Posted on 12/02/2010 6:26:16 AM PST by Red in Blue PA
By Wednesday, the self-proclaimed whistleblower website and its eccentric founder, Julian Assange, were the subjects of bellicose threats from politicians and world leaders, but to this day have faced fewer immediate legal consequences than those selling fake Coach handbags and unauthorized Disney DVDs.
The dichotomy was not lost on some members of Congress, who demanded the administration shut down WikiLeaks once and for all.
“It is time that the Obama Administration treats WikiLeaks for what it is—a terrorist organization whose continued operation threatens our security,” said Rep. Candice Miller (R-Mich.), a member of the House Homeland Security Committee. “Shut down WikiLeaks, which represents a far greater threat to our national security than the sale of fake Louis Vuitton purses.”
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
The Internet is designed to route around damage. A government “shutdown” of Wikileaks would be short-lived, at best.
Julian Assange has much more to fear from Saudi Arabia and Russia than he does from the United States. Assange is a marked man. He will be lucky if he lives to see 2011.
These leaks don't necessarily reflect on us as a country. They reflect on our government, on both Democrats and Republicans. They reflect on our country only insofar as we the citizenry continue to consent to government by these people.
Our "glorious leaders" know that the information which has been leaked calls into question quite a bit of what they do and quite a bit about the lies they tell us on a regular basis. Their only defence is to work to convince us that their interests are our interests.
By definition, a government that keeps secrets is a government that is hiding things. While there are admittedly matters that a government should hide (defence plans, diplomatic dealings in progress, etc.), more often it is the case that hiding information results out of a desire not to be held accountable. A government that is not accountable to its people is "big government" in the very worst sense of that term.
I have absolutely no fondness for WikiLeaks but I believe in addressing the message rather than shooting the messenger. Our "leaders", who we know damn well have done their darndest not to represent our interests in most of everything they do, want us to shoot the messenger and ignore what they have tried to hide. Outrage aside, our enemies already have the information in question -- at this point, the only purpose of keeping this information hidden from the American people is so that we won't hold our politicians and bureaucrats accountable.
I find it interesting that the justice dept has a full time staff protecting obama’s birth and personal records , but has no one to protect classified federal documents. Which one is more important? Apparently one is capable of doing more damage to obama if released.
Agree 100% with your post.....and have yet to hear of a single person who has been jeopardized with this information. I hear the general argument....but never specifics.
What a world! Let’s say a person knows or is approached by someone who has access to highly classified material and needs some money to pay off his mortgage and kid’s education loans. He secretly goes to the Russians, Iranians, Chinese, whoever and says, if you’ll pay me a million dollars, I will obtain information of interest to you and I will publish it on a web page for all to see. And because I’m calling myself a whistleblower, I am immune to prosecution. Is Assange really so altruistic that he is subjecting himself to all of this out of an overwhelming desire to make the world a better place? Or does he have other motives? I hope someone is following the money in whatever form it might take.
Only an incredibly immature and naive person would believe that a democratic government should never keep secrets. This isn’t about the fact that secrets are kept. It’s about the people who are keeping them. No matter what -ism you choose, sooner or later the darker traits of human nature - greed, desire for absolute power, corruption, etc. - will surface and begin to corrupt the tenets of the -ism. Of course some -isms, like Socialisn, Marxism, etc., have their genesis in these darker traits. So what is the answer? There is no perfect answer. We are, after all, a fallen people. But voting for people who believe in and act in accordance with the teachings of a higher authority might help, although, I suspect Obama would claim that is what he is. I guess deciding which higher authority is good to follow is also a decsion we need to make.
Assange isn’t the problem, the lax security and lazy system administrators at State are the problem.
Assange is just a figurehead - anyone anywhere in the world could set up that kind of web site in about fifteen minutes.
The trouble for folks with security clearances is that even though it's been made public, it is legally still classified, and if it is accessed by people with a clearance but without Need-to-Know, or if it comes onto computer systems under the governance of the Defense Security Service, it must still be treated as a classified contamination.
That's exactly right. The trouble is that setting up access controls on a document-by-document basis, managing the lists of individuals who need access to a given piece of information, and doing things like making access rights time-limited - so that a signals PFC can receive and store the message, but not access it later - is a very difficult technical problem and requires very clever people to implement.
In this case, however, the Windows auditing system should have been configured to record when writable removable media was introduced to the system, and those audit logs then checked by security officers smart enough to wonder why this one guy was burning a CD on his workstation so often.
I absolutely agree with your post 100%.
Sadly, snake politicians will always find ways to portray themselves as followers of a higher power... I’d say 99% of politicians are no different than 0bama in that regard. The goats will remain among the sheep until kingdom come. And, as you pointed out in your response prior to the one to me, you really cannot trust the intentions of the Assanges of the world either — they often have hidden ulterior motives behind apparent acts of altruism.
Happy medians that strike the right balance of transparency and secrecy are ultimately impossible. I suppose that the best solution is to recognize that attitudes are cyclical and to allow them to oscillate back and forth between a little too much transparency and a little too much secrecy depending on the times and, as you said, who is in charge. Our attitudes about such things tend to be as fluid as our society and time itself and that might be the key to balance rather than fixing it at a particular level.
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