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.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/7...
If any death results from this "leak", Jake should be held accountable.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
> [...] 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.
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.)
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 !?
After all, the government isn't the one doing the shooting. This seems to be the defense of the Wikileaks guys.
