Unpublished Iraq War Logs Trigger Internal WikiLeaks Revolt
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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.
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.
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.
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.
I think everyone's motivations are clear. Money, power, and reproduction.
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.
None of which were harmed. While countless people are put at risk everyday by the wars that continue there. Yep.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
Two birds with one stone.
The sole, only and absolute job of wikileaks is to leak information, which they have done very well.
If the US leadership can't fight their wars because of it, that is their problem, not wikileaks.
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 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.
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.
Sure, he's concerned about the leak to Newsweek, but he also completely and totally disregards questions and comments from the other Domscheit-Berg.
If this is the real transcript, Wikileaks is done for.
Check out the June 2006 entry:
http://web.archive.org/web/20060712184552/http://iq.org/inde...
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.
It rather sounds like his only personal issue is that people are making up news about him.
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?
By taking sides he's lost the advantage that he had.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/141716/new-high-call-afghanistan-...
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.)
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.
And if it harms the war effort of the US, then again it is not their problem.