Posts by giovanni tiso
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
Trying to improve relations by improving exposure isn't sinister unless you believe the US is so seductive everyone will be immediately converted to wanting everything they want, or, alternatively, that everyone they send is very easily influenced. Or both. I think it might be slightly more complex than that.
Of course it is - it was the case even when Western journalists visited the Soviet Union on state sponsored trips, and each side was trained to think the worst of the other.
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I don't think that even the Pentagon Papers leak is comparable. What Ellseberg did was more directly to what Manning has allegedly done in copying the war cables and passing them on to Wikipedia, and arises out of moral outrage for the nature of the informaiton withheld. Assange is attacking the notion that communication between elected public officials should be confidential in the first place, due to his beliefs regarding how integral that confidentiality has become in making the actions of said officials unaccountable to us and undermining the whole idea of the consent of the governed. I think it's interesting in this respect that you are all offering examples of leaks that come from the world of intelligence. How would the release of, say, the 9/11 pager messages compare to those? I think we're looking at something entirely different here.
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OnPoint: Pay Attention, in reply to BenWilson,
If that's the case, then there's no evidence whatsoever to the claim that these leaks foster more open communication. It's hit-and-hope.
Yes, as most things that are done for the first time are.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
But if the State Dept sends a journalist to the US to cover one of their elections is there really a massive conflict of interest?
I don't know. I think it complicates things, at the very minimum. Why does the State Department even offer? What's in it for them?
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OnPoint: Pay Attention, in reply to BenWilson,
You just asked the question whether anyone had tried with the leaks, in the context of the discussion about whether it has led to any real improvements in openness. There have been many leaks over the years... let's discuss the extent to which they helped
I'm suggesting that they are fundamentally different strategies. Even the leak of the Pentagon Papers wasn't like what WikiLeaks does, which is attacking the edifice of secrecy. So it seems to me that citing historical leaks may not be helpful unless they are part of a similar design.
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There are also journalists who happen to think it taints the process - Consumer Magazine, amongst others, even though it limits what they do in that they can only compare products that they can afford to purchase.
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OnPoint: Pay Attention, in reply to BenWilson,
There's still a case for secrecy on some matters.
Has WikiLeaks ever taken the position that there should be no secrets whatsoever? If they did, they'd just dump all that they have. The problem is exactly that they need time and resources (which often means the help of regular media) to parse the information first and make sure that releasing it won't endanger informants amongst other things. So this is really not a valid counter argument for what they do, it seems to me.
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OnPoint: Pay Attention, in reply to Keir Leslie,
Something that Wikileaks makes far far more likely.
Even accepting this sillogism, which seems highly suspect to me, what are you actually saying? That we were better off by not knowing those things that we didn't know, because now they'll be made even more secret? I'm really struggling to figure out your ultimate point.
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OnPoint: Pay Attention, in reply to BenWilson,
The leaks of Valerie Plame did a lot to convince me that the US systematically lied in the lead up to the Iraq war. The leaks that outed her as a CIA operative, however, were highly counterproductive.
I'm not even sure what 'the leaks of Valerie Plame' means. Her husband was conducting an investigation during which he may have relied on her knowledge as an operative - has anybody suggested he wasn't cleared to do so? But if you think that her outing as an agent is in any way comparable to the WikiLeaks strategy of mass disclosure, then I think we're getting our wires seriously crossed.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Neil Morrison,
If the aim is to prevent all confidentiality then I think that's not something I support.
Since I believe you might have been the person who claimed in another thread that US diplomacy is aimed at doing good in the world and upholding human rights, I'd humbly submit that you might benefit from reading this.