Wikileaks Is Running Out Of Cash
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I myself don't really know what to think of Wikileaks. I, however, do know that major banks and financial institutions find it perfectly okay for you to send money to all kinds of horrible organisations (say, the Ku Klux Klan, clubs that campaign for underage sex, Westboro Baptist Church, whatever you can come up with, and they probably have a bank account), but not to Wikileaks.
I can't imagine how Wikileaks can be considered a so much more evil organisation than Stormfront (http://www.stormfront.org/forum/announcement.php?a=63, all cards accepted) that the first needs to be blocked and the latter does not.
It can only be that at least this part of what Wikileaks is saying is true: Major banks and businesses, a scarily small number of organisations that control a large part of the world's financial transactions, want to control to who you give your money. This means that they want to control who gets money and what they do with it. This shit is NONE of their business, and the fact that they can do this without serious legal issues scares the shit out of me.
I like to believe that western governments are out to serve their citizens and protect their freedoms, but I cannot explain how that fits with what these banks are doing and how the governments just let it happen. This has absolutely nothing to do with the nature of Wikileaks as an organisation.
Really, this fact alone makes me want to send money in an envelope to Wikileaks, despite how ridiculous I thought Cablegate was.
Edit: If Wikileaks were a terrorist organisation (blowing up buildings and people and whatnot), I'd understand governments to force a ban. Not banks banning them on their own initiatives, but governments forcing it. If you genuinely feel that Wikileaks is as bad as Al Qaeda and Hamas and the alikes, then I'll understand if you disagree with me, although even then I hope you agree that it should've been a government decree, and not banks solo-piloting their sense of morality. In all other cases, really, I can't wrap my mind around it.
Silencing people's political opinions (even horrible evil people) is considered bad. This is why donations to these evil organizations is tolerated.
Wikileaks is being blacklisted not because of their political opinions, but because these organizations, rightly or wrongly, believe Wikileaks is threatening security of the nation, causing deaths of informers and collaborators in the Middle East. And last but not least, Wikileaks seems to be actively perusing leaks in banks and financial organizations. If you bite the hand that feeds you ...
It'd be better to say that there is potential value (as opposed to 'money', which is a term with overloaded definitions), but yes - as long as there is scarcity, opportunities for trade will exist.
Except that's exactly what they've been doing for about the entire world history of banking.
They're not protecting the nations, they don't care. They're protecting their own hides. You know Wikileaks got dirt on the banks too, right?
Funny thing is, when they release it (and they already have, parts of it), everybody will be like "everybody already knows this". Tickles me mad, that :-D
The banks are not "feeding" Wikileaks. The people are.
But those organizations don't feed Wikileaks. It's donations that do. In fact, the banks and cc companies are making money off it.
Had they been ordered to shut out Wikileaks through some judicial process I'd have no beef with it.
And I really doubt they did it out of desire to protect informers et al. I wonder if the banks and Visa were pressured into it.
I can, in spirit, though I wouldn't necessarily use the term "evil" as the comparator. Stormfront generates bigotry and hate speech. Distasteful and contempible. But Wikileaks spreads as widely as possible information which can pose real security risks to people (such as US soldiers). As a Jew, I'd rather see people support offensive but peaceful organizations like Stormfront (I'm assuming they're all talk) than organizations which may actually contribute to getting people killed.
You obviously have no idea what you're talking about. Stormfront is not all talk and their actions have easily endangered more lives than Wikileaks has. This is the largest online community of neo-nazis on the web, for fuck's sake! What do you think they do, drum circles and interpretive dance??
I'm glad for you that you obviously live in a part of the world where hate-crimes are not much of an issue, but take a look at North East-Germany for instance. There's whole villages occupied by neo-nazis after they chased away the population that wouldn't salute the swastika flag. Yes, in the 21st century. And yes, they do assault and/or kill Jews, Gypsies, Muslims, Blacks, you name it (the ones not in those villages, obviously nobody goes there willingly).
They just don't happen to affect the lives of the super-rich and powerful very much.
Stormfront is quite objectively more evil than Wikileaks no matter how you spin it, unless you're ignorant or have neo-nazi tendencies yourself.
Skrebbel is pretty much spot-on in his assessment.
How? What violent or dangerous actions have they taken?
>This is the largest online community of neo-nazis on the web, for fuck's sake! What do you think they do, drum circles and interpretive dance??
No, I think they make posts on the internet about Jews controlling the world economy, sell racist bumper stickers, etc. Offensive and stupid, but not dangerous.
>Stormfront is quite objectively more evil than Wikileaks no matter how you spin it, unless you're ignorant or have neo-nazi tendencies yourself.
As I said in my original comment (which you don't appear to have read very carefully), I'm Jewish and I find Stormfront offensive. I also said that evil wasn't the relevant way to compare Stormfront with Wikileaks. But, given the information I have, I think the standard position of supporting free speech so long as it doesn't endanger people is consistent with blocking donations to Wikileaks but not to Stormfront.
If that's the case, then, why defend hate speech and not Wikileaks? It seems to me that hate speech also has the very real potential of inciting violence (holocaust, pogroms, etc).
I agree with you, though, that Wikileaks probably is more dangerous (in the people-could-get-killed sense) than Stormfront, right now. It certainly seems much more likely that Wikileaks could cause violent rioting (and worse) than that Stormfront will suddenly come to power, although my observations don't extend past the US. It could well be the case that neo-nazis are a bigger problem in other parts of the world.
Personally, I find myself becoming more pro-Wikileaks as I see more interviews of Assange. The man is articulate and logically consistent (a rarity for any public figure) and I've found his arguments quite compelling. If you haven't seen him speak, I'd recommend it. He does a better job defending Wikileaks than anything that I could articulate in a post on HN.
Wikileaks is doing what the press should have done years ago. What we need to know enough to look for in the future even if nobody spells it out for us.
I'm afraid I can only relate anecdotal observations, but my corner of the Midwest does sadly host an active Neo-Nazi population. A couple of my friends in the city where I live have been violently assaulted and injured by self-professed Neo-Nazis (and strangers) venturing here from rural counties looking for trouble to start.
Likewise, I have a couple times seen Stormfront host threads by individuals who disagreed strongly enough with (usually far-left leaning) political protests in this city to seek identification of the protesters in any photos, names, and where they live. Along with not terribly subtle threats of violent retribution.
I can certainly see recklessness in Wikileak's actions, especially revealing identities of covert agents, thereby endangering them.
I would hope at my least anecdotal observation above of Stormfront's connection to violent criminal behavior makes clear both organizations do indulge in recklessness, albeit in degrees being debated here.
And what if a Jewish soldier is captured in battle and his enemies are avid readers of Stormfront?
In this case, it's pretty clear the U.S. Government is instrumental in making it happen, not allowing it to happen.
well, the problem that bankers find with Wikileaks is probably that its not censored enough for them,
look for example what Wikileaks says about the Rothschilds banking family, informing us that the family is trillionaires , while referring to totally credible sources.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothschild_family
While The Independent describes "an even older tradition - the ability of the family to sustain their secretive fortune, which industry insiders count not in billions but in trillions, and keep it within the family. Secrecy has been a hallmark of the Rothschilds from the outset."[56]
We're pretty sure they're not considered a terrorist organization... right?
Every cent might be in the direct pursuit of free information but I worry that isn't the case.
The impression i was left with over the split between Wikileaks and OpenLeaks (and incidentally here's link to open leaks: http://openleaks.org/ ) was that WikiLeaks was left w/o any infrastructure to accept new documents, making it, effectively, useless.
I am not going to donate to Julian Assange's defense, as i think he's destroyed Wikileaks' credibility and capability to continue operating.
I completely missed any recent news regarding Assange... do you mind expanding on your reasons? I'm really interested.
The reasons that i have are not directly tied to the substance of the accusations against him there.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/23/julian-assange-wiki...
However he's almost certainly a complete cock to people on a regular basis. There's a lot of evidence for that. Just because you are totally awesome at one level of social discourse doesn't mean you aren't also a complete bastard to people on a personal level.
If this was a smear campaign orchestrated by the top echelons of the US intelligence/military complex, they would have done it better. If they're out there twisting arms and making up charges, why not make it a proper rape, not this "well, strictly he should have known she didn't really approve even though she didn't say anything at the time"-business.
Good point. I read a lot about this when it was happening so my reflex was the point to the source, who I believe. Looking forward to an actual court case so some facts can become public.
> he doesn't practice what he preaches.
Reread the grandparent's comment. He's not saying Wikileaks should reveal it's sources but that it should release its source material. As opposed to editorialize. As opposed to becoming yet another dishonest filter of information.
I did. I'm satisfied. It might not be perfect but it's far better than anything I see on TV.
No, I don't believe that Wikileaks should be transparent with the whilstlebowers who give them information. I do believe that Wikileaks should provide the information that they give as close to the originals as possible(with limits on whether or not the leak could directly endanger people), and not attempt to editorialize at all. There is a huge need for a place to view these primary sources. There are way too many places that editorialize the sources for their own purposes. It doesn't help transparency if Wikileaks refuses to release information in order to get "more press". Just release it, and let the public decide.
While it's a slightly slippery argument, Wikileaks has argued that:
1: It is not of the ruling oligarchy. 2: Its own organizational requirements require a certain lack of transparency.
I can sympathize with both arguments, though a pledge, say, to release information at a time when it is no longer harmful to Wikileaks' operations, might be a class act.
As with other movements, I suspect Wikileaks is rather smaller at its core than many people realize. Assange and a few close lieutenants (some no longer quite so close).
So the problem I have with Assange is, ultimately, that he's a terrible journalist. He's not even a good gonzo journalist.
He made the epic mistake of letting the story become about him, and worse yet, making sure that Wikileaks's fortunes (both literally and figuratively) were directly tied to his. He did that in that Wikileaks is paying directly for his legal defenses, and also in that he quite literally ransomed the wikileaks diplomatic data dump, and said, more or less, if anything happens to me, all of this data will be released publicly.
Worse yet, they've been so lax and incompetent with their data security policies that they let the password for the data dump leak out!
So, not only is he so difficult to work with that he has been abandoned even by people who have defended him previously, and agree with the major thrust of his work, but he's proven himself unable to even credibly maintain a threat as supposed leverage. He's still in legal trouble, and the worst case data release scenario has come to pass.
The problem we find ourselves in now, is that wikileaks is now proven to be incompetent, unable to manage their data, entirely occupied with Assange's legal defense, and clearly developed into a cult of martyred celebrity.
What wikileaks is clearly not, is a clearing house for future whistleblower data. Wikileaks had a chance to act as a trusted broker and exist as a non-state actor. But the key component to that was putting trust ahead of personal gain, recognition or vendetta. Instead now we're going to see a host of successors to wikileaks which will all have questionable pedigrees and histories of trustworthiness, and leakers are going to have to navigate those tenuous waters alone, as they've always done.
In short, Assange blew it. Sad times.
Assange was intentionally the lightning rod. Within Wikileaks his role is similar to Rumsfeld's in the Bush administration. He takes lots of criticism, personal attacks, etc.
The strategy of those wishing to shut down Wikileaks has been to attempt to vilify Assange. This is to be expected. Yes, Assange should have been more careful about who he slept with, but can you blame him at this point for trying to clear his name and stay out of prison?
The release of the password and some of the other organizational challenges that Wikileaks has faced could be the result of a sloppily run organization, or they could be due to someone on the inside being bought off, etc. To accuse Assange of having the motive of self-aggrandizement (considering that he's the only one who has put himself at risk for assassination, prison, etc.) seems a bit of a knee-jerk reaction.
One thing to consider is that Assange is a poor judge of character -- he misjudged his publishing company, the two female accusers, and probably at least one of the core Wikileaks team members. So yes, Assange has lost a few points... but are you really ready to write him off? This is a guy with exceptionally uncommon courage and will, and he's up against professional intelligence organizations.
Wikileaks has been slowly learning how to do its own proactive PR, how to resist infiltration, etc. We're talking about a very small organization (a startup of sorts) that has had a few growing pains. I think the jury is still out on whether the organization will fizzle out or will continue to gain credibility, integrity, etc.
So far, I think the trend has been that Wikileaks has learned from its mistakes. It has been rather astonishing to me to see the extent to which companies and governments have gone into attack mode against Wikileaks and Assange. For every attack, subterfuge, and machination that has been public there have likely been dozens of others attempted. While these may have succeeded in ways we do not yet know in dealing a death blow to Wikileaks, I think it's too soon to write the organization off. Assange has inspired a lot of people that even in today's world a small number of dedicated people can make large and corrupt organizations very uncomfortable.
Second, they have made assurances that the wikileaks platform is in fact inoperable, given the state that the platform was in when they departed. By their account, wikileaks was not trustworthy enough to operate the platform, so they felt no inclination to fix it.
I am not going to claim first hand knowledge of any of these facts, and I don't know how the actual departure of Daniel Domscheit-Berg and co. actually went down. Assange has made statements contrary to Domscheit-Berg, and again, having no 1st hand knowledge, i can't claim to know one way or the other.
Assange has not, in any of the statements i've seen, addressed the current state of the platform, or how documents can be uploaded. On the other hand I haven't seen any prominent publication of how leakers can get documents to Wikileaks either. (happy to stand corrected if someone could point me to links!)
I'm not even saying I agree or disagree with wikileaks itself, but heck, considering the amount of pressure they get from everywhere, giving away information about how they spend their money would be plain stupid and would take them down in a eyeblink. Just two cents.
Same as governments, then.
Indeed, this is a strawman argument. Governments shouldn't hide information from people. That's the point.
To say that transparency only applies to governments is to miss the whole point of transparency. If that is indeed Wikileaks' position as you say, then they've missed the point from the get-go.
2) that would only be effecting your life through inaction. defunding wikileaks would have the same effect.
You can't choose not to pay your taxes (at least without breaking the law). You can choose the kind of politicians you vote, but again, those politicians may choose to do something else with your money when they have the power.
If you do support WL, and believe in what they have achieved so far, I think that it's wise to trust them, given the amount of criticism they face from almost every government in the world. I haven't read about any government denying anything that was published, but I've read a lot about those governments trying to censor what is published. So, who's the censor here?
It takes some seriously warped logic to see hypocrisy in this, but hell, americas seem to think corporations are people, so I guess I shouldn't be that suprised.
By the way, even if (ii) is correct, it makes little matter, because of the power balance. As Chomsky often points out, when the powerful obtain information about the powerless, they gain even more power over them than the powerless would have gained over the powerful from similar information. Which means that a more "open" society, with less privacy for individuals and less secrecy from trusts and governments, will inevitably tip the power balance even further.
It is just unreasonable to treat state (and corporate) secrecy and individual privacy the same way. Assange may be a hypocrite, but on this particular issue, he's clean.
This is exactly the same rationale for why the U.S. government doesn't want their secret diplomatic cables published.
In other words, he describes Wikileaks as a last-resort channel for addressing institutional wrong-doing.
[0] http://www.wau-holland-stiftung.de/english.html
[1] http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,734318,00.h...
All I want to know is where I can send a check.
Long live government transparency.
It would be nice to have a bitcoin alternative that was actually a viable currency; as of now I know of no such thing.
Could not make sense of their IRC thing, though. Why not generate a new BitCoin address directly on the page?
Of course there's some poor reporting in the US, like anywhere else. I don't know of any European/Asian newspaper that does a better job than the NY Times or WaPo (or for that matter any good regional US paper), for all their faults, and those who are comparable are usually less widely read than the American ones.
While there's a left-centrist party in office, not one positive news is to be shown in mass media vehicles, even when the president receives an international award, the people are kept in the dark about it and you have to follow alternative news to be informed. This discrepancy has even been reported in international news before.
See for example this:
Universal Health Care is the Jihadists' secret weapon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMu6wCqdeyQ
Not carrying guns suggests Norway is not a democracy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EX3km583Dw
For News successfully argues in court that it is allowed to lie in its news: http://www.relfe.com/media_can_legally_lie.html
We should be aware that wikileaks actions are indeed crimes. That said, some cables put it crystal clear, some politicians are really corrupt and are using their privileged position to their own advantage.
Do the goals justify the means?
1) Exposing corrupt politicians. 2) Stop politicians from screwing millions of people over and over again.
And the downsides are: 1) Some politician loses his/her reputation, and the people of his/her country know who he/she really is. 2) Some frictions between countries, for example when an embassador is just a mean for creating a corporations' lobby.
I'd say yes, the means are well justified in this case. Truth can never be a bad thing.
> 1) Exposing corrupt politicians.
> 2) Stop politicians from screwing millions of people over and
over again.
The thing is — if there is anything worth knowin in those cables it will become visible through the actions of the officials sooner or later. If it will not — I don't care.
"The U.S. bargained with other nations on moving prisoners from the Guantanamo Bay detention camp to other countries. In one case, U.S. officials allegedly offered Slovenia a meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama, if the country accepted one of the Guantanamo Bay detainees.[24][25] Offers to other countries include economic incentives or a visit from Obama"
"In 2009, the U.S. manipulated — via spying, threats, and bribes — the Copenhagen global climate change summit to coerce reticent participants into supporting the treaty. The U.S. punished countries such as Ecuador and Bolivia, which were deemed "unhelpful" for not signing the Copenhagen Accord, by cutting off millions of dollars in necessary funds;[27] while, the U.S. relieved Saudi Arabia, the world's second-biggest oil producer and one of the twenty-five-richest countries in the world, of any kind of obligation.[28] The U.S. used funds in millions of dollars to recruit the Maldives to sign the Copenhagen Accord, after it has relentlessly took a stand against it"
The above is a sliver of things I've personally learned, and am glad I know, from the leaks. It may not be pleasant or happy information, but I want to know what the Governments and corporations are doing. You may not care or want to know, but some of us do care what is happening.
(used wikipedia's listings to find what I was looking for, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contents_of_the_United_States_d... )
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_the...
Additionally, I feel that in general you shouldn't say something that you can't bear being repeated by others. Every child learns this. Yet, the government feels they can wheel and deal, and talk about other countries behind the backs of others and feel that the knowledge will never come out.
Our government has increasingly classified or made secret more and more documents in recent years and... The more the government tries to hide things the more the people become less trusting of said government.
the government should work for the people, and they should have a responsibility to provide full disclosure to their citizens. the only reason the government should want to keep things secret from their own people is if they aren't working in our best interests.
That is why they're "secret". They're not supposed to be viewed by any other country. If they are freely available to citizens, there is nothing stopping them from being freely available to everyone.
This is the shell game that has been played by all diplomats since the beginning of time. There wasn't really anything all that interesting about the cables, and all it really gave was a good look at how our diplomatic services work.
More tellingly, the US Supreme Court case that is the basis of the State Secrets Doctrine, United States v. Reynolds (1952), was based on deceptive and false claims on the part of the US. In that case, the government argued that it could not be compelled to introduce evidence into the court, or even disclose it in chambers to the justices of the United States Supreme Court, because it would irreparably disclose vital state secrets.
The crash documents were declassified in 2000 (and are available online). In Herring v. United States it was argued (unsuccessfully) that the documents in fact contained no such secrets. In district court an on appeals to the 3rd Circuit, "there was no fraud because the documents, read in their historical context, could have revealed secret information about the equipment being tested on the plane".
Not all are convinced of this. Nor that the case is sufficient justification for the doctrine of state secrets which has resulted from it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Reynolds http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/books/02liptak.html?scp=2&... http://www.barry-siegel.com/ClaimOfPrivilege.html
Diplomatic cables do not meet this standard in the general case. They are a log of a government's interactions with another government, and thus need to be public so that the people can confirm it is working in their interest, and not conspiring to implement a global copyright regime at the behest of Big Media, or aiding a foreign government in oppressing its people, or sending detainees to foreign soil with the understanding that they'll be tortured, or trying to overthrow democratically-elected leaders, or any of the other reprehensible things that the American government is doing literally while I type this, right now.
As while I think many people want to support Wikileaks, they don't want to support his personal legal case, be it politically motivated or not.
Anybody know why they haven't gone this route?