I wonder if this is part of a policy to try and debase wikileaks by making it clear that if you affiliate with them or support them that life will be made hard for you.
I know Jake. I was a member of Noisebridge. I feel the work that Wikileaks is doing is incredibly important, and I know he's got the fortitude to deal with the bullshit and continue fighting the good fight.
They do, they don't release material that could potentially cause bodily harm to specific individuals.
could some of the leaks potentially lead to the Taliban uncovering an agent and murdering him? possibly, but not likely. The New York Times or Washington Post could probably be accused of the same.
These are hard questions for Wikileaks, as they have been for the rest of the press for decades.
They only thoroughly checked about ~2000 of the documents according to a speech Julian gave on Lateline (Australian TV Show), They [wikileaks] did offer the US government a chance to check though and blank any names they found but they did not accept the offer.
"They only thoroughly checked about ~2000 of the documents according to a speech Julian gave on Lateline (Australian TV Show), They [wikileaks] did offer the US government a chance to check though and blank any names they found but they did not accept the offer."
Why take the chance? Why not blank out all the names?
They don't seem to care about the potential loss of human life.
"Why take the chance?" is just fearmongering, not a rational argument. Every time you get in a car, you could cause numerous deaths. Why take the chance? Giving the government the chance to redact is a much greater precaution than any of us take when operating deadly machinery. The question is why the government, which was in a position to know their sensitive nature, didn't blank out all the names.
I'm crazy about the idea of wikileaks but the Journal's article brings up good points. These documents are unlikely to fundamentally change peoples' opinion on the war(s), yet the documents have already been found to name afghan informants by full name, village and father's name.
I understand your point, but isn't the idea to be better? It's hard to argue that information should be free when the direct results of this will be human casualties. I mean, that's how it is being played and will be played.
Note, I'm speaking literally when I say "hard to argue". I think it's the correct ideal and I think our government could use doses of unexpected transparency but it's the Fox News I'm thinking about.
The messenger had a responsibility with the information they received. They willingly gave out the information with no regard for the people in the documents.
The difference between Wikleaks and the actual person that leaked the information is that Wikileaks has a large audience.
They could have removed names, but didn't. Now the blood is on their hands.
I don't want to engage in a long discussion, especially as I'm not acquainted with all the facts, but who is held accountable for the deaths caused by our government funding a security organization that directly undermines efforts in Afghanistan?
It seems that there are no risk free way to unravel great injustices. In what has become an incredibly contracted and bloody conflict, it seems absurd to try and apportion blame and fault to an organization that's trying to reduce net suffering.
It seems similar to someone exposing human rights violations in a company, the company performing poorly because of the press, and them being blamed for all the jobs lost.
Who has the moral authority to hold Jake accountable? He exposed the truth. By contrast, Bush, Cheney & Rumsfeld gave us Gulf of Tonkin II, the meretricious congressmen gave the executive branch all the power it wanted, we know that we invaded a country based on lies, 100,000s have died, and noone has been held accountable. What's the rule here? You kill 1 it's a tragegy, but if you kill 1,000,000 it's a statistic?
I concur. Additionally I think it's interesting how blame is being specifically ascribed to Jake and Julian, the most visible speakers for wilileaks, when the number of people contributing, editing, managing, and supporting wikileaks is in the hundreds.
I feel it might be part of an urge people have to latch on to concrete and explicable causes for events they feel an emotional repulsion to, ie:
"You, specific human being (Obama, Bush, Jake, Jesus, what have you) are to blame for the evils in the world."
as opposed to
"You, complex social phenomenon that may or may not be capable of being influenced by any individual action, are to blame for the evils of the world."
"Who has the moral authority to hold Jake accountable? He exposed the truth. By contrast, Bush, Cheney & Rumsfeld gave us Gulf of Tonkin II, the meretricious congressmen gave the executive branch all the power it wanted, we know that we invaded a country based on lies, 100,000s have died, and noone has been held accountable. What's the rule here? You kill 1 it's a tragegy, but if you kill 1,000,000 it's a statistic?"
So you claim nobody has the "moral authority" to hold the people from wikileaks accountable, yet you want to hold Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld accountable (it's interesting you would use only republicans as examples btw) for their actions?
If I intentionally gave out your address to criminals and told them when you wouldn't be home (and they robbed your house), would you hold me accountable? I'm just "exposing the truth"
This information has the possibility of getting thousands killed. On a side note, I'm hoping I can get jake's full address and phone number so I can give it out to some people. I'm sure he won't mind. I'm just "exposing the truth"
I think a more apt example would be if you knew of the address of a meth lab. Meth labs are often heavily defended. You give the address of the meth lab to the police, knowing that when busting it some police officers may lose their lives.
Would you be accountable for the deaths of the officers?
When the Americans kill civilians ("Collateral Murder"), Wikileaks gets blamed for being biased. When the Taliban kill civilians, Wikileaks gets blamed, even when they tried to contact the White House so they could remove information about informants.
Perhaps I'm just out of touch, but I normally would put most of the responsibility for these things on the warring parties. Blaming a third party that doesn't have an army, a militia, or guns seems self-serving or disingenuous, depending on who's doing it.
You wouldn't really expect the White House and Pentagon to sit and watch as a bunch of "kids" are revealing their dirty laundry !? All the classified "dirty laundry" -- not security related stuff, like nuclear launch codes, but rather "shameful" acts.
They are very good at propaganda and so went full steam with it. A couple of themes emerged from that effort.
1) "Obama knows about these problems and is already handling it". This is a great use of propaganda. It both makes the leaked documents "un-interesting" and it makes Obama look good. I've heard this one on the radio and in a couple of other sources. It is often regurgitated verbatim without any supporting evidence how Obama has improved the situation.
2) "This will hurt our troops". This is also a great propaganda line because it plays on the existing framework of "support our troops". Nobody wants to hurt the son or husband of their neighbor in their small town. Wikileaks is not exposing cover-ups and mis-management of resources, death of civilians, it is "hurting our soldiers". This appeals to the middle America. "Those Wikileaks kids might as well just shoot our boys in the back" kind of feeling.
3) Now, in the Defcon case. They just hope to scare any hackers or anyone thinking of contributing or collaborating with Wikileaks. The implication is that "you might also get a visit from FBI" or "You might get randomly search everytime you fly. Are you prepared to make that choice?" Again that is very effective.
Now I am not saying that there is necessarily a unified, centrally controlled propaganda campaign, it could be just an emergent behavior from a bunch of govt. agencies.
Your argument is absolutely ridiculous. This has nothing to do with republicans vs democrats. As far as I know, LBJ and McNamara were democrats. And so are Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, who voted for the war in order to avoid jeopardizing their chances of getting to the oval office. What exact part of "meretricious congressmen" didn't you understand?
Assange has never claimed that there are no legitimate secrets. He's not exposing cyphers nor nuclear secrets. The truth that he's exposing is one that the Afghans know well, but that the American public does not know. The purpose of WikiLeaks is to promote transparency and accountability by exposing truths that catalyze reform. This means, essentially, to close the feedback loop so that the electorate can make wise decisions every four years. If the electorate has no clue what is going on, you have no republic, you have a farce.
What reform is attained by exposing someone's phone or address? That's right. None. If you can't understand that privacy and transparency aren't incompatible, then you must be seriously intellectually challenged. In other words, you have no point, and you have no argument.
"What reform is attained by exposing someone's phone or address? That's right. None. If you can't understand that privacy and transparency aren't incompatible, then you must be seriously intellectually challenged. In other words, you have no point, and you have no argument."
When you are exposing potential informants and spies to known murderers, lots.
Either you're too naive or not cynical enough. Assange is on a power trip, but WL is necessary and has been useful so far, so I forgive him. He has a large ego and wants to deliver impact. Exposing informants is peanuts. Why would he do it intentionally? He has already caused one government to collapse (in Kenya). If you had such power, would you use it for the little things, or for the big things? Too bad for the informants, it would have been better if no names had ever been exposed.
"Seriously. You're complaining about Wikileaks doing it (debatable) when Cheney makes this seem like so 2006"
Seriously. When has two wrongs ever made a right? Also, the topic isn't Cheney, it's Wikileaks.
Do republicans that don't run the country anymore always have to be brought up when left leaning organizations or politicians are criticized for their actions?
"Perhaps I'm just out of touch, but I normally would put most of the responsibility for these things on the warring parties. Blaming a third party that doesn't have an army, a militia, or guns seems self-serving or disingenuous, depending on who's doing it."
I'm not blaming Wikileaks for those things. As you say, they don't have an army. What they do have is a very large audience. Just like with a militia (or owning a gun), you need to be responsible. Giving out the names of potential informants and spies is not being responsible.
If there was even a chance that people could die as a result of this information, they shouldn't have gone public. Because they did, it leads me to believe that they are being driven by an anti-war political agenda.
To me, the information given is not worth the number of lives that will be lost as a result.
"To me, the information given is not worth the number of lives that will be lost as a result."
Fair enough; that's an honest disagreement. My perspective on the matter is simply that whatever the number of deaths that Wikileaks will hypothetically be responsible for, the American government and Taliban are each responsible for a hundred times as many. I do a little introspection and realized that I'm not all that outraged about the actions of the American government with respect to Afghanistan and Iraq[0], so I can't bring myself to be upset about something that is a drop in the bucket (not to mention indirect, rather than direct, responsibility) in comparison.
Clarification: I am not suggesting that you either disagree or agree with the position I present here. I'm just presenting it.
[0] To spell it out: Afghanistan started their war by knowingly allowing al Qaeda to plan and train for the September 11 attacks in Afghanistan. The American invasion is therefore a retaliation, and not a war of aggression, so fair enough. My feelings on the war in Iraq are that it was a waste of time, effort, lives, and money, and was driven by the American and British governments knowingly and intentionally deceiving their publics. If the country I live in had tagged along for the ride, I would be rather upset about the situation, but if some foreign government wants to self-harm it's not my problem.
"I do a little introspection and realized that I'm not all that outraged about the actions of the American government with respect to Afghanistan and Iraq."
If you don't live in Russia nor China, what makes you think that the U.S. won't converge towards tyranny at some point in the future and start using their fantastic military machine to invade countries at will, building an empire that neither Napoleon nor Hitler could even dream of? If that sounds impossible, let us not forget that Germany in the 1920s was quite different from Germany in the 1930s.
I remember the huge demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq in Europe in early 2003. Hundreds of thousands of people protesting in Barcelona. The biggest protests since Vietnam. And, then, one year later, the Madrid metro bombings "forcefully" convince the vastly anti-war Spanish electorare that it was intolerable to have a handful of troops in Iraq. Just because you don't live in the U.S. nor the U.K. do not rule out the possibility that you might suffer the consequences of the reckless invasion of Iraq.
"Fair enough; that's an honest disagreement. My perspective on the matter is simply that whatever the number of deaths that Wikileaks will hypothetically be responsible for, the American government and Taliban are each responsible for a hundred times as many."
This makes Wikileaks just as bad as the people they are trying to "expose". It really makes me question many of their past articles.
Why release a video of American soldiers killing innocent people when they themselves don't have the decency to respect human life? They don't know or care about how many people could die as a result of this information. It could be 0, 10, or 1000.
1. Why are these mutually exclusive? I think it's possible to believe that both Iraq/Afghanistan and Wikileaks' release of these documents without checking to see if they put people's lives at risk are irresponsible.
2. If exposing the truth is always the best alternative, one wonders why Assange & co are so secretive about their own operations & movement. Clearly they have good reasons, for example Wikileaks tries to maintain the secrecy of their sources so they don't end up on jail. If they really exposed Afghan sources in these documents, the outcome for them will most likely be far worse than jail.
Personally I think WL is important and has great potential, but I wouldn't automatically consider them the good guys in every situation. It's more complicated than that.
I never claimed that they are incompatible. I merely claimed that those who invade a sovereign country that posed no threat, leading to 100,000s of deaths (5,000 of which U.S. soldiers) have no moral authority and cannot claim that their irresponsibility is even remotely comparable to the irresponsibility of revealing possible informants' names.
From what I understand WL offered the US government the chance to clear names of informants. They refused. They obviously wanted to pressure wikileaks not to release the information.
It's a bit harsh to hold Jake accountable for deaths. I think that's the reason people downvote the comment.
It is a true concern though whether or not exposing data like the Afghan documents could endanger the lives of people in Afghanistan and people working in the area affiliated with the coalition forces. After reading this article http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/30/taliban-says-it-will-targ... it becomes clear that the Taliban is checking the documents to find Afghan people that supply the coalition forces with information. If found they will be 'punished'.
This doesn't take away the value of the documents exposed. I'm just trying to point out that besides the great value of this exposure some damage to (relative) innocent people might be done as well.
Assange gave the Guardian, that paper's main competition, advance access to the docs.
Bitter much?
To date, there is absolutely no evidence of these sort of reprisals actually taking place, other than a vaguely worded threat from some token Taliban mouthpiece. And you know how uncommon that is...
It would be a good thing if more prominent people became associated with Wikileaks and diluted the one-man-show aspect. It's the principles that matter.
Interesting that FBI agents at Defcon said they wanted to know if "human rights" were being "trampled". Is that a clumsy way of establishing rapport with the subject, or are there actually FBI agents who think like that?
Is that a clumsy way of establishing rapport with the subject, or are there actually FBI agents who think like that?
No no, they were getting to know their subject, building a profile, seeing how he responds. Did they deliver the question straight? Then see how he colors it. With sarcasm? See how he deals with antagonism. etc.
Can any individual government agent in such a capacity ever really be "just like me"? I don't take orders from anyone. They do. In that respect, they are nothing like me at all.
A large part of what makes tales of government harassment like this one so troubling is how similar, reasonable, and even pleasant the agents are. If they are just like us, then why is there so much injustice?
> [...] when he was pulled aside by customs and border protection agents who told him he was randomly selected for a security search
> [...] Receipts from his bag were photocopied and his laptop was inspected but it's not clear in what manner, the sources said. Officials from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Army then told him he was not under arrest but was being detained, the sources said. They asked questions about Wikileaks, asked for his opinions about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and asked where Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is, but he declined to comment without a lawyer present, according to the sources. He was not permitted to make a phone call, they said.
What's more worrisome to me is that doublespeak like nonrandom "random searches" and "not arrested but detained" — not to mention state officials imprisoning citizens and holding them up to some political litmus test over their opinions of our foreign wars while searching through their documents and confiscating their equipment without a warrant — has apparently become such a norm in the USA that even more open-minded news sources like Wired don't bother to question it.
Except that in Communist Russia he would have probably "disappeared" into some labor camp in Siberia. We are still far from that.
However, at the same time, in Communist Russia nobody had the illusion that it was a free, open, morally superior country. All that propaganda bullshit was recognized as bullshit. Except for some old WWII veterans who believed in the "system", everyone in private knew it was all a spectacle.
In case of the American society, the majority still think they live in a democracy, where they can do whatever they like, say whatever they like, that the government doesn't spy on them, doesn't put people on black lists, that searches are really "random" and so on.
And I like how the FBI agents want to talk about "human rights". Wow! Such a cheap shot at creating rapport. They couldn't really come up with anything better !?
Except that in Communist Russia he would have probably "disappeared" into some labor camp in Siberia. We are still far from that.
That's what happened to Maher Arar when his plane had to make an unplanned landing in the US a few years back. Except it wasn't a labor camp; it was just a Syrian prison, where he was tortured, for months. If he hadn't been able to send an SMS to his wife while he was being disappeared, and if he weren't completely innocent of any wrongdoing, he'd still be there. We have no way of knowing how many other people this has happened to.
That's a good example. Yeah I remember being shocked at the lack of media coverage and indignation over the case, also at other Americans' indifference to it all.
I guess if you don't restrict my comment to just American citizens, then yes, we have crossed into the "fascist police state" territory a while back.
> We have no way of knowing how many other people this has happened to.
Very good point. We only know about the people who have "disappeared" unsuccessfully from the point of view of the ones doing the "disappearing". Of course the point is for there to not be any evidence. The better they are the harder it is to convincingly blame them.
Immigration and Customs officials don't need a warrant to detain you (temporarily), search you, ask your questions or seize some or all of your luggage. This has always been the established norm as it is on the (controlled) borders of just about any country.
Even to the extent that this is currently the norm, why is it OK?
Why should state officials ever be allowed to interrogate U.S. citizens' political opinions, regardless of whether those citizens happen to be standing in an airport?
It makes perfect sense that Customs be allowed to inspect physical items passengers bring through the airport, but what rationale says they should look through your computer files, especially in a post-Internet world? (I.e., there's no sense in claiming that you'll stop child pornography or other hot-topic illegal data entering the U.S. in an age where the Internet exists.)
Why is what OK? For law-enforcement personnel to ask you questions? Or search you? Both of these are established and legal and common. Saying they shouldn't be able to search your laptop because of the Internet is like suggesting police shouldn't check suspects in violent crimes for knives because of the availability of guns. Instead of making more vague regulations about what you can and can't be asked at the border, there is a very simple remedy for government agents asking you questions you don't want to answer - simply not answering. That's a legal right Jacob Appelbaum had no trouble taking advantage of.
I hope that when there are discussions about the "drug war" in the US in the future, that people blame the cartels for murders and not the fact that drugs are illegal.
After all, the government isn't the one doing the shooting. This seems to be the defense of the Wikileaks guys.
57 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadI know Jake. I was a member of Noisebridge. I feel the work that Wikileaks is doing is incredibly important, and I know he's got the fortitude to deal with the bullshit and continue fighting the good fight.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/7...
If any death results from this "leak", Jake should be held accountable.
could some of the leaks potentially lead to the Taliban uncovering an agent and murdering him? possibly, but not likely. The New York Times or Washington Post could probably be accused of the same.
These are hard questions for Wikileaks, as they have been for the rest of the press for decades.
Why take the chance? Why not blank out all the names?
They don't seem to care about the potential loss of human life.
what the hell kind of reasoning is that?
Note, I'm speaking literally when I say "hard to argue". I think it's the correct ideal and I think our government could use doses of unexpected transparency but it's the Fox News I'm thinking about.
The messenger had a responsibility with the information they received. They willingly gave out the information with no regard for the people in the documents.
The difference between Wikleaks and the actual person that leaked the information is that Wikileaks has a large audience.
They could have removed names, but didn't. Now the blood is on their hands.
It seems that there are no risk free way to unravel great injustices. In what has become an incredibly contracted and bloody conflict, it seems absurd to try and apportion blame and fault to an organization that's trying to reduce net suffering.
It seems similar to someone exposing human rights violations in a company, the company performing poorly because of the press, and them being blamed for all the jobs lost.
I feel it might be part of an urge people have to latch on to concrete and explicable causes for events they feel an emotional repulsion to, ie:
"You, specific human being (Obama, Bush, Jake, Jesus, what have you) are to blame for the evils in the world."
as opposed to
"You, complex social phenomenon that may or may not be capable of being influenced by any individual action, are to blame for the evils of the world."
So you claim nobody has the "moral authority" to hold the people from wikileaks accountable, yet you want to hold Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld accountable (it's interesting you would use only republicans as examples btw) for their actions?
If I intentionally gave out your address to criminals and told them when you wouldn't be home (and they robbed your house), would you hold me accountable? I'm just "exposing the truth"
This information has the possibility of getting thousands killed. On a side note, I'm hoping I can get jake's full address and phone number so I can give it out to some people. I'm sure he won't mind. I'm just "exposing the truth"
Would you be accountable for the deaths of the officers?
Perhaps I'm just out of touch, but I normally would put most of the responsibility for these things on the warring parties. Blaming a third party that doesn't have an army, a militia, or guns seems self-serving or disingenuous, depending on who's doing it.
They are very good at propaganda and so went full steam with it. A couple of themes emerged from that effort.
1) "Obama knows about these problems and is already handling it". This is a great use of propaganda. It both makes the leaked documents "un-interesting" and it makes Obama look good. I've heard this one on the radio and in a couple of other sources. It is often regurgitated verbatim without any supporting evidence how Obama has improved the situation.
2) "This will hurt our troops". This is also a great propaganda line because it plays on the existing framework of "support our troops". Nobody wants to hurt the son or husband of their neighbor in their small town. Wikileaks is not exposing cover-ups and mis-management of resources, death of civilians, it is "hurting our soldiers". This appeals to the middle America. "Those Wikileaks kids might as well just shoot our boys in the back" kind of feeling.
3) Now, in the Defcon case. They just hope to scare any hackers or anyone thinking of contributing or collaborating with Wikileaks. The implication is that "you might also get a visit from FBI" or "You might get randomly search everytime you fly. Are you prepared to make that choice?" Again that is very effective.
Now I am not saying that there is necessarily a unified, centrally controlled propaganda campaign, it could be just an emergent behavior from a bunch of govt. agencies.
Assange has never claimed that there are no legitimate secrets. He's not exposing cyphers nor nuclear secrets. The truth that he's exposing is one that the Afghans know well, but that the American public does not know. The purpose of WikiLeaks is to promote transparency and accountability by exposing truths that catalyze reform. This means, essentially, to close the feedback loop so that the electorate can make wise decisions every four years. If the electorate has no clue what is going on, you have no republic, you have a farce.
What reform is attained by exposing someone's phone or address? That's right. None. If you can't understand that privacy and transparency aren't incompatible, then you must be seriously intellectually challenged. In other words, you have no point, and you have no argument.
When you are exposing potential informants and spies to known murderers, lots.
Seriously? You're complaining about Wikileaks doing it (debatable) when Bush & Co make this seem like so 2006.
Seriously. When has two wrongs ever made a right? Also, the topic isn't Cheney, it's Wikileaks.
Do republicans that don't run the country anymore always have to be brought up when left leaning organizations or politicians are criticized for their actions?
I'm not blaming Wikileaks for those things. As you say, they don't have an army. What they do have is a very large audience. Just like with a militia (or owning a gun), you need to be responsible. Giving out the names of potential informants and spies is not being responsible.
If there was even a chance that people could die as a result of this information, they shouldn't have gone public. Because they did, it leads me to believe that they are being driven by an anti-war political agenda.
To me, the information given is not worth the number of lives that will be lost as a result.
Fair enough; that's an honest disagreement. My perspective on the matter is simply that whatever the number of deaths that Wikileaks will hypothetically be responsible for, the American government and Taliban are each responsible for a hundred times as many. I do a little introspection and realized that I'm not all that outraged about the actions of the American government with respect to Afghanistan and Iraq[0], so I can't bring myself to be upset about something that is a drop in the bucket (not to mention indirect, rather than direct, responsibility) in comparison.
Clarification: I am not suggesting that you either disagree or agree with the position I present here. I'm just presenting it.
[0] To spell it out: Afghanistan started their war by knowingly allowing al Qaeda to plan and train for the September 11 attacks in Afghanistan. The American invasion is therefore a retaliation, and not a war of aggression, so fair enough. My feelings on the war in Iraq are that it was a waste of time, effort, lives, and money, and was driven by the American and British governments knowingly and intentionally deceiving their publics. If the country I live in had tagged along for the ride, I would be rather upset about the situation, but if some foreign government wants to self-harm it's not my problem.
If you don't live in Russia nor China, what makes you think that the U.S. won't converge towards tyranny at some point in the future and start using their fantastic military machine to invade countries at will, building an empire that neither Napoleon nor Hitler could even dream of? If that sounds impossible, let us not forget that Germany in the 1920s was quite different from Germany in the 1930s.
I remember the huge demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq in Europe in early 2003. Hundreds of thousands of people protesting in Barcelona. The biggest protests since Vietnam. And, then, one year later, the Madrid metro bombings "forcefully" convince the vastly anti-war Spanish electorare that it was intolerable to have a handful of troops in Iraq. Just because you don't live in the U.S. nor the U.K. do not rule out the possibility that you might suffer the consequences of the reckless invasion of Iraq.
This makes Wikileaks just as bad as the people they are trying to "expose". It really makes me question many of their past articles.
Why release a video of American soldiers killing innocent people when they themselves don't have the decency to respect human life? They don't know or care about how many people could die as a result of this information. It could be 0, 10, or 1000.
2. If exposing the truth is always the best alternative, one wonders why Assange & co are so secretive about their own operations & movement. Clearly they have good reasons, for example Wikileaks tries to maintain the secrecy of their sources so they don't end up on jail. If they really exposed Afghan sources in these documents, the outcome for them will most likely be far worse than jail.
Personally I think WL is important and has great potential, but I wouldn't automatically consider them the good guys in every situation. It's more complicated than that.
From what I understand WL offered the US government the chance to clear names of informants. They refused. They obviously wanted to pressure wikileaks not to release the information.
It is a true concern though whether or not exposing data like the Afghan documents could endanger the lives of people in Afghanistan and people working in the area affiliated with the coalition forces. After reading this article http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/30/taliban-says-it-will-targ... it becomes clear that the Taliban is checking the documents to find Afghan people that supply the coalition forces with information. If found they will be 'punished'.
This doesn't take away the value of the documents exposed. I'm just trying to point out that besides the great value of this exposure some damage to (relative) innocent people might be done as well.
Bitter much?
To date, there is absolutely no evidence of these sort of reprisals actually taking place, other than a vaguely worded threat from some token Taliban mouthpiece. And you know how uncommon that is...
Interesting that FBI agents at Defcon said they wanted to know if "human rights" were being "trampled". Is that a clumsy way of establishing rapport with the subject, or are there actually FBI agents who think like that?
No no, they were getting to know their subject, building a profile, seeing how he responds. Did they deliver the question straight? Then see how he colors it. With sarcasm? See how he deals with antagonism. etc.
A large part of what makes tales of government harassment like this one so troubling is how similar, reasonable, and even pleasant the agents are. If they are just like us, then why is there so much injustice?
Politics.
> [...] Receipts from his bag were photocopied and his laptop was inspected but it's not clear in what manner, the sources said. Officials from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Army then told him he was not under arrest but was being detained, the sources said. They asked questions about Wikileaks, asked for his opinions about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and asked where Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is, but he declined to comment without a lawyer present, according to the sources. He was not permitted to make a phone call, they said.
What's more worrisome to me is that doublespeak like nonrandom "random searches" and "not arrested but detained" — not to mention state officials imprisoning citizens and holding them up to some political litmus test over their opinions of our foreign wars while searching through their documents and confiscating their equipment without a warrant — has apparently become such a norm in the USA that even more open-minded news sources like Wired don't bother to question it.
However, at the same time, in Communist Russia nobody had the illusion that it was a free, open, morally superior country. All that propaganda bullshit was recognized as bullshit. Except for some old WWII veterans who believed in the "system", everyone in private knew it was all a spectacle.
In case of the American society, the majority still think they live in a democracy, where they can do whatever they like, say whatever they like, that the government doesn't spy on them, doesn't put people on black lists, that searches are really "random" and so on.
And I like how the FBI agents want to talk about "human rights". Wow! Such a cheap shot at creating rapport. They couldn't really come up with anything better !?
That's what happened to Maher Arar when his plane had to make an unplanned landing in the US a few years back. Except it wasn't a labor camp; it was just a Syrian prison, where he was tortured, for months. If he hadn't been able to send an SMS to his wife while he was being disappeared, and if he weren't completely innocent of any wrongdoing, he'd still be there. We have no way of knowing how many other people this has happened to.
I guess if you don't restrict my comment to just American citizens, then yes, we have crossed into the "fascist police state" territory a while back.
> We have no way of knowing how many other people this has happened to.
Very good point. We only know about the people who have "disappeared" unsuccessfully from the point of view of the ones doing the "disappearing". Of course the point is for there to not be any evidence. The better they are the harder it is to convincingly blame them.
Why should state officials ever be allowed to interrogate U.S. citizens' political opinions, regardless of whether those citizens happen to be standing in an airport?
It makes perfect sense that Customs be allowed to inspect physical items passengers bring through the airport, but what rationale says they should look through your computer files, especially in a post-Internet world? (I.e., there's no sense in claiming that you'll stop child pornography or other hot-topic illegal data entering the U.S. in an age where the Internet exists.)
After all, the government isn't the one doing the shooting. This seems to be the defense of the Wikileaks guys.