Of course, there's a personal psychology to it, that I enjoy crushing bastards, I like a good challenge, so do a lot of the other people involved in WikiLeaks. We like the challenge.
It's comments like this that regularly put me off Wikileaks. If you do the job they do then I believe very strongly you should be driven by a desire for truth (not a desire to crush anyone) and also be objective. I don't always 100% see that in their actions.
No one crazy enough to work on wikileaks would be in it for something as intangible as "the truth." At least these guys are willing to admit they're after the adrenaline rush one gets from destroying people you disagree with.
again, i'm tired of repeating this, but wikileaks, at least to my mind, is not a news organization, it's a medium for whistleblowers to release information. can't be objective!
it's a job for news organizations and journalists (some of whom might be supporters or volunteers of wikileaks) to analyze and present this released information objectively.
You also have to remember they suffer from selection bias.
Someone has to make the conscious effort to leak to WikiLeaks. Those people leak because they find the leaked material odious. WikiLeaks only gets the negative stuff, because happy employees don't leak the positive stuff.
It would be nice if it were so simple -- wikileaks is just a version of YouTube.
But they're not. They don't publish everything they get. They have an agenda. And they don't seem to have publication guidelines, which even YouTube (and every other quasi-anonymous publisher) has. In addition, everything they publish is supposed to be against the wishes of some national government somewhere.
Nope. Once they gave up neutrality, they're not a publishing channel. They're a political cause masquerading as a public service.
Free speech is first and foremost political free speech. You have a right (and obligation) to assemble and speak on matters of public policy.
But you don't have a right to say just anything. Obviously if you decided to "out" all the spies in Bulgaria and that resulted in dozens of deaths? A crime has been committed.
I absolutely support political organizations and their right to speak out. But that's not a blank check.
Right, it's certainly not as clear cut as some people have been making it out to be. I think that by and large, though, Wikileaks has not released anything that would come in conflict with the "clear and present danger" criterion pioneered by Schenck v. United States. Otherwise they wouldn't have such a clean legal slate.
So I agree that there are limitations to be placed on free speech, as the Supreme Court agrees, but in Wikileak's case people are trying to silence information that is legal by the court's judgment. And I don't think the CIA should be above the law, although it seems to disagree.
As a contrarian, my concern is that this issue is being painted with way too broad of a brush. There are limits from a U.S. constitution standpoint for free speech. There are also practical limits as to how useful to the global public an organization can be if it has an agenda and a megaphone for disseminating secrets. Lots of room for third-party players to screw with public opinion.
As a libertarian, however, I think these guys are doing the work of the angels and I support anything that levels the playing field between the individual and the state. Rock on.
I just don't think everybody involved has thought it through completely, though. Lots of sloganeering and simplistic arguments going on. And that keeps nagging at me. I get this feeling that we are missing something important.
I would imagine they don't publish things that they cannot verify as probably true, or things that aren't newsworthy.
On the other hand, here's something they did publish: a leak of their own donor list. http://www.newswiretoday.com/news/46864/. I see that as pretty good evidence of their integrity.
According to a WikiLeaks member, they publish all true and false documents together with a judgment whether they think it's true/false and why. For example, they published a fake Steve Jobs medical report together with a note why they considered it a fake. They do have criteria (e.g. no self-made write-ups, no publically available documents), but nothing against boring or false stuff.
This whole saga is probably the best thing that could happen to WikiLeaks. Huge increase for their visibility, which in turn increases the value of the role they play.
Provided that they're not currently being played by some intelligence org that fed them bogus data. A huge increase in visibility leading up to a huge flameout could set them back years.
-----
This whole saga seems to me like WikiLeaks is trying to have it both ways. On the one hand, they style themselves as the intelligence organization of the people, doing serious and valuable work releasing information in the people's interests. On the other hand, they get upset when other intelligence organizations try to bully them, and they play the "mean CIA detained a 17 year old kid" card.
Wikileaks provides a valuable service, but they need to tread carefully. Releasing the wrong information could get some of our spies killed. If that happens, I suspect the CIA "bullying" will get much more severe.
"At exactly the time when U.S. government secrecy is at an all-time high, the institutions ostensibly responsible for investigation, oversight and exposure have failed. The American media are largely co-opted, and their few remaining vestiges of real investigative journalism are crippled by financial constraints...
The need for independent leaks and whistle-blowing exposures is particularly acute now because, at exactly the same time that investigative journalism has collapsed, public and private efforts to manipulate public opinion have proliferated. This is exemplified by the type of public opinion management campaign detailed by the above-referenced CIA Report, the Pentagon's TV propaganda program exposed in 2008, and the ways in which private interests covertly pay and control supposedly "independent political commentators" to participate in our public debates and shape public opinion."
I still am confused by the WikiLeaks budget request -- $200k minimum exclusive of salaries per year just to keep the lights on? $600k with a couple salaries?
Even though I agree that the figures are strangely high, I wouldn't actually hold it against them if they just said they want to keep some for themselves. If they're really followed by spooks, detained and threatened - I guess they could use some reward for all of that. It's not something you sign up for with the minimal wage. (when they went public about those incidents, I assumed they're at least a bit worried about "disappearing")
But yeah - showing what is the money spent for would be a good idea.
No, keeping money for themselves is a massive conflict of interest. If they were doing that I don't think I could really trust what they had to say any more.
No, it's very clear who funds Wikileaks. Individual donors do. They make it clear that they do not accept money from governments or corporations. They are, in general, very open about their finances, and the information is not difficult to find.
I apologise because I struggled to find anything but the leak from a little while ago. I couldn't find a comprehensive list of donors.
No Governments and corporates is obviously a good policy. But that does not mean individuals with an agenda are not involved. What if it came to light that, to pick a random ott example, senior Chinese officials were personally donating?
All I'm pointing out is that it is unclear where their complete funding comes from; making it difficult to filter for any bias. If they take no personal payment that becomes a little easier, for me anyway, to sync.
they incur some pretty massive legal fees, afaik. i saw a thing where they justified the numbers, at some point, but i can't find it. will edit once i find.
"We don’t have to pay for our lawyer’s time. Hundred of thousands or millions dollars’ worth of lawyer time are being donated. But we still have to pay things like photocopying and court filing. And so far we have never lost a case, there were no penalties or compensations to pay." - http://stefanmey.wordpress.com/2010/01/04/leak-o-nomy-the-ec...
A solid fraction of 200k, massive legal fees, and things like photocopying and court filing can be the same thing. Court costs add up fast. If they where paying for everything then you would expect 10's of million / per year in legal fees.
I personally lost all respect for how WikiLeaks does business after I offered several servers and was told that they didn't even want me maintaining login access to them. So I offered my development skills to help improve their setup and never heard back. I especially dislike the holding of their information hostage until they reach their donation limit. If it's server/capacity, just let it be slow, go down to only a couple of servers.
The only real value they provide is the anonymization of submissions -- there are technical ways to do this, but most people with information won't know about those technologies beforehand.
Authenticating the information could be done with a cryptographic signature, possibly by an unknown signer. Operate on the "last 100 0-days signed by this key when initially published were good, #101 is probably good too" basis, to build a brand.
The problem of maintaining a nice repository for the information is much much simpler, once it's already online. Google could do this for most data (just include a special string in the file), and for stuff google won't touch, there are plenty of people who would pass it around informally.
Some parts of the leaked anti-Wikileaks document don't seem too objectionable. For example, one of the main recommendations that Salon highlights, and appears shocked by, is that the government should deter leaks by identifying and firing the individuals responsible. Isn't that totally normal and expected policy, though? If some CIA or Pentagon documents get leaked, the obvious response is going to be them trying to figure out who leaked them.
When a government employee leaks a document, a crime has been committed. The government's job in this case is to prevent its employees from committing crimes.
If instead it takes on its own propaganda effort do discredit a private nonprofit, something stinks.
The CIA is largely a propaganda organization, by the way. One wonders how many Iranian tweets are being funded by US tax dollars and CIA operations.
In my opinion it's completely scary to think that there might be a campaign to discredit wikileaks, but it's a huge relief to see that that document was itself leaked, suggesting that at least some government employees are aware of possible excesses committed by their departments.
If a government agency wanted to discredit wikileaks and didn't feel empowered to simply assassinate the people running it, it could use all sorts of time tested approaches to discredit/discourage it.
Thanks for the example. Yes, it was a serious question - I thought the CIA was largely an intelligence gathering agency. I hadn't heard of this before.
1. On the ground intelligence gathering (ie - Bribing a reluctant member of a militant group for information on their operations and physical location).
Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_(informant)
2. Analysis of gathered intelligence and policy recommendation (how trustful is the information from the above described asset, does it mesh with what is already known, and if it is what course of action should be taken).
Example: Philip Seymour Hoffman's character in Charlie Wilson's War, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Wilson%27s_War
3. Clandestine operations (carrying out of policy recommendations in #2 that can't be performed by traditional military forces, say the group in question is determined to present a credible threat and needs to be neutralized but is headquartered in Iran). Example: Bay of pigs invasion, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_of_Pigs_Invasion
- Thare are laws explicitly prohibiting the CIA from producing propaganda intended to influence US citizens in the US (the infamous NY Times' Ahmed Chalabi Iraq chemical weapons truck articles were in violation of these laws and came to exist semi-accidentally b/c the CIA funded Chalabi who generated the "smoking gun" photo which was picked up by the British press and then the US press).
- We all know that the CIA funds things like opposition groups, etc. Funds them to do what? Buy guns? Recruit new members? The membership recruitment aspect is obviously propaganda, and I think one could easily consider (for example) a bomb detonated by an opposition group to be propaganda, much like a radio spot or infomercial.
In my opinion it's completely scary to think that there might be a campaign to discredit wikileaks, but it's a huge relief to see that that document was itself leaked, suggesting that at least some government employees are aware of possible excesses committed by their departments.
I support the idea of open government enormously. We make too many things secret, and a government with so much secrecy is not responsive to its citizens.
Having said that, I also support the idea that some things -- some very few things -- should be kept secret.
Wikileaks does not seem to discriminate between these things.
Therefore I cannot in good conscience support Wikileaks with their mission to make everything they find public. If, as the article indicates, they're in it for personal kicks then that makes it all the worse.
It's 2010. You'd think the average person/whistleblower would have enough ability to self-publish for the entire world to see, right? If Wikileaks isn't providing some kind of independent, third-party vetting or creating some standards for what can be published or not, what value do they bring to the table?
> Wikileaks does not seem to discriminate between these things.
And how can someone without a clear view of the whole picture distinguish between both? And who do you want to arbitrate what should and what should not be secret?
> We need a picture of both/all sides' dirty laundry, and Wikileaks doesn't really give that.
Just don't expect Wikileaks to be a one-stop-shop for leaked documents.
And, BTW, I doubt Al Qaeda has such a document. That's not their style to document everything. One may interpret that as one of their major tactical strengths.
You're a one man spam army on this idea of Google hosting a WikiLeaks mirror... Not to say it's not a good idea, but I don't think this is the place for such pestering.
haha... Well I feel sort of bad doing it b/c I love google... I just think it needs to be pointed out. It might help people realize a) the silliness of Google pretending to be fighting censorship and b) that they should donate to wikileaks.
"Nor can we accept government or corporate funding and maintain our absolute integrity." from their fundrising drive section.
The last time I've looked Google was a company.
I think Google would have far more impact upon wikileaks via pagerank tweaks than via funding (if it wanted to). But in any case if Sergey had any balls he'd make a public statement praising wikileaks. It doesn't take balls to criticize the Chinese government.
grandalf; your posting essentially an off topic rant over and over in these threads. That kind of behavior (i.e. a rant agenda) is generally frowned upon here - you should know that dude!
Your not going to get any kindlier ears simply by reposting it every time this topic comes up...
It's an impractical suggestion that would be bad for Google and Wikileaks
Well, I realize it's probably going to have to stop soon, but I've earned lots of karma for posting more widely agreed upon comments, and so I think spending a bit of karma on an important issue is worthwhile.
A few others have since started to pick up on the idea, so I think I can retire from this particular thing.
Im confused by your logic :) are you seriously suggesting that you think Google hosting a Wikileaks server is a good idea (for anyone)? Or are you just "trolling" anti-google sentiment?
Regardless of karma you have to "spend" neither of those are appropriate behavior (on these threads).
Well I'm glad you feel entitled to be the moral police officer of HN :)
I should remark that I feel my comment is witty and appropriate and happens to employ a useful bite of sarcasm/satire to the issue.
Furthermore, I don't think that posting a comment that you deem inappropriate constitutes inappropriate "behavior". The comments have clearly received lots of upvotes as well, but have ended up a few points negative after a few days.
I am far from anti-google. In fact Google is one of my favorite companies, but its one vice is its tremendous willingness to get involved in politics (first Eric Schmidt's schmoozing with politicians and now Sergey's neoconservative anti-China posturing).
Wikileaks occupies the uncomfortable space of being a subversive element right in Google's back yard. And, as much fun as it is to throw stones at China, there are still important issues of censorship and corruption right here in the US that could use exposure.
The worst aspect of politics, by the way, is the way it leads people toward an "us vs them" view. Google's approach on China reinforces this. Being anti-China is the new livestrong bracelet, and it's dangerous to our society and will result in war.
It's comments like this that regularly put me off Wikileaks. If you do the job they do then I believe very strongly you should be driven by a desire for truth (not a desire to crush anyone) and also be objective. I don't always 100% see that in their actions.