move: You’ll explain how this is inconsequential. Please, go ahead.
joe from Lowell
@edwin:
But what is in there that the people of Europe didn’t already know?
Was the killing of the Spanish camerman by US shell fire unknown?
The torture of European detainees?
The use of European bases for renditions?
The cables that document bad behavior under the Bush administration seems to fill in details of stories that are already well known.
LT
Correction: Turkey has threatened to file suit.
General Stuck
@edwin:
nobody talks to the one who can’t keep a secret.
matt
The thing is that the US is rich enough to be relatively successful even while carrying enormous inefficiencies. See health care, defense budget. Perhaps the same is true of its brain. Assange might be misunderestimating the power of lots of stupid.
joe from Lowell
@LT:
Are you aware that this has nothing to do with what I wrote?
Here, try reading this again, and see if you can figure out why “Russia and Turkey are mad” is irrelevant to me:
OHNOES, Vladimir Putin is mad! How terrible that makes us!
edwin
The people didn’t know the collusion between the US government and their top court officers, including bringing false charges against prosecutors to prevent them from investigating the US.
read the link
joe from Lowell
@LT:
I love these attempts at pre-emption: “I can see that there’s a very obvious argument to rebut me. I think I’ll sneer at it in the hopes that it will make that argument seem disreputable. Aren’t I clever?”
Martin
@Paula:
Sure, and that’s much of the reason why these leaks aren’t so damaging. But what the public sees is less important here than how these organizations react to the risk of the public seeing it. They have no way of controlling what bit of information gets seized on once its out there. Sure, it might be overlooked, or someone might get ahold of it and shove it onto every newscast. That’s way too dangerous a game for most enterprises to tolerate.
matoko_chan
Douchehat even links the Brady article but obviously doesnt understand it. for example, Douchehat misses this paragraph, where Brady explains that Assange IS ALREADY SUCCEEDING.
Simon Jenkins is this guy.
how dare you link that assclown! all he does is lie and spin. the quote he used from Brady’s article says nothing about what Assange intends. why dont you just link McMegan?
I hate you all so much.
LT
@joe from Lowell:
You wrote, for starters:
If you think damaging relations with our allies – Russia especially – is “harmless,” then why the fuck am I talking to you?
But hey, joe from Lowell knows better than you!
schrodinger's cat
I refuse to read anything by the misogynist religious scold, Douthat.
joe from Lowell
@matoko_chan:
The legal concept of conspiracy has three elements:
multiple people working together
covertly
to commit a crime.
How does the revelation that the Syrians are listening to John Kerry as he tries to talk them into peace negotiations meet that third criteria?
Assaunge seems to be assuming that everything done covertly must necessarily be a crime, and that that covert nature of an act must necessarily be a bad thing.
What about cases, such as our government keeping it quiet that many Arab countries want to see Iran bombed, where there’s nothing nefarious whatsoever about the desire to keep a lid on the story?
Jay B.
@burnspbesq:
Like Presidents?
And for that matter, who elected Lockheed Martin? Or Xe? Who elected the energy companies who get to manipulate our market and buy our government? Who elected the Koch Brothers? Or hell, who voted for Citizens United?
It’s such a stupid argument. Sure all these other non-state, non-elected actors get unprecedented protections from the state and have enormous consequences on our lives — all done in secret or near secret and you simply could give a shit or conveniently ignore it to make some laughably old man comment about “punks who take the law into their own hands.”
What law? Torture conventions? International law? U.S.? We don’t follow the law in any meaningful way. We choose what to prosecute and what to follow. Our government certainly doesn’t give a shit about the law.
How would you handle a massive Security State which has eviscerated the 4th Amendment? Submit? Wait for an unelected hack court to rule on it? We’ve literally witnessed the complete breakdown on the rule of law. Sure there are cops and drug wars and all that other bullshit. But what law does our government believe in?
But that punk, with his computer!!!111!! Funny.
America is no force for good. Ellsberg knew this. Assange does too.
joe from Lowell
@LT:
Oh, I see. You just didn’t understand what I was saying.
Maybe, next time, you could just say that you didn’t understand what I was saying, rather than pumping yourself up into a righteous fury in your confusion.
Read it again. I’ll give you one last chance to prove you’re not an illiterate:
Did you understand this time?
No? You still think my comment is about the impact of this release on our foreign policy?
OK. That’s unfortunate.
Is there a question you’d like to ask me politely?
joe from Lowell
Here, I’ll even highlight the most important part for you:
Does that help clear it up for you at all?
edwin
Maybe part of the problem of seeing what difference these leaks will make is that it is being viewed from a strictly myopic US perspective.
The ability of the US to bully countries into submission is not the same thing as devotion to the US. Devotion to the US will also become a liability in future elections. A number of countries have functioning judicial systems that have the ability and the independence to provide lasting harm to relations with the US. Spain is very high on this list. Some of these countries, before the leaks did not have the independence – but the leaks will shift that balance of power I think.
The US is the country everyone loves to hate, and that hate just got a lot stronger in a number of countries – and most importantly – in Europe. Nobody likes to be humiliated – and that is exactly what the US has done to its allies.
There is so much emphasis on how all the countries know all this anyway. Secrets are not kept to keep other countries in the dark. They are kept to keep one’s own population in the dark. In the US, I don’t know how much it will matter. In a number of other countries, I think there is the real possibility of a destabilization of the current power structure, and serious lasting harm to US relationships.
Paula
@Martin:
So does it follow that the immediate reaction of the state is “let us all promise to stop doing bad things because there’s a chance we might get caught”?
I agree with the sentiment that it encourages the paradigm of State secrets to get even stronger.
Its not that I think bringing information to light is a bad thing. I agree with the first two Wikileaks dumps. But this third one as far as I can tell, has no point and it has the potential to make a hard job — diplomacy — harder. I don’t think it’s catastrophic or anything, but to be honest it really makes me question Assange’s real motives.
THE
@matoko,
When Wikileaks or its serious Chinese imitator takes down the Chinese security state, then I’ll be impressed.
Actually the most likely outcome is that these “security hackers” will be co-opted by the security agencies themselves
as they continue to escalate their spywars into cyberwarfare.
LT
@joe from Lowell:
Nope. Completely lost. I took this:
to mean that the biggest stories here seem completely harmless. I’m such a fucking dolt.
P.S. I called Russia an “ally.” Before somebody jumps down my throat – that’s a very loose use of the term.
matoko_chan
HOW DARE YOU LINK DOUTHAT !!
you didnt read the brady article and he cherry picked it to present it as Assange is a nutty liberal elite.
Assange is proposing information anarchy based on systems theory and information theory.
it is a an entirely NEW EVENT. a NEW PARADIGM.
and we get to fucking watch the field lab experiment.
GWAWD I HATE HOW STUPID YOU ALL ARE.
just kill me naow.
no moar desu.
>:(
joe from Lowell
@Jay B.:
And this is the problem with Assaunge and his fans: he, and they, don’t understand the difference between a good thing that America does, and a bad thing that America does. If America does it, they reason, it must be bad.
So, the administration not giving in to other countries as they try to get us to bomb Iran gets released along with, and therefore works to dilute the impact of, the genuinely embarrassing stuff discussing bad behavior, such as renditions.
This is why this dump is more like an attack on the United States than like the Pentagon Papers: the Pentagon Papers were a release of information designed to bring to light a specific pattern of bad behavior, so it can be changed. This dump throws out the baby with the bath water, with the apparent goal of hurting the United States’ capacity to engage in positive actions, just as much as negative ones.
Bob Loblaw
@LT:
Save your breath, LT. If it doesn’t happen in the United States, it doesn’t happen at all. Fuck Brits and Turks and Qataris, that shit don’t count.
I look forward to this board’s population continuing to tell us what worldly citizens they all are, though. And deep, nuanced thinkers who don’t need the media to condense stories down into giant, world shaking headlines to keep their attention for longer than 3.4 seconds. That too.
@burnspbesq:
Did you vote for the head of BP’s international exploration efforts? What about the CEO of DeutscheBank? Because those guys are way more important to international affairs than Julian Assange. But I’d bet 100 million dollars I’d never see you make that argument.
@joe from Lowell:
Yes, yes, he needs to be “tougher” (whatever that means) and more embracing of the state at all times, instead of this pussy-assed, blame-America-first hippie shit…
Uncle Clarence Thomas
@burnspbesq:
.
.
Fixed.
For the record, I don’t like megalomaniacal poltroons bloviating pure hypocritical balloonbagger horseshit talking points
on blogsanywhere. (Fixed myself.).
.
matoko_chan
@joe from Lowell: READ THE FUCKING ARTICLE GODDAMIT before you tell me what Assange seems to think.
matoko_chan
@joe from Lowell: READ THE FUCKING ARTICLE GODDAMIT before you tell me what Assange seems to think.
wengler
To the many “wikileaks is criminal!!” people on this thread:
Our economy doesn’t work.
Our military has been sent on an imperial mission that has no connection to the actual defense of this country our its citizens.
And yet there are people here calling Julian Assange a criminal and doing their best to shill for the security state.
Someone in this world needs to do something to shake up the imperial stranglehold of stupidity. Julian Assange and PFC Manning are goddamned heroes. Stop humping authority for a little bit to appreciate that fact.
Or don’t.
The crucial vital mission of the US government in the service of imperial power and the power of transnational corporations does nothing but destroy the many and help the few. Perhaps if you are in that few and also have sociopathic tendencies then outrage to these released cables is surely yours to have. But for the vast majority of people this is a challenge to that authority. One desperately needed especially for the enfeebled pathetic American public.
joe from Lowell
@LT:
OK, I’ll clear it up for you.
I’m not talking about the leaks not harming us.
I’m talking about the actions revealed in the leaks not being evil. Take a look at the examples I gave again:
and the conclusion?
It doesn’t make you a dolt that you didn’t get it the first time. It would make you a dolt to continue not to get it at this point, or to pretend to.
bjacques
@salacious crumb 56:
This. Most of the huffing and puffing over Wikileaks involves throwing around words like terrorism or invoking the Espionage Act, which both miss the point wildly. Wikileaks is first and foremost a secure site for whistleblowers, not spies let alone terrorists. They don’t pay, blackmail, flatter or make political appeals, which are the traditional methods for getting insiders to betray their institutions, companies or governments. (and they don’t post jihad videos either.) They simply present themselves as an anonymous drop for insiders who are pissed off or deeply bothered or both by what their bosses are up to, and they promise to release it in a timely fashion and without betraying the leakers. A lot of organizations have ombudsmen, internal affairs desks, whatever, but an employee knows that even if raising an objection results in sweeping changes, chances are good that he or she will be swept out as well. So, despair within the organization and hope outside it. That’s a powerful motivation. Douche-hat’s partly right, but the effects he mentions at the end will only make leaks more likely, which is Assange’s aim. And I agree with it.
That also means that, as the current public face of Wikileaks, Julian Assange should head straight for the Swedish embassy and face the court, taking one for the team as advertisement for the probity of Wikileaks. And, of course, the Russians are probably after him by now. They only need to snag one of his associates to torture and kill their way to him.
@46 General Stuck:
Another environmental factor is that the compartmentalization of “need to know” proved a hindrance in the months leading up to 9/11, and even before that the intelligence services realized they needed to pool their photo-gathering efforts into the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). Before that, the Jojnt Chiefs of Staff came out of the need for the different branches of the US armed forces to coordinate from time to time.
So secret organizations have a constant tension between the desire to protect secrets by compartmentalizing them, and the need to bring them together to combine, compare and evaluate them so as to form a picture that makes sense. An organization’s natural reaction to Wikileaks will be to reinforce the former at the expense of the latter. Which also further’s Assange’s aim.
joe from Lowell
@matoko_chan:
You mean the one I quoted to you?
If you’ve got a point about what I wrote, go ahead and throw it out there.
Jay B.
@joe from Lowell:
And you can’t tell the difference between “America is no force for good” and “America is always bad.” Obviously, many Americans think America is good. But it’s not. It, like most every other nation-state, is more or less a rational actor in that it acts in her own interests. Sometimes a rational actor’s actions are very good. Enlightened, even. Sometimes they are not. And sometimes still, they aren’t even rational (like, say killing countless Iraqis for some reason).
We, as the “informed” citizenry of said nation-state, should have some ability to judge, for ourselves, what these interests are and how they are defined. We looked for ways to NOT bomb Iran? Good! We told U.N. diplomats to spy on other U.N. diplomats? Bad!
But we aren’t allowed this information. Don’t you think it’s in our interest? Do you think that a Security State that spies on U.S. citizens doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt?
We are, without a doubt, a paranoid state. Maybe we have reason for it. Maybe we don’t. But the unknown is more corrosive than the known, IMO.
Martin
@General Stuck:
Ironically, I think this leak is the unintended consequence of Obama’s effort. Here, roughly, are the numbers as I understand them.
Between 1% and 2% of the US working population has security clearance to read the documents just leaked. Most don’t have physical access to the documents, but that’s how many people have low-level security clearances. In order to improve intelligence gathering and use, these documents are being expanded beyond the territorial security layers that previously existed so that probably almost everyone at State and DHS and the Pentagon had access to these documents.
Secret documents present conflicting demands. On the one hand, you classify them because you don’t want that information released, but you don’t destroy the documents because you believe it might be useful to someone. So you then have another problem to tackle – discovery. If the information is specifically useful, you can make the existence of the information known the people who need to know it and then lock it off only to them, with no further provision for discovery. Basically, nobody can learn that secret by accident unless someone who knows the secret reveals it.
If the information is potentially useful, like all of this shit is, then you need to have it open enough that people can search or browse for it, causing them to trip over all kinds of stuff that they didn’t intend to see.
So if you protect the secret too well, the secret no longer is useful. If you don’t protect it well enough, it doesn’t stay secret. For small amounts of information or small populations this isn’t a terribly difficult problem to solve. For large amounts of information and large populations, you’re fucked. It’s impossible. The only way to win is to not play.
Obama was responding to the problem that secrets were protected too well. Different agencies couldn’t see information that the other had gathered, and so intelligence failures resulted. A byproduct of this is that you get a massive duplication of intelligence which is not only wasteful in resources but also makes the problem of keeping the secrets worse, because now you have even more secrets. Obama was working to remedy that, and my guess is that this leak won’t change anything, because by all accounts we’ve had some pretty damn good intelligence successes as a result of this – and I think those successes will outweigh this embarrassment by a lot. What would be nice to see from Obama and Democrats is a retasking of government workers from some of this gathering (which is taking on Stazi-like scale, to be honest) to actually going through and reducing the volume of the secrecy stack and organizing. I know they’re doing this – they need to do it with real urgency now. They have so much shit they don’t even know what they’re at risk of losing.
Martin
@General Stuck:
Ironically, I think this leak is the unintended consequence of Obama’s effort. Here, roughly, are the numbers as I understand them.
Between 1% and 2% of the US working population has security clearance to read the documents just leaked. Most don’t have physical access to the documents, but that’s how many people have low-level security clearances. In order to improve intelligence gathering and use, these documents are being expanded beyond the territorial security layers that previously existed so that probably almost everyone at State and DHS and the Pentagon had access to these documents.
Secret documents present conflicting demands. On the one hand, you classify them because you don’t want that information released, but you don’t destroy the documents because you believe it might be useful to someone. So you then have another problem to tackle – discovery. If the information is specifically useful, you can make the existence of the information known the people who need to know it and then lock it off only to them, with no further provision for discovery. Basically, nobody can learn that secret by accident unless someone who knows the secret reveals it.
If the information is potentially useful, like all of this shit is, then you need to have it open enough that people can search or browse for it, causing them to trip over all kinds of stuff that they didn’t intend to see.
So if you protect the secret too well, the secret no longer is useful. If you don’t protect it well enough, it doesn’t stay secret. For small amounts of information or small populations this isn’t a terribly difficult problem to solve. For large amounts of information and large populations, you’re fucked. It’s impossible. The only way to win is to not play.
Obama was responding to the problem that secrets were protected too well. Different agencies couldn’t see information that the other had gathered, and so intelligence failures resulted. A byproduct of this is that you get a massive duplication of intelligence which is not only wasteful in resources but also makes the problem of keeping the secrets worse, because now you have even more secrets. Obama was working to remedy that, and my guess is that this leak won’t change anything, because by all accounts we’ve had some pretty damn good intelligence successes as a result of this – and I think those successes will outweigh this embarrassment by a lot. What would be nice to see from Obama and Democrats is a retasking of government workers from some of this gathering (which is taking on Stazi-like scale, to be honest) to actually going through and reducing the volume of the secrecy stack and organizing. I know they’re doing this – they need to do it with real urgency now. They have so much shit they don’t even know what they’re at risk of losing.
Corner Stone
@Martin:
Interesting point. I’m reminded of the recent govt actions to seize some 70 websites, some torrents and some only vaguely related to torrents.
joe from Lowell
@bjacques:
Agreed. Wikileaks isn’t required to keep the US government’s secrets for it. The leakers themselves, like this ambitious PFC who violated his confidentiality agreement, they might well have committed crimes, but this isn’t Britain, with its Official Secrets Act. The government is responsible for keeping its own secrets. Nobody except agents of the government itself has any legal duty to do so.
You’d have to show that Assaunge’s actions were part of some criminal conspiracy, which itself was a violation of some law, in order to conclude that Wikileaks committed a crime. If he was working with, say, the Iranian government or al Qaeda to pass some specific information to some specific group so they could use it to kill people, and this memo dump was the means to do so, then that would be a crime.
But a private person telling secrets, in and of itself, isn’t a crime in this country, and it shouldn’t be.
Corner Stone
@KCinDC:
If either were actually working as journalists at the time they’d both be captured by the system, wealthy and lazy.
No way they’d have followed some whisper to “follow the money…” Because they’d already know all about where the money led to.
LT
@joe from Lowell:
I appreciate you mellowing this shitstorm out. I’ll go along with that.
A couple things:
We can just disagree about that, although I wouldn’t use that term. As Greenwald pointed out, what HClinton appears to have ordered/condoned for her staff is illegal. If you aren’t bothered by the actions, illegal or not – that’s fine.
And the actions you picked – I agree, those ones DO make us look better. But isn’t that cherrypicking? They aren’t the only ones. The UN thing alone makes us look pretty fucking bad, I think, which doesn’t matter, but foreign officials also think, which does matter.
joe from Lowell
@Jay B.: The relentless negativity in your original comment, to which I was replying, seemed to indicate that you supported this dump on the same grounds as Assaunge seems to – for the purpose of dealing a blow to bad ol’ America.
If that wasn’t your intent, good.
I think there are legitimate, important reasons to keep back-channel diplomacy covert, not just nefarious reasons. I would have preferred that Assaunge act more like Ellsburg, and release information about genuinely bad actions.
edwin
I wouldn’t be surprised if the US had the world’s most open laws regarding free speech. Everything I have read so far indicates that wikileaks has not broken US laws yet.
matoko_chan
cant you retards even FUCKING READ? you just let pudgy reese witherspoon tell you whats in the brady article??
DOUTHAT IS LYING.
Assange is not proposing “death by a thousand cuts”.
He proposing a hundred leaks, a sort of infection with system paranoia. Every leak, while not damaging on its own, increases system lvl classification and slows and dumbs down the system. that is why the 250k diplo cables. the ginormous data dumps. the sheer volume of the emergency leak protection causes a security immune response. more and more material becomes compartmentalized and the system ossifies.
How dare you let that fucking moronic douchebag Douthat tell you what to think. you better believe he is in pantswetting terror over this whole thing. if Assanges experiment works, conservatism is dead.
secrecy and lying are conservatisms blood and breath. they cant control the base/populist tiger without misdirection.
joe from Lowell
@Martin:
What are you talking about?
What accounts?
What successes?
Please, expand.
matoko_chan
@joe from Lowell: you didnt read it.
Assange uses a systems theoretic definition of conspiracy. Assange’s conspiracy is secret keeping, data classification.
joe from Lowell
@LT:
I did say “all in all.” Obviously, in a giant dump like this, you’re going to be able to find something smelly. Still, I think the overall impression is a pretty good one.
I’m not sure that what Hillary ordered violates the relevant agreements. The details matter. Was she telling diplomatic-service people to open other gentlemen’s mail? Or just to take down their addresses? So to speak.
I do take your point that there are some things that have come out that are going to make other governments mad at us.
General Stuck
@Martin:
Thanks, as usual Martin, that has expanded my knowledge of this sort of thing.
Bob Loblaw
@Martin:
Like what, exactly? The lone Pakistani guy in Denver? Some random Al-Shabab guy in Somalia? The drone program?
Or is this just one of those things people say to give administrations of any partisan bent credit without having any idea whether they’ve successfully improved anything or not?
Edit: joe from lowell beat me to it
Paula
Or, various States will offer better money to former Wikileaks hackers to tell them how to protect themselves from leaks.
Or, the staff will be imprisoned and outside supporters threatened.
I’ll believe your new world order when I see it happen.
Calouste
@joe from Lowell:
That wasn’t unknown, but it was unknown that in the handling of that case the Spanish Attorney-General took orders from the US embassy, down to which prosecutors and judges to put on or remove from the case.
Martin
@Paula:
No, the immediate reaction will probably be ‘let us all promise to stop documenting bad things because there’s a chance we might get caught’. Nobody goes to jail for breaking the law. They go to jail because they leave evidence of breaking the law.
But even this is helpful. Large bad acts require documentation – lots of it. Large bad acts just got more expensive. Doesn’t mean they won’t do it, but making them more expensive is still helpful.
That would probably backfire. The problem with making secrets stronger is that it undermines the need to keep them useful. So, let’s say you decide the remedy to the problem of this low-level douchebag who leaked the stuff is to take all this stuff that was just leaked and kick it up a security level. Now most of the people that needed it can’t get to it, so you’re inevitably going to increase their clearance so they can see it, and now that same douchebag can get access to even MORE secretive stuff. The next leak becomes even more damaging.
You can try and erect all kinds of legal fences and make it so that you can haul Assange’s ass in on some kind of criminal violation, but once it’s out there, what good will that do? It doesn’t really solve the problem at all.
I don’t have a problem with it. Yeah, there’s a near-term cost, but it’s exposing a much more pernicious problem that hasn’t been dealt with in decades and which the government has zero incentive to solve without incidents like this happening. Secret material is leaked left and right. It flows between governments and corporations like water. Everyone but voters has access to it.
I don’t see the diplomatic damage. China would be okay with a unified Korea under Seoul? BFD. They’re not willing to do anything about it and there’s no pressure on them because that information wasn’t public. Everyone wants to blow up Iran and blame the US for it? Well, we just went through this diplomatic bullshit charade when we got everyone to line up to go into Iraq and what has that cost us. Can we at least look at the case for Iran with eyes a bit more open? Half the planet wants to nuke them and leave us holding the bag. How about the US voters not encourage that this time.
Sure, Europe will be pissed at us a bit, but so what? They’ll still work with us on things that matter. We’re still the ones willing to do their dirty work and the ones that hold all the cards. And if they’re pissed enough to not buy our bullshit the next time we want to do something stupidly adventurous, all the better.
Bob Loblaw
@Calouste:
Shorter joe from lowell:
“Well, of course the Obama administration has been illegally tampering with Spanish and German investigations into the Bush torture state! What do you think they are, amateurs?”
burnspbesq
@LT:
To whom is Assange accountable?
THE
@matoko_chan:
Assange’s experiment won’t work. It’s silly to think that in this day of growing AI, they won’t find mathematically optimal tradeoffs between leaks and compartmentalization.
More and more of the data organization and categorization is being done by the software.
Can’t you see how clever Google is getting, not to mention all the even-more cutting edge stuff.
If you were talking about human intelligence being overwhelmed there might be some truth to what you are saying, but the human/AI hybrid is getting smarter all the time.
General Stuck
@bjacques:
While I agree with this, I cannot see how what has transpired so far, with these massive low level secret releases, it all furthers Assange’s aims. It just seems scattershot, and released for the simple reason this was what was given them. I see no method or aim in that.
Chris
I don’t know where the fuck this guy’s been hiding, but al-Qaeda’s plan worked like a charm – the U.S. launched not just one but two wars against Muslim-majority nations, stretching its own military commitments to the breaking point and giving al-Qaeda the clash of civilizations and the greatest recruitment tool they could have asked for.
That they fucked it up, especially in Iraq, is a testament to their own spectacular insanity – not the “resilience” of the American system.
Jay B.
@joe from Lowell:
Assaunge seems to – for the purpose of dealing a blow to bad ol’ America.
If that’s what you want to take away, great.
Personally, I think, right now, America as a superpower is an overall detriment to the planet and its citizenry. We’re armed to the teeth. A hyperpower which routinely ignores International treaties and laws, while maintaining a crippling military empire around the world. An oligarchy whose ruling elite lowers their taxes while squeezing the people for every cent, while providing diminishing services AND relying on a corporate system to keep track of us or misinform us. As well as a nation that sucks down a vast amount of the world’s resources and pollutes the shit out of the planet.
China is nearest to us in scope and influence and they are a nightmare of a different dimension, but one we strive in many ways to emulate, rather than stand opposite from. Neither country serves the vast majority of its citizens needs and are problematic.
So take away from that what you want.
This is an over generalization. But not by much. The bright spots are few. America and Americans could be much better off — the first step is to stop what’s killing us.
Justin
Right, because the consequences of Wikileaks will be a meta-sizing of America’s shadow government and security state, those basta – oh right.
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/
Wikileaks and this pushback against the security state are the effects of massive secrecy, not its cause.
General Stuck
@Martin:
I don’t know Martin, seems to me the really nasty secrets we have are already compartmentalized to the max, and is really a separate issue from what we are dealing with here. Showing our warts, that every country has, albeit commensurate with our size, influence, and standing in the world, doesn’t do much to further any cause other than causing temp headaches for us and others. And to make folks tighten up more. Until, or unless, somebody inside the small circles of highly classified info spills the beans like with the Pentagon Papers, this shit doesn’t do anyone much good, seems to me. Other than maybe put a target on Mr. Assanges back.
Maybe there is some grand game of Risk he has figured out, pulling strands of yarn from the world’s power matrix, that will realize his lofty goals, but it is beyond my capacity to see it, if it exists.
joe from Lowell
@Bob Loblaw:
Would you mind citing the relevant law?
burnspbesq
@LT:
If you can’t understand the difference between Ellsberg and Assange, there is no hope for you.
Jay B.
@burnspbesq:
To whom is the Fed?
I suppose accountability is only for those who oppose unchecked power. Not those who wield it.
joe from Lowell
@Jay B.:
Uh huh. But if I “take away from that” that you’ve got a problem with America, one that’s best solved by haring it, that’s on me.
Hokay.
Personally, I think that the best way to deal with America’s problems is to reform those problems, not deal broad blows to America as a whole.
Choosing to walk away from foreign adventures, reducing the suppression of political dissent, expanding civil liberties, taking a more ethical position on the distribution of resources – these are the actions of confident, stable nations, not frightened, besieged nations.
burnspbesq
@matoko_chan:
I love the reference to Assange’s ethics, because it leads directly to the question for which you have no good answer:
What gives Julian Assange the right to impose his ethics on hundreds of millions of people who have the inherent right as human beings to choose for themselves?
Jay B.
@burnspbesq:
Does Ellsberg?
He’s such an asshole, how dare he celebrate Assange narcissism like that.
Calouste
@Bob Loblaw:
The cables in the Spanish case happened under Bush, according to El Pais (in English).
Will be interesting to see what the fall out is in Spain because the government (the Soci_alists that pulled Spanish troops out of Iraq) that was so compliant to the Americans on that are still in power.
Calouste
@burnspbesq:
I guess that comment loses the internet for the day.
Jay B.
@burnspbesq:
The choice for their government to hold secrets from them was enshrined in the Bill of Rights, of course. So glad you’re on the side of the people here.
@joe from Lowell:
BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. One of the problems is a vast secret state in desperate need of reform and sunlight. And not only haven’t we “reformed” those problems, we are moving quickly away from even barely addressing them.
And we are an unbelievably frightened nation in no small part due to a terrible government and an electorate that is kept ignorant.
burnspbesq
@Jay B.:
If you don’t want to answer the question, don’t answer the question. The fact that you are changing the subject suggest that the answer to the question makes you queasy.
The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System is appointed by the President of the United States, by and with the consent of the United States Senate. If you are age 18 and a citizen of the United States, you get to vote for President every four years, and get to vote for two Senators every six years. That’s called accountability.
Who appointed Julian Assange? Who gets to vote on what he chooses to do?
burnspbesq
@Calouste:
That’s awfully lame. Answer the question, if you can.
Jay B.
@burnspbesq:
It’s because the question is completely stupid.
He is not a government. He is a private actor. His actions are open to the law. If they can catch him, they can arrest him and even try him, if they think he’s broken the law. How is that not accountability?
And yes, I know technically there’s some “democratic” underpinnings for the Fed. You really believe that there is some correlation between electing the President and the Fed’s policies? If so, then it’s clear that Obama is to blame for the Fed’s cruel and heartless actions.
burnspbesq
@Jay B.:
You’re babbling. Take a deep breath, gather your thoughts, and try again.
Chris
@joe from Lowell:
I don’t know if I’m as skeptical as Jay B, but I tend to agree with the overall assessment that I don’t see those changes, however necessary they are, taking place in the foreseeable future.
And it’s a damn shame. I don’t want America to keep going on down this road, I think a Chinese run world would be even worse, and I agree with you that simple reform is the best way to address it. I just don’t think it’s going to happen, given the state of politics right now (both in government and in the electorate).
Jay B.
@burnspbesq:
Answer my question. You seem to think that because he’s not elected and therefore unaccountable he shouldn’t…what exactly? There are thousands of unelected people who have done things that have affected the lives of millions of people whether they wanted it or not.
And in no way are the people comparable, but of course, everything you just whined about “unelected” “unaccountable” “his own ethics” could be used to describe Martin Luther King. Or, for that matter David Koch. What’s your point?
burnspbesq
@Jay B.:
“If so, then it’s clear that Obama is to blame for the Fed’s cruel and heartless actions.”
That is exactly correct. Obama is responsible for the Fed’s actions. And if you believe that those actions are bad for the country, that is an entirely rational and defensible reason to not support Obama’s re-election.
Julian Assange is fucking with the world in ways that I don’t approve of, and I don’t get to not support his re-election. That’s the point I have been trying to make.
Martin
@General Stuck: Well, there’s two subtleties here.
1) Even the secrets we have compartmentalized largely aren’t secret. They’re secret from the public, but not from foreign nations. Secrets are flowing wholesale across nations. No nation was in the dark regarding Iraq – not even Iraq. The only people in the dark were those outside of the levers of power – and so the public in the US and Britain and other nations were the only ones that really didn’t know what was going on.
2) Even in the case where the public does know what’s going on, that information comes digested. Quite a lot of us knew the score with Iraq. Reporters brought us the information, but because we didn’t have the raw evidence, it became debatable and easier to dismiss. And so even though half the nation didn’t believe that Iraq had WMDs and were helping Al Qaeda, they had no evidence to point to other than the reporting of various people, and to this day half the nation still believes that Iraq was involved in 9/11. If those kinds of embarrassing communications between the US and Britain and other partners were released in the raw, no nation have actually learned anything new at all. They’d all profess that they did, because they had to, because they’re now caught in the same lie, but the problem isn’t that new information has surfaced rather that evidence now exists that can’t be spun away.
We live in a hearsay world. The absence of shared facts is literally killing this nation. We need something real to point to get this country working and governments and corporations can do this voluntarily, or it can be done for them.
tkogrumpy
I apologize for not reading this entire, very interesting thread. I believe the particular items released in these document dumps are irrelevant. They were released not for what they reveal, but because they were classified. the purpose of their release is not to expose secrets, but to provoke a reaction from the offending governments. As long as there are people who care about what is right there will be leaked documents. This governments actions have generated enemies from without and within. The existence of Wikileaks is 100% the responsibility of our corrupt failed press, media what ever you want to call it in the 21 century. Given a functioning press Wikileaks could not exist.
trizzlor
I think wikileaks taps into another aspect of modern culture that hasn’t been discussed and that’s the kind of “We live in public” attitude that’s fostered by facebook and twitter. Sites like Cryptome and The Smoking Gun (to a lesser extent) have been doing this sort of thing for over a decade now, but what Assange is doing differently is releasing each leak in a very media-centric way: slowly putting out the dumps to major newspapers only, specifically highlighting the most damaging bits, scripting and editing videos for press-conference and immediately for YouTube. The first thing you see on the Wikileaks page is that it’s a non-profit media organization, and that’s exactly why it’s been so successful.
Couple the increased dependence on technology, more readily available anonymity, and a massive ego-based culture that yearns to be heard, blogged about, and on TV – and there’s no way incremental security-tightening is going to keep up with that.
Martin
@burnspbesq:
I don’t understand where this is going. Assange, by all accounts isn’t being selective about what is released, other than to apply some reasonable standards to protect individuals. But he’s not releasing some documents that he feels advances a cause and not others that runs against it. He’s simply putting factual information on the record and allowing people to draw whatever conclusions he wants from that.
In that way, he’s doing nothing different than what any media outlet does – none of whom are elected either. But the media as a regular matter does draw conclusions on our behalf. They do release some and not other information. They don’t dump 250,000 documents on us – they pick the ones they feel ‘matter’ and just give us those. That is an imposition of some arbitrary standard. It might be a good or bad standard, it might be biased. But we don’t know because we don’t know what we weren’t given. And they release anonymously sourced and secret information all the fucking time, and they always have.
Assange avoids that problem by giving us everything. He’s not deciding what matters or not. He’s just burying us in information and letting us to decide for ourselves. If Assange is violating some ethical standard, then the media has for all time violated that standard to an ever higher degree.
Here’s a cool article (apologies on a link to Fox News) on the Stuxnet worm and what we’ve learned about it, along with implications that it was a military weapon designed by the US, Germany, and Russia.
Any guesses how deep the state secrets lake is being plumbed in that article?
burnspbesq
The analogy between Ellsberg (or King) and Assange is false.
Ellsberg and King were working from within a system whose fundamental legitimacy they accepted, to attempt to change it incrementally. They understood that they were breaking the law, and they were willing to go to jail to make a point about the illegitimacy of the laws they chose to break. Their actions are entirely consistent with small-d democratic principles.
Assange has set out to place himself outside and above the laws of all states, and his stated goal is not to reform, but to destroy. He denies the legitimacy of everything.
gwangung
@Martin: That we live in a hearsay world is a byproduct of authoritarian forces, not a cause. We have been brought to this because sizable portions of our society DON’T WANT TO KNOW and will reject anything that counters their worldview. See deniers of evolution, climate change, CFC and simple, obvious birth announcements.
If they’re going to reject science that’s inconvenient, there’s nothing WIkileaks can do to remedy that. They’ll just dismissed as partisan hackery (no matter how well supported), and that’s that.
tkogrumpy
@burnspbesq: I don’t know where you get that from. Has he broken some law i’m not aware of? Just exactly what is he out to destroy?
dslak
What’s the relevance of whether Assange is elected or not? The purpose of elections, at least in the ideology of the Founders, was to provide a a means of accountability for the state. It’s not based simply upon influence or power. We don’t vote for the CEOs of corporations, even very large ones, and this is just an accepted fact of modern society.
As for a negative impact on America, many Americans probably haven’t noticed this, but US foreign policy of late has been having a deleterious effect on the freedom and security of people who aren’t Americans. Most of those people didn’t vote for anyone in the US government. Speaking of which, did Spain and Germany elect the US diplomats who interfered in the functioning of their judicial systems?
In short, talk about Assange not being elected to office is a red herring. Elections are not the only form of accountability, nor does their mere occurrence result in accountability (noticed any admitted, American war criminals on trial lately?).
Martin
@trizzlor:
Well, I think that’s a defensive move, personally. Among other things, Assange has been willing to work with various parties to protect individuals in these documents. That puts the Pentagon and State with an interesting choice – do they make a faustian bargain with Assange, tolerating these dumps but ensuring that the most sensitive information gets redacted, or do they turn their back on Assange and run the risk that these dumps go out without redaction and wind up being far more damaging as a result?
I think Assange is angling to be the NYT of this trade. Nobody wants to have their story exposed, but if it has to be exposed, let’s at least have it happen in a more responsible way. And I think that’s why I think the regular media outlets are also jumping in here. He’s aiming for legitimacy and he’s largely getting it. If he can get the government to accept him as a lesser evil, then he’ll be protected. It’s a ballsy thing, though.
Mo's Bike Shop
Do nothing. The luddites are self-pantsing.
tkogrumpy
@dslak: Perfect.
burnspbesq
@Martin:
You’ve missed the point. For Assange, wikileaks is a means to a larger end. He has a philosophy of how the modern state should be organized and function, and all of his actions are designed to make it impossible for states to be organized and function in ways of which he disapproves. He is, explicitly, a political actor, attempting to rip out the established order by the roots and replace it with something else. And if you don’t like what he’s doing, in his mind that’s just too bad.
That’s a little different than Rupert Murdoch, who really only wants to get richer.
tkogrumpy
@Martin: The Pentagon has already rejected that bargain I believe and the NYtimes is dead. It just doesn’t know it yet.
tkogrumpy
@burnspbesq: I believe you have missed the point. This is not about Julian Assange it is about the collapse of the press in the U.S. Something like Wikileaks had to arise to deal with the lack of transparency and lawlessness and accountability. As the man said how many self proclaimed war criminals have been brought before the bar.
Corner Stone
@burnspbesq:
And it’s a damned stupid one.
trizzlor
@Martin: I think self-defense can certainly has a lot to do with it from his perspective. But I’m just baffled as to why it took so long for this kind of service to get big, particularly in the context of Cryptome (which, ironically, released a bunch of anti-Assange stories recently). And it’s clear that the Wikileaks approach has a much stronger emphasis on theatrics compared Cryptome’s no-nonsense endless river of secrets. Working within the media structure as opposed to completely circumventing it doesn’t change your status in the eyes of the government, but it does make you more attractive to potential leakers. Heck, even the guy who leaked the War Logs got caught because he was bragging about it.
The Moar You Know
FWIW, I think y’all are being way too hard on mahoko_chan. He/she/it is just caught up in the excitement that we’ve all felt at some point in our lives, that there was this incredible new technological/social/political development that was going to revolutionize the world, bring down the evil oppressors, and restore human decency and kindness.
The reason, mahoko_chan, that so many on here are treating you with scorn if not outright abuse is twofold:
1. You can’t write a coherent sentence to save your life. This counts when attempting to persuade others.
2. We’ve all been here before, and we’ve all felt that shame and pain of the dream dying as we watched the social/technological/political “sure thing” go down in a blaze of failure, death and blood. My wife, no idiot she, was convinced last year that Twitter was going to overthrow the Iranian government and lead the “green revolution” to victory. We all know how that turned out. The hippies thought they had a path to world peace. We’re still punching them for their failure to bathe forty years later. Turns out people need baths to get along.
Change happens, sometimes via one of these change agents, usually as a result of agonizingly slow changes in knowledge and attitude. It never comes fast enough for the young and often comes far too fast for the old, who have adapted to the circumstances of their present hell on earth, in much the same way that we get used to a lumpy old recliner, finally declaring it our favorite even though it’s shoving our spines out of alignment.
Be nice to mahoko_chan, if you can find it in yourself to do so. He/she/it is about to go through the biggest let-down a human being can experience. Don’t make it harder than it has to be.
wengler
@burnspbesq
The difference between Assange and Ellsburg is that Ellsburg leaked highly classified secret government documents while Assange helped distribute lowly classified cables leaked by someone else.
Who told me this?
Well, Ellsburg of course in an interview he had on Democracy Now! on Monday.
DLT
As mentioned by mahoko_chan and others, Douthat is basically reiterating Zunguzungu’s incisive essay. (Btw, the academic’s name is Bady, not Brady). Douthat’s column linked to the Zunguzungu piece under the “he’s counting on it” phrase. I’d rather see a discussion of Zunguzungu’s take rather than it filtered through Douthat. The original post is here: http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/julian-assange-and-the-computer-conspiracy-%E2%80%9Cto-destroy-this-invisible-government%E2%80%9D/
Maude
@burnspbesq:
#166, I’m tired so bear with me.
Assange didn’t do this for the public. Not in any country.
He has an agenda and part of it is to undermine any government that he feels is not doing what he thinks it should.
The content of the dumps is a separate issue from the action of providing a site where secret information can be displayed.
If he had gotten everyone’s medical records and posted them on the web, there would be, I imagine, real outrage.
Assange isn’t a US citizen trying to rectify wrongs done by the US government and prevent such things from happening in the future.
He is trying to undermine elected government. This time it’s the US. He has no respect for the people in this country. He is calling us stupid fools because we trust our elected officials.
Also, he does this because he can.
General Stuck
@burnspbesq:
After reading some of Assange’s statements, which are really nothing less than manifestos of personal political intent, at least to me, I fully agree with this statement. His game is destabilization, any way he can, creating the opportunities for a different form of world governance and interaction through a degree of creating chaos and dysfunction. IMHO.
Some of his goals may be laudable, and I might even agree with a few. But his methods are unsound and cathartic in nature, that seem to be based on some version of the Phoenix bird rising from the ashes, or at least two alarm fire.
Martin
@burnspbesq: I still don’t see the distinction. Every lobbyist is an example of an organization applying their vision of government on the populace. Every media head is as well.
Assange is applying a rather old adage of ‘information wants to be free’. You can disagree with that, but even if Assange wasn’t doing this, Wikileaks and similar sites would be proving the adage. Rupert is pursuing a different one: ‘all information ought to be monetized’. Along that way he’s perfectly content to try and reshape government to his own view as well. His motives might be different, but his outcomes are the same – and in the case of Murdoch, the outcomes are arguably worse because we don’t know what’s been left out of the record.
Assange is presenting a challenge to all organizations – and its one that has existed for some time, just not as clearly expressed – and that is that information gets out. As I’ve noted, those secrets have been getting leaked forever. Wikileaks is no more damaging than a comparable leak to the Russians or the British – the only difference is that it’s a leak not excluded to governments but a leak that is open for all to see. Nothing has changed here. Nothing is getting out that wasn’t getting out before. No government learned anything new here. If Wikileaks wasn’t there, the guy who took this information would have released it to someone else – and in the past that was a foreign government. The only difference is that the public is now the beneficiary. I don’t quite understand why secrets released to the public is somehow more ‘political’ than secrets just released to foreign governments.
Sure he might have motives, but those motives are negated by the fact that he’s taking information that’s already out there (let’s not lose sight of the fact that he didn’t take the material) and simply handing it to the full public.
Martin
@General Stuck:
My argument is that this is already happening, it’s just happening outside of the view of the public. Every nation bullshits every other nation and, separately, the populace of every other nation. Everyone is trying to destabilize to their own gain. Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Cuba, even Canada if you read the documents. The US and Canada are gaming each other. Nobody is exempt here.
The goal as I read it isn’t so much to destabilize governments in the way that governments seek to destabilize each other, but to undermine that effort. By forcing information into public view, the ability to dick with governments and with the public is reduced.
Assange isn’t seeking this information as far as I can determine. He’s merely the conduit for it. That information would be getting out regardless. It may not become public, but it’d be getting directed to various agents based on a far more specific goal. And Assange has no way of knowing if that isn’t also happening. What gets leaked about middle east cables could also be going to Israel or Iran as well as Wikileaks. Well, now it’s going everywhere. Anyone who might have been getting that info before is still getting it, but anyone who might have been cut out of that info (including the US knowing what was leaked) is also getting it.
matoko_chan
i simply cannot believe Cole et al are going to shut up and swallow Douthat.
Douthat said the OPPOSITE of what Bady’s article says.
Douthat SAYS Assanges experiment CANT work and dismisses it.
the article he links by Aaron Bady says it already IS WORKING NAOW.
un-fucking-believable.
“we will never again be able to practice diplomacy like before,”
that sounds like results to me.
General Stuck
@Martin:
Sorry, don’t see it your way. too many assumptions for me to swallow about who sees our classified info. I will study up on it though/
matoko_chan
@burnspbesq:
but only unjust regimes are vulnerable to Assange’s paranoia frag bomb. that is the beauty of the design.
the level of injustice perpetrated by the regime correlates directly with the destruct power of Assanges systemkiller.
it is a quite elegant solution to power accumulation and overclassification and coverup. i dont know if it will work– but we get to seeee.
we are the field lab.
matoko_chan
soonergrunt, i hope you see this.
i apologize.
Manning could have had access to all the wikileaks accumulated releases in one SECRET lvl SCIF.
i was wrong.
you an’ i have different customers, different levels of access, and different theaters. your experience is much more accurate in the context of Manning’s facility.
i think…your lvl of access does not require poly….is that correct?
THE
Well, I’d certainly say hackers will have more job openings in the future and cyberwarfare is a growing career path.
I will take him seriously when he attacks China.
Attacking the USA is like attacking your aging grandfather who used to be a prizefighter in his twenties.
Just Some Fuckhead
@The Moar You Know:
OMFG, yer married to Sully????
matoko_chan
@The Moar You Know: do you think i will be let down if Assanges experiment fails?
But is has already partial positive results.
its quellism in action. im living my favorite scifi novels. :)
im having a blast.
and if it all goes south, meh….im still a teenage anarchist.
i will survive.
;)
matoko_chan
@Just Some Fuckhead: i thought that too. but twits are not hackers. if the Green Wave had hackers instead of twitterers, they would have overcome.
@THE: no….the US is the perfect field test, because the US pretends to be just while actually being unjust.
China does not give a shit about pretending to be just.
But China is next if Assanges paranoia frag bomb works. they are paranoid…..also the logistics of language. sadly, chanese is not the same as chinese.
Martin
@General Stuck: But the problem that intelligence presents is that it’s not like a commodity that you can just add up. The absence of information, even the absence of knowledge that information has changed hands, has value.
Consider that you tell me a secret about something you don’t want burnspbesq to know about. There’s several possible scenarios here:
1) I keep the secret.
2) I tell burnspbesq the secret and you don’t know.
3) I tell burnspbesq the secret and I inform you of this.
4) I don’t tell burnspbesq the secret, but I inform you that I did.
5) I tell burnspbesq the secret and I don’t inform you of this, but you learn about somehow.
6) I tell burnspbesq that I have a secret that you entrusted to me, but I don’t reveal what that secret is.
7) I tell burnspbesq some part of the secret or I misrepresent the secret.
8) I tell Corner Stone the secret anticipating that he’ll tell burnspbesq.
There are some other variants, but that’s a pretty solid start. The end state of each of these scenarios will probably be different. In some ways you may want to head off a situation, in others I may just be baiting you to reveal it yourself. In some I may be able to reveal the information and claim innocence. Reactions to my role will vary from case to case, and your reaction would vary as well.
My point is that with your secret, you’ve lost control of the outcome. I have almost complete control. I can manipulate pretty much any party in a manner that suits me – but most importantly I can manipulate you. And the scenario that is probably most damaging to you is for me to pass it on without you knowing. That would then allow burnspbesq to manipulate you as well.
And when a secret is taken, as these are, nobody knows where they’ve gone. Maybe everyone gets the information except for the US – they don’t even know it’s gone. But Assange really has no way to know, nor should he make any assumptions.
If Assange was selectively revealing this info I’d be much more critical of him and his motives. But he’s not. It goes full public. Everyone, including the people that lost the information get to see what’s lost. Nobody, including the public, is left out.
THE
China will only be attacked if Chinese hackers do it.
If they imitate Wikileaks.
If they are willing to die and have their organs recycled for spare-part surgery.
Corner Stone
@Martin: This may be the most cruel thing ever said about me on this blog.
Martin
@Corner Stone: Yes, I worried when writing it that I had gone over the line. Then I realized that we have no line here. Suck it up, man.
Corner Stone
@Martin: You can call me whatever you like. But associating me with the execrable burnspbesq is definitely a bridge too far.
It’s like getting hit with an ice cold douche!
Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
“Obama was working to remedy that, and my guess is that this leak won’t change anything, because by all accounts we’ve had some pretty damn good intelligence successes as a result of this – and I think those successes will outweigh this embarrassment by a lot. ”
Err, no. I imagine the State Dept are wondering WTF they ever put their cables where some wanker of an E-2 could fuck up decades of diplomatic work by GS-15’s.
Let’s be clear here, Manning and Assange have shat all over the State Dept’s mission. And for anyone with an eye for inter-agency rivalry within the federal government, weakening the State Dept ain’t what progressives should want to do.
The 9/11 commission wanted to get rid of the silos for information. But I suspect that given the size of the leaks, and assuming there’s no technical solution in the works, the solution within the government will be “fuck that sharing information shit, especially with the fucking DoD.”
It’s nice to help other agencies with their mission, but if there’s a 0.1% chance of that screwing with your agency’s mission, they’ll cut the information flow.
Which will compromise our security. Really.
Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
“i think…your lvl of access does not require poly….is that correct?”
Hey, we’re all impressed that you have access to shit we don’t have, but I don’t think that you having that access should be plastered over this blog.
In other words, show some fricking discretion.
DPirate
He’s right and wrong. Resilient in that airing the dirty laundry won’t force internal change, but wrong as shown by the response to not only leaks but any criticism which demonstrates how fragile the internal culture perceives itself to be.
matoko_chan
@Sock Puppet of the Great Satan: i dont have any access. i quit.
@DPirate: we dont know yet. But the Bady article Douchebag linked says Assanges experiment is already showing results. if any of you read it…..
HAAY JUICERS!
Know wat? This place IS the low rent Atlantic. Cole just approvingly linked Pudgy Reese Witherspoon Douthat, the same teabagging assclown that told us Dr. Tiller’s death was our fault because we wouldnt overturn Roe to make the life warriors happy.
/spit
You all just let Douthat tell you what to think.
Shut up and swallow, cudlips.
Calouste
@burnspbesq:
Refridgerator.
matoko_chan
heres My Letter to Andrew, but it could be to all of you cudlips too.
THE
@Sock Puppet of the Great Satan:
This.
I think it’s just insane to believe that the rest of the world is going to conform to the open government expectations of libertarian Americans and Australians.
All that will happen is that USA will increasingly be left out of policy decisions. Governments won’t trust, what is for them, sensitive information, to a US State Dept that they can see leaks like a sieve. On a massive scale.
Just as they are increasingly trying to bypass the US dollar as the unit of international trade, so they will try to bypass the US government as the middleman and power-broker in policy formation.
Decisions will be made, and the USA can find out about them through Wikileaks. Or not.
I have wondered if there might be one possible weakness in the Wikileaks position though.
What if governments started to use it a a serious conduit for disinformation?
In the long run as the errors were found out, it might end up discrediting Wikileaks, until it came to be seen as being no better than any other unreliable source.
grendelkhan
I admit, I failed to properly apply an open mind to Ross Douthat’s writings, and worked backward from his conclusion (that Wikileaks is a net bad) rather than working through his justifications. But in my defense, I have a sneaking suspicion that that’s what he did.
This is the rankest of bullshittery. Exposing, say, that there was no fucking super-secret magical evidence demanding that we invade Iraq wouldn’t have made life just a bit better for the subsequent million-plus excess-dead Iraqis? Secrecy doesn’t just make people cranky; keeping secrets leads to tragedy on an unimaginable scale, again and again, because they lie to us and they get away with it.
Douthat thinks there’s no benefit from Wikileaks unless they overthrow the entire national security state. I think leaking, say, the Downing Street Memo before the invasion of Iraq would have made at least a little bit of difference.
We hear a lot about the costs of revealing secrets, but almost nothing about the costs of keeping them.
Dave
My main problem is that I’m not sure Wikileaks gets more than 1 shot to really be big deal. And the shot they took didn’t weaken the system enough that it could set off a chain reaction. I don’t think people will demand more openness from the government, as people are generally okay with government keeping some elements of foreign policy away from them, as evidenced by the acceptance of the state secret doctrine. All that happens is that America gets egg on its face in the eyes of the world, which may cause a reaction against forced openness, as Americans rally around the flag.
Now, if he had drawn back the curtain in Washington and showed everyone who was really in charge (big corporate donors and lobbyists), maybe then I would support him. One could argue that no one would listen unless he did something to stir up controversy, but I think that people care enough about openness there (bans on certain forms of lobbying, required disclosure of donations) that it would have been enough by itself to make people stand up and notice.
And yeah, the “communist” insurgents of Central America did so well against US backed forces. Clearly, the US is helpless before the mighty Red menace to the south. If only we had drastically over-reacted and aided corrupt dictatorships in their fight to keep their people oppressed, making them stronger and thus, able to oppress even more!
Flugelhorn
@matoko_chan:
Uh huh… So far the most damning thing from this dump has to do with intelligence gathering orders issued by Hillary to her diplomatic flunkies and you want to tell us that secrecy is the bailiwick of conservatives. Without secrecy, the conservative movement will die. Right. Obama’s entire campaign was one big misdirection to capture and control a populist movement, but conservatives are evil.
You will die a disappointed fool if this is your end-game.
Dave
And I don’t think only unjust nations will be hurt by Assange’s paranoia frag bomb, because part of what’s hurt US interests is that part of what was released was not unjust, merely indecorous. Every nation offers views of their allies which are often uncharitable to say the least. You just keep it a secret. It’s not unjust to consider Karzai a crackpot idiot, you just can’t say it out loud, or he’s going to be impossible to work with. We, essentially, have been forced to be indecorous and I think that other nations are likely to punish us for that even more. And other countries, which may be just but can be forced to be indecorous, could suffer if it were used against them.
matoko_chan
@grendelkhan: also too, the Bady article that scumbag is quoting also says explicitly THAT ASSANGES STRAT IS ALREADY WORKING.
but of course Pudgy Reese Witherspoon isnt pointing that out.
and you cudlips are too numb from the jackboot on your neck to actually read it.
sj
This is exactly wrong…
It’s not any damage that an attack by WikiLeaks or Al Quaeda that will destroy us. In our irrational response we will destroy ourselves. And it’s already working.
grendelkhan
@Dave: I’m not so sure this was the last chance. Wikileaks’ next project is reported to be a leak of internal memoranda from a major American bank–hopefully we’ll see some more of the corrupt strings between the banking system and its supposed regulators.