Washington, we have a problem!

[PassedOut]

This does not seem like an efficient system. Best to keep information in as small cells as possible.

Yes, this not only reduces the chances for leaks, but makes it easier to identify the leaker when it happens (and sometimes information will be leaked, as Helene says).

 

But the sheer amount of data copied was staggering. It seems to me that Ken is right to opine that a technological solution could prevent copying of sensitive information on this massive scale.

[hotShot]

...

But the sheer amount of data copied was staggering.

...

 

250.000 dokuments each less than 4 kB (=2-3 pages of text) if accessible as Textfiles. are only 1 GB, nothing you can't copy to your mobile phone or a SD-RAM chip smaller than a fingernail.

[hrothgar]

From what i have gathered from news outlets, it seems to be American policy that you can see all documents at your security rating or below, irrespective of the filed that they are in. So military analysts have access to diplomata tic data etc. This does not seem like an efficient system. Best to keep information in as small cells as possible.

 

After 9/11 there was immediate hue and cry that the attacks we preventable if only information weren't siloed...

 

There were all sorts of hearings discussing how the competing intelligence services weren't able to share information, that the FBI wasn't able to cross-index information with the CIA, and that no one had a clue what the NSA was up to.

 

An enomrous amount of time and effort was spent flattening silos and making information more open and accessible (within the intelligence community). They suceeded so well that individuals soldiers were able to access a wide variety of sensitive information - and, subsequently, do whatever they damn well wanted with it...

 

What we're witnessing is a feature, not a bug... (More precisely, we're seeing folks whipsaw between one extreme and the other).

 

Personally, I don't find any of this at all surprising.

Off hand, does anyone know how old the expression "Generals fighting the last war" is?

[Winstonm]

I don't remember the editors of the New York Times being villified as "endangering American lives" when they elected to publish the Pentagon Papers leak. How Wikileaks's embarassment of the U.S. State Department can be villified by news organizations as criminal says more about the decline of the ethical responsibilities of those news organizations as watchdog organizations than any genuine criminality of Assange's actions.

 

I sometimes wonder if the Right Wing and especially the Christian Coalition haven't forgotten this prescient quote from the book of John, Chapter 3:

 

...For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed...

[nige1]

I sometimes wonder if the Right Wing and especially the Christian Coalition haven't forgotten this prescient quote from the book of John, Chapter 3:

Truth and honesty sometimes hurt, but lies and deception inflict more and worse damage.

[Winstonm]

seems to me that treason doesn't apply, but something probably does

 

Yes. I think it is called the First Amendment.

[PassedOut]

The government will never be able to stop dribs and drabs of information from leaking out, but it seems that the Obama administration is quickly putting in place technological solutions to prevent massive releases of secret data: Keeping Secrets WikiSafe.

 

Whether or not the Obama administration tries to prosecute those who disseminated the information, it is determined to use technology to preserve its secrets. The Defense Department is scaling back information sharing, which its leaders believe went too far after information hoarding was blamed for the failure to detect the Sept. 11 plot.

 

The department has also stripped CD and DVD recorders from its computers; it is redesigning security systems to require two people, not one, to move large amounts of information from a classified computer to an unclassified one; and it is installing software to detect downloads of unusual size.

It is a bit surprising (or maybe not) that these measures were not taken long ago.

[kenberg]

Kathleen Parker today supplied a view from Le Figaro that I found amusing:

 

Writing for the center-right Le Figaro, French journalist Renaud Girard said: "What is most fascinating is that we see no cynicism in U.S. diplomacy. They really believe in human rights in Africa and China and Russia and Asia. They really believe in democracy and human rights."

 

Yes, we really do.

 

[/Quote]

 

Indeed, sincerity is the key. Once you learn to fake that, the rest is easy. (I forget who first made this observation. Probably long ago.)

 

The article

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/10/AR2010121004812.html

has something of a "stop wining and eat your spinach" approach that I think I agree with.

[y66]

Kathleen Parker today supplied a view from Le Figaro that I found amusing:

 

Indeed, sincerity is the key. Once you learn to fake that, the rest is easy. (I forget who first made this observation. Probably long ago.)

 

The article

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/10/AR2010121004812.html

has something of a "stop wining and eat your spinach" approach that I think I agree with.

 

Just read that.

 

We need to be the people we were meant to be: strong, resilient, disciplined, entrepreneurial, focused, wise, playful, humorous, humble, thoughtful and, please, self-deprecating.

 

We're idiots. Come on. Let's stop pretending. This is what we hate Assange.

[Winstonm]

The latest compelling reflex reaction from the DOJ is to try to pin a conspiracy charge on Assange for encouraging Manning to turn over classified documents; if this strategy is successful, the entire idea of free press may as well be written out of the Constitution, as virtually every investigative reporter known to man has and continues to use the same techniques to get stories.

[kenberg]

As I understand it, the argument is that while the NYTimes might publish the Pentagon Papers they did not actually hire Ellsberg to go out and steal them. I grant that there is a difference but I am not sure how conclusive it is. The issue with, say, Robert Hanssen or Julius Rosenberg was not whether they were paid but rather what they did. Hanssen certainly did it for money, Rosenberg I think did it for ideology. Who cares?

 

If possible, law should encode our values. That's often tricky. For me, the values issue runs something like this: The WikiLeaks seemed not to be based on any intention to expose wrongdoing but simply to eliminate privacy. As I get it, there was little (although definitely not nothing) that seriously compromised security. In the past, Watergate was about government officials planning and covering up a break-in of opposition offices, Monica Lewinsky was about a man's poor choice of playmates. It's not the same thing. (Yes, I know, the charge was lying under oath. But it was lying under oath about sex.) WikiLeaks proved that when people are speaking in what they believe to be private, they don't always phrase things as tactfully as they do in public discussion. What a shocker.

 

Ultimately, we no doubt have to put up with a certain amount of misuse of freedom in order to keep our freedom. We don't have to like all the uses to which this freedom is put, but all close calls should be resolved in favor of restricting government interference. No doubt Jimmy will be able to apply this dictum in many other areas, and in some of them I will agree.

[Aberlour10]

The latest compelling reflex reaction from the DOJ is to try to pin a conspiracy charge on Assange for encouraging Manning to turn over classified documents; if this strategy is successful, the entire idea of free press may as well be written out of the Constitution, as virtually every investigative reporter known to man has and continues to use the same techniques to get stories.

 

There are rumors that USA already searches intensively for the possiblities to get Assange (via Sweden) to the US court, even with dubious tactics. If they really do this, I predict >>> this will be the biggest PR shot in own knee the USA made in last 20 years.

[mgoetze]

The WikiLeaks seemed not to be based on any intention to expose wrongdoing but simply to eliminate privacy.

 

How would you know what the intentions of anyone involved were?

 

The fact of the matter is: a significant amount of wrongdoing has been exposed.

[kenberg]

How would you know what the intentions of anyone involved were?

 

The fact of the matter is: a significant amount of wrongdoing has been exposed.

 

 

Of course no one can know for certain what another person's intentions are or were. It is often possible to make reasonable guesses based on actions and statements. But perhaps we could agree, or perhaps not, that the legal case should not turn on his intentions. People can do really awful things with the best of intentions.

 

As far as Assange goes, I see him as a warning shot that we need to get our thoughts together on what the law should be. The internet revolution has/will make us rethink our laws involving copyright, privacy, data gathering and so on. Massive downloading of diplomatic cables can be added to the list. Surely your government as well as mine would prefer that their diplomatic correspondence be kept private, and I think many citizens can see the point of this.

 

 

I don't see it as wrong to prosecute him under current US law, if it applies. It would not surprise me to find that it does not apply. Whether it does apply or not, some serious thinking should be done regarding such future leaks. As to the extradition to Sweden on sex charges, I regard it as suspicious but I don't want to be a pig about it. I strongly oppose, and I hope everyone does, any action along the lines of "Well, we can't get him for what we really object to so let's see if we can trump up some other charges". Just as I have no real way of knowing his intentions, I have no real way of knowing if the charges are trumped up. I mean no disrespect to the Swedish authorities, certainly Swedish laws must be respected, but they must realize how convenient this all looks.

[luke warm]

i go back and forth on this thing... i *think* i've settled on this position - what he did should not be illegal (although to the extent that he placed others at harm, i believe it could be immoral)... the blame here goes to those whose words, deeds, actions were exposed... either do no wrong or hide it better

 

i kinda sorta had to settle on that position to be consistent (and of course the offense would be punishable by death, quickly and cheaply, when i'm in charge - but that's another story)

[Winstonm]

I really encourage everyone to become fully vested in the circumstances of this story as it has the potential to be critical to freedom of speech and a free press. The DOJ is running around in circles trying to come up with a reason to charge Assange - yet doing nothing about the real crime exposed by Wikileaks of Hillary Clinton encouraging the theft of credit cards from U.N. members.

 

The complaint against Assange is simply that he had the audacity to publish what a powerful government did not want known.

 

Assange admits he is most afraid of extradition to the U.S. - and with Gitmo still open and the black sites still operating in Afghanistan who can blame him? In this attempt to silence Assange and Wikileaks, the U.S. is acting more like Mao's Red China than the paragon of democracy and freedom it purports to be.

 

I also think it naive not to realize all investigative reporters encourage the release of information in order to prove the allegations. I doubt if Woodward and Bernstein said, "Hey, we don't want any proof. Just tell us what you think happened."

[Winstonm]

Here is a reality check on what Wikileaks actually did concerning the diplomatic cables.

 

WikiLeaks has posted to its website only 960 of the 251,297 diplomatic cables it has. Almost every one of these cables was first published by one of its newspaper partners which are disclosing them (The Guardian, the NYT, El Pais, Le Monde, Der Speigel, etc.). Moreover, the cables posted by WikiLeaks were not only first published by these newspapers, but contain the redactions applied by those papers to protect innocent people and otherwise minimize harm.

 

When you agree to redact, the case for the charge of espionage the DOJ was considering certainly sounds lame, don't you think?

 

The more I learn the more this seems like a Salem Witch Trial or a lynch mob. The trouble is that with the court-sanctioned powers grabbed by the executive in the war on terror, a government sponsored lynch mob has nothing to fear as long as it cries "national security".

[mgoetze]

Surely your government as well as mine would prefer that their diplomatic correspondence be kept private, and I think many citizens can see the point of this.

 

Surely they would prefer that. I, as a citizen, do not. I would prefer for my government not to do anything they would not be proud to have the entire world know of, say, 1 year after the fact (I realize that there can be valid reasons for keeping ongoing negotations under wraps until things are finalized).

 

I don't see it as wrong to prosecute him under current US law, if it applies.

 

I do. I strongly resent the US attitude that they have jurisdiction over the entire world and their laws apply everywhere. I would not appreciate it if, say, Saudi Arabia started arresting tourists because they had been drinking alcohol in their home countries. But this is exactly the sort of thing the USA does.

[kenberg]

I know nothing about the copyright case you cite. I would hope for international agreements. But your analogy with being prosecuted under Saudi law for drinking here is, I think, off the mark. When I was a graduate student some students bought cheap copies of texts, shipped from overseas. I did not. The legal status of these texts was at best fuzzy, the moral status seemed clearly wrong. This is a closer analogy, I think. The guy, as I get it, was enabling free use of copyrighted material. That's not drinking a beer, it's ripping off someone else's stuff. I see that he was found not guilty. All that this means to me is that in copyright disputes the lawyers will have to see how it goes.

 

Back to the cables. I think it was Calvin Coolidge (aka Silent Cal, our president for a while between the wars) who put a stop to intercepting and reading letters from diplomats on the grounds that "Gentlemen don't read other gentlemen's mail". A charmingly naive notion.

 

I hope for clear agreements among nations that the countries would then adhere to. Achieving that would be a good day's work.

[Gerardo]

If you obtained the eBook legally, what's wrong with format shifting?

[mgoetze]

Michael Moore on rape charges against Assange:

 

[T]hey know that you [the Swedish government] are cynically and disgustingly using the real and everyday threat that exists against women everywhere to help further the American government's interest in silencing the work of WikiLeaks.

[kenberg]

Do not cross Michael Moore!

 

From his screed:

 

Message to rapists? Sweden loves you!

[/Quote]

 

I indeed find the charges suspicious, as I have said. However, I definitely would not want to be lumped in with, or in any way associated with, Michael Moore. I find such statements as the above to be so ludicrous that I totally discount anything the man has to say. Really, "ludicrous" is an understatement. Words fail me here.

[blackshoe]

If Michael Moore told me water was wet, I'd ask for a second opinion.

[Winstonm]

If Michael Moore told me water was wet, I'd ask for a second opinion.

 

I feel the same way about George Bush.

[ggwhiz]

Is this not much ado about nothing?

 

Industrial espionage, cyber attacks etc. are recent provocations in relative years but lack of transparency in diplomacy? ..... Duh!

 

The only reaction up here has been the occasional raised eyebrow followed by a chuckle. A media firestorm though and that will get Michael Moore's attention.