All that is obvious. One does not need to come from a military family to understand that. Common sense should suffice. The interesting questions are:
1) if the WikiLeaks war logs contain "nothing new" (according to the White House), then why is that it's a problem of national security?
2) yes, guys with guns must be held to the highest standard possible; unfortunately, the civilians who have the power to send the "guys with guns" to invade sovereign nations and kill people are held to no standard at all. We didn't lower the bar, we removed the bar. Zero accountability for the decision-makers, death penalty to the pawns in uniform? Isn't a rogue executive branch potentially more dangerous than a rogue Army private?
3) did Congress authorize the war in Afghanistan? I don't remember any declaration of war. If we're not officially at war, then what Rogers claims to be "treason" does not call for capital punishment.
4) if we are at war and Manning should be executed for treason, then why not execute Cheney too? Didn't he reveal classified information and endangered Americans when he exposed Valerie Plame?
> if we are at war and Manning should be executed for treason, then why not execute Cheney too? Didn't he reveal classified information and endangered Americans when he exposed Valerie Plame?
That will never happen. Unfortunately, the political decision-makers are above the law. We all know that. Does anyone remember LBJ & McNamara being prosecuted for the deaths of 58,000 Americans and over 2,000,000 Vietnamese?
When we get to comments like this, I think we can safely say this doesn't belong on Hacker News. There must be some other political forum where this can rehashed.
And it is probably just as likely as Henry Kissinger being prosecuted. I'm sure that you may see the odd foreign judge or two throw out a summons for Bush, to little or no effect.
Fortunately for the political class, malice can easily be disguised as incompetence. Plausible deniability makes it hard to attribute culpability.
If a mafia top dog sends his goons to invade private property, his goons get shot at and return fire and kill people, then the mafia guy is a criminal. If the commander-in-chief sends his goons in uniform to invade a sovereign nation that poses no threat to the U.S., his pawns get shot at and return fire and kill 100,000s of people, then the commander-in-chief is a national hero, and anyone who dares to disagree is a traitor, a liberal, a communist, a socialist, un-american scum. Lesson to be learned: if you want to be a criminal, avoid the private sector.
Actually, the author is a very experienced prosecutor who has worked on many murder cases (including Charles Manson). He certainly sounds like he knows what he is talking about!
re: (2) I suggest that congressmen start checking the executive branch, which is their duty. Failing to do so, they committ a soft form of treason. We expect the guys in uniform to sacrifice their lives, but the congressmen are not even expected to sacrifice their careers in the defense of the U.S. Constitution. Soldiers will continue to die for nothing, and congressmen will continue avoiding unpopular fights that might cost them votes.
Who has the moral authority to hold Jake accountable? He exposed the truth. By contrast, Bush, Cheney & Rumsfeld gave us Gulf of Tonkin II, the meretricious congressmen gave the executive branch all the power it wanted, we know that we invaded a country based on lies, 100,000s have died, and noone has been held accountable. What's the rule here? You kill 1 it's a tragegy, but if you kill 1,000,000 it's a statistic?
1. Why are these mutually exclusive? I think it's possible to believe that both Iraq/Afghanistan and Wikileaks' release of these documents without checking to see if they put people's lives at risk are irresponsible.
2. If exposing the truth is always the best alternative, one wonders why Assange & co are so secretive about their own operations & movement. Clearly they have good reasons, for example Wikileaks tries to maintain the secrecy of their sources so they don't end up on jail. If they really exposed Afghan sources in these documents, the outcome for them will most likely be far worse than jail.
Personally I think WL is important and has great potential, but I wouldn't automatically consider them the good guys in every situation. It's more complicated than that.
From what I understand WL offered the US government the chance to clear names of informants. They refused. They obviously wanted to pressure wikileaks not to release the information.
I never claimed that they are incompatible. I merely claimed that those who invade a sovereign country that posed no threat, leading to 100,000s of deaths (5,000 of which U.S. soldiers) have no moral authority and cannot claim that their irresponsibility is even remotely comparable to the irresponsibility of revealing possible informants' names.
I concur. Additionally I think it's interesting how blame is being specifically ascribed to Jake and Julian, the most visible speakers for wilileaks, when the number of people contributing, editing, managing, and supporting wikileaks is in the hundreds.
I feel it might be part of an urge people have to latch on to concrete and explicable causes for events they feel an emotional repulsion to, ie:
"You, specific human being (Obama, Bush, Jake, Jesus, what have you) are to blame for the evils in the world."
as opposed to
"You, complex social phenomenon that may or may not be capable of being influenced by any individual action, are to blame for the evils of the world."
"Who has the moral authority to hold Jake accountable? He exposed the truth. By contrast, Bush, Cheney & Rumsfeld gave us Gulf of Tonkin II, the meretricious congressmen gave the executive branch all the power it wanted, we know that we invaded a country based on lies, 100,000s have died, and noone has been held accountable. What's the rule here? You kill 1 it's a tragegy, but if you kill 1,000,000 it's a statistic?"
So you claim nobody has the "moral authority" to hold the people from wikileaks accountable, yet you want to hold Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld accountable (it's interesting you would use only republicans as examples btw) for their actions?
If I intentionally gave out your address to criminals and told them when you wouldn't be home (and they robbed your house), would you hold me accountable? I'm just "exposing the truth"
This information has the possibility of getting thousands killed. On a side note, I'm hoping I can get jake's full address and phone number so I can give it out to some people. I'm sure he won't mind. I'm just "exposing the truth"
When the Americans kill civilians ("Collateral Murder"), Wikileaks gets blamed for being biased. When the Taliban kill civilians, Wikileaks gets blamed, even when they tried to contact the White House so they could remove information about informants.
Perhaps I'm just out of touch, but I normally would put most of the responsibility for these things on the warring parties. Blaming a third party that doesn't have an army, a militia, or guns seems self-serving or disingenuous, depending on who's doing it.
You wouldn't really expect the White House and Pentagon to sit and watch as a bunch of "kids" are revealing their dirty laundry !? All the classified "dirty laundry" -- not security related stuff, like nuclear launch codes, but rather "shameful" acts.
They are very good at propaganda and so went full steam with it. A couple of themes emerged from that effort.
1) "Obama knows about these problems and is already handling it". This is a great use of propaganda. It both makes the leaked documents "un-interesting" and it makes Obama look good. I've heard this one on the radio and in a couple of other sources. It is often regurgitated verbatim without any supporting evidence how Obama has improved the situation.
2) "This will hurt our troops". This is also a great propaganda line because it plays on the existing framework of "support our troops". Nobody wants to hurt the son or husband of their neighbor in their small town. Wikileaks is not exposing cover-ups and mis-management of resources, death of civilians, it is "hurting our soldiers". This appeals to the middle America. "Those Wikileaks kids might as well just shoot our boys in the back" kind of feeling.
3) Now, in the Defcon case. They just hope to scare any hackers or anyone thinking of contributing or collaborating with Wikileaks. The implication is that "you might also get a visit from FBI" or "You might get randomly search everytime you fly. Are you prepared to make that choice?" Again that is very effective.
Now I am not saying that there is necessarily a unified, centrally controlled propaganda campaign, it could be just an emergent behavior from a bunch of govt. agencies.
Your argument is absolutely ridiculous. This has nothing to do with republicans vs democrats. As far as I know, LBJ and McNamara were democrats. And so are Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, who voted for the war in order to avoid jeopardizing their chances of getting to the oval office. What exact part of "meretricious congressmen" didn't you understand?
Assange has never claimed that there are no legitimate secrets. He's not exposing cyphers nor nuclear secrets. The truth that he's exposing is one that the Afghans know well, but that the American public does not know. The purpose of WikiLeaks is to promote transparency and accountability by exposing truths that catalyze reform. This means, essentially, to close the feedback loop so that the electorate can make wise decisions every four years. If the electorate has no clue what is going on, you have no republic, you have a farce.
What reform is attained by exposing someone's phone or address? That's right. None. If you can't understand that privacy and transparency aren't incompatible, then you must be seriously intellectually challenged. In other words, you have no point, and you have no argument.
"What reform is attained by exposing someone's phone or address? That's right. None. If you can't understand that privacy and transparency aren't incompatible, then you must be seriously intellectually challenged. In other words, you have no point, and you have no argument."
When you are exposing potential informants and spies to known murderers, lots.
Either you're too naive or not cynical enough. Assange is on a power trip, but WL is necessary and has been useful so far, so I forgive him. He has a large ego and wants to deliver impact. Exposing informants is peanuts. Why would he do it intentionally? He has already caused one government to collapse (in Kenya). If you had such power, would you use it for the little things, or for the big things? Too bad for the informants, it would have been better if no names had ever been exposed.
"Seriously. You're complaining about Wikileaks doing it (debatable) when Cheney makes this seem like so 2006"
Seriously. When has two wrongs ever made a right? Also, the topic isn't Cheney, it's Wikileaks.
Do republicans that don't run the country anymore always have to be brought up when left leaning organizations or politicians are criticized for their actions?
I think a more apt example would be if you knew of the address of a meth lab. Meth labs are often heavily defended. You give the address of the meth lab to the police, knowing that when busting it some police officers may lose their lives.
Would you be accountable for the deaths of the officers?
"Perhaps I'm just out of touch, but I normally would put most of the responsibility for these things on the warring parties. Blaming a third party that doesn't have an army, a militia, or guns seems self-serving or disingenuous, depending on who's doing it."
I'm not blaming Wikileaks for those things. As you say, they don't have an army. What they do have is a very large audience. Just like with a militia (or owning a gun), you need to be responsible. Giving out the names of potential informants and spies is not being responsible.
If there was even a chance that people could die as a result of this information, they shouldn't have gone public. Because they did, it leads me to believe that they are being driven by an anti-war political agenda.
To me, the information given is not worth the number of lives that will be lost as a result.
"To me, the information given is not worth the number of lives that will be lost as a result."
Fair enough; that's an honest disagreement. My perspective on the matter is simply that whatever the number of deaths that Wikileaks will hypothetically be responsible for, the American government and Taliban are each responsible for a hundred times as many. I do a little introspection and realized that I'm not all that outraged about the actions of the American government with respect to Afghanistan and Iraq[0], so I can't bring myself to be upset about something that is a drop in the bucket (not to mention indirect, rather than direct, responsibility) in comparison.
Clarification: I am not suggesting that you either disagree or agree with the position I present here. I'm just presenting it.
[0] To spell it out: Afghanistan started their war by knowingly allowing al Qaeda to plan and train for the September 11 attacks in Afghanistan. The American invasion is therefore a retaliation, and not a war of aggression, so fair enough. My feelings on the war in Iraq are that it was a waste of time, effort, lives, and money, and was driven by the American and British governments knowingly and intentionally deceiving their publics. If the country I live in had tagged along for the ride, I would be rather upset about the situation, but if some foreign government wants to self-harm it's not my problem.
"I do a little introspection and realized that I'm not all that outraged about the actions of the American government with respect to Afghanistan and Iraq."
If you don't live in Russia nor China, what makes you think that the U.S. won't converge towards tyranny at some point in the future and start using their fantastic military machine to invade countries at will, building an empire that neither Napoleon nor Hitler could even dream of? If that sounds impossible, let us not forget that Germany in the 1920s was quite different from Germany in the 1930s.
I remember the huge demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq in Europe in early 2003. Hundreds of thousands of people protesting in Barcelona. The biggest protests since Vietnam. And, then, one year later, the Madrid metro bombings "forcefully" convince the vastly anti-war Spanish electorare that it was intolerable to have a handful of troops in Iraq. Just because you don't live in the U.S. nor the U.K. do not rule out the possibility that you might suffer the consequences of the reckless invasion of Iraq.
"Fair enough; that's an honest disagreement. My perspective on the matter is simply that whatever the number of deaths that Wikileaks will hypothetically be responsible for, the American government and Taliban are each responsible for a hundred times as many."
This makes Wikileaks just as bad as the people they are trying to "expose". It really makes me question many of their past articles.
Why release a video of American soldiers killing innocent people when they themselves don't have the decency to respect human life? They don't know or care about how many people could die as a result of this information. It could be 0, 10, or 1000.
Agreed. But please do note that the Taliban didn't fly any aircraft into buildings. The ones who did were Saudis. The Taliban want to kick the invader out, just like the Vietcong 40 years ago. If you think the war in Afghanistan is motivated by the desire to kill Al Qaeda, you need to read a thing or two on geopolitics.
Al-Qaeda are about as Saudi as the IRA is British. The people who make that argument, and forget the close ties between Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the first place, are the ones who need to read a thing or two on geopolitics.
"Starting a business, operating it for a while and a successful exit are the whole meal."
Are you serious? You mean that in general, or in this particular case? Frankly, I am shocked by your assertion. Quoting Andy Grove:
"Intel never had an exit strategy. These days, people cobble something together. No capital. No technology. They measure eyeballs and sell advertising. Then they get rid of it. You can't build an empire out of this kind of concoction. You don't even try."
My thoughts exactly, only expressed more eloquently. What do you want? Make a couple of million and spend the next 30 years bored by the pool drinking cocktails? Or do you want to build an empire? Sure, building an empire is hard work, but at the time of my death, I want to know I chose the path of adventure, not the easy way out.
I am by no means advocating taking enormous risks and chasing quasi-impossible dreams. But if one's startup is taking off, why not stick around and try to scale it up? Building a company of a few 100s of people from scratch sure must be a whole lot of fun. You are creating employment, you are creating wealth. If you sell your business as soon as it starts working, then you do the hard work, and someone else gets all the credit and the fun.
If your goal is to create a company that is going to be around in its original form and that will 'change the world' then by all means, stick around.
But if you create 'web-apps' for an emerging field where you'll be faced with 10's if not 100's of competitors a successful acquisition is not bad at all. In such markets shake-outs are the norm, and that period is marked by acquisitions and obituaries.
Most successful start-ups find that at some point in time they're going to be acquired.
Your comment reminds me of the criticism levelled at mint.com when they 'sold out', as though what they achieved and did was all negated by selling to their 800# gorilla competitor.
Personally I think they - and Peter Cooper, albeit at a lesser scale - did great.
Whether you should stick around or not depends on a lot of factors, your ambition, your ability to manage a larger company (and your desire to do so), your risk profile and so on.
No one size fits all, there is room enough for all strategies and tactics, what works for you may not work for everyone. Peter managed to do what very few people here will ever manage to do, in spite of all the potential, he did it under his own power, recouped his investors money and paid them a premium, had a pretty much text-book acquisition for a company this size. Nothing to complain about.
Could you do better ? Maybe. But you could also do a lot worse.
The joke goes that no deal is ever right, if you manage to sell you should have waited, if you crash you've waited too long.
So a certain feeling of 'I could have done better' post sale is pretty much the norm, and maybe you really could have done (a lot) better, but for all the same money you'd have crashed horribly or you could have found yourself the proud owner of a stagnant business in a field with lots of better funded and better executing competitors. There might be a way to turn that around but it's not a given.
"It all depends on your initial goals. If your goal is to create a company that is going to be around in its original form and that will 'change the world' then by all means, stick around. But if you create 'web-apps' for an emerging field where you'll be faced with 10's if not 100's of competitors a successful acquisition is not bad at all."
I entirely agree. I know that HN'ers love web-apps and love thinking that "building something people want" is enough. But web-apps are too "easy", i.e., the barrier of entry is too low, and the competition is fierce. If one's business is a website, then sticking around may be foolish. Just take the cash and go build something real, and let people with a large pillow of capital take the risk.
My point is this: Andy Grove and the founders of Intel were not successful because they built "something people want". They were successful because they created something people did eventually want, because they made wise decisions at the right time, and because their skillsets made them irreplaceable almost. If you want to build an empire, then create something the world will need in the future, make sure you're the only one who knows how to do it, and capitalize on your knowledge while the rest of the world is catching up. This is extremely hard to accomplish in software, but it's not impossible in hardware. I am thinking of electronics, photonics, microfluidics, and the like... not web-apps that can be built in a weekend.
The webapp market is limited by people's leisure time. There can't be 10 Facebooks, because if the average person spends 30 min per day on Facebook, then it would have to spend 4h30min on the other 9 webapps. Nobody has that much time. The market for electronics, photonics is almost unlimited... because these technologies are meant to automate, not to entertain. This is not a matter of electronics being "nobler" than webapps, it's just the realization that one encounters certain limitations in the webapp area that do not exist elsewhere.
FWIW, Tarsnap is both b2b and b2c. My best guess from eyeballing email addresses and talking to some Tarsnap users is that businesses are only 20% of Tarsnap users,
although they account for about 80% of the total usage.
The way tarsnap is marketed I'd never ever expected it to be b2c, most private individuals I know outside of computing would have a very hard time understanding what it's all about without a lot of explanation. That's really interesting.
Ah right, of course, why didn't I think of that angle. That should have been obvious. To my defence I'll say I wrote that before my morning tea while on a holiday. Will try harder next time.
but yes, i am going on record saying that facebook will probably not be the last word in social networking. someone else will come along and figure out how to do it better, just like what happened to friendster and myspace.
They do have some strong network effects, but just like its predecessors, this market moves too fast for that to create a durable lead, I think.
Also, social networking is subject to the whims of fashion. I think part of what facebook used to kill myspace was that myspace was full of lower class people. Facebook seeded themselves from colleges, giving themselves a nice middle class base to build upon. Facebook has largely abandoned that level of control now, and it has yet to be seen if the seeding was enough.
There were a load of online auction sites, then eBay won. You could wrongly say that people moved from auction site to auction site, but that wasn't the case.
Maybe there will be the next facebook, the next ebay, the next amazon, but I'm skeptical.
I was under the impression that most of the 'me too' auction sites came /after/ ebay showed how it was done, then they died, because they were trying to beat ebay by being like ebay.
hah. I actually think Google is in a similar place. they aren't the first search engine, and I think their strongest claim on being the last isn't so much that they have some kind of moat, it's just that they've hired four out of five people who might compete with them.
I actually think the search engine market has the opposite of a network effect barrier to entry. If you made a search engine that was half of google's 'native effectiveness' (by which I mean googles effectiveness before the spammers start mucking it up) assuming your search algorithm is different enough that it's not gamed in the same way as google's, you will have a search engine that is more effective than google until it becomes worth the spammer's time to mess you up.
I think google's talent pool is interesting, though. they have a whole lot of really good people, and they are probably exploiting that talent better than any other company of similar size. It really seems like they should own more markets than they do.
I think Google's biggest weakness on that front is that they have nearly all their employees thinking that google is both competent and altruistic. I don't see the same internal dissent with my friends who work at google as I saw when I worked at Yahoo. At Yahoo, we'd point out what the company was doing wrong. At google, the employees seem to think their masters know best.
(this aside, the essential problem with search engines is that the advertising business model creates a conflict of interest; if the search results are that much better than the search ads, nobody will click on the ads. On the other hand, nobody has come up with another business model for 'generalized search')
It is a personal choice, IMO. Some like to build empires and for some startup is a path to financial independence. And financial independence is not just about drinking cocktails. It can be a way to do a world tour, spend time researching quantum physics, learning a new musical instrument, or going to International Space Station. Different people, different motivations.
Sure. Different people have different motivations. Nothing wrong with that. But, to be honest, if your goal is financial independence, go work in investment banking until you are 35, retire, go see the world, live frugally, learn quantum mechanics for fun, start painting in your free time. I know people who did that.
The point is: if you're after financial independence, take the boring, yet easy, path. Give 10 years of your life to a bank or law firm. Maybe you can make a million or two. Retire. But, if you're going to give 10 years of your life to a company that has a 1% chance of getting anywhere, then be committed to it, do it for fun, to build an empire. You'll most likely fail, but you'll have a good time, at least.
The barrier to entry for investment banking is a lot higher than it is for writing web-apps, also that route may be closed to a very large portion of the world (by virtue of location alone).
Building a web app that might be the gateway to your dreams takes nothing but a computer, a working brain and an internet connection. Getting into investment banking has a wholly different set of requirements and so might not be the 'boring yet easy path', it might in fact be much more difficult. Also, investment banking would not support the number of people that are trying their luck in the web-app (or phone app) lottery.
And for plenty of people 'boring' doesn't cut it, no matter what the rewards.
Investment banking only requires you to go to the right schools and to be able to tolerate excruciatingly boring work for 16 hours a day. I know people who amassed a nice loot that way. By contrast, I don't know anyone who amassed the same amount by creating software, although I know a few who tried.
The problem with web-apps is precisely that the barrier of entry is too low. You are competing against the entire world. No special skills are required beyond programming. It does not require credentials. What makes the game easy to play is also what it makes it so hard to win.
> Investment banking only requires you to go to the right schools
That alone is a deal breaker for probably a very large percentage of those that would want to go this route. Also, it requires a plan long in advance. So that 'only' is a bit out of place there I think.
> to be able to tolerate excruciatingly boring work for 16 hours a day.
That's another slight problem. You couldn't pay me enough for a job like that, I'd probably burn out long before reaching my goals, whatever they were.
> I know people who amassed a nice loot that way.
So do I, their personalities and backgrounds are about as far away from the typical web entrepreneur as you could get.
> I don't know anyone who amassed the same amount by creating software, although I know a few who tried.
I know more people that made somewhere in the millions to 10's of millions with a few 'out of the ballpark' hits in software than in any other business outside of regular trade.
I know one investment banker that did well, but then again, most of my contacts are in the software world, not in banking so that will likely skew the picture.
Competing against the entire world is pretty much the norm for every other business except for software. So first mover advantage, execution, customer support and so on are where you make the difference, and that gives people a sense of control over their destiny, which is a powerful motivator by itself.
that is only the 'easy way' if you are already through one of the best schools in the country. just to be considered by a law firm, I'd have to go to school for 6 years; that is enough time to start and fail one or two companies. also, if I wanted to get into a law firm that would pay what we're talking about, that school had better be Harvard or something else that is expensive and difficult to get in to.
I know several newly minted lawyers from reasonable but not top tier schools who are trying to find work. (unfortunately in fields I don't know and don't care much about, like family law, otherwise I'd find something for them to do.)
as for investment banking, the competition, I hear, is absolutely fierce. I'm a pretty bright kid for a biz guy, but your average quantz is going to eat me alive.
Working for other people is really only easier if you are the sort of person who is good at playing the organizational game.
My impression is that if you start a company in an area where you have some experience, your chances of success are way better than 1%. Is it better than your chances of making a lot of money working for other people?
my experience has been that building a business that pays bay area sysadmin wages is a /whole lot/ harder than getting a bay area sysadmin job. But my theory is that multiplying that bay area sysadmin money by five or ten is going to be easier to do with this business than it would be going back to school and attempting to learn a trade that would pay that much natively.
but yeah; most people who run businesses for the long term do it because they enjoy the freedom. My company is paying me about 1/3rd a bay area sysadmin wage right now, and I'm a /whole lot/ happier than I was being a sysadmin for someone else.
These days, people cobble something together. No capital.
No technology.
Reddit, Dropbox, Mint and an endless list of others don't fit this description. The idea that you can just 'cobble something together' and get an exit seems mostly an urban legend to me.
Frankly, when compared to Intel, Reddit surely looks like something that was just "cobbled together". Intel has hundreds of physics, chemistry, engineering PhD's building circuits with billions of transistors with dimensions one order of magnitude smaller than the wavelenght of visible light. And these circuits are built in billion-dollar factories. And the competitors can't catch up because they don't know how Intel does its magic.
By contrast, Reddit looks like something that was built in a couple of days by two bored college students. I like Reddit, but let's face it, they're not pushing technology anywhere. They don't have to deal with quantum effects, current leakage, and that kind of stuff. They just run a few servers, and they don't have a business plan that can compare to Intel's. So, what exact point are you trying to make?
Frankly, when compared to Intel, Reddit surely looks like something that
was just "cobbled together".
Like any other large company, Intel regularly buys some of these, so called 'cobbled together' startups. Those startups have business plans of their own and technology of their own, but no interest in taking on Intel, Motorola or any of the other giants. That's a valid business proposition and not a sign of weakness.
They don't have to deal with quantum effects, current leakage, and that
kind of stuff.
You're either romanticizing hardware or you're underestimating software. I'm an experimental physicist: I fully empathize with your respect for the engineering problems a company like Intel deals with. However: software startups mostly aren't solving engineering problems. That's not their goal. It's like criticizing the Los Angeles Lakers for not winning the Super Bowl.
are often not it's just too easy to disregard the problems each distinct piece of software faces.
Both google and oracle have shown much more vision, as well as ability to generate revenue, than reddit. So it's not fair to replace with them. They're not equal.
To a large extent that depends on your definition of empire. If an 'empire' is defined as a multi-billion dollar company then I agree with you, if it is anything over 10 million then there must be 10's of thousands of them.
I'm pretty sure my own company does not qualify as an 'empire' by any standard, but it keeps me free, off the streets and pays the bills, I couldn't wish for more. I wouldn't exchange it for a boring job in investment banking for whatever compensation you put on the table, there's more to life than money, as I've found out the hard way.
I am not after financial independence the easy way. I could never work for an investment bank. It's boring. And even if you're paid $200K a year at a bank, you're still a pawn. Nothing more than a mere cog in a big machine, unable to decide your own future. I don't advocate that. I am only stating that there are tradeoffs. You can trade money for freedom. You can trade excitement for safety. You can be a sheep and be bored, you can be a wolf and be lonely.
In any case, there's nothing particularly noble about empire per se. Sure, it pleases the ego. But there's always a bigger empire. And empires require HR departments and middle managers and other such distasteful things. You don't need to be the captain of an aircraft carrier. It's also fun to run a pirate ship.
huh? Reddit is pretty much the best example of this. No real technology, just a community, sold for $10m or whatever, and now struggling because it doesn't have a business model.
Intel? You mean the company that just paid Dell 4.3 million dollars to prop up their failing business and assure Dell didn't work with their number one competitor? Not a great example to use for success. They are huge, but not exactly the model of success.
Both Ellsberg and Assange have claimed that they do believe that there are legitimate secrets (e.g., cyphers, nuclear technology, and the like). Your argument is based on the assumption that WL sees all secrets as being born equal, which is utter nonsense. Do you honestly believe that:
- the Afghan war diaries contain secrets of the same magnitude as, say, U.S. radar tech 70 years ago?
- Pakistan does not know that the U.S. knows that elements of the Pakistani intelligence are collaborating with the Taliban? (of course they are, they know the Taliban will most likely win, and they want to ensure tranquility after the U.S. gets tired, declares "victory", and leaves)
- the enemy does not know it's using heat-seeking missiles against U.S. choppers?
- the enemy does not know the attacks on U.S. forces? They were the ones who carried the attacks out!
Think about it. The release of the documents contains very little the enemy does not know about. Therefore, your entire argument is invalidated. Apples and oranges. The secrets you alluded to do compromise national security. The secrets exposed last weekend by WL only compromise the politicians who lied to the world about how the war was going in order to avoid losing popular support.
The burden of proof lies on the accuser's shoulders. How do you know it's not disinformation? From now on, the Pentagon will blame WikiLeaks for every civilian death. WikiLeaks had no incentive to put innocents at risk, but the Pentagon has all the incentives to discredit WikiLeaks.
While it may be true that WikiLeaks had no incentive to put innocents at risk, it's also beside the point. It's entirely reasonable to believe that laziness/stupidity/lack of resources caused them to leak informants names even if that wasn't their intention.
I accept the concept that Wikileaks puts informants at additional risk. I also accept that the government is lying through their teeth about the activities on the ground in Afghanistan.
Is it more important for a the taxpaying population to be informed of what the military is doing in their name? Or is it more important to hide all information that may have any connection to the activities of informants?
I would suggest, that as an informant you make a direct choice to act, which effectively stakes your claim to a large majority of the repercussions. No such choice is offered to the public, and even if it were, a large heterogeneous group of people cannot be saddled with the same responsibility that an individual chooses for them self.
Additionally, any government that hides non national security type information from their population, puts itself at risk by allowing it's informants to be possibly exposed by leaks. If it wanted to provide protection from possibly damaging leaks, thus ensuring the anonymity of it's informants, it would provide a robust channel of accurate information to the public. Such information would greatly reduce the perceived need for leaks, hold the government and military more accountable, better serve the public good, and provide additional protection for informants.
effectively stakes your claim to a large majority of the repercussions
So what are you saying, that if Wikileaks got access to the data of the Witness Protection Programme in the US it should publicize that too? Because all government coverups are bad?
Further - the one with the info is truly responsible for keeping it a secret. Maybe the Pentagon should look internally if they want to see the real leaker. However - it has to be said that the more secrets weigh on the conscience, the more risk they are of compromise. The worse the moral perception of the act, the more risk of a leak.
Yes, because the average American surely has the time to read 100s of classified documents. The goal of the release is to attain reform, and if drama stokes discussion and catalyzes reform, so be it. What's the problem with drama exactly? The more notorious Assange gets, the harder it will be for the powers that be to get rid of him.
Do you honestly think that drama leads to the downfall of media? Do you remember CNN, Fox, NYTimes in early 2003, when they all claimed that Iraq had WMD? Why do they still have credibility? They do because media has become part of the enterntainment industry, which makes it obvious why WL is necessary.
It seems self-defeating to argue there's a shortage of people who are capable of dramatizing leaked information on the one hand, while on the other hand arguing that the entire news industry is solely interested in entertainment.
If I remember correctly, weapons inspectors were sent to Iraq, they found nothing, and then the U.S. invaded a sovereign nation based on lies. Fox News had reporters embedded with the U.S. military during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and I remember them reporting that "WMD sites had been secured"! It's all a circus. You can have all the journalists you want embedded with ground units in Afghanistan, but if the editors back in NYC or Washington D.C. are constrained, then you won't get the real story. In other words, your argument is a joke.
And if you want to cite a credible source of info on these issues, cite STRATFOR's article:
Be very careful with stratfor. I was a subscriber back before and during the Iraq War, and as the war progressed it was clear that their information, as in-depth as it sounds, mostly reveals itself as BS in the long run. One example relavant to your comment was that they were among the worst at pushing obviously and flagrantly false WMD stories even many months into the war. But that's just the start; their seemingly detailed and insightful articles were ultimately wrong about just about every little detail they contained. It became perfectly clear that their sources came from the same ranks as the mainstream media's (the US military and a variety of polically motivated officials), the sources were just more obscure and lower level. Stratfor might have done a 180 in the past couple years, but I highly, highly doubt it.
The people getting kidnapped and killed are not "embedded" with military units and they're not simply parroting some PR guy's talking points. They're using fixers to get guided tours of Baluchistan to meet Taliban leaders.
The people reporting from Peshawar --- literally putting 'Peshawar' in their dateline, like the WaPo has been doing for years --- are not embedded with military units; the US military doesn't have units with embeddings in western Pakistan. But there those reporters are, inconveniently damaging your argument.
Embedded or not, they still work for an American newspaper, which means that their stories can be censored via legal bullying. By contrast, WikiLeaks can't be stopped by the powers that be.
WikiLeaks' war logs contain 100s of short reports from troops on the ground. Now the question may be: what is more truthful, a platoon leader's report, or a wild-roaming journalist's report? The platoon leader must please his commanding officer, the journalist must please his boss. They both are constrained.
Yes, there are journalists who were in Afghanistan / Pakistan back in the 1980s during the war with the USSR who are visiting Taliban leaders. They can go where no U.S. soldiers can go, for sure. But is that bringing forth that much truth? Sure, it's valuable to listen to the enemy's point of view, but don't we all know already what the Taliban want?
You're forgetting that self-censorship is sometimes the greatest pressure on editorial staff. These newspapers's primary duty, unless their staff have signed up to the Munich convention of 1971, could be seen to be to advertisers, and then to industry regulators who they're hoping to get some kind of booster shot/protection aginst nu meedja from; that, at least, is not the case at Wikileaks.
Self-censorship is also driven by editorial staff purposely biasing their reporting to reflect the political biases of their readership. There's a sizeable segment of society that thinks that reporting on alleged abuses in Afghanistan is akin to terrorist-sympathising.
It sounds callous, but what do I care if somebody gets kidnapped and killed? That doesn't add any value to journalism in itself. All I care about is what ends up in the paper I'm reading.
Well the guy who leaked the Iraq video to wikileaks is in prison now. I think that is quite a high price. Not many journalists if any are prosecuted from their own state for reporting what the power that be does not want to hear. Though that said, Dr. Kelly in Britain paid a high price too.
> Not many journalists if any are prosecuted from their own state for reporting what the power that be does not want to hear.
I don't quite get where are you coming from with this. A good deal, maybe half of the political prisoners and political assassination victims worldwide are journalists. Hell, in my homeland at least one journalist mysteriously disappeared and a few went through the prison.
