In defense of wikileaks | Hacker News Reader

In defense of wikileaks

jacquesmattheij.com

9 pointsjacquesm7 comments

I've come full circle on Assange as well. After being shocked and disappointed when he first came out with the propagandistic bias and spy-vs.-spy schtick, I realized that nevertheless, the guy is devoting his life and considerable intelligence to the cause of transparency and whistle-blowing. In an age where even so-called liberal governments continue to inflate the national "security" state and propagate fear and secrecy, we need this badly. Assange et. al. have moved the needle perceptibly in the direction of a freer society; that is no small achievement, and in return for it I've decided to cut him a ream of slack.

Besides which, even if he is a media hog, he's a media hog with a brain who speaks superb English and has no interest in dumbing or toning anything down. Who else can you say that of? Listening to him on flaccid NPR the other day was a blast of fresh air.

That includes the old dogmatic 'access on need to know basis only' and items like that. You really have to wonder how a single individual gained access to 90,000 documents, he couldn't possibly have a 'need to know' the contents of all of those, in fact he couldn't have read that many documents even if he wanted to.

Yep field commanders don't need to know what is going on, guys back home doing intelligence analysis don't need to know what is going on in the field, Generals in charge of the situation don't need to know what is going on. Yep, no need to know there. And no one person isn't expected to sit down and read all 90K documents but they need to be available just in case some one who read the high level report needed more detail. They could go back to the original field reports that went in to the high level report. While wikileaks isn't the only responsible party their hands are not clean in this situation, innocent people are going to be hurt because they don't care.

An informant is not an innocent but a participant.

True, but not always a willing participant -- an informant may be providing information out of necessity, say, if the informant's living conditions are intolerable because of hostility.

I have no problem with the release of the documents, but they should be responsibly redacted with the aid of experts, and truly edited rather than dumped.

An informant's wife, cousin, neighbor, any one who is hurt to get back at the informant besides the informant is an innocent.

Yes, and the informant carries full responsibility for putting his family members in danger.

Innocent people are going to die because of every action you take. It's not usually nearby and it's not usually predictable, but that's what happens every time you change history.

Wikileaks intent and (I think) a reasonably probable outcome of this is to lower the number of innocent people being killed. (Probably on all sides, in the long run.)

I don't see any value-of-life argument that this leak is a bad thing /at all/, or that wikileaks has anything to justify on other grounds.

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