I think one aspect that the article misses, is the fact that the public can't make an informed decision with their votes if the government has secrets.
Society can't function without some level of secrecy there are plenty of people who have social issues for being "too honest", secrets aren't that different to lies at the end and we need to balance them both to maintain any relationship.
A country can still have secrets while maintaining transparency, the government like any other entity has confidential information that has to be kept secret, as no one can operate on any meaningful level if everything they do is public.
Anything from actual national security information (e.g. from list of covert agents to nuclear launch codes) to day to day diplomatic and policy related information needs secrecy.
You can't build a case when the criminals know you coming after them, you can't negotiate a treaty when every discussion is public, you can't always say what you spending money one because it can cause and arms race etc.
The article doesn't misses that aspect the notion that a government can operate without any type of secrecy is just absurd.
Agreed but I think it's also OK to take a fundamental position that all secrecy is bad. If you want to shift the status quo, you need to take an extreme standpoint. Today's status quo in Western governments is a long long way from being the happy medium you're describing.
Case in point would be Stallman - whether you agree or not with his ideals or the GPG you can't deny that his impact on software as a whole has been tremendous and positive. It's reasonable to argue that github would not exist were it not for RMS and his fundamental position that all software should be Open Source
>Agreed but I think it's also OK to take a fundamental position that all secrecy is bad.
But the problem is it's not a position anyone can actually honestly take, I don't agree with RMS and I also think you over-estimate his impact on the software industry but at least he practices what he's preaching while WikiLeaks is a closed and secretive organization which about a step away from becoming a personality cult.
>Today's status quo in Western governments is a long long way from being the happy medium you're describing.
I don't believe this is necessarily true (for all cases, and all countries the US included), you need to understand that allot of the "secrets" that the government is keeping aren't actually intended to protect itself or even it's population but to protect other people and organizations in other countries.
This is why whilst I can understand the release of say the after action reports from Iraq I think that anyone who was involved with the diplomatic cable's leak should end up in prison for good, that was a spit in the face of diplomacy and every western value that people claim to hold and probably have actually caused more damage (as far as human lives go) than all other leaks including the Snowden one combined.
Keep in mind that, in effect, what wikileaks actually advocates is "forcing people to keep someone else's secret is bad". The leaks have to come from someone, arguably someone who a) knows the secret, and b) doesn't think it should be a secret.
People and government need secrets, sure, but do they really need gag orders? (this is not rhetorical, I really don't know what the answer should be)
> If you believe it is illegitimate for a government to keep secrets, it’s a quick jump to assume that a government that holds secrets is illegitimate itself — and that a system that maintains this illegitimacy, namely democracy, isn’t half as good as most people think. In other words: Like any other system, democracy stinks.
This is a very twisted way to paint Assange as a communist. "Governments should be transparent" doesn't logically lead to "democracy is inept". That's just bullshit.
But democracy is inept. It's an illusion. We as citizens (at least in the UK) don't have any day in the running of our country or the decisions that are made by our government. Every four years, we're given a choice to elect the party that we think will do the least damage, while hoping and praying that they'll keep their promises (although it should be noted that they're under no obligation to do so). Even the petition system has no effect on anything. 10,000 signatures warrants a single reply, while 100,000 means it's considered for debate. We're all just sheep at the end of the day, and it's foolish to think we actually have any control.
Imperfection is not the same thing as complete impotence. Western democracies could be substantially better than they are, but they are still leagues beyond any other functioning system of government on the planet that i'm aware of.
Again, that's not to say that it can't be much much better than it is, but you do have some power, and the people who wield the true power are beholden to you to some extent, which as a general rule, is not the case in most of the world.
>Western democracies could be substantially better than they are, but they are still leagues beyond any other functioning system of government on the planet that i'm aware of.
This is a common misconception, but one that does not hold water. I am thoroughly unimpressed by European politics as compared to Singapore even though there are a few things in Singapore that are not as good as in Europe. Singapore has a democracy of sorts but is essentially a one party Corporatist system (most recently copied by China). On paper this is a nightmare for me but in reality it works quite well. In the end the systems importance is not as strong as that of the people who run it. I would much rather a smart benevolent dictator who makes good decisions than the joke of corrupt politics we have in Europe currently. We're so good at self-congratulating ourselves that we haven't realised we've lost our way.
If you feel that Assange and Wikileaks are limited then set up a better one, don't claim that the current one should be run by committee.
Wikileaks is quite possibly flawed but whatever flaws it and Assange have should easily be fixed by creating a similar institution that is not somehow tied to a person.
Wikileaks 'the brand' should not be required for that.
But until someone somewhere decides to take on the establishment on a similar scale as what Wikileaks has dared to do we'll have to continue to rely on that particular flawed individual who spent the better part of the last decade in pretty tight spot. Not many people would be prepared to give up their comfy lives to spend the rest of it in the cross hairs of just about every intelligence service.
My personal guess is that all these 'wikileaks should be run by us' people would fold at a very small percentage of the pressure that Assange has withstood to date and that is the primary reason why he's still running Wikileaks. If not for that we'd have long ago seen an alternative.
If any group is set up to be that alternative it is Poitras/Greenwald and a couple of other brave souls, but none of them so far seem to think they can do a better job of it than Assange.
As for Russia, Assange has set his sights on 'the five eyes' and the machinations of diplomacy at large. You can agree with that or not, that's fine. But if you want an organization that focuses on let's say Russia or China then by all means create one, don't bitch that Wikileaks is ignoring them or must be in bed with them.
It's interesting to read about how Assange's, one journalist's and Domscheit-Berg's actions combined to produce the uncontrolled release of the US cables:
> all these 'wikileaks should be run by us' people would fold
Au contraire: they would relish the power. Who wants to be a stenographer? Media people want to be gatekeepers and tastemakers. Even when they fold under pressure from higher powers, they rationalize it away as "trading favours". When some random uppity Joe Bloggs comes around and shreds their credibility as gatekeepers, they get mad.
> But if you want an organization that focuses on let's say Russia or China then by all means create one, don't bitch that Wikileaks is ignoring them or must be in bed with them.
Sorry, but bitching is my inalienable right. Assange did more harm than good for my home country by cooperating with its secret police. I'm not going to have any reservations about his character just because am not ripe for martyrdom myself.
I read the article. First of all, it's on the 'blog' section of the newstatesman, it's not a newstatesman editorial piece. The information in there is very conflicted, if you read carefully you'll see that this is all about some minor powerplay around who gets to attend the premiere of a movie.
The role of Shamir is more questionable, but in spite of that I'm not ready to see Assange as 'in bed with the regime of Belarus'. If that's true then it will need some stronger evidence and a much better sourced article.
I took the first google hit for "assange kgb minsk" and the summary of the issue in the article is adequate, some pretentious language notwithstanding.
Ok, taking the second link (since I tend to respect the Guardian a lot):
> When I intervened in February 2011 to ask Wikileaks whether they could ensure embassy cables had not been handed over to the dictatorship in Belarus (in particular the government’s secret police, the KGB) via a Wikileaks employee, Israel Shamir - accused of being a Holocaust denier - they refused to comment.
I take that as a tacit admission that this could definitely be the case but that Assange still backs Shamir for some reason. Maybe Shamir has power over him in some form or other, maybe he could do more damage, maybe they are just friends.
But in a way this question is also asking to prove a negative, I don't think Assange could prove to any standard that such a hand over had not happened, the best someone could do is to prove that it had happened.
Shamir would be the one to ask if it had happened or not, not Assange (who would have to believe whatever Shamir told him).
Has there been any recent coverage of this?
> Even after photographic evidence was produced apparently showing Shamir outside the office of the Head of the Presidential Administration in Minsk
I don't see how this is evidence of a document handover.
> and President Lukashenko had made a bizarre announcement stating he was founding his own Wikileaks to expose the opposition,
Indeed, that's pretty bizarre but Lukashenko is an idiot so this should come as no surprise.
> no attempts were made by Assange to protect dissidents.
What do they expect him to do to 'protect dissidents', I don't see this as an actionable item until it mentions specifically what is required. I also don't see any dissidents calling for his head, rather the opposite, they invited him to sit on a panel and they invited him to be there at the premiere of that film.
> Of those “exposed” by Soviet Belarus using cables it claimed were gifted to Lukashenko by Shamir were Andrei Sannikov, a former presidential candidate who was reportedly tortured and Vladimir Neklyayev, the writer and former president of Belarusian PEN. Oleg Bebenin, Sannikov’s former press secretary, was also defamed. Bebenin was found dead in suspicious circumstances the day before I was supposed to meet him in Minsk (I attended his funeral and there are strong suspicions of foul play).
Again, I don't doubt that but why would that be linked to Assange?
> Assisting a dictatorship to defame the dead is pretty low.
That's quite a leap of imagination, to go from a refusal to comment to active assistance to 'defame the dead'.
> Former Wikileaks employee James Ball broke ranks and claimed to Index that Assange personally blocked any attempts at investigation and had covered up for Shamir.
That's bad but disgruntled wikileaks people have said all kinds of stuff in the past rather little of which ended up sticking in the longer term. That's why I asked if there has been any more recent follow-up to this.
Usually this translates into: 'I didn't get my way and now I'll harm you' or some variation on that theme. As a former employer I've had my share of this and it never surprises me what people will get up to once their relationship with you is over.
> Assange’s lack of remorse could not have been better demonstrated when he joined a panel discussion on Belarus alongside political dissidents but entirely failed to acknowledge any concerns over his personal behaviour.
And why would he, given that all of the above amounts to him not wanting to comment on the Shamir case.
If with 'personal behavior' they are referring to other areas of his life then that's another matter entirely but that's not clear from the context here and again we're making some pretty tenuous links between otherwise unrelated items.
-- Ok, enough about that, so here is my personal view, uncensored and without holding back.
Appreciate the time you took to put together your thoughts on this. Not going point on point through your conclusions, although would say I agree with many of them.
I concur that ultimately Assange's contribution to modern society would be judged as a sum of his contributions, and indeed we have many flawed champions, down to MLK. Belarusian opposition just as well would have been stomped out without Wikileaks/Shamir's assistance, although it's certainly not appreciated.
Can't help noticing however that the standard for evidence on any possible flaw of Assange is set exceptionally high. You'd be hard pressed to see a criticism of the establishment face the same scrutiny. Seen that happen both online and with my (mostly tech, mostly libertarian) friends here in Norway. E.g. the rape allegations tend to be downplayed or outright dismissed by quite a few, although same people would jump the gun if someone like Strauss-Kahn is in his place.
My view on the rape thing is mostly in line with what I believe to be the facts of the case and I strongly believe Assange should stand trial and if found guilty should be serve time. However, I find a lot of the machinations around the whole rape case to be extremely suspect but if the facts are what they are and there was no weight given to who committed the alleged crime rather than what the alleged crime was when the case was re-opened then I think he should be able to get a fair trial with proper discovery and with the women that made the allegations in the first place as the witnesses, even a semblance of a show or sham trial will cause a real problem in the longer term and any extradition to the USA afterwards would prove Assange was right all along and will cause serious diplomatic damage as well as cost the UK, USA and Sweden significant goodwill.
If convicted he should not get time off for time spent in the embassy, that's not the same as time spent in a Swedish jail. He should however get the guarantee that he's not going to be extradited to the US no matter what, that seems like a 'free' thing for Sweden and would do a lot of good in terms of moving this case forward, which especially for the women would seem to me to be of prime importance.
Finally, Assange will likely also end up having to stand trial for skipping bail in the UK.
But all that has absolutely nothing to do - I hope, at least - with Wikileaks and what it has done for us all and I for one am quite grateful to Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, Julian Assange and whoever else had a hand in removing some of the veil around all that is ugly and that makes our world into the relatively bad place that it continues to be.
If it takes 'flawed' people to get us there, then so be it.
As for Strauss-Kahn or Julian Assange, when it comes to their public and their private affairs (and crimes) there should be no difference in how they are treated, fame should not be a free pass for misbehavior.
There are lots of things that don't sit right with me about how the Swedes handled this case, for instance in other cases they actually have gone abroad to interview suspects, higher priority crimes never made it to the same level of international police activity, it is relatively unheard of that someone at that level of responsibility would personally get involved to re-open a case, the fact that the womens actions totally contradict their public statements at the time and so on so I have no way of knowing what is the truth but I do know there is some truth to the allegations and I feel that guys that are jerks to women at this level should definitely not be given a free pass.
Personally I have no idea what could drive a man like Assange to do stuff like this, maybe that's what fame will do to you. See also: Bill Cosby and a bunch of British TV characters, Roman Polanski and so on. It seems as if at some point in time something in their psyche switched and they thought they could get away with anything (and some of them actually did get away, sadly).
Russia doesn't really need Assange to expose it's inner workings as bad, we have plenty of evidence as it is. Assange could not possibly harm Russia in a worse way than Putin and his merry band of criminals do all by their lonesome.
Or do you think there is something worth releasing in the Kremlin document store that will do as much damage as say MH317 to Russian interests?
I'm sure you've heard the phrase 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend'. Frontiers - even digital ones - make for strange bedfellows.
History is littered with examples like that and it is no coincidence that Edward Snowden ended up in Russia.
Of course you can then use this to tar them but at the same time you have to wonder if it is possible to alienate all of the world at the same time. It's probably much safer for groups like Wikileaks to purposefully ignore some domains (presumably the ones they care less about) than to be an 'equal opportunity employer' and to hit all of the worlds establishment equally hard.
There's also another phrase, "tell me who your friends are, and I'll tell you who you are". Realpolitik, the firstborn of moral relativism, always comes to backfire.
Wikileaks withholding report on, say, Ecuador, would be understandable in the circumstances. However I find going an extra mile to cooperate with an established dictatorship against its opposition despicable.
Agreed. But it does not diminish what I wrote above and I highly doubt any organization or individual would be able to make a principled stance against every government in the world at the same time.
Even Ecuador has something to gain from this - immense stature in Latin America for standing up to the USA. The world of politics at that level is pretty complex and I have no idea what made Assange decide the way he did vv Belarus but without having all the facts I'll postpone my judgment and re-iterate that I'd be perfectly happy if some other group would stand up and air Belarus' dirty laundry, assuming there is any dirty laundry left to air.
I don't think I wrote that. Simply don't attempt to take away a functioning institution from the person that was instrumental in creating it risking that institution to an experiment with an unknown outcome. Better to create an alternative that proves your merits. Why should Wikileaks be a monopoly, it's not as if there is room for only one of these.
It's rape by the definition of quite a few countries, and rightly so but there is a ton of questionable stuff about that whole affair, enough to make you wonder what's true and what is not. There are some excellent write ups on the grisly facts and Assange definitely does not come out undamaged, no matter what your interpretation would be.
But that's besides the point, the thing that bothers me is that Sweden could have tried him 'in absentia' a hundred times over, it is just all too convenient that they seem to be perfectly content with having him bottled up in that Embassy which actually lends some credibility to Assange's claims. And if I had pissed off as many powerful interests I'd be super paranoid too.
The part that they probably didn't count on was that since he's now in an actual embassy and has very few distractions most of Assanges flaws have no way to express themselves. The only thing Wikileaks currently does not have is a project director that can go places and give speeches, that definitely is a detriment but it need not be a fatal one.
True. But regardless of the details I'm fairly sure they could have done a lot more than they did, especially if they really had those women's interests at heart.
The main problem I have with the whole case is that initially it was dropped, they could have arrested Assange on the spot and be done with it. Only afterwards when the political wheels had made a couple of revolutions did someone decide to re-open the case and prosecute after all. This part does not make sense to me, it seems to indicate that who was involved was important rather than what was done in particular.
Anyone who runs something like WikiLeaks will be vilified. We all have something in our past -- whether a jilted lover willing to make things up about you, or a conflict at work, or whatnot. We all have some slightly unpopular political views on some subject. At the time you get into a position where you have real enemies -- which the founder of WikiLeaks does -- those become publicized and twisted. It doesn't matter who ran WikiLeaks -- the outcome would be the same.
Source: I've been in a couple of positions of minor fame, and through a divorce. In both cases, I had enemies maybe 2-3 tiers down from Julian. My past -- factually -- is squeaky clean. I know what happened to my reputation in both cases.
It used to be that Wikileaks was used in headlines for articles which reported about a leak. I do not see patter anymore, and the articles focus instead on the content of the leaks rather than the platform which it was published on.
I view this as a positive step, and I only hope that we can see the same progress with the "the dark web".
This is just a poorly thought-out hit piece, right?
> Yet, even back then, observers and media partners felt that Mr. Assange had more in mind than transparency, that there was an ideology behind his idea. Over time, that ideology has become increasingly apparent, through his regular public statements and his stint as a host for a Russian state-controlled TV network.
One element of Assange-think has been clear from early on: There is no such thing as a legitimate secret. The public is entitled to share any knowledge governments hold. Only complete transparency can stop and prevent conspiracy. Therefore, editing information by the government — redacting sensitive material, for example — equals manipulating it.
So, the hidden ideology behind mere 'transparency', lurking beneath the surface and which colors all of Assange's work at Wikileaks is... well apparently it's just more transparency.
Frankly, he's right. Any knowledge governments hold which is not germane to some contemporary disaster or military action, diplomacy, etc., should be available to the public. I'm hard-pressed to think of any good excuse for keeping a thing secret for twenty years, a decade being about the maximum for e.g. military secrets, etc.
> And it’s particularly bad, in Mr. Assange’s view, if those people represent Western democracy: In his simplistic reading, the West is hypocritical because it stands for civil liberties, and all secrets are antithetical to liberty. No wonder he got a show on Russian television — his viewpoint puts him nicely in line with Mr. Putin’s ideological agenda.
Eh, his position on secrecy is much more nuanced than that, and I'd bet that even my take on what should be top secret and what should not is more radical than Julian Assange's (and less thought-out, heh). His belief, in a nutshell, is that institutions which mean to control the population share a culture of mistrust, which in turn elevates secrecy to a virtue. Such organizations actually can't operate if they are constantly in danger of having their secrets exposed, even if the risk is low and the real impact even in case of a leak is small.
That's why Wikileaks exists - not because Julian Assange thinks that everything James Clapper knows, we should also know.
> I'm hard-pressed to think of any good excuse for keeping a thing secret for twenty years.
How about technical papers on the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb? Or the name of cover agents who were active twenty years ago and either are still active, or at least alive and could be targeted in retaliation?
Don't get me wrong, there needs to be a way for people to expose illegal or immoral actions of the organizations (government or not) they work for, while protecting them from retaliation. Wikileaks serves that function. But no secrets with a longer life than 20 years? ever? I don't think I really agree.
Eh, maybe. 20 years would put you in the late 60s/ early 70s for thermonuclear bombs, I think. I could see it staying classified for a while past that. And, if releasing the information will put someone's life in danger, sure. But I suspect situations like this account for a fraction of a percent of stuff that stays classified for decades.
If the reason the government keeps something classified is to protect a person's career, or (as I assume is usually the case) just because they can so why go to the trouble of declassifying it, that is not a good enough reason. The default state of information held by the government is that it should be public domain, and anything classified ought to be scrutinized heavily - and regularly - to confirm it should be so and should remain so.
I have no problem separating the man from the organisation. An organisation that publishes in the manner that WIkileaks does is neutral by default. They don't publish opinion pieces, merely cables. Perhaps the author of the piece should reflect inwards if he cannot separate Assange from Wikileaks.
Wikileaks have a track record of releasing cables from a variety of countries throughout the world without selection biases (this is the manner I was referring to). Some of those countries would consider each other as enemies. When you release cables in the numbers that Wikileaks do (millions) it is very hard to skew the selection process.
Wikileaks led a revolution in journalism that has yet to be rivalled and Assange paid a high personal price for it. Any criticism of the man or organisation pales in significance to what they have achieved. Journalism was dead as a non-propaganda means of obtaining quality information until Wikileaks came along.
> At times Mr. Assange seems to let his anti-West ideology take over completely. On the night of the Paris attacks last year, which left 130 people dead, @wikileaks tweeted: “At least 39 dead tonight in Paris terror attacks. 250k dead in Syria & Iraq. Both a direct result of US, UK, France feeding Sunni extremists.”
So, here is the thing, I fail to see any radical anti-West ideology in that tweet. I think it is a fairly popular point of view, based on a reasonable interpretation of historical fact, that the involvement of those three countries in the middle east over the last century or so has led to the rise of terrorism in the region. Additionally, recent interventions have definitely not helped. This is, in fact, the kind of point of view that you'd see in mainstream news in plenty of countries around the world.
You could make the argument that the night of the attacks might be poor timing to tweet this if you read as "finally, this countries got what it deserved for so many more dead elsewhere!". But you can also read it as "our leaders have been pursuing bad policy that is hurting hundreds of thousands abroad and actually came back indirectly to hurt us today as well, this is sad and it's sad that it would have been avoidable". That's not any more anti-West than protesting the Vietnam war was un-American. It is also a reasonable thing to bring up when the gut reaction to an attack like this is to escalate violence, even when it is fairly well established that doing so leads to more recruits for terrorist groups.
Also, I wonder how many people wouldn't be a little bit radical and a little bit anti-X-country if they had been persecuted by said country and forced to hole up in an embassy for 3+ years...
> and that a system that maintains this illegitimacy, namely democracy, isn’t half as good as most people think.
I don't know what this writer is talking about with his 'democracy'. There's no democracies involved here.
> Filtering isn’t phoniness — it’s civilization.
Lets just be clear. It's a civilization that rains death on innocent people with no trial or oversight from remote control death robots. A very uncivil 'civilization'.
It is wildly irresponsible to wield accusations like that without offering some sort of support for that position.
I would say that it is in the US government's interest to discredit wikileaks, as their leaks tend to air dirty American laundry. But a lack of similarly embarrassing leaks about Russia dies not Russian propaganda make. It could simply be that Russian whistleblowers are more likely to meet with a fatal exposure to polonium.
Did US government force Assange (and Snowden) to collaborate with Russia Today? As far as I'm concerned everyone involved with that hive of scum and villainy has irreparably damaged their reputation. Also there is no lack of embarassing leaks about Russian (or Chinese) government. Just because one person was murdered with polonium doesn't mean we don't have any brave people here anymore. Too bad western media cares more about hacks like Assange and Snowden than what happens in Russia.
Ah, but gems like "Russian whistleblowers are more likely to meet with a fatal exposure to polonium" are apparently just fine. What am I supposed to do when people openly insult my country?
You are far off-base when you say "apparently just fine". But making the thread still more uncivil is obviously the wrong thing to do. Better things include: (1) make an accurate, respectful reply—though in this case it would have probably blown things further off-topic; (2) flag the comment; (3) email us at hn@ycombinator.com.
If you can find the will to do so, the very best thing is to be charitable. In this case that might mean remembering that the commenter has likely only heard one heavily politicized side of the story, and has been conditioned by such one-sided information to reflexively associate one thing with another. Then you might respond in a way that confounds their expectation in a positive, surprising manner, instead of getting angry and defensive, which can only reinforce it.
Admittedly that's hard to do and never something one must do. But it is likely the most effective thing to do. When one person responds from a conditioned reflex but another has the presence not to do so, that's how things get unstuck.
The demographics of HN are so unevenly distributed that it's impossible for the discourse here to be objective about many topics, but we can and do at least control for basic respect, and if you watch closely you'll notice that we care about that, and act on it, a lot.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] thread> This is not only nonsense, it is dangerous radicalism
The NY Times likes to promote their own form of propaganda. Other forms are illegitimate.
A country can still have secrets while maintaining transparency, the government like any other entity has confidential information that has to be kept secret, as no one can operate on any meaningful level if everything they do is public.
Anything from actual national security information (e.g. from list of covert agents to nuclear launch codes) to day to day diplomatic and policy related information needs secrecy. You can't build a case when the criminals know you coming after them, you can't negotiate a treaty when every discussion is public, you can't always say what you spending money one because it can cause and arms race etc.
The article doesn't misses that aspect the notion that a government can operate without any type of secrecy is just absurd.
Case in point would be Stallman - whether you agree or not with his ideals or the GPG you can't deny that his impact on software as a whole has been tremendous and positive. It's reasonable to argue that github would not exist were it not for RMS and his fundamental position that all software should be Open Source
But the problem is it's not a position anyone can actually honestly take, I don't agree with RMS and I also think you over-estimate his impact on the software industry but at least he practices what he's preaching while WikiLeaks is a closed and secretive organization which about a step away from becoming a personality cult.
>Today's status quo in Western governments is a long long way from being the happy medium you're describing.
I don't believe this is necessarily true (for all cases, and all countries the US included), you need to understand that allot of the "secrets" that the government is keeping aren't actually intended to protect itself or even it's population but to protect other people and organizations in other countries.
This is why whilst I can understand the release of say the after action reports from Iraq I think that anyone who was involved with the diplomatic cable's leak should end up in prison for good, that was a spit in the face of diplomacy and every western value that people claim to hold and probably have actually caused more damage (as far as human lives go) than all other leaks including the Snowden one combined.
People and government need secrets, sure, but do they really need gag orders? (this is not rhetorical, I really don't know what the answer should be)
This is a very twisted way to paint Assange as a communist. "Governments should be transparent" doesn't logically lead to "democracy is inept". That's just bullshit.
Again, that's not to say that it can't be much much better than it is, but you do have some power, and the people who wield the true power are beholden to you to some extent, which as a general rule, is not the case in most of the world.
Democracy is "rule by the demos". Demos being ancient greek for "the common people". There are no "common people" making any decisions anywhere here.
This is a common misconception, but one that does not hold water. I am thoroughly unimpressed by European politics as compared to Singapore even though there are a few things in Singapore that are not as good as in Europe. Singapore has a democracy of sorts but is essentially a one party Corporatist system (most recently copied by China). On paper this is a nightmare for me but in reality it works quite well. In the end the systems importance is not as strong as that of the people who run it. I would much rather a smart benevolent dictator who makes good decisions than the joke of corrupt politics we have in Europe currently. We're so good at self-congratulating ourselves that we haven't realised we've lost our way.
Wikileaks is quite possibly flawed but whatever flaws it and Assange have should easily be fixed by creating a similar institution that is not somehow tied to a person.
Wikileaks 'the brand' should not be required for that.
But until someone somewhere decides to take on the establishment on a similar scale as what Wikileaks has dared to do we'll have to continue to rely on that particular flawed individual who spent the better part of the last decade in pretty tight spot. Not many people would be prepared to give up their comfy lives to spend the rest of it in the cross hairs of just about every intelligence service.
My personal guess is that all these 'wikileaks should be run by us' people would fold at a very small percentage of the pressure that Assange has withstood to date and that is the primary reason why he's still running Wikileaks. If not for that we'd have long ago seen an alternative.
If any group is set up to be that alternative it is Poitras/Greenwald and a couple of other brave souls, but none of them so far seem to think they can do a better job of it than Assange.
As for Russia, Assange has set his sights on 'the five eyes' and the machinations of diplomacy at large. You can agree with that or not, that's fine. But if you want an organization that focuses on let's say Russia or China then by all means create one, don't bitch that Wikileaks is ignoring them or must be in bed with them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Domscheit-Berg
... "tried" and never actually did.
It's interesting to read about how Assange's, one journalist's and Domscheit-Berg's actions combined to produce the uncontrolled release of the US cables:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/leak-at-wikileaks-...
Au contraire: they would relish the power. Who wants to be a stenographer? Media people want to be gatekeepers and tastemakers. Even when they fold under pressure from higher powers, they rationalize it away as "trading favours". When some random uppity Joe Bloggs comes around and shreds their credibility as gatekeepers, they get mad.
Sorry, but bitching is my inalienable right. Assange did more harm than good for my home country by cooperating with its secret police. I'm not going to have any reservations about his character just because am not ripe for martyrdom myself.
Citation needed.
The role of Shamir is more questionable, but in spite of that I'm not ready to see Assange as 'in bed with the regime of Belarus'. If that's true then it will need some stronger evidence and a much better sourced article.
Here's an editorial from The Guardian mentioning the issue in passing:http://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/jan/31/wikileaks-holoc...
An op-ed at The Independent: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/protect-whistleb...
An Index on Censorship report: https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2011/02/wikileaks-belarus-...
> When I intervened in February 2011 to ask Wikileaks whether they could ensure embassy cables had not been handed over to the dictatorship in Belarus (in particular the government’s secret police, the KGB) via a Wikileaks employee, Israel Shamir - accused of being a Holocaust denier - they refused to comment.
I take that as a tacit admission that this could definitely be the case but that Assange still backs Shamir for some reason. Maybe Shamir has power over him in some form or other, maybe he could do more damage, maybe they are just friends.
But in a way this question is also asking to prove a negative, I don't think Assange could prove to any standard that such a hand over had not happened, the best someone could do is to prove that it had happened.
Shamir would be the one to ask if it had happened or not, not Assange (who would have to believe whatever Shamir told him).
Has there been any recent coverage of this?
> Even after photographic evidence was produced apparently showing Shamir outside the office of the Head of the Presidential Administration in Minsk
I don't see how this is evidence of a document handover.
> and President Lukashenko had made a bizarre announcement stating he was founding his own Wikileaks to expose the opposition,
Indeed, that's pretty bizarre but Lukashenko is an idiot so this should come as no surprise.
> no attempts were made by Assange to protect dissidents.
What do they expect him to do to 'protect dissidents', I don't see this as an actionable item until it mentions specifically what is required. I also don't see any dissidents calling for his head, rather the opposite, they invited him to sit on a panel and they invited him to be there at the premiere of that film.
> Of those “exposed” by Soviet Belarus using cables it claimed were gifted to Lukashenko by Shamir were Andrei Sannikov, a former presidential candidate who was reportedly tortured and Vladimir Neklyayev, the writer and former president of Belarusian PEN. Oleg Bebenin, Sannikov’s former press secretary, was also defamed. Bebenin was found dead in suspicious circumstances the day before I was supposed to meet him in Minsk (I attended his funeral and there are strong suspicions of foul play).
Again, I don't doubt that but why would that be linked to Assange?
> Assisting a dictatorship to defame the dead is pretty low.
That's quite a leap of imagination, to go from a refusal to comment to active assistance to 'defame the dead'.
> Former Wikileaks employee James Ball broke ranks and claimed to Index that Assange personally blocked any attempts at investigation and had covered up for Shamir.
That's bad but disgruntled wikileaks people have said all kinds of stuff in the past rather little of which ended up sticking in the longer term. That's why I asked if there has been any more recent follow-up to this.
Usually this translates into: 'I didn't get my way and now I'll harm you' or some variation on that theme. As a former employer I've had my share of this and it never surprises me what people will get up to once their relationship with you is over.
> Assange’s lack of remorse could not have been better demonstrated when he joined a panel discussion on Belarus alongside political dissidents but entirely failed to acknowledge any concerns over his personal behaviour.
And why would he, given that all of the above amounts to him not wanting to comment on the Shamir case.
If with 'personal behavior' they are referring to other areas of his life then that's another matter entirely but that's not clear from the context here and again we're making some pretty tenuous links between otherwise unrelated items.
-- Ok, enough about that, so here is my personal view, uncensored and without holding back.
I'd be more than happy to support an a...
I concur that ultimately Assange's contribution to modern society would be judged as a sum of his contributions, and indeed we have many flawed champions, down to MLK. Belarusian opposition just as well would have been stomped out without Wikileaks/Shamir's assistance, although it's certainly not appreciated.
Can't help noticing however that the standard for evidence on any possible flaw of Assange is set exceptionally high. You'd be hard pressed to see a criticism of the establishment face the same scrutiny. Seen that happen both online and with my (mostly tech, mostly libertarian) friends here in Norway. E.g. the rape allegations tend to be downplayed or outright dismissed by quite a few, although same people would jump the gun if someone like Strauss-Kahn is in his place.
If convicted he should not get time off for time spent in the embassy, that's not the same as time spent in a Swedish jail. He should however get the guarantee that he's not going to be extradited to the US no matter what, that seems like a 'free' thing for Sweden and would do a lot of good in terms of moving this case forward, which especially for the women would seem to me to be of prime importance.
Finally, Assange will likely also end up having to stand trial for skipping bail in the UK.
But all that has absolutely nothing to do - I hope, at least - with Wikileaks and what it has done for us all and I for one am quite grateful to Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, Julian Assange and whoever else had a hand in removing some of the veil around all that is ugly and that makes our world into the relatively bad place that it continues to be.
If it takes 'flawed' people to get us there, then so be it.
As for Strauss-Kahn or Julian Assange, when it comes to their public and their private affairs (and crimes) there should be no difference in how they are treated, fame should not be a free pass for misbehavior.
There are lots of things that don't sit right with me about how the Swedes handled this case, for instance in other cases they actually have gone abroad to interview suspects, higher priority crimes never made it to the same level of international police activity, it is relatively unheard of that someone at that level of responsibility would personally get involved to re-open a case, the fact that the womens actions totally contradict their public statements at the time and so on so I have no way of knowing what is the truth but I do know there is some truth to the allegations and I feel that guys that are jerks to women at this level should definitely not be given a free pass.
Personally I have no idea what could drive a man like Assange to do stuff like this, maybe that's what fame will do to you. See also: Bill Cosby and a bunch of British TV characters, Roman Polanski and so on. It seems as if at some point in time something in their psyche switched and they thought they could get away with anything (and some of them actually did get away, sadly).
Or do you think there is something worth releasing in the Kremlin document store that will do as much damage as say MH317 to Russian interests?
History is littered with examples like that and it is no coincidence that Edward Snowden ended up in Russia.
Of course you can then use this to tar them but at the same time you have to wonder if it is possible to alienate all of the world at the same time. It's probably much safer for groups like Wikileaks to purposefully ignore some domains (presumably the ones they care less about) than to be an 'equal opportunity employer' and to hit all of the worlds establishment equally hard.
Wikileaks withholding report on, say, Ecuador, would be understandable in the circumstances. However I find going an extra mile to cooperate with an established dictatorship against its opposition despicable.
Even Ecuador has something to gain from this - immense stature in Latin America for standing up to the USA. The world of politics at that level is pretty complex and I have no idea what made Assange decide the way he did vv Belarus but without having all the facts I'll postpone my judgment and re-iterate that I'd be perfectly happy if some other group would stand up and air Belarus' dirty laundry, assuming there is any dirty laundry left to air.
But that's besides the point, the thing that bothers me is that Sweden could have tried him 'in absentia' a hundred times over, it is just all too convenient that they seem to be perfectly content with having him bottled up in that Embassy which actually lends some credibility to Assange's claims. And if I had pissed off as many powerful interests I'd be super paranoid too.
The part that they probably didn't count on was that since he's now in an actual embassy and has very few distractions most of Assanges flaws have no way to express themselves. The only thing Wikileaks currently does not have is a project director that can go places and give speeches, that definitely is a detriment but it need not be a fatal one.
It has nothing to do with pregnancy and that does not in any way diminish the crime.
Source: I've been in a couple of positions of minor fame, and through a divorce. In both cases, I had enemies maybe 2-3 tiers down from Julian. My past -- factually -- is squeaky clean. I know what happened to my reputation in both cases.
Footnote: Jochen Bittner is a judgmental jerk.
It's a path that one does not choose lightly.
I view this as a positive step, and I only hope that we can see the same progress with the "the dark web".
> Yet, even back then, observers and media partners felt that Mr. Assange had more in mind than transparency, that there was an ideology behind his idea. Over time, that ideology has become increasingly apparent, through his regular public statements and his stint as a host for a Russian state-controlled TV network.
One element of Assange-think has been clear from early on: There is no such thing as a legitimate secret. The public is entitled to share any knowledge governments hold. Only complete transparency can stop and prevent conspiracy. Therefore, editing information by the government — redacting sensitive material, for example — equals manipulating it.
So, the hidden ideology behind mere 'transparency', lurking beneath the surface and which colors all of Assange's work at Wikileaks is... well apparently it's just more transparency.
Frankly, he's right. Any knowledge governments hold which is not germane to some contemporary disaster or military action, diplomacy, etc., should be available to the public. I'm hard-pressed to think of any good excuse for keeping a thing secret for twenty years, a decade being about the maximum for e.g. military secrets, etc.
> And it’s particularly bad, in Mr. Assange’s view, if those people represent Western democracy: In his simplistic reading, the West is hypocritical because it stands for civil liberties, and all secrets are antithetical to liberty. No wonder he got a show on Russian television — his viewpoint puts him nicely in line with Mr. Putin’s ideological agenda.
Eh, his position on secrecy is much more nuanced than that, and I'd bet that even my take on what should be top secret and what should not is more radical than Julian Assange's (and less thought-out, heh). His belief, in a nutshell, is that institutions which mean to control the population share a culture of mistrust, which in turn elevates secrecy to a virtue. Such organizations actually can't operate if they are constantly in danger of having their secrets exposed, even if the risk is low and the real impact even in case of a leak is small.
That's why Wikileaks exists - not because Julian Assange thinks that everything James Clapper knows, we should also know.
How about technical papers on the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb? Or the name of cover agents who were active twenty years ago and either are still active, or at least alive and could be targeted in retaliation?
Don't get me wrong, there needs to be a way for people to expose illegal or immoral actions of the organizations (government or not) they work for, while protecting them from retaliation. Wikileaks serves that function. But no secrets with a longer life than 20 years? ever? I don't think I really agree.
If the reason the government keeps something classified is to protect a person's career, or (as I assume is usually the case) just because they can so why go to the trouble of declassifying it, that is not a good enough reason. The default state of information held by the government is that it should be public domain, and anything classified ought to be scrutinized heavily - and regularly - to confirm it should be so and should remain so.
Wtf? It's not terribly hard to employ a skewed selection process on non-opinionated material.
Wikileaks led a revolution in journalism that has yet to be rivalled and Assange paid a high personal price for it. Any criticism of the man or organisation pales in significance to what they have achieved. Journalism was dead as a non-propaganda means of obtaining quality information until Wikileaks came along.
So, here is the thing, I fail to see any radical anti-West ideology in that tweet. I think it is a fairly popular point of view, based on a reasonable interpretation of historical fact, that the involvement of those three countries in the middle east over the last century or so has led to the rise of terrorism in the region. Additionally, recent interventions have definitely not helped. This is, in fact, the kind of point of view that you'd see in mainstream news in plenty of countries around the world.
You could make the argument that the night of the attacks might be poor timing to tweet this if you read as "finally, this countries got what it deserved for so many more dead elsewhere!". But you can also read it as "our leaders have been pursuing bad policy that is hurting hundreds of thousands abroad and actually came back indirectly to hurt us today as well, this is sad and it's sad that it would have been avoidable". That's not any more anti-West than protesting the Vietnam war was un-American. It is also a reasonable thing to bring up when the gut reaction to an attack like this is to escalate violence, even when it is fairly well established that doing so leads to more recruits for terrorist groups.
Also, I wonder how many people wouldn't be a little bit radical and a little bit anti-X-country if they had been persecuted by said country and forced to hole up in an embassy for 3+ years...
> and that a system that maintains this illegitimacy, namely democracy, isn’t half as good as most people think.
I don't know what this writer is talking about with his 'democracy'. There's no democracies involved here.
> Filtering isn’t phoniness — it’s civilization.
Lets just be clear. It's a civilization that rains death on innocent people with no trial or oversight from remote control death robots. A very uncivil 'civilization'.
I would say that it is in the US government's interest to discredit wikileaks, as their leaks tend to air dirty American laundry. But a lack of similarly embarrassing leaks about Russia dies not Russian propaganda make. It could simply be that Russian whistleblowers are more likely to meet with a fatal exposure to polonium.
Please don't conduct political ragewars here. They're tedious and not in the spirit of intellectual curiosity which is supposed to guide this site.
If you can find the will to do so, the very best thing is to be charitable. In this case that might mean remembering that the commenter has likely only heard one heavily politicized side of the story, and has been conditioned by such one-sided information to reflexively associate one thing with another. Then you might respond in a way that confounds their expectation in a positive, surprising manner, instead of getting angry and defensive, which can only reinforce it.
Admittedly that's hard to do and never something one must do. But it is likely the most effective thing to do. When one person responds from a conditioned reflex but another has the presence not to do so, that's how things get unstuck.
The demographics of HN are so unevenly distributed that it's impossible for the discourse here to be objective about many topics, but we can and do at least control for basic respect, and if you watch closely you'll notice that we care about that, and act on it, a lot.