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.
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.