Phryxis wrote:Honestly, I hope somebody kills him. I just would not want it to be officially sanctioned by our government (or unofficially). I just wish the guy the worst possible fate, I don't feel morally justified in demanding it.
[...] He's obviously a self-serving profiteer, whatever the form he chooses to take his profits.

Goliath wrote:I've got to say that there is no way that the most recent leak could be considered "in the public interest".

This one: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11923766

the only thing that that leak is useful for is giving a shopping list for terrorist organisations.

Whatever else WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has accomplished, he's ended the era of innocent optimism about the Web. As wiki innovator Larry Sanger put it in a message to WikiLeaks, "Speaking as Wikipedia's co-founder, I consider you enemies of the U.S.—not just the government, but the people."

The irony is that WikiLeaks' use of technology to post confidential U.S. government documents will certainly result in a less free flow of information. The outrage is that this is Mr. Assange's express intention.

This batch includes 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables, the kind of confidential assessments diplomats have written since the era of wax seals. These include Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah urging the U.S. to end Iran's nuclear ambitions—to "cut the head off the snake." This alignment with the Israeli-U.S. position is not for public consumption in the Arab world, which is why leaks will curtail honest discussions.

Leaks will also restrict information flows within the U.S. A major cause of the 9/11 intelligence failures was that agencies were barred from sharing information. Since then, intelligence data have been shared more widely. The Obama administration now plans to tighten information flows, which could limit leaks but would be a step back to the pre-9/11 period.

Mr. Assange is misunderstood in the media and among digirati as an advocate of transparency. Instead, this battening down of the information hatches by the U.S. is precisely his goal. The reason he launched WikiLeaks is not that he's a whistleblower—there's no wrongdoing inherent in diplomatic cables—but because he hopes to hobble the U.S., which according to his underreported philosophy can best be done if officials lose access to a free flow of information.

In 2006, Mr. Assange wrote a pair of essays, "State and Terrorist Conspiracies" and "Conspiracy as Governance." He sees the U.S. as an authoritarian conspiracy. "To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed," he writes. "Conspiracies take information about the world in which they operate," he writes, and "pass it around the conspirators and then act on the result."

His central plan is that leaks will restrict the flow of information among officials—"conspirators" in his view—making government less effective. Or, as Mr. Assange puts it, "We can marginalize a conspiracy's ability to act by decreasing total conspiratorial power until it is no longer able to understand, and hence respond effectively to its environment. . . . An authoritarian conspiracy that cannot think efficiently cannot act to preserve itself."

Berkeley blogger Aaron Bady last week posted a useful translation of these essays. He explains Mr. Assange's view this way: "While an organization structured by direct and open lines of communication will be much more vulnerable to outside penetration, the more opaque it becomes to itself (as a defense against the outside gaze), the less able it will be to 'think' as a system, to communicate with itself." Mr. Assange's idea is that with enough leaks, "the security state will then try to shrink its computational network in response, thereby making itself dumber and slower and smaller."

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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange hopes to hobble the U.S. government.
Or as Mr. Assange told Time magazine last week, "It is not our goal to achieve a more transparent society; it's our goal to achieve a more just society." If leaks cause U.S. officials to "lock down internally and to balkanize," they will "cease to be as efficient as they were."

This worldview has precedent. Ted Kaczynski, another math-obsessed anarchist, sent bombs through the mail for almost 20 years, killing three people and injuring 23. He offered to stop in 1995 if media outlets published his Unabomber Manifesto. The 35,000-word essay, "Industrial Society and Its Future," objected to the "industrial-technological system" that causes people "to behave in ways that are increasingly remote from the natural pattern of human behavior." He's serving a life sentence for murder.

Mr. Assange doesn't mail bombs, but his actions have life-threatening consequences. Consider the case of a 75-year-old dentist in Los Angeles, Hossein Vahedi. According to one of the confidential cables released by WikiLeaks, Dr. Vahedi, a U.S. citizen, returned to Iran in 2008 to visit his parents' graves. Authorities confiscated his passport because his sons worked as concert promoters for Persian pop singers in the U.S. who had criticized the theocracy.

More on WikiLeaks
Cables Reflect Tensions Over Terrorism Funding U.S. Cable: China Ordered Google Hack The cable reported that Dr. Vahedi decided to escape by horseback over the mountains of western Iran and into Turkey. He trained by hiking the hills above Tehran. He took extra heart medication. But when he fell off his horse, he was injured and nearly froze. When he made it to Turkey, the U.S. Embassy intervened to stop him being sent back to Iran.

"This is very bad for my family," Dr. Vahedi told the New York Daily News on being told about the leak of the cable naming him and describing his exploits. Tehran has a new excuse to target his relatives in Iran. "How could this be printed?"

Excellent question. It's hard being collateral damage in the world of WikiLeaks.

Phryxis wrote:
The fundamental problem of the first world these days is that we have almost no connection at all to real consequence. We just flounce through our lives in total safety, total freedom, total divorcement from anything unsafe or upsetting.

Anonymous has launched a broad-ranging campaign in support of Wikileaks, starting with a DDoS assault on a PayPal website.

The denial of service attack lasted for eight hours and resulted in numerous service disruptions, Panda Security reports.

The group, spawned from anarchic message board 4chan, first came to prominence with a long running campaign against the church of Scientology, its beef with the Hubbard faithful centering on their attempts to censor content from the net.

PayPal's decision to stop processing donations for Wikileaks following its controversial publication of US diplomatic cables as well as the withdrawal of hosting services by Amazon are seen on 4chan and elsewhere as attempts to censor the whistle-blowing site, a development Anonymous intends to oppose.

IceRaptor wrote:I would love to know how your concept of 'total safety, total freedom, and total divorcement from anything unsafe' applies to the destitute in 'first world countries' - or even the lower end of the American middle class. Sure we don't suffer under a genocidal anarchy or are exposed to torture on a routine basis - but that hardly puts the majority of us into a 'totally safe' fantasy land you're describing.

Monster Rain wrote:

I'm not saying that the poor in the US have it easy, but I think Phryxis was right for the most part.

WarOne wrote:

Monster Rain wrote:

I'm not saying that the poor in the US have it easy, but I think Phryxis was right for the most part.

The poor can have lots of children, apply for aid, and live better than some medium income families in America.

sebster wrote:Fraz, you should have posted the link for that. It was an interesting piece, combining some interesting observations, including a pretty decent summary of Assange's beliefs, the silly, comparing him to a mail bomber, and the incredibly wrong, such as the claim no evidence of wrongdoing coming from the diplomatic cables.

Frazzled wrote:

sebster wrote:Fraz, you should have posted the link for that. It was an interesting piece, combining some interesting observations, including a pretty decent summary of Assange's beliefs, the silly, comparing him to a mail bomber, and the incredibly wrong, such as the claim no evidence of wrongdoing coming from the diplomatic cables.

Sorry, Op Ed this morning-Wall Street Journal

Is a person anti-American if he acts in a way that makes the US government look bad?

I don't really know the law that well, but I'd be shocked if publishing secret documents wasn't illegal in most countries.

Self-serving profiteers of questionable morals deserve death or 'the worst possible fate' through government agency?

I would love to know how your concept of 'total safety, total freedom, and total divorcement from anything unsafe' applies to the destitute in 'first world countries' - or even the lower end of the American middle class.

Do you think that Scooter Libby (or Rove, or Cheney or whoever actually authorised the leak) should be killed? By some reports the outing of Valerie Plame, and thereby the outing of her workplace as a CIA front, exposed many, many contacts, and by some reports resulted in deaths.

So it's a good thing when leaks show people the reality of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, then?

Phryxis wrote:Yes it is, but it's also not really necessary to have sensitive information involved in doing so. You don't need to have specific GPS coordinates, names, dates, etc. to convey the horrors of war, or the complications of conducting peacekeeping operations.

Monster Rain wrote:I'm not saying that the poor in the US have it easy, but I think Phryxis was right for the most part.

Phryxis wrote:
What I'm saying is "if you think life is EVER hard in the first world, you're unfamilliar with what life is like in the rest of it."

Phryxis wrote:
What I'm saying is "if you think life is EVER hard in the first world, you're unfamilliar with what life is like in the rest of it." Being pulled out of your bed in the middle of the night and killed isn't a rarity. It's the NORM.

Phryxis wrote:
We're such a coddled, safety obsessed society, so totally unwilling to allow ANYONE to have a bad outcome EVER that we can't really process reality effectively. In real life, bad outcomes happen CONSTANTLY.

An interesting ‘coincidence’ in the still unfolding honey pot trap that has ensnared Julian Assange. From Kirk Murphy at Firedoglake.com:

Yesterday Alexander Cockburn reminded us of the news Israel Shamir and Paul Bennett broke at Counterpunch in September. Julian Assange’s chief accuser in Sweden has a significant history of work with anti-Castro groups, at least one of which is US funded and openly supported by a former CIA agent convicted in the mass murder of seventy three Cubans on an airliner he was involved in blowing up.

Anna Ardin (the official complainant) is often described by the media as a “leftist”. She has ties to the US-financed anti-Castro and anti-communist groups. She published her anti-Castro diatribes (see here and here) in the Swedish-language publication Revista de Asignaturas Cubanas put out by Misceláneas de Cuba. From Oslo, Professor Michael Seltzer points out that this periodical is the product of a well-financed anti-Castro organization in Sweden. He further notes that the group is connected with Union Liberal Cubana led by Carlos Alberto Montaner whose CIA ties were exposed here.

Quelle surprise, no? Shamir and Bennett went on to write about Ardin’s history in Cuba with a US funded group openly supported by a real terrorist: Luis Posada Carriles.

In Cuba she interacted with the feminist anti-Castro group Las damas de blanco (the Ladies in White). This group receives US government funds and the convicted anti-communist terrorist Luis Posada Carriles is a friend and supporter. Wikipedia quotes Hebe de Bonafini, president of the Argentine Madres de Plaza de Mayo as saying that “the so-called Ladies in White defend the terrorism of the United States.”

Who is Luis Posada Carriles? He’s a mass murderer, and former CIA agent…

[continues at at Firedoglake.com]

Luis Posada Carriles is so evil that even the Bush administration wanted him behind bars:


In 2005, Posada was held by U.S. authorities in Texas on the charge of illegal presence on national territory before the charges were dismissed on May 8, 2007. On September 28, 2005 a U.S. immigration judge ruled that Posada cannot be deported, finding that he faces the threat of torture in Venezuela.[11] His release on bail on April 19, 2007 had elicited angry reactions from the Cuban and Venezuelan governments.[12] The U.S. Justice Department had urged the court to keep him in jail because he was “an admitted mastermind of terrorist plots and attacks”, a flight risk and a danger to the community.[7]

On September 28, 2005 a U.S. immigration judge ruled that Posada cannot be deported, finding that he faces the threat of torture

Ahtman wrote:I'm anti-Castro, does that mean I am also a CIA stooge?

IceRaptor wrote:

Monster Rain wrote:I'm not saying that the poor in the US have it easy, but I think Phryxis was right for the most part.

With which part? That the 'first world' countries have it easy, or that that's somehow a bad thing?