In February 2009, before Wikileaks was well known, I listened to an interview (http://www.kuechenradio.org/wp/?p=366) with the back then German representative of wikileaks. Back then they had the problem that big media didn't care about anything that came out of wikileaks. They thought that part of the reason for the lack of attention was that no publication wanted to use a lot of pages for material that was accessible to their competitors as well. The practices Wikileaks employs today might be against the intended ethos, but have sure shown to be effective and are this way better for the cause.
You misunderstand. Your email _address_ (and mine) have already been leaked, shortly before Christmas 2011. What WikiLeaks is now publishing is a list of actual internal emails, as in, the content of their internal, private communication. Unless you were a source for them, or a buyer of their more confidential information, you won't be directly affected by this leak.
I think the impact could be bigger than you suggest. Communications between Stratfor staff, clients, and sources are buried in this data dump. There is an entire spreadsheet of non-US media contacts who had agreements of some kind with Stratfor. There is correspondence between Stratfor executives and their attorneys that was most certainly subject to attorney/client privilege before it was posted. This only scratches the surface.
"The Global Intelligence Files exposes how Stratfor has recruited a global network of informants who are paid via Swiss banks accounts and pre-paid credit cards. Stratfor has a mix of covert and overt informants, which includes government employees, embassy staff and journalists around the world." + "Stratfor has realised that its routine use of secret cash bribes to get information from insiders is risky" - from the link
What in the world are you talking about? Politicians blackmailing each other for personal gain is unethical. And I'm pretty sure that "the electorate" doesn't qualify as a "governmental official".
"Is it not possible to profit by bribing/blackmailing a government official and benefit the public at the same time?"
The ethical content of an action is not determined by accidental effects. If I shoot a gun blindly into a street and accidentally save someone by shooting their attacker, that doesn't make my actions ethical. Bribing an official for information that you can then sell to the highest bidder is corruption. The intent matters.
"Please think these things through next time before you cathartically post that someone is "the enemy"."
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Did I imply in any way that such political misconduct was ethical? No. Did I suggest "the electorate" qualified as a "government official"? No.
I was simply impugning an absolute statement that blanketed a great number of honorable intelligence gathers as "the enemy", and promoted a great number of sketchy government officials as allies.
Corruption is paying an official to change or ignore a law to benefit you at the expense of others. Incentivizing an official to leak intelligence (most likely not constitutionally obtained in the first place) doesn't fit that definition. If it did, half of the New York Times' Washington bureau would qualify as "the enemy".
No, "cathartically" means what I think it does. I wouldn't call someone an enemy and really mean it unless that enemy was deliberately trying to harm me or my family. Any other use would be an attempt to invoke emotions.
"I wouldn't call someone an enemy and really mean it unless that enemy was deliberately trying to harm me or my family."
I didn't literally call them the enemy, I put it in scary quotes as a reply to the (IMO) naive sentiment of the OP that because they're "not the CIA", they're not a legitimate target of WikiLeaks.
Please ask for clarification next time before you cathartically lecture someone based on your own misunderstanding.
Well, that's a fair point and I'll ask for clarification when I see something in quotes next time. When a disqualifying statement (not "the enemy") is flipped like that and directly applied to something, it carries more weight, especially when a loaded term like "enemy" is used. Politicians get in trouble for "with us or against us" rhetoric all the time. Not everything is so black and white, unless you make a compelling case that it is.
I hope no one is surprised by this. If governments are willing to spend billions upon billions for intelligence, why wouldn't private corporations. Hell I've throughout of doing this a few times - then I think about the work it entails.
I bet there'll bee som interesting, actionable material in there.
That's not particularly useful to people who want to rip through the entire corpus using standard textmining tools; we'd really rather a signed torrent of a compressed imap archive or something similar. Having all the headers in formats accessible to scripts to read and tag different emails, etc.
This is sort of like having to do research on an archive that's been photocopied onto kleenex. But, we'll suck it up, and write a scraper to turn it into what we need. But it means that some of the interesting stuff is delayed, because wikileaks is trying to get the most bang for the buck by dribbling it out.
Just to pick an example of what I mean by interesting; tag all emails that mention a country or city and see if there are correlations between who sent and received emails and the countries mentioned, or if informants are mentioned in connection with more than one country.
One of the more interesting things to emerge from this is Strafor's failed attempt to create a hedge fund that would use their intelligence to invest in government bonds, currency, etc.
Thank you for the reference - I agree, that's the most likely interpretation of the email. I wonder why this wasn't called out more strongly when the hedge fund was mentioned in the press release.
I've read STRATFOR's intel summaries / newsletters for a while - and I generally support Wikileak's and Anonymous's goals, if not always their specific tactics. So this is grabbing my interest, both personally and professionally. If nothing else, it will be interesting to consider ways to apply their methodology to the sort of threat intelligence we work with in network security.
(Side note: it's entirely possible to support Wikileaks and still think Assange is kind of a jerk.)
The thing is, though I'm not saying that's true in your case, that many people's perceptions of Assange are entirely due to the picture the media has painted rather than things he has himself said or done.
Check out the disinformation campaign that's been going on in Sweden for example, propagated by tabloid press in releases oddly synchronous with statements by the prime minister concerning an upcoming 'smear campaign against Sweden'.
"But we must acknowledge that this incident would not have been possible if Stratfor had implemented stronger data protection mechanisms - which will be the case from now on. Indeed we will immediately move to implement the latest, and most comprehensive, data security measures."
Seriously? These people were emailing what they considered the most sensitive information straight out of their organisation, the only "security" being a caveat in the subject line. I wouldn't trust them with a cookie jar let alone preventing leaks ;)
We are the rest of the world. We understand that you are embarrased, so are we. We understand that your experiment in government has slid towards fascism. Don't worry, you are not alone, it was a popular movement for Mussolini.
Do you realise that a vast majority of HN readers would support Manning's release? You're being downvoted because you come across as a young, annoying child, not because of your opinion.
They don't really concern me. He made the choice to do it. I think he was probably aware of the risks and decided it was worth the punishment. If not then he made a huge mistake.
hmm.. so no one commented on pastebin being used as a newsletter CMS. i guess this is common practice? i guess this is in tune with those stories about using git as publishing platform
"Denial Plan: Specific plan for managing security breaches. In some intelligence organizations, multi-volume regulations. In others, the plan consists of running around circles, waving your arms and blaming everyone else. Which one are we?"
A bit from the definition of Passive Intelligence "...The flow of passive material decreases the cost of intelligence and increases the time for analysis. Problem-the same intelligence is available to everyone. Stratfor’s strength is efficient gathering of passive intelligence, rapid patterning, superb analysis. Or so we tell our customers. Better to have a few sources in your pocket as well."
"How is Stratfor fundamentally different from Wikileaks? They both obtain leaked information ..."
That's like asking "How are the Crips different from the LAPD? They both drive around Los Angeles and carry guns ..." In the case of Stratfor and Wikileaks, one group finds secret information and makes it public, the other group takes secret information and sells it back to the same secret community from where the leaks originate.
"I wouldn't say these are fundamental differences."
> "How are the Crips different from the LAPD? They both drive
> around Los Angeles and carry guns ..."
... and they both enforce laws, and they both initiate the use of force against peaceful citizens, and they both take funding from unwilling people by the threat of violence.
I'm not sure you're making the point you intended to make, unless you're an anarcho-capitalist like me ;-)
That's exactly my point. Between any two groups, you can cherry pick lots of things that they have in common. So yeah, the Crips and the LAPD both wear "uniforms" and money is a big driving force yada yada. But at the end of the day, one group has a mission that is sanctioned by the overwhelming majority of the community and the other group absolutely doesn't. And I'm sure there's lots to be said about how the gangs and the LAPD are co-dependent but that doesn't make them the same.
I think Stratfor is an example of this trend of for-profit private outsourcers of things which used to be government-only functions.
Political science types are fond of saying "government must have a monopoly on the use of XYZ", but apparently now if you put the right retired government people on your payroll it's legit.
Military intelligence, international informant "asset" management? Good grief, this is some scary stuff.
I think the only thing political scientists say government should have a monopoly on is violence and national security. Anything beyond that and you enter a fractious field.
even there, the monopoly on both these things is mighty narrow. For example, how many political scientists would say that the state should have such a monopoly on violence that there should be no recognition of a right to defend oneself and others?
However international informent asset management? Does it impinge on the government's necessary monopoly on national security and violence? Two for two, I'd wager.....
That's funny, because the way I read the analogy, Stratfor was the Crips, gathering information and using it for private gain, and Wikileaks was the LAPD, using it for public good. Now clearly the LAPD is probably nearly as corrupt as the Crips, just in different ways-- so I'm not sure far this analogy holds, for that reason and many others. Still very amusing.
I am a subscriber to Stratfor, because of their insightful analysis. It feeds my curiousity about why things they way the are, not not just what is happening (which is what you get from most news sources, if you're lucky). I haven't seen much in the way of leaked information in Stratfor's reports --- in fact, I can't think of any that I could identify as leaked information.
I remember them talking about their sources in the FSA when discussing Syria, etc. I still think targeting this was absurd; I lost sympathy for Anonymous after they attacked Stratfor.
Anyone commenting about the supposed irony of Wikileaks putting an embargo on releasing this information before an agreed date is being naive.
At one point in time Wikileak's stated mission was just to leak information, and this was done without — comparatively — much fanfare.
What we see now is a change of tactics. If the ultimate goal is not simply to leak information, but to effect change, then what is the best way to do this?
A coordinated, simultaneous release has a better chance of being noticed by more people and thus a greater chance of effecting some meaningful change.
We can disagree on tactics. Assuming you believe their goals are reasonable, what else could they do? I'm not suggesting there are not other options, but I rarely read any suggestions of a better way.
i'm not sure you can say that wikileak's goal is to effect change. their goal is to take information that was private, and make it visible to as many people as is possible. controlling the release furthers that goal. they don't seem to care what happens with the information once it is released, just that the release gathers notice. i don't think their goals have changed over time, they've just become more aware of the fact that releasing information is no good if there's no audience for the release.
Well, effecting change is their stated goal. Assange has spoken at length about the idea of exposing information in order to break down conspiracies which an informed public may consider corrupt. I think that Wikileaks is a long way from being able to do that yet — undermine the corruption/lawlessness in a govt to an extent where it's weakened — but I'm hopeful.
Their focus is not simply exposing private information. Again, Assange has repeatedly said that Wikileaks has no interest in violating personal privacy and has in fact explicitly said that an individual has a right to privacy.
Exposing all private information is a radical position, one for which they couldn't expect to gain popular support. In other words, that is not their goal at all. It's reductive to simply say that they want to destroy privacy.
>I think that Wikileaks is a long way from being able to do that yet — undermine the corruption/lawlessness in a govt to an extent where it's weakened — but I'm hopeful.
They were completely successful in Kenya and had a not-insignificant role in sparking the Arab Spring. They're not able to bring down powerful corrupt regimes, but they've certainly proven successful at effecting change in some of the smaller countries.
Manning perhaps had the guts to remind you all of your constitution. If you are prepared to ignore your constitution then I will ignore all the things that make U.S.A. great.
Which really makes you question just why the US is persecuting Wikileaks as vigorously as it is... until you notice that most of the dictators who have fallen and countries where rebellions occurred were US allies, or at least had close ties to the US. Even Gaddafi was cozying up to the west until things got hairy.
The truly sad thing is, we knew all this. We've known that supporting friendly but brutal and murderous dictators has been the modus operandi for the US for years. Despite the leaks and the Arab Spring, this will continue to be the case so long as it's easier to keep a friendly dictator in power than try and work with a democratically elected government of a country where the vast majority of people don't like you.
Don't you think it also works the other way around? The majority of people don't like you because you support a violent dictator that's clearly bad for them.
It's a ratchet effect. Population are not particularly interested either way; government tells US government they're not going to put US interests ahead of their own people's, gets overthrown and replaced with a brutal dictatorship, population gets distinctly unfriendly, democratic government replaces dictator after revolution, opposes US interests as it plays well with population.
Hey, that sounds kind of familiar... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran#Pahlavi_dynasty_.281925.E2...
Technically, it only works because it looks very much like an accident. China and at least one dictator have accused the US of doing this on purpose, so the US has to prosecute and act all hot and bothered about it, otherwise it starts to look like an intentional leak.
China's case is particularly interesting. It's nearly impossible to criticize them directly for anything, since they just deny it, mirror the same criticism back, and then threaten some kind of economic retaliation for it. Their playbook is clear, and effective.
But this accidental Wikileaks release allowed the US to publicly say to the world all sorts of stuff about what our government really thinks about the Chinese government, and there's nothing they can do in response. It was an accident, US is embarrassed and pissed off, but it just so happens the collateral damage to Chinese government's PR machine (and various dictators and whatnot) was worse.
To a large degree I agree with this standpoint.
The problem with the Stratfor case is, that it was by and large a private research company who's only "crime" so far was selling information for money. And the idea of running an investment fund based on geo political informations seems a pretty smart idea. But what investment fund doesn't want to consider potential problematic externalities in their investments?
The statement including $1,200 a month paid to the informant from the Wikileak's press release seems an almost ridiculously low amount, even when payed regularly, when in contrast other media outlets are paying thousands, and in some cases even millions for access to some temporary celebrities or access to other irrelevant banalities of public life.
Unfortunately, I don't see any timetable for release of the entire corpus; if they're going to release 167 emails per day, that's going to take 82 years.
One difference is one makes money doing it and the other loses money doing it. One silos information in order to extract wealth from people who are interested in that information. The other releases it for free. One in moving in the direction of more secrecy and information hiding. The other is moving in the direction of more openness and transparency.
I disagree that this is not "fundamentally different". It doesn't get much more "fundamental" than the ideological difference that drives the two organisations.
Stratfor sought to make a profit. Journalists seek to make a living. A lot of the journalists I know would be perfectly happy to work for a not-for-profit organization because they're in it for the work, not the money.
The news organisations seek to make a profit just as much as STRATFOR. When that interferes with their ethics you get News Corp. When it doesn't we have reputable journals.
The people at STRATFOR, similarly, could generally earn much more by working at macro hedge funds. Why they choose not to is their personal decision to make.
I'm not trying to tease out a nuance here, but simply demonstrate that a profit motive doesn't inherently corrupt information collection and analysis.
Sure, but there's a difference between journalists and news organizations. You were conflating them.
Also, I suspect you're wrong. Every serious journalism organization maintains Chinese walls between the journalists and the profit-seekers. I think that's because a profit motive does inherently corrupt in that it creates conflicts of interest.
That's a fine unbacked assertion, but it's wrong. Profit is a measure of a venture's gain beyond its expenses, nothing more. People are not businesses, and one's life is not measurable by a P&L.
That's a warm and fluffy thing to say, but it's not actually true: as an individual, you trade your time for wages, which you spend on first living, and then on living the lifestyle you desire. The latter is "wants", not "needs". It's possible to live a very, very nice lifestyle working for a "non-profit". Nothing wrong with that of course, but let's call a spade a shovel.
That is a modern American consumerist interpretation of the nature of life. P&L is a modern business invention; you can certainly try to interpret the world in terms of it, but it's a narrow and weak philosophy. E.g., what's the ROI on voting?
How is that relevant? We are talking about economic activity. Wanting to work for a "non-profit" is easy; being willing to work for no personal gain takes true commitment. One that you will find that very few of the "capitalism is bad" crowd actually have.
It's relevant because you're trying to view everything through the peephole of a P&L statement. "Everything is capitalism" is no more rational than "capitalism is bad".
I'm talking difference, you go talking about good and evil.
Individual actions taken by people who may or may not be journalists could be good or evil, depending on the individual action.
Journalism paid for by advertisers cannot report on anything that is contrary to the interests of their advertisers.
Direct subscription journalism, like Wikileaks, Counterpunch, or to some extent Le Monde diplomatique is now essential to getting information on what global organisations are really doing (as opposed to what they advertise they are doing).
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 213 ms ] threadhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-irony
Edit: It's in the article. Stratfor gathers information using paid informants, including government officials. That's bribery.
EDIT: ok, really, what bribes?
Is it not possible to profit by bribing/blackmailing a government official and benefit the public at the same time?
Please think these things through next time before you cathartically post that someone is "the enemy".
"Is it not possible to profit by bribing/blackmailing a government official and benefit the public at the same time?"
The ethical content of an action is not determined by accidental effects. If I shoot a gun blindly into a street and accidentally save someone by shooting their attacker, that doesn't make my actions ethical. Bribing an official for information that you can then sell to the highest bidder is corruption. The intent matters.
"Please think these things through next time before you cathartically post that someone is "the enemy"."
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
I was simply impugning an absolute statement that blanketed a great number of honorable intelligence gathers as "the enemy", and promoted a great number of sketchy government officials as allies.
Corruption is paying an official to change or ignore a law to benefit you at the expense of others. Incentivizing an official to leak intelligence (most likely not constitutionally obtained in the first place) doesn't fit that definition. If it did, half of the New York Times' Washington bureau would qualify as "the enemy".
No, "cathartically" means what I think it does. I wouldn't call someone an enemy and really mean it unless that enemy was deliberately trying to harm me or my family. Any other use would be an attempt to invoke emotions.
I didn't literally call them the enemy, I put it in scary quotes as a reply to the (IMO) naive sentiment of the OP that because they're "not the CIA", they're not a legitimate target of WikiLeaks.
Please ask for clarification next time before you cathartically lecture someone based on your own misunderstanding.
I bet there'll bee som interesting, actionable material in there.
This is sort of like having to do research on an archive that's been photocopied onto kleenex. But, we'll suck it up, and write a scraper to turn it into what we need. But it means that some of the interesting stuff is delayed, because wikileaks is trying to get the most bang for the buck by dribbling it out.
Just to pick an example of what I mean by interesting; tag all emails that mention a country or city and see if there are correlations between who sent and received emails and the countries mentioned, or if informants are mentioned in connection with more than one country.
(Side note: it's entirely possible to support Wikileaks and still think Assange is kind of a jerk.)
Check out the disinformation campaign that's been going on in Sweden for example, propagated by tabloid press in releases oddly synchronous with statements by the prime minister concerning an upcoming 'smear campaign against Sweden'.
"But we must acknowledge that this incident would not have been possible if Stratfor had implemented stronger data protection mechanisms - which will be the case from now on. Indeed we will immediately move to implement the latest, and most comprehensive, data security measures."
Seriously? These people were emailing what they considered the most sensitive information straight out of their organisation, the only "security" being a caveat in the subject line. I wouldn't trust them with a cookie jar let alone preventing leaks ;)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/9107911/...
"WikiLeaks is about to launch a distributed, encrypted "Facebook for revolutionaries" (https://wlfriends.org/)."
https://wlfriends.org/about#whatfowlis
I see no evidence it's truely distributed though.
We are the rest of the world. We understand that you are embarrased, so are we. We understand that your experiment in government has slid towards fascism. Don't worry, you are not alone, it was a popular movement for Mussolini.
"torrent dumps are available at http://wlstorage.net/torrent/gifiles/, pick newest one available"
A glossary of the intelligence jargon that they use, written in an entertaining style.
That's like asking "How are the Crips different from the LAPD? They both drive around Los Angeles and carry guns ..." In the case of Stratfor and Wikileaks, one group finds secret information and makes it public, the other group takes secret information and sells it back to the same secret community from where the leaks originate.
"I wouldn't say these are fundamental differences."
I certainly would.
> around Los Angeles and carry guns ..."
... and they both enforce laws, and they both initiate the use of force against peaceful citizens, and they both take funding from unwilling people by the threat of violence.
I'm not sure you're making the point you intended to make, unless you're an anarcho-capitalist like me ;-)
A better analogy would be to compare the Crips and a private detective agency.
Political science types are fond of saying "government must have a monopoly on the use of XYZ", but apparently now if you put the right retired government people on your payroll it's legit.
Military intelligence, international informant "asset" management? Good grief, this is some scary stuff.
However international informent asset management? Does it impinge on the government's necessary monopoly on national security and violence? Two for two, I'd wager.....
Care to justify your assertion?
At one point in time Wikileak's stated mission was just to leak information, and this was done without — comparatively — much fanfare.
What we see now is a change of tactics. If the ultimate goal is not simply to leak information, but to effect change, then what is the best way to do this?
A coordinated, simultaneous release has a better chance of being noticed by more people and thus a greater chance of effecting some meaningful change.
We can disagree on tactics. Assuming you believe their goals are reasonable, what else could they do? I'm not suggesting there are not other options, but I rarely read any suggestions of a better way.
Their focus is not simply exposing private information. Again, Assange has repeatedly said that Wikileaks has no interest in violating personal privacy and has in fact explicitly said that an individual has a right to privacy.
Exposing all private information is a radical position, one for which they couldn't expect to gain popular support. In other words, that is not their goal at all. It's reductive to simply say that they want to destroy privacy.
They were completely successful in Kenya and had a not-insignificant role in sparking the Arab Spring. They're not able to bring down powerful corrupt regimes, but they've certainly proven successful at effecting change in some of the smaller countries.
https://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/11/28-2
TLDR: US Government got mud on its face, but dictators around the world faired much worse, and the fallout for them is ongoing.
The truly sad thing is, we knew all this. We've known that supporting friendly but brutal and murderous dictators has been the modus operandi for the US for years. Despite the leaks and the Arab Spring, this will continue to be the case so long as it's easier to keep a friendly dictator in power than try and work with a democratically elected government of a country where the vast majority of people don't like you.
China's case is particularly interesting. It's nearly impossible to criticize them directly for anything, since they just deny it, mirror the same criticism back, and then threaten some kind of economic retaliation for it. Their playbook is clear, and effective.
But this accidental Wikileaks release allowed the US to publicly say to the world all sorts of stuff about what our government really thinks about the Chinese government, and there's nothing they can do in response. It was an accident, US is embarrassed and pissed off, but it just so happens the collateral damage to Chinese government's PR machine (and various dictators and whatnot) was worse.
https://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/11/28-2
TLDR: US Government got mud on its face, but dictators around the world faired much worse, and the fallout for them is ongoing.
The statement including $1,200 a month paid to the informant from the Wikileak's press release seems an almost ridiculously low amount, even when payed regularly, when in contrast other media outlets are paying thousands, and in some cases even millions for access to some temporary celebrities or access to other irrelevant banalities of public life.
I disagree that this is not "fundamentally different". It doesn't get much more "fundamental" than the ideological difference that drives the two organisations.
The people at STRATFOR, similarly, could generally earn much more by working at macro hedge funds. Why they choose not to is their personal decision to make.
I'm not trying to tease out a nuance here, but simply demonstrate that a profit motive doesn't inherently corrupt information collection and analysis.
Also, I suspect you're wrong. Every serious journalism organization maintains Chinese walls between the journalists and the profit-seekers. I think that's because a profit motive does inherently corrupt in that it creates conflicts of interest.
Individual actions taken by people who may or may not be journalists could be good or evil, depending on the individual action.
Journalism paid for by advertisers cannot report on anything that is contrary to the interests of their advertisers.
Direct subscription journalism, like Wikileaks, Counterpunch, or to some extent Le Monde diplomatique is now essential to getting information on what global organisations are really doing (as opposed to what they advertise they are doing).