
WikiLeaks will Not be abandoned. - d_c
http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/18289990888
======
roboneal
We need organizations that are true watchdogs of the government. Governments
should be made uncomfortable by the press.

However, WikiLeaks lost me when they released selectively edited video,
spliced in editorial overlays, registered a domain name "CollateralMurder" and
advocated a position.

~~~
vaksel
here is the question...off the top of your head can you remember one other
leak besides the collateral murder one that wikileaks leaked?

~~~
roboneal
The "Climategate" CRU emails.

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panacea
That was wikileaks? FUDleaks then.

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JeffJenkins
Is there some background on this I should know about?

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mukyu
<http://cryptome.org/0001/wikileaks-dump.htm>

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man1sh
Pentagon declared Wikileaks as a threat to national security.

I we look at The Apache helicopter and Australian internet plans leaks, the
government was trying to do something wrong, which Wikileaks exposed. Now they
have been declared threat to national security. Great progress in hypocrisy.

~~~
tptacek
That's just about the most generous possible interpretation of what's been
happening with Wikileaks.

A less generous interpretation:

* Wikileaks leaked the video that accompanies a detailed transcript (with quotes) of the same video that appeared in the Washington Post many months beforehand --- a PR black eye to be sure, but in no way a revelation.

* Wikileaks has in fact cultivated confidential sources inside DoD and military service agencies that are talking about forwarding cables and other TS-classified material, and is in fact part of a grave threat to national security (which, true, the real "threat" is clearly the negligent lapses in operational security that allow someone like Manning to leak cables in the first place).

In other words: Wikileaks is less valuable to society than it seems, and at
the same time the government has a legitimate (if misdirected) concern with
them.

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barrkel
Do you really believe Manning is the leaker?

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tptacek
I don't care that much, but, what's your theory?

~~~
barrkel
I just found the whole story a quite odd - the Wired reporter and his friend's
difficult to believe story, this low-level kid, the obvious desire - and
leaked plans - of the US to find and punish leakers to discredit Wikileaks.

I don't care that much either. On net, I think Wikileaks is a good thing, but
I've never donated and never would until they are more transparent about their
own operations. Re that video, the first half wasn't what disturbed me, but
rather the firing of the missiles into the building in the second half.

But there's an obvious strategy for the US to discredit Wikileaks, and that's
to find someone - anyone - that appears to have leaked to them, and come down
hard on them. Finding an oddball kid suits the story they want to tell,
irrelevant of how guilty he may be. But the Wired stuff is just off the wall
odd.

~~~
tptacek
Doesn't it bother you that without reliable evidence, you can make a similarly
credible narrative out of almost anything else? Maybe it was the Bush-era DoD
people who leaked the story to discredit the Obama administration! You can't
prove a negative.

I'm working under the assumption that someone named Manning did in fact do
something stupid with Wikileaks, which did indeed encourage him to do that
stupid thing. That Wikileaks is encouraging stupid people to do stupid things
is something that bothers me about Wikileaks; that stupid people are given
access sufficient to do stupid and damaging things is something that bothers
me about the DoD.

~~~
barrkel
I don't think Wikileaks encourages stupid behaviour - as I understand it, the
input avenue is primarily an file upload field.

As to evidence (in the legal sense), I don't have any one way or the other
that Manning had anything to do with the leak. I just have media reports,
which sound really weird, which makes me not give them much weight.

~~~
tptacek
Regardless of how (say) Manning conveyed files to Wikileaks, leaking
classified-TS cables is manifestly stupid. One doubts most of the people who
might help Wikileaks from inside the DoD have any idea what they're actually
doing. My guess is that it all seems unreal, happening as it does on the
always fake-seeming Internet using computers that make everything seem like
chat room drama.

~~~
barrkel
Do you have evidence that classified top secret cables were leaked? That one
is easy to prove. A quick Google search, though, seems to only turn up
rumours.

The only direct source of much of the rumours seems to be the completely
unbelievable Wired story. The Salon story on Wired's reporting is the primary
reason I don't trust it, nor anything implied by it on other sites:

[http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/06/18...](http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/06/18/wikileaks)

~~~
tptacek
You're saying it's easy to prove that someone likely to have classified-TS
access who said they leaked classified-TS information _did_ or _did not_ leak
information?

And to support that argument, you're citing Glenn Greenwald?

~~~
barrkel
You earlier spoke of proving a negative; by easy to prove, I meant that this
is a positive, and an existence proof is sufficient.

If something was leaked, but noone can point to it, or the consequences of it,
is it really leaked?

The way you phrase your sentence about Glenn Greenwald, you seem to imply that
I should know something about him. What are you imputing?

It also seems an ad hominem attack. I cited the article as reason to doubt the
Wired story; but the article should be attacked on its own merits. And the
reason to doubt the leak of TS cables is because I haven't seen evidence that
they've been leaked. The video certainly was leaked - I saw it - but I've seen
not a peep of these alleged cables.

It doesn't make any sense. Why would a 22-year old kid have access to
thousands of top-secret cables? Why should we trust an attention-seeking ex-
convict who says he had an IM with a leaker who spontaneously contacted him
for the first time ever (randomly choosing him from twitter #wikileaks, of all
things), and boasted to him that he leaked such cables? When Wikileaks denies
that they have such cables?

When these stories come up in the news, who benefits?

~~~
tptacek
I am absolutely confident that 22 year old kids have access to ridiculous
information; I think that's far more of an outrage than any news Wikileaks has
"broken" about the DoD.

~~~
barrkel
On the other hand, I think the risk of the US to the world is greater (far
greater) than the risk of the world to the US.

The US is in no danger of being attacked or invaded by anyone; one cannot say
the same about other countries with respect to the US.

Even something as substantial as 9/11 was only a crime - a monstrous crime -
but certainly not an act of war. There isn't any actor with the capability or
will to do any serious damage to the US that wouldn't be annihilated by
nuclear retribution; the US's security derives from its obvious and plain-
sight strengths, not anything it keeps secret.

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Natsu
Has anyone noticed a pattern yet? We get a sensational rumor. Then we get a
flat denial. Over and over.

Someone trying to cast doubt on their viability in hopes of getting people to
stop funding them?

