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Plugging the WikiLeak: What can U.S. government do?

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“It wasn’t Pentagon papers that took down Richard Nixon,” said Bamford. “It was his attempt to stop the papers that brought him down.”

Not Watergate?

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This story is way off track and is sensational nonsense.

The U.S. government doesn't need to break the encryption code to discover what the "insurance" file contains because it already knows what is inside. Assange asked the White House weeks ago to help Wikileaks vet the remaining 15,000 files. And all the talk of destroying their website or erasing files isn't going to do much good given that news organizations around the world have already downloaded the file and are just waiting on the encryption key to open it.

Enjoy some irony with your Monday... U.S. Senators have today called on "Whistler Blowers" in the UK and Scottish governments to leaks evidence of a link between the release the Lockerbie bomber and an oil deal.

Can the U.S. government have it both ways? Sounds like it.

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The US gov't can start by not lying to the people. Transparency would rendor these wikileak operations meaningless.

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I just downloaded this 1.4Gb torrent -and it opened fine. I don't see what these people are complaining about.

-must be Windows users or something.

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http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Afghan_War_Diary,_2004-2010

=links to the hashes.

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Sorry, I just woke up from napping? Is blowback "on" yet?

Informing the public is dangerous, and should be stopped immediately! We CAN'T HANDLE the truth!

With that, back to sleep. Wake me when we get blowback, okay?

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“It wasn’t Pentagon papers that took down Richard Nixon,” said Bamford. “It was his attempt to stop the papers that brought him down.”

Not Watergate?

Its what led to Watergate and then his demise.

I've got to wonder about Obama. He's learned pretty much there is nothing as transparency in the higher halls of power in the US GOVT. That is one thing I agree with Palin on about his naivete. However, without these whistleblowers we would all just be blind sheep. I just wish there was more of them during the early years of the Bush administration. We now know that he was just a lapdog of PNAC. It would have helped greatly back then and stopped a lot of the headaches we have now.

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Honestly sometimes there need to be secrets, like the names of informants, or information that could help someone find them. These are secret because they're protecting someone's life and I don't honestly think that anyone here would want to try and explain to some widow or mother than her husband or child died because the public was curious or "had the right to know".

The real problem here isn't secrecy, it's the fact that governments (not just the U.S. government) have betrayed the trust of the people one too many times by concealing things that they didn't want the public to know because the public wouldn't approve. A good example in Japan is the recent exposure of secret deals between the U.S. and Japan regarding the movement of nuclear weapons in and out of Japan.

In these cases the public has a right to know because without information it's not democracy. If politicians had the right to make anything secret then we'd never find out about the reasons why we shouldn't vote for them, and it would become a 1-party state, with the ruling party hiding all their secrets and exposing the secrets of their opposition.

There needs to be some sort of public oversight in terms of making anything secret, or governments need to become more worthy of the trust the public places in them. Governments can't have it both ways, covering up their dirty laundry while simultaneously saying, "Trust us!".

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Wikileaks is a personal publicity vehicle used by Assange. For months he published nothing new on the site and the secure methods of submitting documents didn't work. It's clear that all of Assange's talk of "the right to know" etc is just posturing.

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Frungy at 02:41 AM JST - 17th August = Excellence!

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samuraisam,

Its what led to Watergate and then his demise.

Watergate led to his resignation. A stroke led to his demise.

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Frungy is right. There are some things the public doesn't need to know. If it needlessly endangers human lives that are not our own, we don't need to know, and we really don't have a right to know, either. What about the privacy of individuals? WikiLeaks has neither the manpower nor the resources to remove all names (particularly of the Afghans who are helping stabilize their country). It is clear already that WikiLeaks does not look at the context (particularly in their sensationalizing) and see that they are more hurting their cause than helping it. Why? Because now the crackdown will be even harder. You know what an ordeal it is to get a security clearance now? With this, they have pushed their own cause back 20 or 30 years, as more draconian measures will be (if they aren't already) put in place to make sure this information does not get out.

Actually, I have two gripes about WikiLeaks. First, they put all of this out there and don't give the public the context of the situation. It's all about making sure people are lead deliberately to the wrong conclusions - that is to say, whatever Assange wants them so see. Second, although there is no paper trail showing Assange is getting these secret documents and then only placing the ones that they wanted in public view, that is what they are doing. Ultimately, it is a biased organization that wants to skew the information in the direction they want it to go. You don't think that cables showing successes in Afghanistan would make it to WikiLeaks Latest Leaks section, do you? How about if someone leaked documents showing that Company X was secretly stealing money from their CEO and donating it to fund a public library in Nebraska? Nope, even though they are doing it in secret, it would never make it up there. Why? because that isn't scandalous enough. It doesn't pass the "we're shamelessly promoting ourselves as givers of information, but really we only show you what we decide you should see" test.

The difference between the government and Assange? The government is at the very least bound by the rules of law. Assange is a immoral clown who does what he wants and runs like a coward to avoid the consequences of his actions. If his cause was seriously noble, if he really thought his goal was good, he wouldn't run. He wouldn't need to.

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The only thing the US government can do is repeal the 1st Amendment. What kind of a question is this? Next.

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All this secrecy and darkness. It would be hilarious if that file gets unencrypted and contains a really nice picture or Shakespeare's complete works. That's the big trap the US is scared of. If they decide to attack WikiLeaks and it turns out that this was nothing more than a ruse, then the government looks like Big Brother manifested (and they are!)

Of course the neo-conservatives think that the public is a collection of morons and deserve to be fed lies, but is that the principles that our countries were founded upon? They are the modern day tyrants.

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