7 ms·

I wonder what happens the first time that there's a credible link to someone dying as a results of Wikileaks leaking a document. You know, if you keep leaking

I wonder what happens the first time that there's a credible link to someone dying as a results of Wikileaks leaking a document. You know, if you keep leaking any and all classified information you can, inevitably some informant or logistics route or defensive position is going to get routed or assassinated. It's just a matter of time - while the government does some bad stuff, I'd reckon the majority of classified documents are classified for decent reasons. It's not just a bunch of wild animals running the show. And when an operative or informant or ally or supply team or soldier or law enforcement officer eventually gets killed as a result of a leak, I wonder what the government's response will be. Edit: Knock off the downvoting and make a reply. There's an informant in the Chinese politburo who is risking his life to protect the dissidents that the Chinese government targeted with the Google attacks. His life is at risk now. If you have any credible argument for why releasing any information related to the man, let's hear your argument. Because I think his life is at risk, and that's a bad thing. If you disagree, let's hear your reasoning of why it's okay to do that.

mattm 16y ago
> I wonder what happens the first time that there's a credible link to someone dying as a results of Wikileaks leaking a document. I'm really getting sick and tired of the "If it saves one life, it is worth it" argument. No it isn't. Life has risks. I prefer a world that is open and truthful. This informant obviously knows that. What if he believes that risking his life in the name of freedom is more important? That is his prerogative. Just because you place safety and life as a priority over freedom, doesn't necessarily mean that other do.
CamperBob 16y ago
Let's say you're a Politburo member who has developed serious moral qualms about what your regime is doing. You have three options: 1) Stick with business as usual. Go along to get along. 2) Quietly retire to "spend more time with your family" or for "health reasons." 3) Use your position to betray your country as a spy, working for what is arguably a greater good. Option 3) is what this Politburo member went with. Just like delivering pizzas, installing roof shingles, or maintaining power lines, espionage and treason comes with certain risks. This is true whether you're working for the good guys or the bad guys. This is one of those risks. He knew, or could reasonably have been expected to know, what he was doing. I agree with the comment from the other thread: Wikileaks is putting the whole US government through a full-body scanner. Frankly, I'm tired of governments having all the illegal search-and-seizure fun. Now we get to play, too.
- GHFigs 16y ago
  This is one of those risks. In other words, Wikileaks is making it riskier for dissidents to work as US informants. Gee, thanks, Julian.
  - CamperBob 16y ago
    The idea being to reduce the need for dissidents to operate at all. Transparency is either a good thing, or a bad thing, and I'd like to remain optimistic at this point.
  - YuriNiyazov 16y ago
    You say "gee thanks" as if somewhere in Julian's stated intentions is "helping the US government." - it obviously isn't, and one of his stated objectives is to change how governments work.
    - GHFigs 16y ago
      I am vastly more concerned with real-world consequences than stated intentions.
davidcuddeback 16y ago
I agree with you that Wikileaks should be selective about what they publish. Publishing some secrets may only risk lives without revealing much, but certainly there are things that citizens have a right to know. A press that can expose government deception is the people's check and balance against unrestrained government power. If the mainstream media did a better job of exposing government deception, we wouldn't need Wikileaks. I'd like to point you to the Pentagon Papers case [1], in which The New York Times published information that revealed the US government's true intentions in the Vietnam war. When Nixon asked the courts for an injunction preventing The New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers, here is what the Supreme Court said in its ruling [2] (in favor of The New York Times): "In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell. In my view, far from deserving condemnation for their courageous reporting, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other newspapers should be commended for serving the purpose that the Founding Fathers saw so clearly. In revealing the workings of government that led to the Vietnam war, the newspapers nobly did precisely that which the Founders hoped and trusted they would do." Later in their decision, another justice wrote: "In the absence of the governmental checks and balances present in other areas of our national life, the only effective restraint upon executive policy and power in the areas of national defense and international affairs may lie in an enlightened citizenry - in an informed and critical public opinion which alone can here protect the values of democratic government. For this reason, it is perhaps here that a press that is alert, aware, and free most vitally serves the basic purpose of the First Amendment. For without an informed and free press there cannot be an enlightened people." [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers [2] http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=403&invol=713 http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&#3...
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
mcantelon 16y ago
>You know, if you keep leaking any and all classified information you can, inevitably some informant or logistics route or defensive position is going to get routed or assassinated. Risky business is risky. >It's not just a bunch of wild animals running the show. They did unilaterally invade Iraq, killing, by their own records, tens of thousands of civilians in the process. They may not be animals, but their hands are far from clean.
- lionhearted 16y ago
  Did you read any of the leaks? It's talking about how there's an American informant in the Chinese Politburo... you know the Chinese are going to be looking for him now. What are they going to do to him and his family if they find him? What happens if friendly politicians in Yemen are bombed by al-Qaeda when their role in counter-terrorism comes out? What if their wives and children are beheaded on television, as has happened in the past? Leaking war documents to show what's happening - questionable. Leaking anything and everything possible, with no particular objective in mind - reckless and insane.
  - mcantelon 16y ago
    >It's talking about how there's an American informant in the Chinese Politburo... you know the Chinese are going to be looking for him now. What are they going to do to him and his family if they find him? You don't think the Chinese knew that already? >Leaking anything and everything they can, with no particular objective in mind - insanity. They are not leaking everything they can. Wikileaks is not releasing all cables and if you actually read the cables, sensitive names are redacted. They also offered to talk to the US authorities, which could have allowed them some say in what got released, but US authorities refused.
    - lionhearted 16y ago
      > You don't think the Chinese knew that already? Dude, cantelon, drop the partisan stuff and think for a second. A single offhand mention like, "Donated to informant's mother's pension fund" might be enough to identify an informant, round up him and his family, and torture them to death. I get it. You're in favor of Wikileaks and don't like the U.S. government. But they're doing reckless crazy stupid shit here. Everyone regardless of politics should be able to see that, if you look at the summaries of what they released.
joe_the_user 16y ago
I wonder what happens the first time that there's a credible link to someone dying as a results of Wikileaks leaking a document. It depends on who is doing the crediting, I suspect. To ask the opposite loaded-question, [rhetoric]"what will happen the first time there's a credible link to someone's life being saved by a Wikileaks release?" (Perhaps someone being released from Guantanamo Bay when they wouldn't have otherwise been? What if Wikileaks catches child-molestors in high places?)[/rhetoric] Back honest discussion... it's pretty hard to pin blame Wikileaks for any given event, though. If our supposedly democratic government has decided that secrecy will be standard operating procedure for law enforcement, that government still has the main job of protecting it's secret operatives. Wikileaks isn't a spy agency, they just take information that's there. Any good intelligence operation compartmentalizes information on a need-to-know basis. So if names of some operator are flying around, someone has screwed up long before Wikileaks appears on the scene. The good way of protecting the classified information is keeping it within an intelligence agency. Should free-speech be hobbled for those situations where the secret-keepers screw-up? Further, it doesn't seem coincidental to me that the main justification for government secrecy is stopping victimless crimes and intervening in foreign conflicts. How many people have been killed as a result of this? (countless) What are people going to do about this?
- lionhearted 16y ago
  > To ask the opposite loaded-question, [rhetoric]"what will happen the first time there's a credible link to someone's life being saved by a Wikileaks release?" (Perhaps someone being released from Guantanamo Bay when they wouldn't have otherwise been? What if Wikileaks catches child-molestors in high places?)[/rhetoric] This is where discretion comes into play. If they caught a child molestor, that'd absolutely be the kind of thing you should leak - a crime. Leaking war videos to show people the real impact of a war - probably okay. Leaking war plans and war logistics info - a heck of a lot more questionable. Leaking anti-nuclear proliferation, leaking informants trying to protect dissidents - totally, straightup wrong. Discretion. They just demonstrated they don't have very much. Why the hell would they release that Chinese informant info? That's crazy. That's nuts. That's against their own frigging goal of more openness in the world. They want publicity, and don't have a sense of judgment. Leak crimes. Absolutely, yes! That's a public service. But don't frigging leak info that obstructs obviously good causes and accomplishes nothing. > Should free-speech be hobbled for those situations where the secret-keepers screw-up? Free speech has limits. Risking getting objectively good guys killed - like the Chinese politburo agent - is probably over that line. Can you see any good reason to leak that info besides getting celebrity and attention? Let me ask you Joe - do you think leaking that was bad? I do. I don't see any good it accomplishes for the potential damage it does.
mike-cardwell 16y ago
Couldn't it go either way? Isn't there just as much likelihood that somebody's life would be saved by these leaks?
vaksel 16y ago
leaks happened before and people got killed, i.e when Valerie Plame was outed something like 70 of her informants were killed and in that case most people behind the leak got away scott free
- waterlesscloud 16y ago
  I'm not ready to toss out that number, but is there any source for it more credible than Roger Ebert? That's all I got from Google, and a bajillion references to Ebert's assertion (insert comment about quality of google search results here).
- dctoedt 16y ago
  > when Valerie Plame was outed something like 70 of her informants were killed The massive leak is certainly likely to be damaging, but the Plame citation seems unwarranted: A quick Google search revealed zero corroborating evidence for this assertion, which seems to have been a bald, unsupported assertion by Roger Ebert in reviewing a film on the Plame affair. See http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/11/i_bet_youre_wrong_roger_ebert.html http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/11/i_bet_youre_wron...
jrockway 16y ago
Freedom is worth dying for.
- nano81 16y ago
  Easy to say when you're not the one at risk of dying.
  - jrockway 16y ago
    "If you don't want someone to kill you for something you're doing, maybe you shouldn't be doing it."
danbmil99 16y ago
I think the issue is that future informants, such as this Chinese guy, are going to simply assume that anything they say to anyone in the USA is potentially going to get leaked. Therefore intelligence will dry up, making the US weaker. I suspect both Wikileaks and most of those doing the leaking are of the opinion that a crippled US intelligence force, and corresponding limitation of the USA operating in the international sphere, is net net a good thing.
electromagnetic 16y ago
So the Chinese managed to infiltrate Google's systems to get information on dissidents, but they can't infiltrate US government systems (like Wikileaks did) while the US government is still passing virtually all its software contracts off to Microsoft - you know, the least secure OS out there. Please, you're tech savvy, actually fucking think. If Wikileaks did it, a government with thousands of trained operatives in espionage were doing this four fucking decades ago. Wikileaks just illustrates how easy this information is to get. If we know our governments counter-espionage is this bad, at least we know our people are already in danger. Taking down wikileaks simply leaves everyone with a false sense of security. I would put thousands of dollars on the fact the Chinese already know everything about the informant in the politburo that the US government does. At least now the general public and the US government believes he may be in danger. You're moronic if you think a US spy in China is, in any form or bastardized definition of the word, safe. Hiding in a lions den is always dangerous... even if they're not eating you right this second.
napierzaza 16y ago
Aren't these diplomatic communications? Not tactical military ones?

mattm 16y ago

> I wonder what happens the first time that there's a credible link to someone dying as a results of Wikileaks leaking a document. I'm really getting sick and tired of the "If it saves one life, it is worth it" argument. No it isn't. Life has risks. I prefer a world that is open and truthful. This informant obviously knows that. What if he believes that risking his life in the name of freedom is more important? That is his prerogative. Just because you place safety and life as a priority over freedom, doesn't necessarily mean that other do.

CamperBob 16y ago

Let's say you're a Politburo member who has developed serious moral qualms about what your regime is doing. You have three options: 1) Stick with business as usual. Go along to get along. 2) Quietly retire to "spend more time with your family" or for "health reasons." 3) Use your position to betray your country as a spy, working for what is arguably a greater good. Option 3) is what this Politburo member went with. Just like delivering pizzas, installing roof shingles, or maintaining power lines, espionage and treason comes with certain risks. This is true whether you're working for the good guys or the bad guys. This is one of those risks. He knew, or could reasonably have been expected to know, what he was doing. I agree with the comment from the other thread: Wikileaks is putting the whole US government through a full-body scanner. Frankly, I'm tired of governments having all the illegal search-and-seizure fun. Now we get to play, too.

GHFigs 16y ago
This is one of those risks. In other words, Wikileaks is making it riskier for dissidents to work as US informants. Gee, thanks, Julian.
- CamperBob 16y ago
  The idea being to reduce the need for dissidents to operate at all. Transparency is either a good thing, or a bad thing, and I'd like to remain optimistic at this point.
- YuriNiyazov 16y ago
  You say "gee thanks" as if somewhere in Julian's stated intentions is "helping the US government." - it obviously isn't, and one of his stated objectives is to change how governments work.
  - GHFigs 16y ago
    I am vastly more concerned with real-world consequences than stated intentions.

davidcuddeback 16y ago

I agree with you that Wikileaks should be selective about what they publish. Publishing some secrets may only risk lives without revealing much, but certainly there are things that citizens have a right to know. A press that can expose government deception is the people's check and balance against unrestrained government power. If the mainstream media did a better job of exposing government deception, we wouldn't need Wikileaks. I'd like to point you to the Pentagon Papers case [1], in which The New York Times published information that revealed the US government's true intentions in the Vietnam war. When Nixon asked the courts for an injunction preventing The New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers, here is what the Supreme Court said in its ruling [2] (in favor of The New York Times): "In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell. In my view, far from deserving condemnation for their courageous reporting, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other newspapers should be commended for serving the purpose that the Founding Fathers saw so clearly. In revealing the workings of government that led to the Vietnam war, the newspapers nobly did precisely that which the Founders hoped and trusted they would do." Later in their decision, another justice wrote: "In the absence of the governmental checks and balances present in other areas of our national life, the only effective restraint upon executive policy and power in the areas of national defense and international affairs may lie in an enlightened citizenry - in an informed and critical public opinion which alone can here protect the values of democratic government. For this reason, it is perhaps here that a press that is alert, aware, and free most vitally serves the basic purpose of the First Amendment. For without an informed and free press there cannot be an enlightened people." [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers [2] http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=403&invol=713 http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&#3...

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

mcantelon 16y ago

>You know, if you keep leaking any and all classified information you can, inevitably some informant or logistics route or defensive position is going to get routed or assassinated. Risky business is risky. >It's not just a bunch of wild animals running the show. They did unilaterally invade Iraq, killing, by their own records, tens of thousands of civilians in the process. They may not be animals, but their hands are far from clean.

lionhearted 16y ago
Did you read any of the leaks? It's talking about how there's an American informant in the Chinese Politburo... you know the Chinese are going to be looking for him now. What are they going to do to him and his family if they find him? What happens if friendly politicians in Yemen are bombed by al-Qaeda when their role in counter-terrorism comes out? What if their wives and children are beheaded on television, as has happened in the past? Leaking war documents to show what's happening - questionable. Leaking anything and everything possible, with no particular objective in mind - reckless and insane.
- mcantelon 16y ago
  >It's talking about how there's an American informant in the Chinese Politburo... you know the Chinese are going to be looking for him now. What are they going to do to him and his family if they find him? You don't think the Chinese knew that already? >Leaking anything and everything they can, with no particular objective in mind - insanity. They are not leaking everything they can. Wikileaks is not releasing all cables and if you actually read the cables, sensitive names are redacted. They also offered to talk to the US authorities, which could have allowed them some say in what got released, but US authorities refused.
  - lionhearted 16y ago
    > You don't think the Chinese knew that already? Dude, cantelon, drop the partisan stuff and think for a second. A single offhand mention like, "Donated to informant's mother's pension fund" might be enough to identify an informant, round up him and his family, and torture them to death. I get it. You're in favor of Wikileaks and don't like the U.S. government. But they're doing reckless crazy stupid shit here. Everyone regardless of politics should be able to see that, if you look at the summaries of what they released.

joe_the_user 16y ago

I wonder what happens the first time that there's a credible link to someone dying as a results of Wikileaks leaking a document. It depends on who is doing the crediting, I suspect. To ask the opposite loaded-question, [rhetoric]"what will happen the first time there's a credible link to someone's life being saved by a Wikileaks release?" (Perhaps someone being released from Guantanamo Bay when they wouldn't have otherwise been? What if Wikileaks catches child-molestors in high places?)[/rhetoric] Back honest discussion... it's pretty hard to pin blame Wikileaks for any given event, though. If our supposedly democratic government has decided that secrecy will be standard operating procedure for law enforcement, that government still has the main job of protecting it's secret operatives. Wikileaks isn't a spy agency, they just take information that's there. Any good intelligence operation compartmentalizes information on a need-to-know basis. So if names of some operator are flying around, someone has screwed up long before Wikileaks appears on the scene. The good way of protecting the classified information is keeping it within an intelligence agency. Should free-speech be hobbled for those situations where the secret-keepers screw-up? Further, it doesn't seem coincidental to me that the main justification for government secrecy is stopping victimless crimes and intervening in foreign conflicts. How many people have been killed as a result of this? (countless) What are people going to do about this?

lionhearted 16y ago
> To ask the opposite loaded-question, [rhetoric]"what will happen the first time there's a credible link to someone's life being saved by a Wikileaks release?" (Perhaps someone being released from Guantanamo Bay when they wouldn't have otherwise been? What if Wikileaks catches child-molestors in high places?)[/rhetoric] This is where discretion comes into play. If they caught a child molestor, that'd absolutely be the kind of thing you should leak - a crime. Leaking war videos to show people the real impact of a war - probably okay. Leaking war plans and war logistics info - a heck of a lot more questionable. Leaking anti-nuclear proliferation, leaking informants trying to protect dissidents - totally, straightup wrong. Discretion. They just demonstrated they don't have very much. Why the hell would they release that Chinese informant info? That's crazy. That's nuts. That's against their own frigging goal of more openness in the world. They want publicity, and don't have a sense of judgment. Leak crimes. Absolutely, yes! That's a public service. But don't frigging leak info that obstructs obviously good causes and accomplishes nothing. > Should free-speech be hobbled for those situations where the secret-keepers screw-up? Free speech has limits. Risking getting objectively good guys killed - like the Chinese politburo agent - is probably over that line. Can you see any good reason to leak that info besides getting celebrity and attention? Let me ask you Joe - do you think leaking that was bad? I do. I don't see any good it accomplishes for the potential damage it does.

mike-cardwell 16y ago

Couldn't it go either way? Isn't there just as much likelihood that somebody's life would be saved by these leaks?

vaksel 16y ago

leaks happened before and people got killed, i.e when Valerie Plame was outed something like 70 of her informants were killed and in that case most people behind the leak got away scott free

waterlesscloud 16y ago
I'm not ready to toss out that number, but is there any source for it more credible than Roger Ebert? That's all I got from Google, and a bajillion references to Ebert's assertion (insert comment about quality of google search results here).
dctoedt 16y ago
> when Valerie Plame was outed something like 70 of her informants were killed The massive leak is certainly likely to be damaging, but the Plame citation seems unwarranted: A quick Google search revealed zero corroborating evidence for this assertion, which seems to have been a bald, unsupported assertion by Roger Ebert in reviewing a film on the Plame affair. See http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/11/i_bet_youre_wrong_roger_ebert.html http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/11/i_bet_youre_wron...

jrockway 16y ago

Freedom is worth dying for.

nano81 16y ago
Easy to say when you're not the one at risk of dying.
- jrockway 16y ago
  "If you don't want someone to kill you for something you're doing, maybe you shouldn't be doing it."

danbmil99 16y ago

I think the issue is that future informants, such as this Chinese guy, are going to simply assume that anything they say to anyone in the USA is potentially going to get leaked. Therefore intelligence will dry up, making the US weaker. I suspect both Wikileaks and most of those doing the leaking are of the opinion that a crippled US intelligence force, and corresponding limitation of the USA operating in the international sphere, is net net a good thing.

electromagnetic 16y ago

So the Chinese managed to infiltrate Google's systems to get information on dissidents, but they can't infiltrate US government systems (like Wikileaks did) while the US government is still passing virtually all its software contracts off to Microsoft - you know, the least secure OS out there. Please, you're tech savvy, actually fucking think. If Wikileaks did it, a government with thousands of trained operatives in espionage were doing this four fucking decades ago. Wikileaks just illustrates how easy this information is to get. If we know our governments counter-espionage is this bad, at least we know our people are already in danger. Taking down wikileaks simply leaves everyone with a false sense of security. I would put thousands of dollars on the fact the Chinese already know everything about the informant in the politburo that the US government does. At least now the general public and the US government believes he may be in danger. You're moronic if you think a US spy in China is, in any form or bastardized definition of the word, safe. Hiding in a lions den is always dangerous... even if they're not eating you right this second.

napierzaza 16y ago

Aren't these diplomatic communications? Not tactical military ones?