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Comment by tedunangst | Hacker News Reader

Wikileaks is going to start releasing information before things happen?

They could, if they had that information. I have meetings scheduled out until November right now. If I tell you I have a meeting on Monday and here's the agenda for the meeting, that's releasing the information before the event happens.

While this sounds awesome and potentially disastrous, it also distroys itself as valuable info IMO.

Plans can change, the past cannot. Now, if there's breaking news however and it affect a large amount of people in a negative way, you'll notice it'll be reversed before it'll become finalized. This is something similar to that vein of thought, and IMO is why social media is important.

Then I guess my question is more about the failures of today's journalists. Is the implication that the Times knows about these plans but refuses to talk about them?

I'm trying to wrap my head around just what wikileaks is doing differently here, regarding BEFORE and AFTER. It would have been nice if wikileaks had told those photojournalists that the gunship was coming BEFORE they were killed, instead of posting the video of the event AFTER it happened.

People tend to make and disseminate plans to their minions prior to executing them. Thus, the plan could be leaked before the thing that is planned occurs.

Easy solution: Make plans for every possible option, so you don't know which one will actually occur.

Oh, wait. The Pentagon already does this: The have battle/attack plans for every country in the world! So I guess they should leak those and let people scream in outrage?

A plan is not equal to intent. And you only know intent after it happens, not before.

"Here are the targets we'd attack in Canada if we were at war" is a little different from "everyone meet up at Fort Afghanistan in Tent 123 at 1300 hours".

And how exactly do you want wikileaks to announce this in advance? The military is not known for giving early warning of things like this.

By the time a schedule like this is announced (even internally in the military), it's already in progress!

Well, the thing of importance would be the enemy knowing a strike is coming (for example). If the military is having people come to a meeting, the subject of that meeting is already determined. A mole could release the details on Wikileaks, saying "they're meeting in Tent 123 to prepare for the attack on Kabul National Bank". Well, now the bank manager knows there's a strike force inbound.

Not that this is a problem inherent to Wikileaks; you could use any service to communicate the same thing. I'm just giving an example of a time where publishing sensitive documents could be done ahead of time to disastrous consequences.

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