It would be interesting to compare the damage caused by open, crowd-sourced investigative efforts against the damage caused of closed "authoritative" investigative efforts.
Australia and East Timor negotiated a treaty to divide up oil and gas in the sea between the two countries. Australia bugged the East Timorese government offices to get an unfair advantage in the negotiations.
The East Timorese government found about this, and then sued Australia in the Permanent Court of Arbitration to have the treaty invalidated.
An Australian intelligence agent (''Witness K''), who knew about the bugging, contacted East Timor's lawyer – Australian Bernard Collaery – offering to testify for East Timor.
The Australian government responded by cancelling Witness K's passport to stop him from testifying, raiding the offices of East Timor's lawyer, and now both of them are on trial – in secret.
The problem is that in protecting one person's reputation they're ruining the reputation of an entire country.
Shameful Australia.
Minor factual correction though: Christian Porter is the Attorney-General, not the DPP
It's exactly the job of the Australian intelligence agencies to protect for the countries interests and gain advantages where they can.
This case is even more reasonable as it's a country spying on a country so both parties have the opportunity do so.
The NSA has directly spied on corporations (Airbus) and passed the information to their own corporations (Boeing) in the past which seems less acceptable to me.
Australia needs these island states to stay friendly for national security reasons.
It shouldn't be taking advantage of their small and relatively unsophisticated governments to make a quick buck.
Try to bring issues to the public and they'll charge you with "espionage"/"mishandling classified information"/etc. Even if the charges don't succeed, you'll lose your career and the court case will ruin you.
Also, read Ronan Farrow's piece from the New Yorker last week. They targeted a straight-laced DOJ lawyer with >20 years of experience. These organizations are out of control and pose a very serious threat to our freedom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russ_Tice
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/09/how-a-cia-cove...
And that is why those senior public servants with power in security agencies hate wikileaks and are willing to trash the constitutional protections for journalists to get Assange and also want to destroy Snowden so very badly.
And the public had literally millions of people on the streets shouting about it.
And we still went to war anyway.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-cia-slamdunk-idUSN264...
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=House_of_Special_...
The politically appointed heads of the intelligence agencies used this information to lie to the American public.
Assad bombed his own people
The Russians hacked the election (a very broad statement, like “let’s believe in evolution”)
North Korea hacked SONY
All at very convenient times for our moves abroad and totally nonsensical from the point of view of motivation of the ones doing it (like Assad)
It’s like they don’t even try anymore. They just say “17 intelligence agencies all concur” with each other.
That would never happen today.
Not to show support for the invasion of Iraq, but it was a far cry from "millions of lives". https://www.iraqbodycount.org
Which is to say that measuring damage done by the Iraq invasion versus damage cause people falsely finger individuals for crimes is an exercise in fallacious analogy. The US isn't planning to crowd source their next invasion research question.
I wouldn't actually be surprised if people actively debated this and did some analytical legwork when they were prevalent as some twisted justification for the practice
I hate that word “interesting” when used for things that are downright fucking despicable.
Human history is rife with witch hunts. Perpetrated by communities against people living on the fringe of society or anyone they just didn’t like. Someone to blame for nothing in particular when they can’t find any other outlet for frustration. I guarantee you wouldn’t find it “interesting” if you were the target of oPeN cRoWdSoUrCeD iNvEsTiGaTiVe EfFoRtS.
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...
I mean I quite like this summation by Christopher Hitchens about the Iraq war: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VABqrEiuP0I
“Had the secret cache been discovered by Saddam’s security elements, Obeidi and his family might have been eliminated.”
And those were the leftovers from dismantling the stuff which was used before 1991, as far as I understand: definitely not a smoking gun, more the old rusty non-functional parts which Saddam didn’t know existed.