Wikileaks internal memo on "The Fifth Estate"
wikileaks.org
wikileaks.org
Really leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Also the claims that Assange is responsible for the harm or death of Americans, or that they later leaked unredacted documents.
The Social Network's dramatization of Zuckerberg wasn't nearly that acrid, in comparison.
I'm not blaming Assange for anything. I'm just saying those messages mean very little.
Braveheart is one example: the section "Historical inaccuracy" takes good 1/3 of the whole Wikipedia article. Amadeus by Miloš Forman is another example. The Social Network...
Those would be novel claims.
Honestly, if anyone's sleazy it's Assange.
It is still sleazy if there's element of truth to that? Cult leader, maybe not, but his ego is visible from the ISS, and his narcissism is fairly hard to miss as well.
Likewise Assange is certainly intermingled with harm/death to Americans, if not directly involved. He claims there are higher reasons such as his effort to foist transparency on the U.S. government in particular, but you don't leak hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables and still end up Doing No Harm.
Additionally it was Assange's mistakes that left the archive of unencrypted unredacted documents on a public web server in the first place. The Guardian journalist should have been just fine to publish the password years after the fact as the FTP share used to push the documents to the journalists doing the analysis was not required to be public for years! So again, although Assange is not "the sole gunman" here he does share in the responsibility.
And all of this now reaches back into why it might be appropriate to describe Assange with cult-like descriptives. You ask a U.S. Democrat and they'll probably be able to list at least 5 things they don't like about a prominent Democratic politician. Even a Republican would be able to list faults with their politicians.
But to hear people describe Assange, he is almost literally perfect, has never done something wrong, makes snap decisions that are revealed to have been 100% beneficial years later, and never suffers from normal human misunderstanding or flaws in decision-making. Where does this come from?? I screw up something at least twice before breakfast every day, but any fault people point out with Assange must be as part of a vast government and media conspiracy to discredit him? OK, sure...
Your entire post reads like you're trying to make mud stick. Give me a break. All of that is a far-cry from what the movie portrayed and is quite intellectually dishonest.
These are not mutually exclusive goals. I'm grateful for Assange's work and the changes it has affected on the world. However, I think if you were picking the front-man for Wikileaks, he would be a poor choice.
Thankfully, the ideal people rarely do anything interesting, and Assange is a very interesting character (in both senses of the word). I was actually surprised by how little of the memo took issue with the film. Almost all of it is tone, and much of that tone is open to interpretation (does the film mock Assange's feeling of being watched, or do the characters in the scene mock it? The scene includes thugs following Assange.). I'm also surprised the film adds a disclaim as to its sources at the end.
Wikileaks seems really upset, but it seems like the film makers could have done a lot worse. I'm sure the people in the US government have their own list of inaccuracies. What do you expect from a form of entertainment?
Source? In what way has he directly been involved in any harm? Second, US Brig. Gen. Robert Carr vittnessed under oath that the armies investigation could not identify a single death. Do you know something that the second largest army in the world could not prove?
> So again, although Assange is not "the sole gunman" here he does share in the responsibility.
I guess the architect for the World Trade Center do share some responsibility when the two building crashed in 2001. Had he built them more secure, more like a bunker, then so many people would still be alive. so again, althrough Daniel Libeskind is not "the sole gunman" here he does share in the responsibility.
or maybe, just maybe I want to put the whole blame on Al-Qaeda.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoru_Yamasaki
Or was that a joke? :)
That's a shameful straw man. I don't know of many people who think Assange the man is any sort of saint, but there are many of us who think the character assassination against him is an obvious attempt to distract from the true story, just as the news stories about Manning's psychological and emotional health were an attempt to cast her decision to release those documents as anything other than a principled and moral one.
I think a world without Wikileaks would be a measurably worse place, and a world without Assange would be a world without Wikileaks. Believing that requires no acts of deification or hagiography on my part. He's a flawed man doing important work.
He is definitely an arrogant kind of guy, but the movie literally portrays him as having been in some kind of cult wherein everyone bleaches their hair white. That kicks him down from "arrogant asshole" to "crazy, God complex cult leader" to people watching the movie.
And really, from what I can tell, he's not done anything particularly immoral. No evidence has come out that anything he leaked harmed any Americans. He sifts through all leaked material before just publishing it willy nilly.
It's possible to support the work of Wikileaks while still acknowledging:
- The work and results of Wikileaks is not solely the result of Julian Assange.
- Julian Assange might be an egotistical narcissist.
- The work and results of Wikileaks may have contributed to harm as well as good.
FTFY. You have to be careful with such subjective characterizations of people you've only seen in the media and never actually met in real life, they're almost always inaccurate. Modern media is full of bias and fallacies.
"might be"? Anyone "might" be! Do you have substantial reasons for suspecting that Assange is one?
> - The work and results of Wikileaks may have contributed to harm as well as good.
No one denies that Wikileaks has done harm. Not even Assange himself. Wikileaks has harmed the US image quite badly. For example, before Wikileaks, I had no idea the US military is run by the kind of people who would gun down innocents from a helicopter, so casually.
Some people have asserted as much, including people who have known him personally. Others have said that those assertions are false.
Since I don't have evidence either way, it "might" be true. Might. Might! I'm not saying it's true. I'm saying I can't prove it's not true.
I'm also saying, if that upsets you, think about why that might be. Is it because you know Mr. Assange personally and know it to be a false allegation? Or is it because you like Wikileaks and interpret any attack on Assange as an attack on Wikileaks?
"L'etat, c'est moi"? I don't believe that's true. I think we should be wary of cults of personality. Even if we don't think the "personality" is themselves creating it.
And no, it's not because I'm fond of Assange. I welcome information from everywhere.
¹ I hear many people in India say something to that effect these days.
"THE FIFTH ESTATE falsely implies that WikiLeaks harmed 2,000 US government informants. ... US Brig. Gen. Robert Carr – who was tasked to investigate this matter by the Pentagon – in fact stated under oath when examined by the defense counsel that there was no harm whatsoever."
"Although THE FIFTH ESTATE purports to be about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, the film was made without the involvement of WikiLeaks or any of its staff, including Julian Assange. ... The multi-million dollar production, produced by Dreamworks and distributed by Disney, has not financially contributed to WikiLeaks or any of its defence funds."
Not being able to prove harm is different from proving that one did not harm someone. Especially when, in this case, the U.S. took measures to pre-emptively mitigate any harm as a preventive concern. Was the U.S. supposed to let their informants be killed by the Taliban just to be able to say that Assange is an even bigger asshole? Please.
This doesn't mean that any party not convicted didn't do it; it simply means they were convicted, just as the legal system sometimes manages to deliver convictions on people who were actually innocent.
In this case there's no way to even think of how to apply a legal-style investigation except under some kind of quantum parallel-universe model. Exhaustive investigation or not, the fact remains that as soon as the U.S. learned of the leaks they took prompt action to forestall the ability of AQ and the Taliban to act on those leaks, which forever screwed up the possibility of conclusively determining which particular individuals would or would not have been slain.
That the threat was mitigated doesn't mean there wasn't an existential threat though, nor does it need a jury of 12 people to demonstrate what is plainly obvious: Loose Lips Sink Ships.
First, I don't actually believe that the Wikileaks releases (Manning's) really caused that much damage, in fact we came out smelling like roses in most cases, our allies however frequently looked like asses (think Saudis wanting to tag gitmo inmates with bird trackers).
The thing here to consider is 1) by the Wikileaks statement above it would seem that the purpose was never to counter US interests [calling bullshit here, support or oppose Assange/WL != pro US gov], so it is disingenuous at best to us the lack of damaging information to suggest that WL was not an anti-USG group.
Is the Disney film less than fully accurate? I'd bet so, it's a commercial endeavor.
I'm more disappointed that Wikileaks chose to focus on the USG and GB than all of the upstanding states around the world like Syria, Russia, North Korea, and China. Sure, when the US fucks up, call us out on it, that's part of an informed democracy.
WL/Assange pretended to be the vanguard of transparency (and when they first announced such ambitions I actually was rooting for them). Instead of focusing on the most opaque and oppressive governments, they focused on finding the warts on governments that by and large are respective of human rights. Russia? Fuck it you get a pass because Assange doesn't have ricin-proof pants yet. NK? Do you know how hard it is to get documents from there?
</rant>
Seriously though, I am disappointed. When they stood up I thought they were going to actually go after folks who actively opposed free speech and human rights. Instead they went after the targets that were easiest to create media stories out of. I would like for Wikileaks to get the memos on the election rigging in Azerbaijan, I would like for them to get the UN memos between RF and Syria. To borrow the line from Rick, I don't mind a whistle blower, I just mind a cut rate one.
[1] No judgement, I've had a decent amount of scotch and to each their own, but really?
[edit: legalize it, and then tax it, and give me a tax break :) ]
No, that's rather the point. "They should be catching real criminals" is the argument used to complain about the police arresting people who have committed a crime because there are more serious crimes.
The argument here is that just because the US isn't the worst, doesn't mean you shouldn't do anything.
>> The argument here is that just because the US isn't the worst, doesn't mean you shouldn't do anything.
I did not say that you should give the US a pass (I in fact explicitly stated the opposite). I did state that if you claim to oppose some common ill of humanity that you should probably focus on where it is most ill.
If I decide to fight malaria, I should probably look at Africa as a good place to do my work.
If I decide to fight corrupt, oppressive, and deceitful governments I should probably look at states with the most distasteful human rights records.
If you anger the US government they will (generally) initiate legal proceedings to see you in court. Even if you think the legal proceedings against you are a sham, you (generally) get your day in court which are (mostly) fair. If you anger China or NK they (generally) don't bother with even that much pretense and you may be tried, convicted and executed before anyone even realizes you're missing.
How much capital (financial, political, human, technical) does Wikileaks spend focusing on each country around the world? How would that list correlate with the worst human rights abusers, the most opaque governments.
This of course in a week when the Azerbaijan presidential elections have just seen the results accidentally released before voting even opened...
The document says this: kill squads, assassination, execution, immunity for the soldiers doing the assassinations. What the documents don't say - destabilize the region, overthrowing foreign governments for political benefit(you could argue they're just playing the geopolitics game with Russia), political exiles, breaching their own constitution in whatever way they can, hacking and cracking(surely an individual hacker would've gotten 50 or so life sentences for the things they've done).
You tell me this is a big stretch.
Russia does, do they not? Were you not paying attention for Snowden or Syria? If Russia is not a moral authority that is at least compatible with WikiLeaks's moral goals then why would Assange host a television show on the state-sponsored Russia Today channel?
Plenty of possible reasons for that. One would be b/c there's no way Assange could get a TV show in the US, but RT has a decent Youtube following here.
I think you should really, really read up on some history.
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2010/1026/WikiLeaks-re...
The closest thing that WL has on their website that is even embarrassing to Russia is a Wikipedia rip of Anna Politkovskaya's summary. Everything else is either coincidental or "anti-Syria" voices saying mean things about Russia. Really, the US is the only country with people in government who disagree with their government?
Really? So if a dissident decides to stop dissenting due to increased government pressure, we should lose respect to all the work he did previously? Just because he was not courageous enough to continue, someone, who didn't have the courage in the first place, will lose respect to him? Moral hypocrisy 101.
who knows what happened for those stories. <shrug>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Domscheit-Berg http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/wiki-war-35...
Agreed that Canada/Aus/UK are well represented, but if we have Canada/UK/US/Aus/Russia, which one of those things is not like the other?
"Wikileaks: Russia branded 'mafia state' in cables"
Wikileaks is less interested in publishing these than anything that is embarrassing to the US/UK. I know I'm throwing HN Karma down the toilet here, but really, while the behavior of the USG is far far from ideal, the behavior of Wikileaks is also so, and in a more insidious manner since its silence on more oppressive governments gives them validation.
Also for those downvoting, please see my other posts. I am not blindly pro-USG or anti-whistleblower. I have more complicated feelings regarding Snowden but wrt Wikileaks I have been disappointed in their focus. I feel this is a valid concern as the obsession with taking the US down a peg also gives validation to those oppressing their own people. Taking the US down a peg and denouncing real atrocities should not be incompatible. I feel that Wikileaks has sacrificed the more valuable duty of the latter in favor of the former.
Also, as a non-US citizen, I think it's justified targeting the US specifically, because they have an inordinate amount of influence on global policies (basically, they force their laws on everybody else through so-called trade agreements)
Assange was using Russian state media (RT) as a mouthpiece for a television show of his before Snowden as well. I believe one of his first interviews was with the leader of Hezbollah, of all people.
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/79749/wiki...
He clearly has an agenda, which can be summarized as anti-American and pro-not-giving-a-fuck-about-anyone.
Please point out which people in those steps of events you are disgusted by, and what you would have done instead in their shoes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/magazine/30Wikileaks-t.htm...
"He was angry that we declined to link our online coverage of the War Logs to the WikiLeaks Web site, a decision we made because we feared — rightly, as it turned out — that its trove would contain the names of low-level informants and make them Taliban targets. "
Also, I would go as far as to say that his deputy's trip to KGB HQ in Minsk was totally unnecessary.
Only after Leigh published the password for the cables, effectively making them public, did Wikileaks post them to its website.
If you have evidence that Assange systematically published cables of informant names before the password was published by Leigh please share it.
Proper INFOSEC involves not leaving information where it doesn't need to be for any longer than it needs to be there, encrypted or not.
So what? I seriously don't understand your position. I don't really care that there's nothing about North Korea on Wikileaks simply because:
1. Everyone knows North Korea has an appalling government. "North Korean Government Official Caught Accepting Bribes" would quite possibly be the stupidest news story ever.
2. I don't live in North Korea. I care about what the UK government is doing, because that's where I live!
I take it you're from the USA. Wikileaks are telling you what your government is doing, and instead of thanking them, you're annoyed that you can't ignore what's going on? You're more concerned about some weird "embarrassment"? Seriously, WTF?
NK might not be useful, but in countries with some amount of information exchange with the rest of the world like Russia, imagine if there were more solid cases of corruption against specific people in power?
We say that WL helped trigger the Arab Spring, so why not the same in Russia?
I guess that is why anyone who mention said knowledge was labeled as conspiracy nut and tinfoil hat. /sarcasm
Please lets not rewrite history. People did not know that US diplomats was used as spies, or that NSA planted bugs in EU buildings, or had secret deals with mail and social networks that gave them privileged information under secret terms. People did not know about secret assassination lists.
Surely a lot of people suspected things, but knowing is an other cup of tea here.
After their redesign in winter 2008 (2009?) the focus of the site shifted entirely, to direct attention to the flaws of the USA and UK instead.
The goal seems to now be to improve the world by disrupting the state (the largest Western ones being those of the US and UK), as opposed to the goal of a "world without secrets". This fits neatly with Assange's worldview (he has said in August 2013 that of the American politicians he is most fond of the libertarians of the right-wing Republican Party).
"The most significant journalists and whistleblowers in the world (that) are either political exiles, political prisoners, or the targets of criminal investigations by an overreaching security state."
Many of these I had heard of but many more I had not... It's a little chilling honestly.
I don't believe for a second this document wasn't intended for public release from the outset.
Likewise the memo is sitting on a public folder on wikileaks.org, I'm pretty sure Assange or his troops could hack together a private intranet if that was what was actually desired here. This is a PR release that is just as transparent as when the U.S. "leaks" positive news to the NYT.
Be hard for the "Based on a true story" defense to work for that I would think.
Edit: Another way the film can get off the hook is by claiming the information depicted is based on the sources (books) it uses for forming the script. I can only speculate, but what matters is shaping the public opinion and they are doing it by leaking the script and expressing their opposition to it.
Another guess is they need definitive evidence before sueing the film/makers. To quote from their memo: "Although the film has premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and numerous other media organizations have been shown review copies, the studio continues to refuse to show the film to WikiLeaks staff."
I can't think of any other film that blatantly sets out to tell a fictional story injurious to the reputation of a living person without renaming them. (Well, My Name Is Bruce, arguably, I guess. But that starred and was directed and co-produced by the "victim", something of an exception.)
I'd love to see Carter-Ruck take this on in a British libel case!
They do? Jobs? The Social Network?
You're right of course, though not sure that Jobs is quite "based on a living person" (though he was alive when the project started, just not when it was released.)
Sarah Harrison, the WikiLeaks journalist who accompanied
Edward Snowden from Hong Kong and assisted his successful
asylum bid, is in effective exile in Russia.