It is a perfect irony that the man calling for more openness and transparency can't handle it when his own private issues are aired publicly.
Some security breaches at wikileaks could lead to informants or employees/volunteers being harassed or harmed, but this breach could only harm Assange's public image. He needs to get over himself and blow this off, or step down if he can't ignore trivial rumors.
A service like wikileaks is valuable to society precisely because (in theory, though apparently not in implementation) it doesn't make the value judgement whether something is of interest or not. Instead, it gives us all the information, and lets people make the decision for themselves.
When I make that value judgement, Assange's private life is absolutely relevant to the public interest. What he says and does in public gives us what little insight we can get into the mind of the person who controls what goes on the servers of wikileaks. He could be a tool of the US government, for all we know, leaking information that is damning but not nearly as damning as the information that won't be dug for nearly as hard now that what we have is public. Or, he could be selectively publishing things in a wildly unbalanced way, trying to stick it to the US government for his own purposes (a popular view, it would seem). Though we can't know for sure, every bit of his private life we can analyze allows us to be more confident in our decision to trust him or not.
We do not decide what is in the eye of the public, which is not the same as in the public interest, the media does.
And when your main goal is to spit the worlds governments and corporations in the eye you can be 100% sure that your private life will sooner or later be subject to scrutiny, and it would be advisable to lead as boring a private life as you can manage under those circumstances because the more 'colour' a character has the easier character assassination becomes.
Ideally an organization like wikileaks is just known for the quality of its output, not because of the name of the 'leader' or the antics of its members, just to make sure the attention does not get diverted from the message and to give any opposition as few points of potential leverage as possible.
Sad that this article spends tens of grafs talking about personal drama, and buries what should be the lede: that a key Wikileaks insider has reason to believe the Af/Pak dump was inadequately redacted --- in other words, that Wikileaks managed to help put people at risk.
But by all means let's pore over their IRC logs and Assange's "and your children's children's children for two weeks" pronouncements. They're a lot more fun to read.
I'm sure that it won't be long before you'll see the reflections of that quote in the mainstream media, but I find that it is not as relevant as you make it out to be.
This person has as little insight in the situation on the ground as the rest of us, only the people on the ground in the relevant countries can make that call.
Whether wikileaks 'managed to help put people at risk' is an open question, afaik there has yet to be given a single hard piece of evidence that that is the case.
And even if it did, I'm still not convinced that makes releasing such information 'bad'.
I like the idea that random people sitting in chairs in front of computers in Western Europe and the US should be able to decide to put Afghanis and Pakistanis at great physical risk because it's for a good cause. That is, after all, the logic our governments used to get us into this conflict.
I like the idea that random people sitting in chairs in conference rooms in Western Europe and the US should be able to decide what their citizens should and shouldn't know as long as they think it furthers their agenda. That is, after all, the logic that our governments keep using to get us into conflicts.
I think we are talking about leaks and not 'rights'. Nobody has to grant us any kind of permission. If it is leaked we will know. Such is reality unencumbered by legality.
I did not mean it to be difficult for you to decipher. I was simply saying that technology helps make ethics or 'rights' irrelevant in these situations. If somebody can leak with relative security and ease, they will.
To quote another HNer:
"Technology bestows rights in a way which is true and real far beyond the law. The law can be changed, but you cannot undiscover AES. The law gives you rights as a fiction, but technology gives you rights as a fact."
So, your argument is that we all have a duty towards Afghani and Pakistani informers to keep their identities safe?
That's just as absurd.
What's leaked stays leaked, there is not much 'we all' can do about that and wikileaks as a conduit is not in a position to make the call, so they should default to 'release all' rather than to make judgement calls on what can and can not be released.
Every secret will inconvenience someone if it were known, some may be more inconvenienced (as in a bullet to the head) than others, but when you turn informer that is a well known risk.
Wikileaks is not responsible for people taking that risk, the only people that have a responsibility there are the informers themselves (don't give your identifying info to parties you can't trust), the US military / government (don't hire people you can't trust) and the leaker (for breaking his oath of secrecy).
What's interesting is that there is a pretty strong effort to shift the blame for the fall-out of the leak on to wikileaks, whereas it should be clear to everybody that the other parties have a much larger part of the responsibility to carry and each and every one of them failed in a very serious way.
And this is what I think is most dangerous. The couple of times that the subject of Wikileaks has come up, here and elsewhere in person, what I hear is people saying that the endangerment of personnel (and/or operations) is enough to condemn the existence of Wikileaks.
I acknowledge that Wikileaks has released information which endangers people, and I acknowledge that they're likely to do it again in the future. However, I think their existence as an international freelance watchdog group is far more valuable, especially given the tendency of various world governments to run operations that their citizens don't know about and might be far less likely to agree with if they did know about.
Wikileaks has an obligation to reduce the risk to individuals when leaking sensitive information; however, even if they did nothing to protect the people implicated in leaks, I would still rather have Wikileaks than not.
I'd probably support the idealized Wikileaks that took due care to minimize harm to the subjects of its leaks. But we don't have the ideal Wikileaks; we have the one run by Julian Assange.
Why not? Who are we to even know the significance of what was leaked?
It could very well be a disinformation operation where names of a bunch of people that were on the hit list of the US army got leaked in a way that was too juicy for WL to pass up.
These people have a deal with the US government, and the US government has a strong responsibility in keeping their identities a secret. If the US government can not guarantee the secrecy of those identities you should not be blaming the messenger or even the telephone wire for that but the organization that was tasked with keeping that information secure.
That's a straw man argument. I don't believe the US is blameless; in fact, I think their obviously horrible opsec makes them primarily to blame for this debacle. What on earth does that have to do with the ethics of Wikileaks?
Wikileaks has as its mission to release classified information to the public, if you are going to do that then you know for a fact that there will be people that are at risk affected by it, that's the nature of the releasing of information that people want to be kept secret.
If there is going to be a transition at some point from a system of closed governments with secrets to one that is open because secrets can be leaked as fast as they are created then I suspect that there will be a lot more people 'at risk' than just the people named in these documents.
Does that mean that striving to open any and all information that is currently under wraps should be abandoned ? I think it shouldn't be, and just like there is collateral damage in a real war there will be collateral damage in a war that centers around information.
I don't think that such a change could be effected without it.
No matter how much you would redact, you could always argue that someone is at risk because of releasing information on current ops.
Ask Valerie Plame what it feels like when information is leaked to serve opportunistic goals, and that was the government doing the leaking, with the express purpose of harming an individual, not exactly to promote a society without secrets.
Really, if anything, I think wikileaks should not even have attempted to redact anything, just like a common carrier they should have passed it on verbatim, by attempting to redact they assume some responsibility, which they could have avoided by not redacting at all.
I understand that that may offend your sensibilities because 'peoples lives are at risk' but that's just a variation on the 'think of the children' argument.
War is ugly, releasing information about a war that is in progress is going to be ugly too, I can't see how it could even be different if you decided to do that.
This is a tautology. The same logic animates the sentence "It is not the job of the Kill-bot 3000 to prevent people from getting harmed; it is the job of the Kill-bot 3000 to kill puppies, a job it has done very well".
Maybe it is right and sensible that Wikileaks provides the information that it does. But it is clearly not automatically immune from ethical/moral responsibility for its actions.
I wouldn't make that argument, because the conclusion is one that ends very poorly for Wikileaks.
I like the concept of Wikileaks, they were leaking valuable information, and seemingly handling it in a way that minimized the risk of harm to people on all sides.
If their actual mentality was aligned with your post, meaning their goal was to leak information and ignore the consequences, then I would fully support the US doing everything in their power to stop them.
Correct, that is my opinion: that is the ethical decision I would make. :)
It is better to put a small number of people at minor risk in a game of anti-war political arm-twisting than it is to let a war that will put a lot more people at much greater risk be prolonged.
I think that you're deluded if you think that Wikileaks' actions will be of any benefit to the Afghanis. If the United States were to suddenly leave tomorrow, the region would not suddenly become peaceful. Possibly the contrary would happen.
Well obviously I am not deluded; you are putting words in my mouth. Read back and take note that I never said there would be any improvement for Afghanis. I said there would be less 'risk' because I am anti-war. The burden of proof is with you to show that a war creates less 'risk' if you want to take it.
> the region would not suddenly become peaceful.
You cannot prove this. Maybe it would. (Maybe a little.)
How the hell can you know that? It is impossible to prove that the classified information hasn't led to higher danger for our troops, and there certainly have been plenty of casualities since July.
> It is impossible to prove that the classified information hasn't led to higher danger for our troops
But we are talking about informants and not troops -- those are the names that would have been redacted.
> How the hell can you know that?
Well that was the case the last time I read an article about this. Although I can't remember where it was... It definitely mentioned that there have been no casualties as of yet. Admittedly I've made an assumption that if there was the US would kick up a huge fuss if an informant was killed due to Wikileaks. That sounds realistic to me.
You're making the assumption that the leaks don't make the US troops more likely to be killed. There certainly have been plenty of troops killed since July, and the leaks contained information other than just the names of informants that can put our troops at risk.
I would love to see fewer people getting killed in these wars on all sides. I don't see how the leak helps that goal. Public opinion is decidedly against the war already, this doesn't change that situation. But the leaks put the troops in more danger, the informants/translators in more danger, and the result of that is more violence that leads to civilian deaths as a side effect. The more combat there is, the more civilians get killed.
The problem is that you're still talking about troops. Read all of the articles about this and you'll see that they're explicitly talking about the informants being redacted out. As for the troops: knowing their names or their locations months and months ago makes little tactical difference. They can defend themselves.
This gossip by the media is a waste of everybody's time. I feel like the stress and pressure are solely created by them. And in relation to the article, I side with Assange, who is under a huge amount of stress: external and internal.
If others want authority or control they must start their own organisation up. Nothing is stopping them and it would be of great benefit to everybody. However if they want to work with Assange they know what they're getting into: they must trust him and they must follow him. It is only fair to do this: if he started it you cannot expect it to turn into a democracy unless that is how he wants it. Assange is right to not trust any of these people either: look what they've done? The "wikileaks" leaks are coming from somewhere aren't they. Case in point: this one.
"I believe that Julian has in fact pushed the capable people away," Snorrason said in an interview with Wired.com. "His behavior is not of the sort that will keep
independent-minded people interested."
The project could be handled by other people if necessary. There is a huge amount of public support for Wikileaks or similar sites. I think they could get other capable people to work for them if it was needed.
I must say, I find the need to spend ages double-checking the leaks to be a little insecure and while I understand that it is to manage their public image, I think it is wrong that they are expected to do so by anybody. You already have the morale high-ground when you point out atrocities committed in a war. Any comparison between deaths that could result from a leak and those documented in the leak I treat with a lot of suspicion because there have been no deaths from leaks so far and there have been a huge number of deaths from the wars. In all honesty, the comparison is unfair and frankly a baseless smear.
Also, why does everybody act all surprised with Wikileaks not liking their own information to be leaked? I think this is two-valued logic and we should avoid seeing everything so black-and-white if we want to have ethics that are actually applicable to real life.
edit; For the record, I do find some fault with wikileaks. It really disappoints me that they spend all of their time with the big leaks nowadays and shirk the smaller national leaks.
I guess the mind control lasers are working. Assange seems to be paranoid and has a messiah complex. I'm sure he's under an incredible amount of stress.
It all sounds rather silly, like two individuals who have lost sight of their true mission. If they do possess a large volume of documents about Iraq comparable to the Afghanistan leak this may turn out to be important historical information shedding new light on what was a highly controversial war.
I wonder if the irony is lost on anyone that it is Assaange here that is worried about a leak in his organization. Assuming the rumors are true, an individual who believes that leaks in organizations' security are always fair game is reacting badly to leak in his own organization's security.
And yet the wikileaks twitter feed still seems to say everything is A-OK
"Successfully completed our next three films. Thank you team and supporters." http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/25591655477
Sorry, but wikileaks has stopped being a force for good and instead is a destructive PR vehicle for Assange.
I fully support the leaking of data -- far too many things are classified -- up and until it reaches the point where the leaks directly get folks killed. At that point the leakers become criminals and should be prosecuted. It's especially egregious when they act as if they are saviors of mankind.
From the recent news involving rape and now this, it appears that Assange has some personal issues he is working through. They need to get rid of him and put somebody else in charge.
You can lose credibility in two ways: you can publish lies or you can recklessly publish harmful things. There is a fine line to walk for wikileaks, and they are straying from the path. I could tolerate the messiah complex if the editorial quality remained high. But it has not.
See, that's exactly why mud-slinging is so successful. People have no clue if there was ever an iota of truth in the rape accusations, still Assange's image is now forever tainted by it. It's 'How to destroy your enemies 101'.
It's kind of like saying "US Intelligence planned to destroy WikiLeaks" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1192677) and then blaming the subsequent erosion of your credibility on US intelligence. It doesn't matter if it was ever true or if you have any actual evidence, so long as you have good story that appeals to your audience. Insinuation and paranoiac fantasy (wherein absence of evidence can be cited as evidence) take over from there.
Reminds me of an old political joke, "They framed a guilty man!"
Conspiracies and poor behavior are not mutually exclusive.
I know how much you want to believe, but wanting to believe is not going to make it so. At the end of the day, Wikileaks has to be about more than personalities if it is going to succeed, conspiracies or not.
Put differently, you can only frame a person who has made himself the image of the organization. Wikileaks should have never allowed Assange in this position.
So fix the error and move on. No harm, no foul. The only damage to Wikileaks occurs if they sit around and do nothing except for form a circular firing squad.
In today's media environment you probably need a singular spokesperson as a front for interviews etc. You won't get the same amount of attention by just being an anonymous "hivemind".
Also, it's very interesting how the media has turned on wikileaks in the recent past. It's not about how many Pakistanis or Afghans the CIA drones are killing per day, it's about whether wikileaks endangers any sources.
I disagree, it hasn't stopped being a force for good.
Where is the evidence that his leaks have directly got people killed?
When I see something like this, my first reaction is, who benefits? Who is better off with Wikileaks discredited?
There's another way to lose credibility you didn't mention, have someone big and powerful with vested interests attack you relentlessly. The Pentagon's primary (and I think leaked) tactic was to turn people against Wikileaks by equating them with the direct loss of life. Sadly, it seems to be working.
They directly leaked the names of informants in a country where such information is an obvious danger. This is reckless, irresponsible, and unforgivable now that we know that Assange was aware of the poor quality of redactions prior to the documents' release.
Their poor editorialization of the Collateral Murder video also put a large dent in their credibility for me. Much effort was spent pointing out the journalists shot, but it was not even mentioned in a glancing note that they were in fact with armed insurgents, and that the group was armed.
If they want to be a credible whistleblower organization they need to be objective and impartial. Right now they reek of fame whoring and partisan bias.
This is starting to smell like bullshit. I agreed at the time that failing to redact these names seemed to be a poor decision that could put people in danger. However, now we're a month or two on, and nobody has cited an instance where anyone has actually been targeted as a result, even though the government would have considerable incentive to be able to point at such an instance.
If a thousand people, or a hundred people had died because of that leak, I would be receptive to the idea that Wikileaks was actually doing harm. If a dozen had died, I would be sharply critical of Wikileaks for not taking more care and redacting their names. But as best we can tell, none have died. It seems pretty clear to me that Wikileaks erred on the right side of "get the documents out as soon as possible" vs. "keep working on them."
An example of what is seemingly innocuous data that was classified for a reason and puts our guys in danger.
A battle report with times in it can be used to basically figure out response time for air support to a given location in Iraq/Afghanistan.
That basically tells the enemy how long they have for their ambush before they should break off.
If they know that time is 20 minutes instead of 5 minutes, they may be more inclined to stick around and put our troops in more danger. If they know the time is 5 minutes when they had thought it was 20 minutes, they bail sooner than they would have otherwise and now we can't kill as many as we would have otherwise, again reducing the effectivness of our troops.
Can you quantify that? How do you know if the insurgents are just getting smarter or if it is from the leak? We can't say for sure but it is very plausible that the wikileaks information was damaging to our troops in the field, even if it didn't have a roadmap to the informants house.
I personally believe that the expected value of -5% public approval for the Afghan war is very, very positive; on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars and many lives. I also assign a high, but hard-to-quantify value to generally decreasing the public's trust in government, which leaks like this tend to do.
I just don't believe that scenarios similar to the one you describe can be having a similar degree of impact. I think your description is plausible, but to imagine that it's happening frequently sounds like an overestimation of the technical capacity and manpower of the Taliban and insurgent groups.
I am very ready to condemn avoidable harm caused by bad practices surrounding leaked information, things that Wikileaks can clearly control, like redacting names. However, the sorts of situations you describe are inevitable with any leak of meaningful classified information, and since I think that these type of leaks are a big net positive (after taking your scenario into account) I'm not inclined to consider them damning in any way.
(I understand that you might disagree strongly with me about the utility of the war in general, so I don't expect to convince you if that's the case.)
The 'enemy' would have a very hard time figuring out which parts of the leaked documents were not leaked on purpose.
Distrust alone of any and all information would significantly limit any direct risk due to being named in a document helpfully supplied by your adversary, or at least people in the same general geographical area. And for all we know that's exactly what happened.
I wished it was because we dearly need wikileaks but we need it to be run by someone that is both stable and squeaky clean, Assange appears to be neither.
He definitely is driven though, you have to hand him that.
where by 'squeaky clean' you mean 'has not been accused of any crime by anyone? is that a state of being outside of the control of the person being accused?
No, by squeaky clean I mean someone that can see the difference between having your own agenda and passing on information in as neutral a way as possible.
By taking sides he's lost the advantage that he had.
Everybody has an agenda or opinion. Even yourself. Nothing is completely neutral. And if you want to convince people yours is the right way you make sure to speak in a persuasive way. Isn't this just a fact of life nowadays?
I agree that nothing is completely neutral, there always is a bias. But if you allow your bias to get in the way of serving your primary goal (the transparent release of information that was otherwise hidden from the general public) then you could do a lot worse than to try not to let your bias get in the way of the reporting.
Julian Assange has failed that test in a very bad way, the 'collateral damage' release claimed at least one unexpected victim, which was the image of integrity of wikileaks.
The weird thing is that I find myself agreeing with Assagnes agenda but I strongly disagree with the way he went about releasing that information.
The last couple of months have seen wikileaks go from solid and with a very high level of integrity to definitely damaged, it won't last at this rate.