WikiLeaks largest classified military leak

[PhilsFan]

Why is the US government sexting, then? Seems awfully irresponsible.

[MadelynIris]

Link is my sig. Sorry. Maddy is my daughter. Her name is Madelyn Iris.
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[financeguy]

The background of the Wikileaks organisation and their funding may merit further research.

[MadelynIris]

This guy has their number:Jester's Court – Stay Frosty My Friends

[Canadiens1131]

Originally Posted by MadelynIris

This guy has their number:Jester's Court – Stay Frosty My Friends

I don`t think he really adds anything to the debate. It`s what I hate about blogs, a lot of poorly-organized rambling.

[Salome]

Originally Posted by Canadiens1131

It`s what I hate about blogs, a lot of poorly-organized rambling.

true that

[melon]

On the flip side, it's not often you get to find out what our "public servants" say behind our backs. It should be fascinating from an academic perspective, at the very least, since its release seems to be a foregone conclusion at this point.

[MadelynIris]

I don`t think he really adds anything to the debate. It`s what I hate about blogs, a lot of poorly-organized rambling

It was a response to financeguy's post about further research into the wikileaks org. The Jester is hacktivist who targets jihadist websites, and recently wikileaks. He's downloaded their board membership, financial records, etc... encrypted and uploaded to various sites around the world as "insurance" against "wikileaks insurance", their encrypted file that they are using to "protect" their interests.

Poorly organized or worded? Maybe. I was able to follow it just fine. It's all theoretical anyway.

[mobvok]

Originally Posted by cobl04

i don't know much about the topic (i'm only 20, and perhaps an aspiring journalist), but saying the public "has a right to know" is not a good enough excuse to release classified documents without permission, whatever the content.

That's one heck of a caveat.

The US is already kind of doing it your way and shown it's failed as a standard.

Besides (besides?) embarrassing things like the US military turning a blind eye to Iraqi torture and the 100,000+ casualty count, the Afghan and Iraq leaks showed us that an awful lot of harmless crap gets sucked into the "classified" vortex. See this report for example, about......missing orphans. Scandal! Think about the factual inaccuracy of labeling this document as harmful to national security were it to be released. Words have meanings! That is why the public should have a presumptive right to know exactly what's being done in our name with our money; the government should have to make the affirmative case like proving guilt in a court of law to separate the wheat from the chaff in a manner that simply is not being done currently.

It looks like the first Afghan leak was a little risky as far as proper redaction, but I've heard that Wikileaks got their act together with the Iraq leak (and got media savvier, judging by the Der Speigel/Guardian/New York Times collaboration).

Link

In July, WikiLeaks released 70,000 documents related to the Afghanistan war. A junior US Army intelligence analyst, Private First Class Bradley Manning, was arrested in May and charged with the unauthorized use and disclosure of classified information. He is being held in the US Marine Corps brig at Quantico, Virginia.

Since then, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Afghanistan leak did not reveal any sensitive intelligence sources or methods.

That’s essentially the point made by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange regarding the latest report on Iraq.

“While there may have been legitimate reasons to keep many of these reports secret at the time they were made, that time has passed,” he said in an interview with Sky News. “The attempt to keep them secret is an attempt to keep the public record sanitized and keep the American administration from being criticized.”

[PhilsFan]

The problem is that the US government has tasked itself with defining what deserves being classified information. And the leaks have revealed that they've failed miserably at that task. Are there things that are in our interest to remain classified? Sure. But there's so much that is being deemed classified that shouldn't be that I think these leaks are good. We're not just learning the information; we're learning what type of information the government has decided is classified. That's the more important thing here, I think.

[AliEnvy]

WikiLeaks putting 'lives at risk' - World - Canoe.ca

Wikileaks 'under cyber attack' - Telegraph

B-movie, spy thriller ridiculousness.

[mobvok]

Holy moly this stuff's gone live:

One link of many, I'm sure.

Gonna start reading this now.

¶ A dangerous standoff with Pakistan over nuclear fuel: Since 2007, the United States has mounted a highly secret effort, so far unsuccessful, to remove from a Pakistani research reactor highly enriched uranium that American officials fear could be diverted for use in an illicit nuclear device. In May 2009, Ambassador Anne W. Patterson reported that Pakistan was refusing to schedule a visit by American technical experts because, as a Pakistani official said, “if the local media got word of the fuel removal, ‘they certainly would portray it as the United States taking Pakistan’s nuclear weapons,’ he argued.”

¶ Gaming out an eventual collapse of North Korea: American and South Korean officials have discussed the prospects for a unified Korea, should the North’s economic troubles and political transition lead the state to implode. The South Koreans even considered commercial inducements to China, according to the American ambassador to Seoul. She told Washington in February that South Korean officials believe that the right business deals would “help salve” China’s “concerns about living with a reunified Korea” that is in a “benign alliance” with the United States.

¶ Bargaining to empty the Guantánamo Bay prison: When American diplomats pressed other countries to resettle detainees, they became reluctant players in a State Department version of “Let’s Make a Deal.” Slovenia was told to take a prisoner if it wanted to meet with President Obama, while the island nation of Kiribati was offered incentives worth millions of dollars to take in Chinese Muslim detainees, cables from diplomats recounted. The Americans, meanwhile, suggested that accepting more prisoners would be “a low-cost way for Belgium to attain prominence in Europe.”

¶ Suspicions of corruption in the Afghan government: When Afghanistan’s vice president visited the United Arab Emirates last year, local authorities working with the Drug Enforcement Administration discovered that he was carrying $52 million in cash. With wry understatement, a cable from the American Embassy in Kabul called the money “a significant amount” that the official, Ahmed Zia Massoud, “was ultimately allowed to keep without revealing the money’s origin or destination.” (Mr. Massoud denies taking any money out of Afghanistan.)

¶ A global computer hacking effort: China’s Politburo directed the intrusion into Google’s computer systems in that country, a Chinese contact told the American Embassy in Beijing in January, one cable reported. The Google hacking was part of a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese government. They have broken into American government computers and those of Western allies, the Dalai Lama and American businesses since 2002, cables said.

The Guardian has a running liveblog with a summary of what they've got so far. Both The Guardian and the NY Times promise up to 9 (!) days of releases.

From Der Spiegel:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's emissaries also learn of a special "Iran observer" in the Azerbaijan capital of Baku who reports on a dispute that played out during a meeting of Iran's Supreme National Security Council. An enraged Revolutionary Guard Chief of Staff Mohammed Ali Jafari allegedly got into a heated argument with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and slapped him in the face because the generally conservative president had, surprisingly, advocated freedom of the press.

[Canadiens1131]

Even thought a lot of the "choice" summary points are already well-known, the next few weeks are going to be absolutely fascinating.

[MadelynIris]

I can't tell you how detrimental this is and potentially lethal.

[financeguy]

Originally Posted by MadelynIris

I can't tell you how detrimental this is and potentially lethal.

What are you hearing? There are claims on the web that Wikileaks is a Soros/Open Society front but I've no idea if it's true or not.

[yolland]

I see little, very little, in what I've read so far to make me think that leaking these documents was at all morally commendable. And I find most of the arguments I've seen to the contrary (mostly made by people who hadn't even read any of them yet) astoundingly trite and superficial. In situations held by strong international consensus to entail great evil, such as when massacres or torture are covered up, then yes, there's a worthy case to be made that (illegally) exposing them is not only morally permissible, but morally imperative. But, just as the state's monopoly on legitimate violence is a fundamental legal and political concept (without which we couldn't have functional law and order), so is the state's right to confidentiality in communications with its representatives abroad fundamental (hence, the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which WikiLeaks would be violating left and right if it were a country). It's extremely dangerous and irresponsible to endorse the view that whoever finds a given instance of diplomatic conduct (as related in classified documents) sleazy, hypocritical, educational, titillating, or bleakly funny therefore has the moral authority to break the law by leaking it. Not because each and every classified cable out there has been designated as such only after the gravest and most exacting of evaluations--hello, do you have any idea how many embassies and consulates abroad we have, and how many communications go back and forth each day?--but because the principle of due confidentiality is essential to the functions they serve.

I will keep reading.

[mobvok]

Some of The Guardian's commentary is raising what seems like an awfully good point worth emphasizing- any ostensibly private/candid diplomatic conversation with an American official over the last 5-10 years could have ended up freely accessible by 1 of at least 3 million citizens with appropriate security clearances like Bradley Manning. Yikes. That's the flip side of post 9/11 info sharing. In a way I'm sort of glad that the US is learning some of the benefits of compartmentalizing with organizations at least ostensibly devoted to redaction and harm minimization, rather than for the first time with more malicious groups.

[AchtungBono]

At first I wanted Julian Assange shot for treason but I changed my mind.....I want him to live......

I want him hunted, I want him to walk forever looking over his shoulder, I want him harrassed, I want to know every time he flushes his toilet, I want him to get a speeding ticket if he walks too fast.....I want the hubble telescope pointed at his house at all times, I want him to sleep with one eye open (if at all), I want him to feel what his alleged rape victim felt - FEAR and TERROR!

Stupid son of a bitch - who died and made HIM god.....? He's nothing but a pesky little brother who got a hold of his big sister's diary and he's releasing parts of it a few pages at a time. Sure the sister will be mortified and embarrased by the secrets, but at the same time she will be plotting the most awful revenge......

So yes.....I want him to live - just like Bin Laden lives.....in a wormhole somewhere just waiting to be caught - and he WILL be caught......one way or another. And YES....I AM comparing him with Bin Laden because they are both terrorists - Bin Laden uses weapons and flunkies to do his dirty work to kill innocent people and Assange uses his keyboard and flunkies (Bradley Manning and god knows who else....) and his actions also put thousands of people in danger.

So hide Julian.....hide.....and enjoy your freedom for as long as you can, because it won't last long.

[sarit]

Originally Posted by AchtungBono

At first I wanted Julian Assange shot for treason but I changed my mind.....I want him to live......

I want him hunted, I want him to walk forever looking over his shoulder, I want him harrassed, I want to know every time he flushes his toilet, I want him to get a speeding ticket if he walks too fast.....I want the hubble telescope pointed at his house at all times, I want him to sleep with one eye open (if at all), I want him to feel what his alleged rape victim felt - FEAR and TERROR!

Stupid son of a bitch - who died and made HIM god.....? He's nothing but a pesky little brother who got a hold of his big sister's diary and he's releasing parts of it a few pages at a time. Sure the sister will be mortified and embarrased by the secrets, but at the same time she will be plotting the most awful revenge......

So yes.....I want him to live - just like Bin Laden lives.....in a wormhole somewhere just waiting to be caught - and he WILL be caught......one way or another. And YES....I AM comparing him with Bin Laden because they are both terrorists - Bin Laden uses weapons and flunkies to do his dirty work to kill innocent people and Assange uses his keyboard and flunkies (Bradley Manning and god knows who else....) and his actions also put thousands of people in danger.

So hide Julian.....hide.....and enjoy your freedom for as long as you can, because it won't last long.

What's wrong with you? Seriously, get a grip.

The only thing there so far that caught me by surprise was H.Clinton wanting to collect biometric data from Ban Ki-moon.

What I don't get is what makes you so angry. Your prime minister not keeping his promises? Hardly a surprise. That you can tell even from inner-state politics. Mossad having interests taking down the Iranian regime? The time spent debating Iranian nuclear power? Egypt having common interests with Israel regarding the condition in Gaza but having to scorn us to the public eye to keep their own interests with the Arab world?

There's nothing there about Israel that you wouldn't have figured out from reading the weekly commentary in the newspapers. Calm down.

[Earnie Shavers]

Nothing that was released yesterday (and it only represents probably less than 10% of what will be released over coming days and weeks) was really 'new', surprising or damaging. It only expands on or confirms already 'known' things.

On the moral front, surely there must be some care being taken. Surely. I mean, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain actively pushing for bombing Iran is 'new' to the public domain, but that they would quite like it has always been kind of 'known', and you can bet Iran were already well aware of their active interest in it happening. And on the more gossipy front, well, Berlusconi likes women and wine - woah, who knew?! All of this can create headlines, and some will be surprising/shocking/scary to the public, but none of it will be to anyone who matters.

But there is a lot more to come, and surely if not Wikileaks, at least the newspaper editors helping to coordinate and manage it's release will feel a sense of a sort of duty of care. I mean, for example, anything to do with the Korean peninsula, you would, at this particular moment in time, be very fucking careful with. Even if it is this sort of widely 'known' but not widely known type of information, you would still have to be very careful with it because of it's excuse giving potential. You wouldn't want to leak some information about covert activities against North Korea, which would not in reality be news to anyone, but might give them a public excuse to flare things up another notch.

As an aside, an International Relations academic I was speaking to on Saturday said that from what he had read of the rumoured content, it's all things relating to Eurasia and Turkey that seem to have the real potential to actually blow open a few genuine secrets. The rest is pretty much worthless in any potential game changing/meaningful way. All 'known' if not known.