The NSA story reinforces why an entity like WikiLeaks is important

It's interested in obstructing the ability of governments and organisations in power to "conspire" against it's populations through technology.

It should be judged on that, not on the aesthetics of it's delivery.

By and large most reporters of The New York Times towed the line before the Iraq invasion and the Wall Street melt down. When you get called into a room by very important people, and are told do it for the sake of the country, few people are going to push back. That's where overly paranoid folk like Assange have a role to play. They force the system to reevaluate the status quo.

You mean it has experienced reporters who editorialize the leaks. Because that's one of the many benefits of Wikileaks: you get the data in its raw form and can reach your own, independent conclusions if you choose to do so.

>>It has a process through which the public can contact the organization and correct errors.

This is well and good, but the process is not efficient enough to deal with the sheer volume of leaks in a timely manner. Just as an example, Wikileaks released 400,000 leaked documents in October 2010. How much time would it have taken for The Guardian to process them, and would the information still be relevant by the time they were released?

See: http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2011/4/29/glenn_greenwald_o...

(As for Wikileaks itself, they eventually released all of the cables without redaction.)

It is neither well known nor respected. The process is not public and there is a great deal of self-censorship that has nothing to do with public safety. There were examples of this even in the publication of the Wikileaks cables.

So do governments. It's much easier to deal with a newspaper :)

They are also dying. Newspapers make their money from advertising. The price you pay for the paper barely covers the cost of printing and delivering it. But print advertising has fallen off a cliff in the face of the web. You can hear all the old hands complaining about how it's all Google's fault (or whatever), but it isn't anybody's fault, it's just a fact. It's a fact that leaves newspapers without the level of resources they had thirty years ago to fight against government overreach.

And it's another fact that most of those "missing" advertising dollars have gone to the tech sector. Which means we have a responsibility to pick up the slack, one way or another.

Unfortunately, the well-known and respected editorial process isn't transparent to the public. I'm not implying this is bad; just that it is vulnerable to being used for hushing up stuff, dusting important (but inconvenient) information under the "not important" carpet.

Neither victim alleges rape.

And I'm not sure how, in the same breath, you manage to implicitly criticize what is happening to Manning and Assange trying to avoid the same fate.

Yes. Security is fiction, the government cannot make you secure. All the government is doing is to make empty promises and spend your money on security theater and surveillance programs that make you less secure by drastically increasing your exposure against malicious governments, which have killed orders of magnitude more innocent people than any terrorists.

Your argument is a straw man. No one is suggesting that the government should be unable to conduct lawful surveillance subject to a warrant based on probable cause "and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." What people are suggesting is that we not have totally unchecked government surveillance power or be forced to design our technological infrastructure with dangerous security vulnerabilities.

Downvoting to express disagreement is a plague that must be eradicated.

Yes!

>The sad reality of our world is that there are terrorists,

Not very many of them. Your chance of being injured by a terrorist are basically zero.

>and they need/use things like email/chat/online forums/regular phones for communication.

They can also use things like coffee shops to talk in. We better get mics in there to record every conversation!

>So the question is where do you draw the line on what is acceptable/not.

I draw the line on none of it is acceptable. We're fighting a practically non-existent enemy. The government abusing this power is a vastly bigger threat and has already been happening for years.

The US government is simply too corrupt to be trusted with anything that avoids strict checks and balances. Why do you imagine the founding fathers put that stuff in there in the first place?

> if you are evading tax and the government finds out, this data cannot be permissible as evidence in court and/or used to prosecute.

For now. But that data will be there forever and attitudes on such things may change. And before you scream "ex post facto" I say look at the case of the guy accessing open AT&T links. That wasn't illegal when he did it, it became a crime well after the fact.

Once we have it piled up in nice data center it would be a shame just to leave it there, and soon everyone and their cousin will be lined up to get a share .. IRS, DEA, FBI and the rest of the alfabet soup. It has pretty much happened already with every government register and I don't see why it wont happen in the future.

And once we start to analyze the data we will see patterns. The guy who stops at the same local pub every day on his way home from work will most probably be scrutinized by both the police and DMV sine driving under the influence of alcohol is considered to be serious matter.

The fact that the pub he visits have the best hamburgers on this side of the Atlantic can't be seen in the gps-location log of his cellphone.

Once people who doesn't follow the ordinary patterns starts to get extra attention from them - the guys with guns and uniforms who have the authority to put you in jail - we will start to self-censor what we say, where we go and in general try to avoid sticking out.

This will hurt our economy, the entrepreneurs who wants to do things in other, better ways isn't there any more - they are buzzy trying to conform. You didn't find to many entrepreneurs in the former eastern block - nor will you find them in your future "balanced" surveillance state.

We will also effectively stop the any development of our society. Not so many years ago homosexuality was a criminal offence, how can the future version of the LGBT-activists possibly assemble, discuss and debate when the rulers of the country knows who and where they are and what they are doing. No more progress and humanism reforms.

We survived the cold war against the Soviet union without having to sacrifice our personal integrity or legal security, and they had spies, infiltrators, actively supported terrorist organizations across Europe and a military with thermonuclear weapons.

Our "enemy" today are a bunch of imbeciles with large beards dressed in nightshirts running around waving with a book that contains as much truth as something written by Brothers Grimm.

And you fear them enough to make the wet dream of stasi a reality?

"First a reasonable suspicion , then limited surveillance" is a principle that have served us well so far, and I hope it will continue to do so.

Unlimited surveillance will lead to unreasonable suspicion, how many honest people should get on the no-fly list of have their job/visa applications turned down for no obvious reason so you can "feel" safe?

Gentlemen don't read each others mail!

I would rather receive my news from multiple sources (who'll have multiple agendas), plus the raw data, and draw my own conclusions.