Hard News by Russell Brown

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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys

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  • giovanni tiso, in reply to James George,

    I could go on about Friedman for days

    Or you could read his column. It takes five minutes.

    Yes China's a nasty place

    You haven't, have you?

    Wellington • Since Jun 2007 • 7473 posts Report Reply

  • Keir Leslie,

    1. Assange’s an arsehole

    2. Government needs to keep secrets

    The first is debatable, but the second is obviously true --- say, an impeding currency devaluation, or things to do with my personal status, or whatever. So governments sometimes need to keep secrets. But at the same time, sometimes they don't. So how do we decide which things the government can keep secret? I think many people are just very very leery of letting Assange be the person that makes that decision, given it's basically the antithesis of the rule of law.

    Personally, I think that Assange, inasmuch as he is operating in what is essentially a spying mode, where information becomes the battleground over which two entities fight, amplifies the conspiratorial nature of government. (Leaking is an operation fundamentally distinct from openness. Leaking depends upon and reinforces secrecy by emphasising control of information; disclosure emphasises rule bound and orderly sharing of information.)

    Since Jul 2008 • 1452 posts Report Reply

  • Russell Brown,

    Concluding paragraph of a rather good new Guardian editorial on the content of the cables:

    And here's another important distinction. Forty years ago, the Nixon administration fought the New York Times all the way to the Supreme Court to stop the Pentagon Papers. The heart of that case was that Washington was doing one thing – expanding the Vietnam war – in private and another – denying it – in public. Secrecy was a shield behind which wars were waged and crimes committed. This time, as the New York Times's Max Frankel has pointed out, the secrecy is often silly and the impact on the US far less discreditable. Yes, the US has things to apologise for. But much of the secret material shows rather little difference between what the US says publicly and what these papers show privately. Hillary Clinton has condemned the leaks, as she must; yet in general the US has responded maturely. Not a shining city on a hill, perhaps, but still a pretty impressive place, shrouding itself in some layers of unnecessary secrecy. US defence secretary Robert Gates said this week: "Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for US foreign policy? I think fairly modest." In the long run, he may be right.

    Auckland • Since Nov 2006 • 22850 posts Report Reply

  • HORansome, in reply to James George,

    A general but important point: Columbus did not discover the Earth was round. We've known that for a very long time; what Columbus discovered was that the spherical Earth was much larger than he anticipated.

    Let's not get history (or let others get history wrong) just to make easy points.

    Tāmaki Makaurau • Since Sep 2008 • 441 posts Report Reply

  • Martin Lindberg, in reply to Don Christie,

    Oh, and don’t you think it is pertinent that Sarah Ferguson’s ex is open to the idea that a bit of corruption is ok?

    Since you asked - No, not really.

    Stockholm • Since Jul 2009 • 802 posts Report Reply

  • BenWilson,

    We've known that for a very long time; what Columbus discovered was that the spherical Earth was much larger than he anticipated.

    Yes, Columbus didn't actually go around the Earth anyway, so he proved nothing about the roundness of the Earth. What he did discover was America.

    As for the size of the Earth, I've seen amazingly accurate calculations made in the ancient world using some very clever techniques. Basically, measure the angle from straight up that the sun is simultaneously at different points whose distance apart is known. Assuming a spherical world, the rest is just maths. But there's nothing like trying it out to see.

    Auckland • Since Nov 2006 • 10657 posts Report Reply

  • Keir Leslie,

    Well, no, he didn’t discover America either. That was done by some person wandering over the Bering Strait.

    At most, he discovered the relationship between America and Europe.

    Since Jul 2008 • 1452 posts Report Reply

  • Danyl Mclauchlan,

    So how do we decide which things the government can keep secret? I think many people are just very very leery of letting Assange be the person that makes that decision, given it's basically the antithesis of the rule of law.

    I think this fails to understand what he's trying to achieve. He's not trying to bring about utopia, or prevent any government secrecy at all - he's making it harder for governments to operate in secrecy as a matter of routine.

    His thesis is that instead of serving the public political elites serve themselves and various powerful interests. To accomplish this they make the day to day functions of government secret from the public. But to function effectively they need to share information with each other, and the existence of Wikileaks means distributing information always risks compromising secrecy.

    (Assange is trained as a computer scientist and his way of explaining this model is that he takes acyclic graphs of directed information and weights the edges).

    So if a government really wants/needs to keep a secret it still can, factoring in the cost (in terms of risk) of sharing that information with additional nodes.
    But Wikileaks makes it harder for an entire elite political class to operate in secrecy. That's not building a new world, or overturning the rule of law, or allowing Assange to decide what is secret and what is known, it's trying to make the currently existing system function the way it's supposed to.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 927 posts Report Reply

  • Keir Leslie,

    But Wikileaks makes it harder for an entire elite political class to operate in secrecy. That’s not building a new world, or overturning the rule of law, or allowing Assange to decide what is secret and what is known, it’s trying to make the currently existing system function the way it’s supposed to.

    `the way it's supposed to' is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

    Since Jul 2008 • 1452 posts Report Reply

  • Joe Wylie, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,

    . . . make the currently existing system function the way it’s supposed to.

    Which would be attempting to re-establish the kind of openness promised by the freedom of information legislation that most Western democracies put in place in the 1970s?

    In retrospect the hopes for a promised new era of government transparency and accountability might seem rather utopian. The privatisations of the ensuing decades meant that governments could weasel out of the commitments they'd once paid lip service to by invoking commercial confidentiality.

    . . . don’t you think it is pertinent that Sarah Ferguson’s ex is open to the idea that a bit of corruption is ok?

    As an example of how things might be done in a situation of unfettered commercial confidentiality, it's very pertinent.

    flat earth • Since Jan 2007 • 4593 posts Report Reply

  • Russell Brown,

    Oh, and don’t you think it is pertinent that Sarah Ferguson’s ex is open to the idea that a bit of corruption is ok?

    Since you asked – No, not really.

    I think there's some reasonable evidence that Prince Andrew is corrupt. The exiled Kazakh billionaire who paid £3m over market value for Andrew's house, which had gone unsold for five years, presumably wasn't doing it just for laughs.

    Meanwhile, Tatiana Gfoeller, the US ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, who never knew her words would be made public, is being moved on from her post. One does have to feel sorry for her, and others like her.

    Auckland • Since Nov 2006 • 22850 posts Report Reply

  • Simon Grigg,

    51% of Americans are (un)officially stupid:

    Rasmussen polled Americans to see if they believed that Julian Assange and Wikileaks are guilty of "treason" and 51% of respondents said yes.

    Of course, Assange is Australian. So he can't commit treason since he's not an American citizen. Not even if he's super-double evil.

    Even if he's triple-double evil.

    Just another klong... • Since Nov 2006 • 3284 posts Report Reply

  • Martin Lindberg,

    I think there’s some reasonable evidence that Prince Andrew is corrupt.

    I guess I was just not surprised.

    Stockholm • Since Jul 2009 • 802 posts Report Reply

  • Neil Morrison,

    So if a government really wants/needs to keep a secret it still can, factoring in the cost (in terms of risk) of sharing that information with additional nodes.

    what made the scale of this leak possible was the response of the US govt to criticism over 9/11 that govt agencies did not share information. So information was centralised and digitised.

    I doubt this is going to make govts more open. The Obama admin will just tighten security. And given that no one appears to believe this is anything more than high level gossip with no real news then I'd say they would be perfecty justified in doing that. What have we gained apart from making diplomats susipcious that everything they say might be taken out of context and made public.

    Since Nov 2006 • 932 posts Report Reply

  • Simon Grigg, in reply to Neil Morrison,

    And given that no one appears to believe this is anything more than high level gossip with no real news

    I'd argue that the furore developing in the UK over the cluster bombs, the Spanish and German anger over attempts to pervert justice, the UN spying in breach of international law, the precise details of funds being extracted from Afghanistan by 'our guys' and quite a bit more are news.

    Spain in particular seems to be reacting fairly strongly to some of the non-news.

    Just another klong... • Since Nov 2006 • 3284 posts Report Reply

  • nzlemming, in reply to Neil Morrison,

    What have we gained apart from making diplomats susipcious that everything they say might be taken out of context and made public.

    Diplomats and public servants have always lived with that.

    Waikanae • Since Nov 2006 • 2937 posts Report Reply

  • Rich Lock,

    tantamount to a declaration of war

    To continue to play devil's advocate for one final post for my own amusement, deliberately sinking a warship is also tantamount to a declaration of war. As is shelling a town. Although I suppose since they technically never finished fighting the civil war they started in 1955, it's a bit different.

    The rocket fired over Japan could have accidentally landed where it wasn't supposed to, if there had been a problem with it's motor or guidance system. Since it was a test flight of an experimental rocket, that's not all that unlikely.

    Some commentary I've read suggests that the current sabre-rattling is so that the new crown prince can get a few results on his CV, and buddy up a bit closer to the N. Korean military. It's not beyond the bounds of possibility that the accidental rocket crash I'm speculating on could happen, if he decides to sabre-rattle a bit further afield than S. Korea. I'm just wondering what would happen afterwards.

    back in the mother countr… • Since Feb 2007 • 2728 posts Report Reply

  • James George,

    The deliberately deceitful editorial in the Guardian is yet another example of opinion writers putting out their ideas without reading their own newspapers hard reporting.
    So far Wikileaks (which was operating in an open, non-conspiratorial manner until US politicians called open season on WikiLeaks senior staff) has exposed all manner of nasty murderous behaviour by ‘diplomats’ operating out of US embassies around the world. And that from a tiny fraction of the number of cables which will eventually be released.
    From [url|http://original.antiwar.com/fisher/2010/12/01/wikileaks-bolsters-claim-of-deadly-us-attack-in-yemen/] libertarian site Antiwar.com:

    A diplomatic cable published by whistleblowing platform WikiLeaks corroborates images released earlier by Amnesty International (AI) showing that the U.S. military carried out a missile strike in south Yemen in December 2009 that killed dozens of local residents, including women and children, the rights group says.
    In the secret cable, written in January 2010, Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh is reported to have assured U.S. General David Petraeus that his government would "continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours".
    According to the cable, this prompted Yemeni Deputy Prime Minister Rashad al-’Alimi "to joke that he had just ‘lied’ by telling Parliament that the bombs in Arhab, Abyan, and Shebwa were American-made but deployed by the ROYG [Republic of Yemen Government]".
    Amnesty International is calling on the U.S. government to investigate the serious allegations of the use of drones by U.S. forces for targeted killings of individuals in Yemen and clarify the chain of command and rules governing the use of such drones.
    Tom Parker, Amnesty’s policy director for terrorism, counter-terrorism and human rights, says that AI wrote to the Defense Department last May regarding the drone strike in Yemen. He said Amnesty raised a range of questions regarding that action, but never received a response.

    Or how about Ellen Knickmeyer the former Washington Post Baghdad Bureau Chief who wrote [ [url|http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-10-25/wikileaks-shows-rumsfeld-and-casey-lied-about-the-iraq-war/ ]]

    During visits to Baghdad's morgue over the next two days, I saw Sunni families thronging to find the bodies of loved ones killed by the militias. The morgue's computer registrar told the grim-faced families and me that we would have to be patient; the morgue had taken in more than 1,000 bodies since the Samarra bombing, and was way behind on processing corpses.
    Here's the thing, though: According to then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his top commanders, it never happened. These killings, these dead, did not exist. According to them, reporters like myself were lying.
    "The country is not awash in sectarian violence,'' the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey said, on talk show after talk show, making the rounds to tell the American home-front not to worry. Civil war? "I don't see it happening, certainly anytime in the near term,” he said, as he denied the surge in sectarian violence.
    Casey had taken his own drive around Baghdad after the bombing of the Samarra mosque and had seen, not executed bodies in the streets but “a lot of bustle, a lot of economic activity. Store fronts crowded, goods stacked up on the street.”
    Donald Rumsfeld held a news conference at the Pentagon to say that U.S. press reports of killings—such as mine that estimated 1,300 dead in the immediate aftermath of the bombing, based on what I had seen at the morgue, interviews with Sunni survivors, U.N. and Iraq health officials—were calculated "exaggerated reporting." Iraqi security forces, he said, “were taking the lead in controlling the situation,” everything he assured his listeners was “calming.”
    . . .snip . . .


    Thanks to WikiLeaks, though, I now know the extent to which top American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world, as the Iraq mission exploded.
    The American troops, who were risking their lives on the ground, witnessed and documented it themselves.

    This is not just embarrassing or merely discreditable, if the truth about the awful violence across Iraq which had been let loose by the USuk invasion, had been widely accepted in western media public pressure would likely have forced a USuk withdrawal. Iraq left to its own devices, no particular group receiving arms and support from outsider., The Iraqis would have settled their internecine difference much sooner and a lot less humans would have been pointlessly slaughtered.
    From the old Grauniad itself [ [url|http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-cables-cyprus-rendition-torture]]

    American officials swept aside British protests about secret US spy flights taking place from the UK's Cyprus airbase, the leaked diplomatic cables reveal.
    Labour ministers said they feared making the UK an unwitting accomplice to torture, and were upset about rendition flights going on behind their backs.
    The use of RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus for American U2 spy plane missions over Hezbollah locations in Lebanon – missions that have never been disclosed until now – prompted an acrimonious series of exchanges between British officials and the US embassy in London, according to the cables released by WikiLeaks. The then foreign secretary David Miliband is quoted as saying, unavailingly, "policymakers needed to get control of the military".
    . . . snip . . .
    As the 2008 row escalated, the US rejected the British concerns over torture in unequivocal terms, with one senior official at the embassy in London baldly stating in one cable: "We cannot take a risk-avoidance approach to CT [counter-terrorism] in which the fear of potentially violating human rights allows terrorism to proliferate in Lebanon."

    The bar has dropped considerably since 911 but even given that I believe that being shown to have advocated torture of people whose involvement in any violent crime was far from proven, is still considered by most humans as more than merely embarrassing.

    Since Sep 2007 • 96 posts Report Reply

  • Sacha,

    Rebecca MacKinnon considers some implications of Amazon's actions (yet misses the extra leverage that homeland security laws offered Lieberman over them). h/t Robert O'Brien

    What is troubling and dangerous is that in the internet age, public discourse increasingly depends on digital spaces created, owned and operated by private companies. The result is that one politician has more power than ever to shut down controversial speech unilaterally with one phone call.

    ...


    This is not the first time Lieberman has demanded that an American internet company take down controversial material. Last time, the outcome was different.

    In 2008, Lieberman wrote to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, demanding immediate removal of "content produced by Islamist terrorist organizations from YouTube." While YouTube did remove a few videos that violated community guidelines against violence and hate speech, it refused to remove most of them.

    Google's lawyers determined that the material Lieberman wanted removed, while upsetting to many Americans, was clearly protected under the First Amendment. "While we respect and understand [Lieberman's] views, YouTube encourages free speech and defends everyone's right to express unpopular points of view," Schmidt wrote in his response.

    ...


    But the WikiLeaks Amazon case also highlights a new problem for American democracy -- and ultimately for the future of freedom and democracy more globally. A substantial if not critical amount of our political discourse has moved into the digital realm. This realm is largely made up of virtual spaces that are created, owned and operated by the private sector.

    Ak • Since May 2008 • 19745 posts Report Reply

  • Simon Grigg,

    The Empire strikes back: the wikileaks DNS server has been terminated as has, it seems, the news blog.

    Twitter and Facebook next as the tentacles of state spread, or am I being too paranoid?

    Just another klong... • Since Nov 2006 • 3284 posts Report Reply

  • Islander,

    Not paranoid Simon Grigg - extrapolations of state control are some of the many reasons I neither tweet, have joined facebook , Linked-in, or any other such sites...

    Big O, Mahitahi, Te Wahi … • Since Feb 2007 • 5643 posts Report Reply

  • BenWilson,

    To continue to play devil's advocate for one final post for my own amusement, deliberately sinking a warship is also tantamount to a declaration of war. As is shelling a town. Although I suppose since they technically never finished fighting the civil war they started in 1955, it's a bit different.

    Yup, it's also a different country being attacked there - South Korea really is scared of war with North Korea. I'm not sure Japan feels the same way. It's not like they haven't got a history of putting down hard beats on flimsy excuses. Give them a decent excuse, and I expect the North Korean regime doesn't want to find out what they're capable of.

    Edit:

    I'm just wondering what would happen afterwards.

    My gut feeling is that Japan would attack them and destroy their airforce, then sue for peace.

    Auckland • Since Nov 2006 • 10657 posts Report Reply

  • nzlemming, in reply to Greg Dawson,

    here’s the text for anyone else interested.

    That was Fab! Thanks Kracklite and Greg

    Waikanae • Since Nov 2006 • 2937 posts Report Reply

  • Sacha,

    US-based DNS company says DDOS attacks forced it to ditch Wikileaks. h/t Juha Saarinen

    Everydns.net said that the attacks – which have been going on all week, and led the site to temporarily host its services on Amazon's more resilient EC2 "cloud computing" service – "threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other websites".

    WikiLeaks was given 24 hours' notice of the termination, and everydns said: "Any downtime of the wikileaks.org website has resulted from its failure to use another hosted DNS service provider."

    Twitter suggesting manual IP address of 88.80.13.160 until WikiLeaks secure another DNS service.


    or 213.251.145.96
    or 46.59.1.2

    Ak • Since May 2008 • 19745 posts Report Reply

  • Sacha,

    And the cables are at http://213.251.145.96/cablegate according to John Perry Barlow

    Ak • Since May 2008 • 19745 posts Report Reply

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