[luke warm]

 PassedOut, on 2010-December-02, 08:55, said:

You must be one of the dreaded elite who claim that words have definitions.

treason: the offense of attempting by overt acts to overthrow the government of the state to which the offender owes allegiance or to kill or personally injure the sovereign or the sovereign's family

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

[PassedOut]

 luke warm, on 2010-December-02, 16:50, said:

treason: the offense of attempting by overt acts to overthrow the government of the state to which the offender owes allegiance or to kill or personally injure the sovereign or the sovereign's family

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

Possibly. But it seems that some folks suppose everyone in the world owes the US allegiance (or else).

[kenberg]

I think it is important to stop the leaks. I recently saw the (not particularly good) movie "The Invention of Lying" which postulated a world in which everyone speaks candidly. Not a life that is appealing to me. In everyday life I want to be able to talk with friends w/o worrying that I am being taped for re-broadcast. Surely this is necessary for diplomacy among allies. Maybe it's even more important in discussion with rivals.


So I favor protecting cable traffic from disclosure. Mostly I assume this to be a technological issue. I wouldn't send flowers if a load of bricks fell on Assange, or whatever his name is, but I would not expect that approach to be effective long term.,

[helene_t]

 kenberg, on 2010-December-02, 19:37, said:

So I favor protecting cable traffic from disclosure. Mostly I assume this to be a technological issue.

I don't think so. No matter how hacking-proof the communication between diplomats, there will always be diplomats who leak information.

[phil_20686]

 helene_t, on 2010-December-03, 03:13, said:

I don't think so. No matter how hacking-proof the communication between diplomats, there will always be diplomats who leak information.

well, mostly it seems that an absurd number of low level lackeys had access to sensitive information. You can obviously never prevent people from leaking information, but they generally only leak things when they take serious issue with government policy, and a certain amount of leaking is healthy in a democracy. This kinda broad based leaking is a new thing. I cannot believe the source has even read all these documents. You can keep secrets effectively if you restrict the number of people who know them. If you don't, then you cannot. 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.

[PassedOut]

 phil_20686, on 2010-December-03, 11:20, said:

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]

 PassedOut, on 2010-December-03, 12:02, said:

...
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]

 phil_20686, on 2010-December-03, 11:20, said:

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:

Quote

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

[nige1]

 Winstonm, on 2010-December-05, 14:32, said:

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]

 luke warm, on 2010-December-02, 16:50, said:

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.

Quote

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:

Quote

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.

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.washingto...0121004812.html
has something of a "stop wining and eat your spinach" approach that I think I agree with.

[y66]

 kenberg, on 2010-December-12, 15:16, said:

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.washingto...0121004812.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]

 Winstonm, on 2010-December-17, 08:37, said:

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]

 kenberg, on 2010-December-17, 09:15, said:

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]

 mgoetze, on 2010-December-17, 12:32, said:

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)