Wikileaks

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Martz

Staff member
May 26, 2001
5,707
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The news sites over the past few days have been stuffed with stories, all breaking from Wikileaks documents released.

I'm finding it very entertaining at the bare minimum. It's already causing a lot of embarassement to diplomats and heads of state all over the world - and I got a feeling they haven't released the juicey stuff yet.

Wikileaks has been sat on this information for a long time, it's also thought that the AES256 encrypted document they published called "insurance" contains the full archive of leaked cables and memos.

Which I thought was very clever. Get the data out to the world, but don't enable them to turn it into information. If Assange is arrested/detained/extradited to face charges of Treason (he's Australian??) then the password can be revealed by other people who have been trusted to guard the secrets. The perfect insurance.

It's going to take a few weeks for all of this information to be fully absorbed, so far i've counted 6 stories - all of which would've have front page news (or at least be heavily featured in World/Political sections).

It could very well change how the world perceives government and their data. Incredible times.
 
thanks to the internet there is simply NO WAY any government can stop the flow of information

:thumb: for teh internet

:thumb: for the truth

fuck all the lying politicians :D
 
It's great :D

Love the way the politicians and diplomats across the world try and discredit Wikileaks and brand them as a terrorist organisation for telling the truth.

When are they going to learn, there's no stopping the internet.
 
I like the concept of Wikileaks a lot :) Doubt it's gonna change anything, don't think things need to be changed, but it's still a great thing ;)

Assange is fuckin stupid for making so many enemies tho, in my opinion.
 
Some things are kept secret because it is in the Public interest to do so, indiscriminate releasing of sensitive information could, undoubtedly will cause untold damage to fragile relationships between states, organisations and politicians, its all very clever and entertaining until it gets someone killed. There are people in the field who have gathered this information whos lives could and probably will be put at risk because of the indiscriminate nature of the release.

Personally I find it neither clever or entertaining watching the fall out from this, simply its dangerous.
 
I'm with Rich....it's all very "power to the people" releasing this info but it will do no good.
We're all very aware of what drove the "defence" of Kuwait and what a pack of lies got Europe drawn into it. Knowing the Yanks wrote that they think the Brits didn't do a good job in Basra is of no consequence.....the Brit's biggest problem is still having the USA not being able to recognise who is on their side, the "enemy" we can cope with.
All the releasing of info will do is cause bad feeling etc politically between currently friendly nations.
 
i find all this very interesting - but can't really say, what to think of it. actually i think it is a little bit too conservative to "only" think about the possible bad consequences. of course no1 wants a war started. but isn't it always/often (?) a good thing if the truth is revealed to every1. i wouldn't want to live fooled. would make me feel powerless like a chicken in a cage. i always thought, that those conspiracy/big brother movies are over the top - but maybe there is more truth to them than one might wanna think.

-----

i saw the face of a 22(!) yr old guy on a newspaper yesterday.
i think it said, he's a soldier working (having worked...) as an "intelligence operator"(? dunno how to translate that into English). the text said something about him having passed all that info to wikileaks? i couldn't follow the story/stories because i was busy the last week(s). so does any1 have more info about the guy and how the documents found their way to wikileaks?

another (maybe naive) question would be:
- which law did Assange break? of course most normal ppl wouldn't publish confidential stuff that some1 else had put into their mailbox. and of course ignorance (of the law) is no excuse. but still. what he does / they do does not seem THAT criminal at first glance.

and one more:
- if they did really break the law, why is the page not being shut down? is it really "just" because he broke US law and the site is hosted in sweden(?) ?
 
Rape allegations in Sweden. He's not actually wanted for anything wikileaks related..

EDIT: Site was taken down temporarily but it was moved from USA to Canada and it's now in Switzerland.
 
All the releasing of info will do is cause bad feeling etc politically between currently friendly nations.

If one of your ''friend'' talks shit about you behind your back, then he's not really your friend now is he?

Fuck the politically correct approaches.

If the flow of information available today can start bringing actual honesty in our politicians, then I honestly don't care if a few people have to die for it.

I mean, doesn't nearly 80%+ of the ''western world'' population already believe politicians to be lying scumbags? I think that's a dangerous feeling to have in a society, no trust in our leaders, but there's no real alternative (LOLcommunism), and that wikileaks thing imo is the biggest step forward i've ever seen in keeping our politicians honest.
 
Julian must be the first person to get to interpol's most wanted list for a 'rape' :P
 
ofc it's a setup that he is searched by interpol for "just" raping. The powerful institutions wanna get rid of him.
So you can see that the US of A is not better than a regime like China if something is against their interests.
All politicians and economy leaders are power hungry bastards, who wanna destroy everyone who is against their interests and intheir way.

So at first i thought: Truth and information for everyone is a good think, but when i thought about it a second time i also realised that mankind showed several times how dumb and ignorant they are. So sometimes it's better to keep the masses uninformed.

Overall this guy has true balls.
But the price is very high: He leaves dangerous now. Wouldnt surprise me if he will be killed ordered by nations (mainly USA) who want him to be silent once and for all.

Oh and there is ofc no real friendship in politics. Cant be. It's like that you have to work with your annoying colleague at work although you really dislike him. Ofc you thank him for his commitment, but in truth you dont wanna see his face at all. So is it in politics. Ofc the USA say that this and this nation are their "friends". In truth they dont like them.
Politics is - and always will be - a place for hypocritics and lies. That's why i honestly hate it for.
 
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You're right, if it made everyone honest, but it won't.

The world will still say what needs saying to get what it wants and think the contrary.

If one of your ''friend'' talks shit about you behind your back, then he's not really your friend now is he?

Fuck the politically correct approaches.

If the flow of information available today can start bringing actual honesty in our politicians, then I honestly don't care if a few people have to die for it.

I mean, doesn't nearly 80%+ of the ''western world'' population already believe politicians to be lying scumbags? I think that's a dangerous feeling to have in a society, no trust in our leaders, but there's no real alternative (LOLcommunism), and that wikileaks thing imo is the biggest step forward i've ever seen in keeping our politicians honest.
 
I honestly don't care if a few people have to die for it
I wonder how much you wouldn't care if it were you or a friend or relative that was first in line to die for it!
 
I think Assange has put this life on the line publishing the documents, he didn't have to do that thought.

All of the information which is being released is screened, some names are changed to XXXXXXXX to protect peoples identities who are "innocent" in all of this.

Also the cables being released is not "raw intelligence", it's "intelligence" which is broadcast around the world.

I've read about estimates of 3 million people people around the world having access to these cables. This isn't stuff which only a handful of people have - it's all hosted on the private government networks (JWICS, SIPRNet, etc)

Bradley Manning was able to extract all of this information extremely easily, and he's only one of millions of people who have access to it. Information from these networks must have been extremely easy for anybody who had money or connections to get, except for Joe Public.

There is no point in protecting the general population from this information (and most of it is either embarasaing or just conflicts with a diplomats public image as portrayed in the media) but allowing terrorists (if you like) to have it due to it being so easily accessible.

This is a major egg on the face of government, we can only hope they are either more transparent or that the access to this information is much more restricted and harder to obtain.

They have fucked up by allowing DVD and USB devices to be writtable, in not having adequate protection of the data and Access Control Lists which actually do any good.

This shit has changed the world though, for better or worse.

In the information age we are in, this was inevitabe to some degree. So now is a good time to plug the holes, have more transparency of data which should be in the public domain but is classified as confidential since it causes embaressment (the truth people talk about) and to ensure that real secrets can never be published.

Note: from what I've seen, there is a big hole from around 2000 to 2004 (i.e. 9/11 information) which hasn't been released yet. Wikileaks has only released a handful of documents, theres 1000's more yet to come.
 
I wonder how much you wouldn't care if it were you or a friend or relative that was first in line to die for it!

yawn most retarded argument ever, in this case.

the only people whose lives are at risk with the release of confidential documents are the "spies", if you agree to take a job as a spy, you and your family well know the risk behind being caught...
 
yawn most retarded argument ever, in this case.

the only people whose lives are at risk with the release of confidential documents are the "spies", if you agree to take a job as a spy, you and your family well know the risk behind being caught...

....and if an American Airlines jet is taken out as a result of the leaks? Are you willing for 100's of NA to die just so you can read what a politician really thought of the Iraq war?

Most of the "retardation" seems to be coming from those that think in a shallow manner. Think "big picture".