OpenLeaks — 'A New WikiLeaks' 538
Flixie writes "Swedish newspaper dagens Nyheter reports: '...[S]everal key figures behind the website that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive governmental, corporate, organizational or religious documents have resigned in protest against the controversial leader Julian Assange only to launch a new service for the so-called whistleblowers. The goal: to leak sensitive information to the public."
Assange gets arrested. (Score:5, Informative)
And ten more shall take his place
Re:Assange gets arrested. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Assange gets arrested. (Score:5, Funny)
Wasn't there some aspect of Assange not playing well with others too?
That's what SHE said.
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That's what SHE said.
Well played, sir.
Re:Assange gets arrested. (Score:5, Funny)
Well, actually SHE said he was playing TOO well with others.
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There were indeed. So it's less a case of "Assange is arrested, and 10 more shall take his place," and more a case of "Assange is a douchebag, and 10 more shall take his place."
Hopefully we'll end up with 10 more *Leaks sites and not 10 more douchebags.
Re:Assange gets arrested. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Assange gets arrested. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Having consensual unsafe sex is not rape unless you live in crazy-town.
When the woman withdraws consent the man withdraws his organ, or it is rape.... unless you live in crazy-town.
Assange allegedly didn't follow that rule, he isn't in crazy-town, so therefore it is possibly.....
PS - Anyone heard anything about Hans Reiser [slashdot.org] lately? (Creator of the Reiser Filesystem so loved in Linux land.)
Julian Assange rape allegations: treatment of women 'unfair and absurd' [guardian.co.uk]
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the man doesnt seem like the kind of person youd want running one (and not because of the assault allegations).
Why, what's it matter if he's the all-time greatest douchebag in the history of douchebaggery? The big qualification to be spokesman for a free information site, is a serious dedication to freedom of information. Assange seems to have that one down pretty well.
Re:Assange gets arrested. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why are journalists a special protected class in your opinion? Would they release information without filtering it? What if they were pressured to not release it by a government? Or what if it exposes the wrongdoing of the corporation that owns the journalists?
The ideal journalist will disseminate the information to everyone anyway, why add the extra step?
Re:Assange gets arrested. (Score:5, Insightful)
In the past, before the web, leakers had to talk to journalists because there was no alternative to reach the masses, even though journalists have never been paragons of objectivity.
Wikileaks today is much better than talking to a professional journalist, because what it publishes is closer to the raw leaked information, and it doesn't care about market share or editorial slant like newspapers do.
But wikileaks is still a middleman. If there was simple free software that any would-be leaker (nongeek) could use to put raw information directly and untraceably on the web, then the ideal would be one step closer.
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In the past, before the web, leakers had to talk to journalists because there was no alternative to reach the masses, even though journalists have never been paragons of objectivity.
How is? If somebody tells me anything else but "I'll do my best to stay objective" I'll start doubting that person immediately.
But wikileaks is still a middleman. If there was simple free software that any would-be leaker (nongeek) could use to put raw information directly and untraceably on the web, then the ideal would be one step closer.
As the ideal is far from possible and you'll always need at least one middle-man to act between you (who want to know) and those who want to withold the information (unless you really choose to take the risk of obtaining the information by yourself), there always be the questions of:
1. How much you trust the middleman?
2. are you lucid enough to pick what you can trust and what is
Re:Assange gets arrested. (Score:5, Insightful)
The only difference between what you see from Wikileaks and the raw data is that the Wikileaks version has gone through "harm prevention".
Here's a hypothetical example. The U.S. federal government gets a tip about a crime ring from someone. The government tramples all over the rights of the crime ring - therein is the leak-worthy material. Do you include the name of the person who tipped off the feds? I think there is a point where leaking certain information is irresponsible, especially when it interferes with an individual's (but not a government's) privacy and/or safety.
WL is, IMO, doing their job in the most responsible way possible - they make efforts to protect the privacy and safety of individuals and prevent any collateral damage.
Re:Assange gets arrested. (Score:5, Insightful)
There's more information now-- if anything, we need them more. Google has hardly killed librarians. Why should Wikileaks kill journalism?
There's a HUGE difference between information and understanding.
Re:Assange gets arrested. (Score:5, Insightful)
In one film, I don't remember which, the chief editor of the newspaper says to his staff "Our job isn't to break the story first. We're never going to beat the television. Our job is to give the story behind the story."
A good journalist will always have his place. He's prepared to do the legwork that the armchair pundit isn't, checking facts and talking to people to find their motivations. Here on Slashdot people are quite happy to paste from Wikipedia as 'evidence'. A good journalist will spot an anomaly, and if necessary jump in the car and trawl through paper archives to see if the digital one is actually correct or has been altered.
Of course there will be bad journalists, like Gizmondo who can't tell the difference between and EveryDNS and EasyDNS, but the good ones are worth their weight in gold. It's the reason people will happily subscribe to the FT and the Economist, yet The Times has died an online death.
Raw data has become more readily available to the public, but hopefully it will inspire more people to write quality articles as well as add to the armory of those already in the business.
Phillip.
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It still leads to greater accountability (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact that the leak is out there for anyone to see means that spin can be kept to a minimum at least, they can't outright lie because people will check the facts against the evidence.
Re:It still leads to greater accountability (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Assange gets arrested. (Score:4, Interesting)
Why are journalists a special protected class in your opinion? Would they release information without filtering it? What if they were pressured to not release it by a government? Or what if it exposes the wrongdoing of the corporation that owns the journalists?
The ideal journalist will disseminate the information to everyone anyway, why add the extra step?
Two simple factors (I'm actually quite surprised that a thinking person wouldn't already realise this): first, not everyone can write, so not all of the material you would want disseminated would be easy to read. Second, journalists do more than just copy, they gather potentially disparate facts, distill them, drop irrelevant cruft, and give the readers the good parts.
Seriously, have you read all of the thousands of recently leaked cables? Do you have any desire to whatsoever? Personally, I'd rather pay a professional reporter to do that for me, and filter out what is important and what is not. I'll especially pay him if he can write well.
Re:Assange gets arrested. (Score:4, Insightful)
When the raw data is only accessible to certain professionals who summarize it for the public, then you can't pay a professional of your choice to sift through the data and summarize it for you, because they'll only have the summaries to work with.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Why are journalists a special protected class in your opinion?
Because it they are given such protection by the Constitution as a check against the government pulling the wool over the eyes of its citizens. This prevents a government-controlled media, and allows for information to spread.
Would they release information without filtering it?
Yes, even though they don't have to. That is what responsible journalism is all about.
What if they were pressured to not release it by a government?
It has been tried many times, the government is virtually never successful. Only when a real, imminent threat to US citizens lives can be demonstrated can the government take action, and it must go
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They can and do face legal action for intentionally lying about the facts they are representing.
This is not true, the courts have ruled they have no such obligation. There was a rather recent case in Florida about FOXnews doing just that.
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What the court is saying is: the FCC policy is not a law. The whistleblower statute only defends against breaches of law. Therefore, Akre is not entitled to compensation under the stat
Press (Score:5, Informative)
The Constitution doesn't mention "journalists". It references freedom of the press:
A press is a device for duplicating written matter. So the Constitution is recognizing the right to publish using presses (as opposed to speaking with your voice). Time passes. Huge presses are reduced to small laser printers.
More time passes. A worldwide network for electronic publishing emerges. Anybody who cares about limits of government would say the Congress does not have the power to limit the ability to use presses (electronic or otherwise).
And the right of the press isn't limited to any one specially-favored group that calls itself "the" press.
Re:Press (Score:4, Funny)
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet.
Sometimes this statement is rather more self-evident than other times.
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The US Constitution was adopted in 1787. What did "press" mean back then?
Specific sense "machine for printing" is from 1530s; extended to publishing houses by 1570s and to publishing generally (in phrases like freedom of the press) c.1680. This gradually shifted c.1800-1820 to "periodical publishing, journalism." Meaning "journalists collectively" is attested from 1926.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=press [etymonline.com]
It seems that at the time, the word meant "publishing", not "machine for printing" or "journalism". Thus, "freedom of the press" is the freedom of publishing, not the freedom of journalists, and although the grandparent is wrong about the meaning of "press", it's still closer to the originally intended meaning than you are.
Re:Assange gets arrested. (Score:5, Insightful)
Unlike WikiLeaks, Openleaks will not receive and publish information directly for the public eye.
Ah. So, it's not really "open" at all then. Following the classic tactic of naming your product/service exactly what it's not (I'm looking at you, Great Quality).
Re:Assange gets arrested. (Score:4, Insightful)
When was the last time that WikiLeaks had a Wiki to which the public could contribute context or analysis?
Re:Assange gets arrested. (Score:5, Informative)
2009 - Petrogate recordings (Peruvian Government and Business), Barcaly Bank documents (UK), Natanz Nuclear accident report (Iran), Kaupthing bank (iceland), Australian censor list (Australia) + many many more.
2010 - Loveparade 2010 Duisburg planning documents (Germany)
That's a fair bit over a short period.
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Unlike WikiLeaks, Openleaks will not receive and publish information directly for the public eye.
Ah. So, it's not really "open" at all then. Following the classic tactic of naming your product/service exactly what it's not (I'm looking at you, Great Quality).
So OpenLeaks is to WikiLeaks as Citizendium is to Wikipedia, then? "We want to be democratic... but not TOO democratic. Successful... but not TOO successful. Information the public eagerly wants to know... but not TOO eagerly, because whether it's Pokemon slashfic, maths theorems or state secrets, there are some bits of knowledge mankind needs to be protected from for your own good."
Hey Larry, how's that project working out for you, anyway?
Missing the point (Score:5, Insightful)
If this site is staffed by ex-Wikileaks members then Wikileaks is better without them since they didn't understand the point that Wikileaks is not about "leaks" but about accountability. A democracy without accountability is no better than a tyranny and the key to a lack of accountability in a sick democracy is the control of the mass media.
oh gee. then they are fools. (Score:5, Insightful)
i think the fact that there has been no major leak that is detrimental to a government or a company has occurred since watergate, escapes these people. werent there any scoops ? werent there any brave journalists to handle them ? surely. why didnt anything in the scale of watergate came up ?
information must be provided to EVERYONE. we are the people, we are the owners of these governments and countries. we have the right to see them first hand. not anyone else, regardless of their profession.
by the way, journalists are people too, from among us. if you release it to us, you release it to everyone.
Re:oh gee. then they are fools. (Score:4, Insightful)
by the way, journalists are people too, from among us. if you release it to us, you release it to everyone.
And because you release it to everyone, you release it to opposing factions who use the intelligence contained. Well done. That'll help everyone. And it'll do a real wonder for whistleblowers to come.
Fun thing about Cablegate - it came about because of an increased inter-agency sharing of intel. That's more eyes seeing more information. While the obvious intent is to make intel agencies more effective (something Assange aspires to prevent), but it put information in front of more sets of eyes. After Manning's mismanagement of that opportunity, we now have the knee-jerk reaction of clamping down on that information. Less eyes. Less whistleblowers.
And of course, plenty of material for politicians to rabble-rouse with.
You've been fooled by the int to enemy angle (Score:4, Informative)
Now we've had a lot of bullshit where manipulative bastards say that anyone that says anything bad about their own side, true or not, is "giving comfort to the enemy." That's just an excuse to be able to let the dead wood say at their posts without being embarrassed by enormous fuckups. The comfort angle in this case is utter bullshit because it really does not matter if somebody does the equivalent of point at one of these things and say "haha".
Re:oh gee. then they are fools. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, yes. It's all detrimental. The question is whether the problem being uncovered is more important than the damage done outing detrimental information.
that doesnt work. private interests and government will ALWAYS say there are big things at stake, and prevent anything from being published. this is what happened up till today, and the only reason we are discovering these stuff is because some people decided governments corporations and news outlets shouldnt decide what is worth it and what is not.
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Can we DDOS this Openleaxe as a protest?
Re:Assange gets arrested. (Score:4, Funny)
as someone else pointed out, that means it's not an open site. it's a bunch of useless bullshit phrases then. May as well have called it opencloudleaks to cram in more buzzwords.
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And ten more shall take his place
But what if one or two of these gets duped into releasing forged documents? Intelligence agencies all over the world could easily feed plausible false information.
How would this all end? Not very well, I suspect. At least not as regards the credibility of such sites.
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I say fragmentation and infighting.
Steve Jobs, is that you?
Re:Assange gets arrested. (Score:5, Insightful)
*sigh*
Who, please name ONE SINGLE person who got killed! One would do.
Repeating spin over and over is not making it any more correct.
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You think Liberman or Palin would hold back if they could offer even something that could resemble a possibility of proof that Wikileaks "killed" someone? Do you?
Re:Assange gets arrested. (Score:5, Insightful)
Additionally, if the information were really that sensitive, why on Earth did the US government not tell Wikileaks what legitimately needed to be redacted? Seems if the information is that dangerous that they ought to be willing to play ball. Seeing as how they couldn't prevent it from getting to the public at that point.
Re:Assange gets arrested. (Score:5, Insightful)
Misleading.
The current claim is that the leaks are killing informants or people mentioned in leaks. What Assange is talking about is people killed as a result of the government clamping down on protests based on information in the leaks. In other words, if people would have kept quiet about the information contained in the leaks, instead of protesting, no one would have died.
So the score is that no one has yet to die because information was leaked. Going for second order effects to blame Assange is kinda silly.
Re:Assange gets arrested. (Score:5, Informative)
They weren't killed because they were informants or whatever and got "burned".
They were killed because they revolted against a corrupt dictatorship.
The leak exposed massive corruption by Daniel Arap Moi, and the Kenyan people sat up and took notice. In the ensuing elections, in which corruption became a major issue, violence swept the country. "1,300 people were eventually killed, and 350,000 were displaced. That was a result of our leak," says Assange. It's a chilling statistic, but then he states: "On the other hand, the Kenyan people had a right to that information and 40,000 children a year die of malaria in Kenya. And many more die of money being pulled out of Kenya, and as a result of the Kenyan shilling being debased."
This wasn't Wikileaks "fault", this was a fight of a people against tyranny, who willingly decided to risk their lives to fight it.
If anything, we the so called "first world" countries are at fault for ignoring this people's struggle.
what responsibility ? (Score:4, Interesting)
wikileaks already has removed names from those leaks. there isnt any sensitive info in them in regard to 'people's lives'.
and what will these people do ? release information to NEWS outlets. 90% of news outlets in usa are owned by parent corporations of 4 movie studios. and they are the very corporations who are also pressurizing and villifying wikileaks.
i fail to see your logic regarding 'fresh'. that seems like what we have been NOT having since watergate : journalism.
i dont want my information censored or edited by any news corporation. i want it direct and uncensored.
What's wrong with wikileaks? (Score:2)
If OpenLeaks publishes anything that offends the US government in the same way then the same thing will happen to them.
Wikileaks already has credibility anyway.
Re:What's wrong with wikileaks? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's wrong with wikileaks? (Score:5, Insightful)
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What good is a leak site if after the first leak it disappears from the public eye
If the public doesn't think it warrants their continued attention then it probably does not.
For the most part the public has looked at what was published and said "big fucking deal".
If his motive were true, he would publish it an let the chips fall where they may.
Re:What's wrong with wikileaks? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's the attitude that got George W. Bush elected. "This Gore guy really sounds like he knows what he's talking about, and this Bush guy looks confused, but Gore keeps sighing and being an asshole and berating poor Bush. I'm not voting for Gore, I'd never sit down and drink a beer with him!"
Why is it more important to be likable than credible?
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Hold on there, are you saying the second shooting incident (where the pilot lied to his commanding officer about people collecting weapons and bodies in order to get permission to kill some more people who had quite obviously only went to the aid of a wounded man at that point) was in some way justifiable as anything other than a war crime?
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No. If you go back and look at the unedited video, you'll find that there were weapons in the group. But that gets removed from the edited version. But of course, the poor kids in the van that's about to get shot up gets blown up and a replay. Because details matter.
Re:What's wrong with wikileaks? (Score:4, Insightful)
you'll find that there were weapons in the group
That's right, because the government should have the right to kill anyone who stands next to a person exercising their right to bear arms.
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People in a war zone that aren't wearing uniforms are civilians. Ever been to those countries? I was in Zagreb when there was a civil war there. Everybody has weapons if nothing else to protect themselves. Unless they were being fired upon, they have no right to shoot first, ask questions later unless they did not come there to bring peace and democracy but occupy local resources for the aggressors interests or possibly genocide.
The fact that local tribes protect themselves against foreign aggressors trying
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Are you sure he didn't actually believe the other people were going for weapons on the bodies?
War is a scary thing. I've never been in it, and as such I can't fully comprehend it, but I have worked with people who have.
I'm not saying you are wrong, but it's easy to second guess the choices of people who are in the middle of combat when you yourself are not and never have been anywhere near it.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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If OpenLeaks publishes anything that offends the US government in the same way then the same thing will happen to them.
Wikileaks already has credibility anyway.
Who will the US Go after I wonder?
Perhaps this leadership will actually remain Anonymous - therefor making it more difficult to run a successful smear campaign.
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What Assange has done is great, but he is quite an egotist and that was getting in the way of making wikileaks effective.
For him, this had to be about him, and it shouldn't be. The focus on him (or any individual) was the biggest weakness of wikileaks.
Horrible Timing... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know, with all the trouble going on - Assange getting arrested, sites getting DDOSed, more people getting arrested for DDOSsing... I think that now is defentally not the best time for this. Public sympathy is too erratic at the moment - adding more sites like that will only make the situation worse.
When its one site, its an anomaly - what's next, a law to prevent similar sites? If they keep popping up like mushrooms, there's going to be less "Please stop letting them get funds" and more "We classify protecting the identity of leakers to be a terrorist act.. bla bla bla"
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Probably the best play for the US government would be to shut up and focus on finding and plugging the leaks. Wikileaks is well set up enough that it's going to be more or less impossible to stop them from releasing the information. What's worse for the government is that by attacking Assange the
Re:Horrible Timing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Horrible Timing... (Score:5, Insightful)
http://comixed.memebase.com/2010/12/08/4-koma-comic-strip-an-issue-of-debate/ [memebase.com]
When an I Can Has Cheezeburger site explains the entire Obama administration, government view of free speech vs. censorship, and current political climate in 3 panels something is wrong.
Yeah some details didn't need to be leaked. But most did. The military calls this "collateral damage" and minimizes it compared to the success of hitting a target. Civilians are apparently held to a different standard because we haven't been trained how to properly attack and cover up.
Re:who's been put in danger ? (Score:5, Insightful)
1300 people dead because they refused to put up with the shit any more, as opposed to several thousand dead from malaria and the country's resources being misused.
Was the leak a good or bad thing? Did it lead to 1300 deaths or save a few thousand more in the long term?
This isn't playschool, there isn't a clear good and bad, just shades of grey and complicated trade-offs.
Re:who's been put in danger ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh my, that evil Julian Assange. If he hadn't revealed that Kenyan politicians were horribly corrupt, the populace would've just voted for the right guy and the incumbent wouldn't have had to blatantly rig the elections to stay in power, causing mass rioting. It's all Assange's fault for not allowing the Kenyan populace to remain in blissful ignorance of just how corrupt and screwed up their political system is. The corrupt, vote-rigging politicians bear no responsibility for it whatsoever.
Seriously, though - did you really just blame Assange and Wikileaks for that?
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A spin off directly from wikileaks doesn't exactly seem to lead to the assumption that similar sites will "keep popping up like mushrooms." Talk to me when we have a third player from outside the wikileaks lineage.
Hell... there exists at least one and existed for quite some time cryptome [cryptome.org]...
Funny thing is: even the quite a long presence, I haven't heard of them until recently, and I only heard of them because of WikiLeaks and Assange (somebody named John Young was foaming a few days ago against Assange and Wikileaks)... I find this a bit (unintendedly) ironic... but, lucky me, cryptome also do have some interesting leaks.
coming soon iLeaks (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:coming soon iLeaks (Score:5, Funny)
And exposing vegetable-related cover-ups - WikiLeeks.
Re:coming soon iLeaks (Score:5, Funny)
We might get to see arms ripped off!
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OpenLeaks tend to focus on security by design, but NetLeaks focuses on portability and cleanliness of leaks. Then there's the new ones like PC-leaks for leaks on the desktop, and specialist ones like LeakNAS that makes storage of leaks easy for everyone.
CIA trick (Score:5, Interesting)
And who's to say that they really are former Wikileaks members, and not agents of the CIA seeking to intercept leaks and trace them back to the source?
*dons tinfoil hat*
Protection (Score:4, Insightful)
Unlike WikiLeaks, Openleaks will not receive and publish information directly for the public eye. Instead, other organizations will access the Openleaks system and in turn, present their audience with the material. Documents will be processed and published by various collaborating organizations.
Who are these other organisations? Surely one of advantage of wikileaks is that leakers are separate from publication. Under Openleak's nebulous "other organisations" leakers might feel more, rather than less, vulnerable. Or am I wrong?
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WRT the US -- there is precedent that a journalist publisher of leaks is not prosecutable.
So organizations like the New York Times or Vanity Fair, for example, might be willing to take on the risk of publication.
Take Heed (Score:3, Insightful)
How is this (Score:3, Insightful)
How is this more transparent then WikiLeaks when the public can't even see the information when it finally IS released?
Double cross? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Double cross? (Score:5, Funny)
And this is why these leak sites should use TOR. And not TOR to Public Internet. TOR to TOR.
Too complex. TOR to TOR is a Traveling Salesman problem.
TOR to TOR. Salesman. Get it?
...
...
*sigh*
All right, don't get up. I'll show myself out....
Sounds good to me (Score:2, Insightful)
Another site that does what wikileaks does, without Assange, sounds like a good thing.
Re:Sounds good to me (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sounds good to me (Score:5, Insightful)
Assange was originally a programmer; overinflated ego comes with the territory.
It's easy to armchair quarterback Wikileaks from your computer, isn't it? Assange is taking a very real stand with very real consequences against some very nasty people working in very compromised governments. You need to be a bit insane, a bit self-important, and more than a bit strong on your convictions and courage to have a mindset that enables to think this is a logical idea. You may not like the way Assange operates, but did you see anyone else do it? No? Exactly.
Wrong name! (Score:3, Interesting)
One of Wikileaks biggest problems is their name: they aren't actually *leaking* anything - they are publishing other people's leaks. Leaking is legally dubious, but publishing is protected by the concepts like Freedom of the Press in many countries. Calling yourself FooLeaks implies that you commit some kind of crime for a living.
Re:Wrong name! (Score:4, Funny)
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And they aren't really a wiki. Not any more.
So the plan is to pass the raw data to... (Score:5, Insightful)
...politically-correct organizations who will decide what we need to see and what would "confuse" us.
Bugger that. Release all of the raw data to the public or you're no better than Fox News and Huffington Post.
Misleading summary (Score:5, Informative)
So there's no leaking, only controlled information transfer to participating organizations. If I was a whistleblower, I'd worry that the serious risks I'm taking to make information available will be wasted.
The more you tighten your grip... (Score:3)
the more websites will slip through your fingers.
Equivalent (Score:2)
But I guess the issue here is credit. Like the fools at TMZ who want to put their stamp on their "exclusive" video of some starlet picking h
CounterLeaks (Score:5, Funny)
Damn.. someone beat me too it...
I have been calling for exactly this for years! (Score:5, Interesting)
Here and on Reddit, every single time a story about Wikileaks comes up I always state that as cool as Wikileaks seems it is terribly flawed overall and far too important to leave as it is... every single time I get downvoted/modded troll/whatever and everyone busts out the hate... after this last debacle people have finally opened their damn eyes and I couldn't be happier. The media is broken which is why Wikileaks is even relevant, and we all need to stand up and win the most important war of our lifetime: The War on Information. The other great thing that will come of this is that the media will see all of the potential and thirst for actual news and information and hopefully shift back to what thy should have been doing all along.
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Why should moral responsiblity == solidarity?
Isn't that one of the problems with many movements, the leaders (w/ all of their faults) are often deified and thus are become easy targets for the opposition. Of course you can argue vaguely about a greater good or the lesser evil, but why not strive for an organization that isn't about a person, but is about an ideal? Do we always have to have egomanics representing a cause?
Re:One for all.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes.
1. People who aren't egomaniacs don't want to be the face of a cause.
2. Causes aren't successful without faces attached to them.
Thus, causes that become popular will always have egomaniacs leading them. Even Gandhi was a bit of an egomaniac, though less reprehensibly than most.
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Most of the older people I know (mid-30's+) aren't even aware Anonymous exists, while most of the younger people I know are aware of it, or actively participating. Even when I go out of my nerdish subset of friends they're aware of it, even if they don't consider anonymous to be particularly relevant.
Anonymous is a clue to the direction the world is heading, spontaneously organized mobs of individuals who become very upset about something, and do something about it. I predict, in the future, this method o