Interview With the Man Behind WikiLeaks 489
An anonymous reader writes "Julian Assange, the man behind WikiLeaks, explains why he feels it is right to encourage the leaking of secret information. He maintains that the more money an organisation spends on trying to conceal information, the more good it is likely to do if leaked. For Assange, leaked intelligence reveals the true state of governments, their human rights abuses, and their activities, it's what the 'history of journalism is.' On the media's role in making information available to the public, Assange maintains that 'the rest of the world's media is doing such a bad job that a little group of activists is able to release more of that type of information [classified documents] than the rest of the world press combined.'"
Slashdot Had the Option to Interview Him in March (Score:5, Interesting)
Blood on his hands (Score:5, Interesting)
Julian Assange also admits someday he's probably going to have "blood on his hands." He has put himself in a tough situation. But I'm betting the increased daylight will do more good than bad.
Idiot (Score:1, Interesting)
This is the kind of bullshit you hear from people who don't have a fucking clue what regular people are like. Sure, it's possible that a government may hide their activities from the public in an attempt to deceive or control them. Much more often, however, the government needs to keep information from the public because the public is full of panicky morons. And yes, sometimes a restriction on information is vital to national security. Traditional media doesn't "fail" to expose this information; they have enough sense to determine what benefits the public and what doesn't. Assange clearly lacks any fucking iota of that kind of sense.
Re:Team up with the Daily Show! (Score:3, Interesting)
Most of their material covers what other news sources have reported.
They do occasionally send "reporter|comedians" to the field.
The best examples of this are their coverage of conventions during national elections.
They do interview actual persons of interest.
Consider how far "real" journalism has fallen (most of it is also editorial and commentary).
The comedy news isn't that far behind.
Good Stuff (Score:5, Interesting)
As a USMC Iraq combat vet, who has for the past few months been studying the Afghan situation extensively, I can say that this is a good thing. Anybody who is actually involved knows that the Paki, and more specifically ISI, have been a problem for us since the early 80's, and not much has changed. The Paki's have and will continue to say "What? Not us!" but they are full of shit. The fact that the politicians are relatively good at hiding this fact undermines the general public's knowledge about the situation, and therefore it is a major part of controlling public opinion about our war. The facts are that we send money to ISI (often bypassing paki authorities completely) who then have (sometimes rogue) officers directly funding everything from afghan warlords, to Al Queda, to Paki Talibs, and on down the line. The fact of the matter is that Pakistan has absolutely no interest in really getting rid of their extremists, on either border, because Islamabad has so much fear of India, the militants are a tool they plan to use if needed. They will only do enough to keep our money flowing to them, but not enough to truly alienate the extremists. Its enormously complicated, with factors such as Iran and Russia playing into the equation. Regardless, I just hope that Assange did a good enough job purging of intel that could jeopardize people, but when so much is being hid, this kind of knowledge should be made public, albeit perhaps a bit with a bit more ambiguous information.
Re:Why the press does a bad job (Score:5, Interesting)
I sometimes wonder if perhaps government needs another wing,
an executive, a legislature, a judiciary and another wing(investigative?) with the job of (but not monopoly on)letting everyone know what the hell the other 3 are up to with as much protection from the other brances as they have from each other and as much power to root around in the others buisness as any wing of government.
it used to be that the citizens were good enough at that job but nowdays with the way the weak ones are getting stamped on for trying and the rich and powerful don't give a damn I think it would be better.
Re:I admire him but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Natural Progression (Score:1, Interesting)
Untrusted news source: They will drift into corruption and/or incompetency and lose their credibility.
Beholden news source: Their donors will congeal into a very small number giving very large percentage of donations.
Self-serving news source: They will focus only on the stories that will stir the most controversy and thereby gather the most publicity for them.
Interview at TED (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The rest of the world media has bills to pay (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The rest of the world media has bills to pay (Score:5, Interesting)
Fluff is not just Idols, it is news that doesn't upset you.
To paraphrase a great 19th century British newspaperman: news is what someone is trying to censor. Everything else is entertainment.
Re:WikiLeaks probably has their own agenda (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Slashdot Had the Option to Interview Him in Mar (Score:2, Interesting)
Where are his efforts to find the Taliban documents showing their human rights violations? Or clear violations of the Geneva Convention? And how they are the ones putting civilians in danger by not following the Geneva Convention
Seriously, are you suggesting that terrorist organisations commit mass murder keeping in mind the statutes of the GC? The Taliban do not pretend like some governments do -- they openly state their threats, and are pretty successful at bringing many of them to fruition -- and violate many a convention in full public view and do not regret a bit in doing so.
And where are the documents showing the amount of effort the US soldiers put in distributing contributions from US citizens, including medical, school, and sport supplies? Putting themselves in harms way to protect civilians during firefights? Or the extrodinary efforts they take to try to limit civilian casualties.
You can watch heart-warming/heart-wrenching documentaries on CNN for that.
Re:Blood on his hands (Score:2, Interesting)
The US entered WWII as a direct result of American soil being attacked. It was pretty clear that fighting back was a matter of national security. In that context it would be easy to make the case that a leaker of battlefield secrets was treasonous.
Actually, there is a lot of evidence to the contrary. The US had been notified multiple times of an impending attack months before the attack at Perl Harbor actually took place. Furthermore, a week before the attack, the US was notified of the location of an immediately impending attack. The day of the attack, several more messages that an attack was both impending and taking place were never delivered. As such, no effective defense was able to be mustered. Add to this the very suspicious and atypical ship deployments on the day of the attack, everything about it stinks to high heaven. Nothing more than, "Oppps...they were lost in channels", were ever offered as a viable explanation.
Combine all of the magical message loss plus our atypical ship deployments with the fact that the President desperately wanted the US involved in the war in Europe, when the majority did not, with continued ploys of much the same on the our enemies throughout the war means its extremely unlikely (sucker's bet) that the US' involvement was not purposely empowered and manipulated. Many credible historians believe this line of thinking has a lot of credibility. This isn't some crazy conspiracy bullshit.
By 1943, support for the war had all but evaporated. By 1944, it was extremely difficult to maintain the war effort as it was financially extremely difficult; and it was only by high profile celebrity and industry war bond drives the war was able to continue. Had the population known that massive civilian deaths had been permitted to guard the fact German and Japanese codes had been broken, all support would have dwindled and dried up.
The reality is, wikileaks should exclusively be used to spotlight malfeasance, not national security disclosure which endangers soldiers, national security, and the lives of all involved. Whoever disclosed the information absolutely is a traitor and should be treated as such if and when they are caught. Had such an ignorant stunt been pulled during WWII, the allies absolutely would have lost the war and the entire face of the world would be different than it is today. While not the world, the future face of the Middle East literally hangs in the balance.
Re:Why the press does a bad job (Score:5, Interesting)
I sometimes wonder if perhaps government needs another wing,
an executive, a legislature, a judiciary and another wing(investigative?) with the job of (but not monopoly on)letting everyone know what the hell the other 3 are up to
I'm often surprised (and impressed) by how well the CBC here in Canada and the BBC in the UK objectively report on government actions and policies. Both of them are government-owned entities, but they seem to provide a much more critical lens on that very government than the private commercial news broadcasters do. It's really counter-intuitive.
Re:Blood on his hands (Score:2, Interesting)
The war in Afghanistan is a direct result of american soil being attacked. I'm Canadian, and our troops are (rightfully) there in support of our American friends. The taliban government harboured Al'Queda, including those who did the 9/11 attacks. By allowing their territory to be used in the attack they committed an attack on all of Nato. The only surprising thing (to me) about all of this is that instead of devoting the bulk of your military resources to nailing down and hunting for the perpetrators of these attacks, your government went off and invaded Iraq instead.
The taliban still need to be destroyed. Afghanistan still needs massive amounts of reconstruction. For all the resources that have been applied, more still need to be applied. We are not in Afghanistan to prop up a fledgling democracy, we are not there to promote human rights. We are there to destroy a fundamentalist movement, and more effort needs to be spent in order to succeed.
Or we can let Afghanistan fall, again. They'll harbour enemies of the west, again.
Re:Team up with the Daily Show! (Score:3, Interesting)
I will say that the exposing hypocrisy in media is one thing the Daily Show does really well.
It sometimes amazes me in this age of data mining that there is not a database of every statement every major public figure has made on every issue kept by major new organizations. It should be nothing more than a couple minutes of searching to pull up every statement Obama, for example, has made on Iraq, making it ridiculously easy to point out if he changes his message.
The segments where The Daily Show has public figures arguing with previous versions of themselves is good solid journalism that I wish the rest of the media would copy. The rest of it... well, I think it's funny, but I don't know that I'd call it a model for future journalism.
Re:Why the press does a bad job (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's hoping citizen journalism can kick some spark back into the industry.
Re:I admire him but... (Score:3, Interesting)
I've heard that argument, and it's not to be dismissed casually. But I haven't seen any actual evidence that this leak included the specifics of the names of villagers helping us or the names of CIA agents or anything so damaging (I haven't read the documents myself, so if this is really the case, I would concede the point). Documents can certainly be redacted for that sort of thing without compromising their public information value. But this "These leaks could do us harm because they could compromise the names of our allies/agents" argument seems to me more like something that the government trots out at each of these leaks as a catch-all excuse for document suppression rather than something that has actually occurred.
Re:Team up with the Daily Show! (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:some amount of secrecy is warranted (Score:5, Interesting)
Why, then, does the US government want to keep the American public in the dark about civilian deaths in the wars that we are fighting?
That's easy. The lessons that the military learned from Vietnam:
1. Never show anything on TV that would indicate that US soldiers are suffering and dying. That includes flag-draped coffins, military funerals, wounded vets, etc.
2. Never show anything on TV that would indicate that US soldiers are killing civilians. This is best done by carefully controlling the situations that reporters can see (see "embedded" reporters).
3. Never institute a draft, so that wealthy college kids aren't affected, only poor and powerless kids.
4. Never let on to the public how expensive the war is.
This is an exact outgrowth of the "stab-in-the-back" theory of why we lost Vietnam - that the war was winnable except that those darn commie peacenik hippies convinced the politicians to end it. Notice how the entire process is to avoid letting the public know what it is that their money and blood is going towards.
Re:I admire him but... (Score:1, Interesting)
Hmmm, plane crash [slashdot.org]... That's very interesting...
Re:Why the press does a bad job (Score:3, Interesting)
And outdated, misleading and a probably always untrue concept. The media has never been a check on the powers of government except in the rarest of instances. If you examine history, you will find that the media has always been the most powerful enabler of government corruption, abuses and injustices. The Afghan and Iraq wars are the perfect example of this. Ordinary people didn't want the war; experts knew there were no weapons; everyone knew it was all about oil. And yet the media--TV, radio and print--drummed and drummed and drummed and drummed up that war.
I can remember the mass protests against the war, apparent the biggest mass protest in human history [wikipedia.org]. What did the media do? They toed the government line. They toed the government line because, in a very fundamental way, the media are a part of the government.
The function of the first estate, the clergy, was to be close to the people and to preach acceptance of state doctrine to them. To be sure they quarreled with the king and the nobility from time to time but overall their function was to keep the people in line. In the modern age, region has lost much of its political power, but politics abhors a power vacuum, and their old function of moulding public opinion and philosophy had to be filled.
And it has been filled. The pundit has replaced the priest, the news desk the alter, and the editorial the sermon. The form is different but the function is the same: to tell the people what to think, about themselves and the world. And it has been a hugely successful transition. A cursory glance at all the important issues of the day shows time and again that the best interests and indeed the very will of the people are essentially meaningless factors when issues are decided; trivialities to be talked away before driving home the scripted message.
The ultimate proof of the obsolescence of the media was this leak, effectively by a lone site on the internet. Tens of thousands of so called journalists across the globe and not one of them even bothered to obtain such files, let alone publish them. The only purpose of their profession is to act as paid shills to those in power, not air dirty laundry. Those days are long gone, if they ever really existed at all. This trove of files will never be properly investigated or scrutinized by such people, and the only real analysis and exposition will be done on private blogs or the occasional book.
Re:Blood on his hands (Score:5, Interesting)
It is also worth remember that, while we didn't find any WMD, pretty near every country who investigated at the time, including US Democrats who voted to authorize the war, believed Saddam had WMD.
That's not quite my recollection. Most every country was confident that he didn't have them and saw through what the US was doing (there was a unprecedented open ovation in the security council to the French rebuttal to Colin Powell's "evidence"). But nevertheless, the UN faced a catastrophic crisis of credibility. If the US had gone to war without UN sanction, it would have been essentially the same situation as when Iraq invaded Kuwait - except with Iraq as the invaded instead of the invader. At that point, by all law and precident, if the US invaded Iraq, the rest of the world should have been required to unite to expel them by force. Obviously, the world was in no mood to wage war against the sole remaining superpower. So the UN, in an unwinnable position, did a diplomatic two-step to save what little face they could: they gave the US the token authority to do what they were going to do anyway.
The UN appeased the US.
This is quite amazing. (Score:3, Interesting)
I can't believe that all these raging rednecks are so blinded with rage, that they still can't understand that WikiLeaks was probably played (quite well) by yanks. I wouldn't be surprised if WikiLeaks was actually a CIA operation. It would be beautiful if it was.
Think about it - what, exactly, has Wikileaks ever released, that has ANY value to anyone, except as entertainment for the sheep^H^H^H^H^masses?
The biggest WikiLeaks achievement, so far, is to 'reveal' how Pakistan is not really a friend of US. Who benefits from this the most? Certainly not the sheep. Or Pakistan. But US govt, since they'll now have instant 'popular support' in any action (non-military, of course) against Pakistan. They could have not done this with normal media manipulation, in such a short time, even if they were fully dedicated to it.
Everyone talks about WikiLeaks, but noone ever mentions Cryptome. Cryptome is the place where real information is released, where real sensitive data can be found, and Cryptome owner is a real living legend, considering how much effort and work he has put in it.
So, why are all these rednecks not making empty threats against John Young?
Oh, it's because you wouldn't know what good information (or logic, for that matter) is, even if it hit you in the head.
Re:Consider, also, *what* is classified (Score:2, Interesting)