Anonymous stops dropping DDoS bombs, starts dropping science
boingboing.net
boingboing.net
If the whole cache is ever going to hit the streets in plaintext it will likely be through wikileaks.
Why is Assange taking so much heat (yes, I know he wanted to be the lightning rod)? Is it merely that it would look bad to go after 'name-brand' news sources?
As stated elsewhere
According to his essay, Julian Assange is trying to do something else. Because we all basically know that the US state — like all states — is basically doing a lot of basically shady things basically all the time, simply revealing the specific ways they are doing these shady things will not be, in and of itself, a necessarily good thing. In some cases, it may be a bad thing, and in many cases, the provisional good it may do will be limited in scope. The question for an ethical human being — and Assange always emphasizes his ethics — has to be the question of what exposing secrets will actually accomplish, what good it will do, what better state of affairs it will bring about. And whether you buy his argument or not, Assange has a clearly articulated vision for how Wikileaks’ activities will “carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity,” a strategy for how exposing secrets will ultimately impede the production of future secrets. The point of Wikileaks — as Assange argues — is simply to make Wikileaks unnecessary.
http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/julian-assange-an...
In both cases, the moral victory is not an immediate part of the action or product. It's about the secondary effects of living in a world where coercive force is no longer rational.
That revealing past secrets will somehow make governments more transparent - they'll use encryption and off-record remarks, watch what they say, ensure records are destroyed, tighten security protocols. But IMO, and it is just that, they will still keep the same secrets and have the same covert conversations and exchange the same messages.
It's not by any metrics naive it's exactly what is going on right now. Overreactions decreasing the ability to communicate. That's what Assange by his own words are after.
If someone wants to whisper something in your friends ear, and seeing it you step closer, does the third party whisperer quit or do they usher you friend away so that they can keep the secret?
Making it harder to keep secrets means that people are more secretive.
Decreasing the ability for people to communicate is not at all a good thing IMO. If diplomats can't do their job, acting as intermediaries and smoothing over relationships between countries then I don't think that is going to help anyone unless they desire anarchy.
>It's not by any metrics naive it's exactly what is going on right now.
Could you expand on this I'm not at all clear what you're saying.
You are making it harder to communicate thus you are making conspiracies harder. You are slowing down things.
> Most of the cables that have come to light so far have not provided new information. It was no great secret that Libya had probably put pressure on the UK over the Megrahi release, that the US was doing strikes in Yemen etc, even if no one was prepared to confirm this in public. But if this was reported by the US government - and then pushed into the mainstream of public debate by journalists for highly respected news organizations, it became common knowledge that could not easily be ignored. Not only did everyone know it - everyone knew that everyone else knew it too. This explains Rachman's paradox - why apparently banal revelations can have very important political consequences.
http://www.themonkeycage.org/2010/12/wikileaks_and_the_diffe...
I didn't know about any of these cases in particular, but as an American I see nothing surprising (sadly) in the fact that the U.S. tried to obstruct these investigations. In two cases American acts are the target of the investigation. In the other case it is the acts of people helping the U.S. government, whom the U.S. has even more powerful incentive to protect. So I guess it was a surprise to Spaniards how much the U.S. was able to affect the investigations? I don't know enough about the Spanish justice system to know what standards to expect, but criminal investigations into another nation's actions in other countries (the first two cases) seem explicitly political to me anyway, hence naturally amenable to diplomatic "pressure."
All in all, it's been the biggest story I've had in my
five years as editor of El País, without any doubt. And
measured by its international impact, it's probably the
biggest story this newspaper has ever been involved with.
[0] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/09/wikileaks-cables...
US-based private security contractor DynCorp, who was hired by the US to train Afghani police, was apparently supplying drugs and young boys for a sort of sex party.
The details are horrifying. The Afghani interior minister apparently went to US officials to warn them that reporters were sniffing around this story, and urged them to try to kill the story. He specifically warned that this would look bad if the connection to DynCorp was made clear (he called them "foreign mentors"). Apparently, US diplomats told him not to worry, and the eventual story was in fact watered down greatly (until now, of course) calling the whole thing a "tribal dance," rather than a party where young boys wear "scanty women's clothes" and "dance seductively" before being "auctioned off to the highest bidder" for sex.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101208/00221812176/so-wik...
There's also the fact that everyone knows the Afghani election was rigged but while the Canadian ambassador wanted to do something about it the US didn't.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/...
The revelations won't have any kind of mind-blowing effect, but the cumulative picture they paint is VERY important.
Nothing wrong with that in this context, but it highlights how hard it is to do anything else. It's easier to talk about the reactions and dissemination and censorship and rhetoric. Those are actually more universal topics, and they're unfolding now.
The nitty-gritty of the cable revelations is subject to a interpretation and even more acrimonious rehearsed-roles debate, so (as here) it often just gets mentioned in passing, with a hand-wave and nod to its importance.
Of the cables' revelations, many that people are 'shocked, shocked' to hear are what was already assumed to be true or partially reported -- covert military strikes in other countries, attempts to downplay fatalities or wartime actions in error, frank assessments of shady regimes.
And it seems to me many people are just seeing what they wanted to see. If they already bought into a Chomskyite view of the US as the scheming amoral fount of all evil in the world, there's enough in the cables to feed that view. If they think the US is just another powerful but bumbling country pursuing its interests, fighting several wars, striking balances with sordid situations not entirely under its control, there's enough in the cables to feed that view, too.
What's the one or two things in the cables you found most surprising?
That said, the role of the oil companies in the Niger Delta unrest isn't exactly unknown, not many people labour under the delusion the Nigerian government isn't to some extent corrupt, and the page you linked to isn't even a particularly damning one, as governments do have a legitimate interest in monitoring activities of rebel groups and the effects on multinationals they target. The smoking gun would be finding documents suggesting that events like the Odi massacre were planned (and possible oil company collusion) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odi_massacre
What's been released recently seems to be the sort of thing that might cause discomfort to a few diplomats who've made rather unflattering and speculative (but in many cases justified) comments about their host countries but it's less than earth-shattering. The half-hearted attempts to discredit Assange feels like an attempt to appease the leaders they've privately insulted; perhpas they have more reason to be concerned about what hasn't been released.
Governments have willingly released far more inadvertently damaging material... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodgy_Dossier
VOA has a good roundup of news about Africa:
http://www.voanews.com/english/news/africa/WikiLeaks-Revelat...
To me as a citizen the US is essentialy a foreign power and I would like it to have no say in the internal affairs of the country I live in without having obvious benefits for me. This doesn't appear to be the case and it isn't because US diplomats apply pressure to get concessions but rather because politicians yield even without pressure.
(I watched CNN America once. Once was enough.)
[0] http://tweakers.net/nieuws/71259/politie-arresteert-16-jarig... (dutch)
How did that end by the way?
(I do find it quite ironic that you chose to troll while calling Anon "trollish" too.)
I love how the response to my ironic post is ad-hominem attacks and calls to come out with the downvote pitchforks... Are we on reddit?
It is also worth noting that this is perhaps the first Anon initiative that the average joe will agree with (and maybe - just maybe - be inclined to help with).
Here's the credit crisis video for those who haven't seen it:
A nice, clear summary of the Wikileaks cables with some quality graphics could gain serious attention.
Many of the libraries involved are available from http://xach.com/lisp/ and https://github.com/xach/ though.
Thanks for the references.
The most amusing thing is the comments section getting bent out of shape at the use of 'gentlemen' in the image as not being inclusive to females. Talk about a culture clash.
And given this groups nature I don't think there will be much evidence about anything they do at all, other than initial communications, side effects and occasionally apparently an arrest.
That's the nature of the beast, and that is exactly what makes it so hard to come to terms with it for many people that would like to see 'organization'. To the extent that anon has an organization you'd probably have to name them 'core' or something like that and even that does not really do it justice. This is a fairly complex issue and even talking about it I find it hard to pick exactly the right terms without almost automatically falling back to using terms that somehow subtly do not apply.
What evidence would satisfy you that some people of some anonymous group are partaking in some activity claiming that they partook in some other activity ?
so to answer you question, i'd say evidence of support for the plan on the irc network, and/or a lack of targets given for hivemind.
If they'd start to bend it to contemporary political correctness, it would loose it's meaning.
Sounds ghastly.
Edit:
Lol, so I'm at 0.
No, seriously, as an aspirational statement it sounds horrible. The elimination of difference instead of its celebration! The difference is life, and faces and names are individuality!
And the privileging of certain characteristics inherent in such sameness would itself be tyranny if carried beyond a game. Everyone is deemed a Gentleman and questioning that homogenisation is considered worthy of downmodding?
Celebrate individuality and difference, don't deny it. Fight sexism by celebrating each individual and not by pretending that gender doesn't exist and then calling everyone Gentlemen.
Regardless, to actually reply to your post, you didn't get downmodded because 'questioning homogenization.' It's because you didn't actually question it: you only said two words. Your edit is much better.
Secondly, this is much deeper than 'fighting sexism,' and Anonymous isn't really out to actually destroy gender... There are, however, many groups that _are_ explicitly about destroying the concept of gender. Anarcha-feminists, people who identify as 'genderqueer,' and... well, even boring old vanilla me, for example. On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. Or a boy. or a girl. It's much better that way.
EDIT: downvoted. quelle surprise.
All your leak are belong to us.
Or, are we just deciding to play on the usual stereotype.
Also, is hanging around in a spot in meatspace with other people a more effective means to a goal than a direct action that is performed online? When you sell software, are you walking door to door? Or selling online? Would it be fair to call you "a lazy basement-dweller" since you don't walk door to door selling software?
Does this statement seem deragatory to you? "This (selling online) doesn't require leaving the computer, a far easier proposition for most I would expect."
Although Anonymous is special, because typical leaderless resistance can only exist with very strict rules (see: ALF).
It makes me think of swarms, flocks, and emergent behavior.
You'd think that it would be easier for something like Anon, but it's actually probably harder. The only thing you have is communication, and so it'll be scrutinized even more. Anon's humor style is incredibly deep and nested, when you really get down to it. I'm not saying that it's impossible, it'd just take some work.