U.S. must stop spying on WikiLeaks - Details on intimidation attempts

Wikileaks makes editorial decisions, a lot of governments are going to be interested in the information that wikileaks receives but decides not to publish.

Sorry, but that's what intel agencies world wide are going to do...accumulate information. In many ways wikileaks is simply a similar intel agency unless they begin to publish all the information they receive and become completely transparent.

Of course, due to the nature of what wikileaks does, it seems that they can not afford to be transparent in their operations... somewhat ironic huh..

Wikileaks _needs_ secrecy in order to function.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DA-Notice

I'm wondering if there's a US equivalent?

Classification is useful only so far as it improves our well-being. Nuclear launch codes and radio frequencies fall under this. Keeping something classified because it embarrasses a gov't official or maybe costs him a job is not.

I think in this case they realized the leak is probably from an insider. So the issue for them is not being able to trust their own people. Unfortunately whistle-blower laws and protections don't work for classified material. Whoever leaked this was either an agent working for another country or someone who had a strong moral sense of right and wrong. They most definitely put their job and freedom on the line. I would guess that they were morally motivated. Government agents and even CIA operatives and analysts are still human beings and (luckily) some of them hold basic human rights and moral values above agency's classification levels.

> ... how deeply they have been penetrated, and this scares them.

That is an interesting phrase because it assumes someone from outside penetrated them. I would guess it is just one of their employees. They don't necessarily plan on quitting or getting exposed, but rather they want to keep working but they are seeing this exposure as helping shed light and getting the record straight. With ultimate good results for US and the CIA.

> Their reaction is understandable.

Yes it is -- from their point of view. But I look at understanding their position as one would understand the position of a serial killer. There is some internal logic of course. But it is rather insane and wrong to the rest of the world. Given that US taxpayers are funding both the alleged killings of civilians and the cover-up, they should probably become aware of what's happening.

One way to stay away from such controversies is to simply not commit things that would bring them about.

So we'll supposedly see soon enough what this is all about. If it is just baseless hype from wikileaks, then they will lose all their credibility and will become as believable as a tabloid magazine.

This is highly relevant when attempting to characterize a trend, as (for instance) your own link to the article on Executive Order 13292 states: "Both Executive Order 12958 and Executive Order 13292 were revoked and replaced in full by President Barack Obama in the issuance of Executive Order 13526." This is why I linked to Executive Order 13526.

I just don't see what your point is, aside from the uncontroversial point that the Bush administration was awful.

Wikileaks is trying to have it both ways. On the one hand, they want to do illegal stuff for moral/philosophical reasons. On the other hand, they want the US government to stop treating them like they're doing illegal stuff. They're obtaining and releasing classified information, and at the same time complaining that the US government is spying on them. Doesn't this strike you as a little bit silly?

I decide to wreak some havoc inside the National Command Authority, possibly as part of some larger strategic objective. So I go to Wikileaks and release the codes.

In this case, in whose interest is Wikileaks acting? Not the U.S. citizen's. Not the rest of the world. Clearly their acting as an agent for the Russians. (Russians are used here as a prop. Substitute any players you like)

The more I think about it, the more the idea of anonymous information leaking seems fraught with lots of problems. Overall, yes, a great idea. But I have some serious questions. As a third party with access to sensitive information, I can play all sorts of games using Wikileaks.

EDIT: I'll add a couple more examples so we don't get lost out in the weeds.

The Chinese decide to invade Taiwan. As part of that, over a period of several weeks Wikileaks "discovers" several documents detailing how certain Taiwanese officials were caught doing drugs/molesting children/robbing banks/beating old people. Most of these stories are true (but old), and generate quite a bit of negative press in the United States. Mixed in at the end, however, are totally false stories guaranteed to cause the greatest public outrage. The MSM has no time to vet the stories just before the Chinese invade, and since it's a 24/7 cable news world and since Wikileaks has a good track record so far and it runs them the MSM runs them too. Public opinion is sternly against giving Taiwan any assistance, creating a decisive edge for the Chinese.

The Israelis decide they are going to have to attack Iran to prevent it from developing nukes. Over a couple of weeks, suddenly documents are found from the French and Saudis "proving" Iran has a nuclear prototype bomb. More documents are "found" showing that the Iranians are prepared to use it on Israel. Let's assume these docs are real, although from the Israelis standpoint it doesn't matter. Finally docs are found that show the Israelis have decided to go through the United Nations and have given up trying to stop Iran with force. These last docs are released just a day or two before the attack.

The difference between a newspaper and Wikileaks is that a newspaper deals in credibility. Wikileaks just deals in leaks. That makes the model horribly broken and easy to manipulate. Just think of the fun an intelligence agency could have with something as simple as marital infidelities. Used to be you'd have to set up an entire operation to get stuff published with some kind of authority. Not anymore.

Wikileaks triages the data, pushes it out to the media, maintains physical drop-boxes across multiple continents, and much more. All of which requires people doing real work, the storage of data is a tiny part of the problem.

And even for the storage part freenet isn't a real solution. How many journalists do you know who use freenet ? - pushing data into the public domain is useless if only a tiny handful of people have access to it.