While some would make it sound as though Wikileaks was 'against' the US or any specific country, it seems clear to me that they are really just out to shine light on everyone that has secrets.
I, for one, don't see this as a terribly bad thing. Governments and large corporations are under the impression that they can do as they please and no one will ever know the wiser.
Despite our government's policies and rhetoric, the USA tends to trade with everybody - remember the Iran Contra affair? I'd imagine even if the leaks mostly incriminate Syria, our government may still be none too pleased to have the extent of our involvement with Assad revealed.
The cynic in me is waiting for the day they start releasing Russian internal communications and state secrets. I don't predict Russia's current government would react to that with words and legal action... or, at least, not just that.
>he's been under house arrest for over 500 days without charges
I feel this is somewhat disingenuous. He's been under house arrest pending extradition hearings because the UK received an arrest warrant for him from Sweden.
EDIT:
And while it's technically true that charges haven't been formally filed yet, it's my understanding that this is due to a peculiarity in Swedish law where they have to have a person physically present to bring charges. Hence the arrest warrant.
That's not accurate. They have said they want to interview him before charging him, and they've refused to do the interview in the UK or remotely, instead insisting that he be on Swedish soil.
The whole thing's a fucking scam so that the US can snag him without a fuss and then disappear him into their network of black sites.
>They have said they want to interview him before charging him, and they've refused to do the interview in the UK or remotely, instead insisting that he be on Swedish soil.
He's already fled the country once ahead of questioning. It isn't unreasonable to want to have him physically present if the questioning is going to result in an arrest. Hence the warrant.
He was given explicit permission from the prosecutor to leave. He was travelling regularly on that time and went to a scheduled event for the release of documents.
It certainly would be delightful to see a trove of internal documents from the current regime in China, with opportunity for the whole world to examine the inner workings of that regime. I daresay many current issues about effective development policy for third-world countries could be better understood if we all better understood what is going on in China behind the Great Firewall. That would surely be of benefit to the common people of China themselves. For that matter, we might better understand what is going on in Syria just now if we had full access to internal documents from the regime in China.
"Tsai Yu slept during the daytime. The master said, "Rotten wood cannot be carved; dirty earth cannot be used for cement: why bother scolding him? At first I used to listen to what people said and expect them to act accordingly. Now I listen to what people say and watch what they do. I learned this from Yu."[0]
Thanks! I really like those visually. While non-standard, I just might have to start using those in my English typesetting/formatting of documents.
As a complete tangent, I think that over the next 50 years, various Chinese phrases, language quirks and usage will start bleeding into English, much as Spanish has if not moreso.
One of the criticisms of Firefly was that for a future that was supposed to have a large Chinese population / integration of Chinese culture, you never really saw any Chinese characters (aka whitewashing). That said, I always thought it was an elegant work-around to broadcast TV's limitations on cusswords.
Maybe they could start picking up a phonetic alphabet in the meantime, so it doesn't take me that long to become competent with their written language.
That doesn't appear to be used for internal communication, but rather for communicating with foreigners. I'm sure many millions of young Chinese schoolchildren would love it if Pinyin was adopted as a native written language, so they wouldn't have to spend quite so much mental effort memorizing the tens of thousands of characters needed to qualify for a diploma.
Same goes for Japanese schoolchildren, since they're plagued with a non-phonetic alphabet as well. The widely-used phonetic [hiragana] alphabet is ready to replace their daunting kanji alphabet imported from China.
Won't start a big argument, but replacing kanji with hiragana would make the language a vaguely-worded nightmare. Massive number of homonyms; huge number of verbs with slightly different nuance achieved through a different choice of kanji.
The language IS evolving toward hiragana for simple, everyday words, but ask any adult who has to read children's books (all in hiragana) how painful it is to group the words correctly and you'll agree a bigger change won't come soon.
If there are many homonyms that could be mistaken despite context, how do people understand the spoken language? Are verbal inflections incompletely represented in hiragana versus kanji?
As for grouping into words, other languages have found spaces useful. ; )
There's a tonal accent, which is not conveyed in writing. I believe there are some regional variations of it, too.
In Japanese, it's related to something called the "accent nucleus." Googling that will give you a lot of random scholarly articles. Oddly enough the best simple explanation I could find was this:
"Katakana are not used only for foreign words. Katakana are also used with onomatopoeia, newly coined words, names when you don't know the kanji, and more.
Furthermore, katakana can be used to vary the style in writing. It is not uncommon to see an entire sentence in nothing but katakana, often to express a certain emotion (even when it lacks foreign words altogether). In other words, ヲ is actually used once in a while.
In addition, in ancient times, katakana were considered the proper way to write the language, while hiragana were considered sloppy and vulgar. In this respect, katakana can be used to evoke an archaic style. "
Not to dispute your (very credible) assertion that it's more suitable for common use than hiragana, can katakana express more tonal subtlety than hiragana? Are there words for which it would be preferable to use hiragana for legibility reasons? Are both used together in compliment to express an even wider range of verbal tones?
The directionality of those is pretty cool. Of course with latin style quotation marks you can always do the 'smart quote' style quotation marks, but those really depend on handwriting a lot more.
I suppose adopting those style quotation marks in English is probably a lost cause though.
At least in the US the old press is protected by the First Amendment. Far too many here in the US seem to think it applies nearly everywhere else too. Yet one disturbing side effect is that the "press" is more than willing to see the government of the US put restrictions if not ban political speech made by other groups and individuals provided they are not part of the traditional press. Blogs, political action groups, radio commentators, and even television, are all fair game according to the tradition press for restrictions they themselves would scream if placed on them.
Since these kinds of leaks are very difficult to authenticate, there is an opportunity for intelligence agencies to game WikiLeaks by (slightly) altering stolen documents.
I'd take everything in these documents with a huge grain of salt.
Or, the far simpler and more plausible explanation:
We live in a world with a massive amount of networked, easily accessible data. Combine that with terrible security and controls, and leaving the final responsibility of data remaining "safe" to the end user (often times just an anonymous cog in the corporate machine) and we have the perfect mix of problems to result in non-public information being "leaked" to the outside world.
If you've followed the Wikileaks releases (as I have only in passing) you'll realize there is tons and tons of useless, boring information in there, interspersed with some interesting nuggets. Often times it requires relatively complex mining methods to comb through the vast quantities of data. If the government was interested in false-flag information planting, there would be far, far easier ways to achieve it.
Your third paragraph is also a pretty accurate summary of the discovery process in complex litigation.
Although much is made of the high-tech data mining services available to assist with discovery, having used some of them I sometimes wonder if it isn't cheaper and more effective to throw low-cost labour at the problem. Enter law students.
Most of the mainstream media is unquestioning at best. The government doesn't need to manipulate WikiLeaks. The sort of people who are more inclined to listen to WikiLeaks over CNN or Fox News were already skeptical, so there's nothing to gain by feeding them false information.
There's always the chance that Wikileaks in total is just a cover operation for all sorts of other activity, plus giving the US and allies 'reason' to act in various ways. We don't have much of a way to know that any of the documents they've ever leaked were authentic. Bradley Manning could just be a fall-guy for false information.
takes off tinfoil hat
I doubt this is happening, but stranger things have happened. I'm sure the CIA has at least considered such...
Bradley Manning could just be a fall-guy for false information.
I doubt this is happening, but stranger things have happened. I'm sure the CIA has at least considered such...
If you want to go all super-paranoid-conspiracy-whatever, we could speculate that all this Wikileaks stuff is total false-flag stuff, and that Bradley Manning was never arrested at all, and is actually vacationing in Bermuda somewhere right now, sitting on the beach, sipping little umbrella drinks while getting rubbed down with suntan oil by hotties in small bathing suits.
And the thing is... who knows, what I just said actually is vaguely plausible - depending on the extent to which you believe that governments do actually create conspiracies to manipulate public opinion, and otherwise do things which would be illegal.
On the one hand, I'm very skeptical. But then you look at history and read about the illegal LSD experiments[1] and COINTELPRO[2], etc., you start to wonder.
This could definitely be true. Ironically, maintaining operational security would be very easy in such a plot, since the cast of characters is very small. It could have begun as a simple honeypot and then evolved into a propaganda strategy.
When you think about it, none of the information released about the US has created any outrage at all on the part of the American public or media.
The few times there has been any outage it's been the standard "tempest in a teapot" kind of ranting that characterizes most political debate, which is largely done for unrelated/indirect reasons and goes away pretty quickly.
I think that the view of the US Government is that social media has made a widespread propaganda strategy an inevitability. No longer can the US rely on the domestic media cartel's message shaping to be adequate to suppress dissent.
I think the goal is for US citizens to feel free and empowered to use social media, but to have mechanisms in place to use it as a monitoring and intel-gathering mechanism and also to leverage it to wage specific propaganda campaigns as needed. These campaigns are subtle and I don't think we've seen any serious ones so far, though I do think that the so-called Arab Spring social media stuff was a trial run which was likely deemed a massive success.
Wikileaks has not yet proven itself as an institution. I believe that over time it may prove itself to be a solid, reliable entity with effective controls to prevent manipulation, infiltration, etc. We'll see.
The thing is, if the information is released publicly, it is possible to verify some of the things and cross-reference them against things known to be factual. So they would not only have to fake information, but figure out a way to make it so that people checking it up to see if it's true get confirmation.. It's a nice conspiracy theory, but seems too hard to pull off.
What I wonder, is if sensitive agencies have started to seed emails with slightly wrong facts, like a golf hater which discuss their golf rounds, allergic people discussing dinners that would have killed them, homosexuals discussing mistresses, etc.
If the email archive is published, there are obvious wrong facts about people found by "spot checks"...
I, for one, don't see this as a terribly bad thing. Governments and large corporations are under the impression that they can do as they please and no one will ever know the wiser.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?