
WikiLeaks Threatens Its Own Leakers With $20 Million Penalty - ssclafani
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/05/nda-wikileaks/
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hugh3
The old joke about the definition of chutzpah involves a guy who kills both
his parents and then tries to get the sympathy of the court because he's an
orphan.

But this may soon be superseded by the spectacle of watching Julian Assange
suing someone for $20 million for leaking "his" information.

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blhack
Oh come on, this isn't _that_ bad.

This is to protect people that have entrusted wikileaks with their
information. Essentially what it's doing is preventing people within wikileaks
from disrupting the release cycle.

~~~
eli
Sure, OK, I get it. But at the very least it's hilariously hypocritical.

Does Wikileaks believe all organizations have the right to aggressively pursue
leakers in court?

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baddox
> _Does Wikileaks believe all organizations have the right to aggressively
> pursue leakers in court?_

Probably so. I don't see how this is hypocritical. Wikileaks never says that
governments or corporations should _enjoy_ their information being leaked.
Wikileaks is just a publisher.

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cube13
For a group that supposedly promotes openness, Wikileaks sure wants to keep
their organization a secret. Who watches the watchmen, indeed.

~~~
corin_
To be fair, at least based on what this article says, it's not so much about
leaking information on Wikileaks as it is about leaking information Wikileaks
is going to release but hasn't yet. Maybe it covers the former as well but it
just wasn't mentioned?

~~~
hugh3
In my mind, that's even worse.

Wikileaks' own secrets are at least (in some sense) the property of Wikileaks,
whereas I really can't see any way in which "information which Wikileaks was
planning to release sometime later" counts as Wikileaks' property.

Does anyone remember when Wikileaks was actually a wiki?

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hamner
Where is the evidence that this document is valid? It may be, but it could
just as easily be forged.

~~~
chadboyda
Exactly. It's probably just more FUD to discredit WikiLeaks.

~~~
hugh3
I'd love to know how you progressed from "possibly" to "probably" there.

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tptacek
And once again (I'm going to start keeping track!), we don't want to believe
something is true, so we invent a controversy to avoid grappling with its
implications. Go us!

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alecco
Wired/Poulsen/Lamo attack piece. Flagged.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Lamo#Greenwald.2C_Lamo.2...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Lamo#Greenwald.2C_Lamo.2C_Wired_Magazine)

~~~
eli
Flagging is for spam or offtopic posts, not authors you don't like.

~~~
alecco
You're right. And I commented about it, too. My bad.

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Pahalial
Several people have already pointed out the tenuous situation between Kevin
Poulsen and Wikileaks, so I won't retread old ground; that said, Poulsen is
really just summarizing a piece from someone else in the new statesman:
[http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/david-allen-
green/2011/05/...](http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/david-allen-
green/2011/05/wikileaks-information-legal)

I for one have never heard of The New Statesman before, but that doesn't
necessarily mean much. Of particular interest to me was this (linkless)
passing jibe: "but on the other hand they make routine legal threats,
especially against the Guardian" - the only results I could find about this
were _also_ from the New Statesman, and actually seemed rather to pertain to a
claimed case of libel about Assange. Not any actual legal action, mind, just a
twitter update from @wikileaks. And no indication of a routine about it, just
the one hit - very clearly not what was being implied by the paragraph in the
original article.

So I for one will be taking this "The New Statesman" with as much of a grain
of salt as I was ready to do to the Kevin Poulsen piece.

Edit for links:

[http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/david-allen-
green/2011/02/...](http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/david-allen-
green/2011/02/wikileaks-legal-guardian)

<http://twitter.com/#!/wikileaks/statuses/32867678527950848>

~~~
eli
Are you trying to wink-wink-nudge-nudge suggest that this document has been
fabricated and the story is false? Otherwise I'm really not sure what Kevin
Polsen's backstory has to do with anything.

Here's the citation for Assange threatening to sue The Guardian last year for
basically trying to releasing Iraq war documents earlier than he had wanted:
[http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/02/the-
guar...](http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/02/the-
guardian-201102?currentPage=all) I'm not sure why you had trouble finding it;
lots of hits on google for "wikileaks threatened guardian." He has indeed made
threats to sue the paper on several occasions.

And the New Statesman is a left-leaning "real magazine" in the UK that been
around for decades, for whatever that's worth.

~~~
Pahalial
I was not at all suggesting the story was false; rather that Poulsen was
further "interpreting" the story based on a prior "interpretation" by the New
Statesman. [honest edit: I suppose this is a weak sentence. I really did not
mean to imply any actual falsehood, rather two levels of the kind of linkbaity
shift one finds all too often in online news.]

That said, it seems my Google-fu is weak; I did not turn up that link nor any
kind of repeat-threatening of the Guardian. Thank you for the link. Frankly, I
think that both the Wired article and the New Statesman piece could have
benefited tremendously (newcomer credibility-wise) from including it.

Having now read the Vanity Fair piece, I'll retract my prior criticism of the
New Statesman article. If anything, given that I've given Wikileaks a lot of
my attention over the last several months, I'm not sure how this escaped my
attention, but it puts a lot of things in a different light. I for one
certainly thought the relationship between WL and its chosen newspapers was a
lot more rosy.

~~~
eli
Fair enough. Reading it again, the Wired post is pretty breathless. But I
think the document speaks for itself.

You might also enjoy this New Yorker profile of Assange:
[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian?currentPage=all)
It's from a year ago, so it's pre-Cablegate.

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canadaduane
To be fair, the US gov't (or any gov't for that matter) steals its information
and tries to assert full control over it as well. Any comments regarding
hypocrisy directed toward Assange ought to apply equally to all governments.
The notable thing here is that, in line with the historically great 4th
estate, we once again have a news outlet that can act as a peer, rather than a
subordinate, of governments.

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lwat
Typical Wired sensationalist bullshit.

