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Wired's Response to Glenn Greenwald (re:Lamo-Manning Chat Logs)

90 points by Athtar 16y ago

8ig8 16y ago
Wired: How about you just post the fucking chat logs and let the tubes decide right and wrong. Edit (added): Wired just sounds like that a-hole kid on the playground that you just want to punch in the freakin' nose.
- fuzzmeister 16y ago
  "Our position has been and remains that the logs include sensitive personal information with no bearing on Wikileaks, and it would serve no purpose to publish them at this time." How can the "tubes" decide right and wrong in a situation like this? Once the chat logs on the internet, it's not like the internet can collectively decide that Wired was right, that the remaining logs are personal and meaningless, and erase them forever.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - 8ig8 16y ago
    I guess it comes down to he said, she said. And by nothing more than gut, Wired seems like they need to prove it's a matter of privacy. It just feels fishy. I wish they would do more to dispel the feeling. Wikileaks feels open. Wired feels closed. Wikileaks feels like the future. Wired feels like the past. Personal feelings, of course. My gut is my gut and they have every right not to do anything more. I believe there's probably others that feel the same way, so that's the reason for my strongly worded comment. But you're absolutely right. Nothing can be erased. So a cool mind gets your point.
  - robterrell 16y ago
    But whose sensitive personal information is it? BradAss87 or Lamo's? Does it shed light on why BradAss87 would admit to treason to some guy on IM? Does the sensitive personal information identify Manning as BradAss87? Also: will Manning's lawyer get to see the entirety of the logs? I agree that you can't put the genie back in the bottle, but a enormous genie has already escaped.
DanI-S 16y ago
This is nothing more than a despicable smear campaign based on the oldest misdirection in the book: Shoot the messenger. Sounds familiar...
grandalf 16y ago
Greenwald's point is not so much that Wired has committed journalistic errors, but that its decision not to disclose the rest of the chat logs leaves aspects of the case open to wild conjecture. So Greenwald, for emphasis, goes on to do some wild conjecture of his own. Clearly the people at Wired failed to recognize the irony of this and quote Greenwald extensively in their refutations, something Assange cannot do since the full logs have not been released.
- btmorex 16y ago
  If your point isn't that "Wired has committed journalistic errors", you probably shouldn't name your piece "The worsening journalistic disgrace at Wired". But really, that's exactly what Greenwald was saying and I think this response pretty much refutes it.
  - grandalf 16y ago
    There are allegations against Assange that he can't refute w/o the chat logs. That's my point. Wired got up in arms after a few accusations it didn't like.
    - cma 16y ago
      They clearly stated that Lamo's recent allegations were included in the chat logs, and that the NYT piece that Glenn quoted got that wrong.
      - grandalf 16y ago
        How do we know this w/o the full text of the logs?
        tptacek 16y ago
        Easy. You take the logs that Wired did release, and the information that Greenwald claims wasn't in there that was documented outside Wired, and you see if they're in there. Wired just went on the record saying they are. Go refute the claim.
jacquesm 16y ago
We need more people like Glenn Greenwald and fewer talking heads spewing talking points.
- btmorex 16y ago
  What specifically separates Glenn Greenwald from all the other talking heads except for your own personal political view? I mean, he's pretty much the definition of a pundit.
  - Bud 16y ago
    How about having 10x the intellectual rigor, more integrity, and being right a lot more often? Oh, and having the cojones to stand up for Wikileaks, too. That takes some guts in the current political environment. Glenn's pretty impressive, most of the time. If he proves to have called this one wrong, so be it. But he sure isn't on the same level as your average hack pundit.
    - brown9-2 16y ago
      The definition of "pundit" from Wikipedia: A pundit is someone who offers to mass-media his or her opinion or commentary on a particular subject area (most typically political analysis, the social sciences or sport) on which they are knowledgeable. Greenwald seems pretty clearly to be offering commentary on these events, and not just straight fact/story-reporting. How much you like him or find him honest doesn't change what you call what he does. You can set him apart from other "pundits" but it's hard to say he isn't commentating or offering his opinion.
      - Bud 16y ago
        What was asked was, what sets Greenwald apart from OTHER pundits? I attempted to answer that. I didn't attempt to say he's not a pundit. I happen to think he's a particularly good pundit; others might disagree. As an aside, there certainly seems to be a lot of downvoting based on disagreement in this comment thread.
  - 16y ago
lionhearted 16y ago
This sort of thing never winds up reflecting well on people involved, just getting caught up in a personal back and forth and speculating on people's motives and nonsense like that. This part seemed particularly silly to me - Greenwald emails on Christmas and when they don't respond by the 26th, he says they're acting unprofessionally - > Nonetheless, once the Times story — and our explanation — was over a week old, Greenwald sent Poulsen an e-mail inquiring about it, and giving him one day to respond to his questions. He sent that e-mail on Christmas Day. > When we didn’t meet the urgent Yuletide deadline he’d imposed on himself to publish a piece about a 10-day-old newspaper article, he wrote in his column that we “ignored the inquiries,” adding: “This is not the behavior of a journalist seeking to inform the public, but of someone eager, for whatever reasons, to hide the truth.”
- wycats 16y ago
  What part of what Wired is doing seems amateurish? I thought this response was thoughtful, well reasoned, and professional.
  - lionhearted 16y ago
    I could've phrased it better - I meant that that the whole unfolding of events generally doesn't reflect well on participants. Just getting sucked into a mudfight is bad, though their response was good. I'll do a clarity edit. For context, here's my exact edits: Before - This whole thing is coming across pretty amateurish on all sides. After - This sort of thing never winds up reflecting well on people involved, just getting caught up in a personal back and forth and speculating on people's motives and nonsense like that.
  - sitmack 16y ago
    At what point did they answer or refute Greenwald's questions about Lamo's assertion about the chat logs? Just answer the fucking question.
  - A1kmm 16y ago
    "and the principal is also embodied in the Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics" I'm not usually one to pick on spelling, but when such an egregious error is present in an article by a supposedly professional news organisation defending the professionalism of said news organisation, it is hard for it not to hurt the credibility of their entire writing, fact checking and proof-reading pipeline.
cma 16y ago
Greenwald fucked this one up. That NYT article he relied on was plain wrong, something he should have been aware of given all of his critiques of the mainstream media's handling of the case and since Wired had already put out an article saying that piece was incorrect and that the specific allegations were in the already-released logs. (Greenwald does get stuff right sometimes though: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XInz4i6AV8M&feature=player_embedded http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XInz4i6AV8M&feature=playe... )
- CopyrightTroll 16y ago
  Interesting opinion, but I do not agree with you. Would you like to try again, or - staying in context - will you just fuck the next comment up as well?
- sitmack 16y ago
  disagree, they did a point for point counter point. Doesn't bode well for Wired. What dhey didn't do is answer his direct question, "refute or affirm Lamo's assertions about the chat logs." This doesn't require releasing the logs. Wired just pulled a Lawnmower Man without using Nootropics.
winfred 16y ago
I'm not sure what to think of these articles from Salon and Wired. Greenwald did have one question, that remains unanswered as far as I know. Why did Manning contact Lamo?
wnoise 16y ago
Wired doesn't need to publish all of the logs -- just the bits that confirm some key assertions that Lamo made. The idea that they are restricted to publishing the whole thing, or nothing more than they already have is a false dichotomy.
- cma 16y ago
  Wired did publish those bits. The assertions Lamo made were about things contained in the original logs--as released by Wired. Go read them, and write back if you disagree.
- wycats 16y ago
  Actually, they're absolutely not taking the position that it's all or nothing: "That doesn’t mean we’ll never publish them, but before taking an irrevocable action that could harm an individual’s privacy, we have to weigh that person’s privacy interest against news value and relevance." The specific request that Greenwald made for partial disclosure missed the fact that the information referenced had already been released, as described by Wired: "The Times story quotes Lamo as saying that Manning described uploading his leaks to Assange via a dedicated file server, and that he communicated with Assange over encrypted chat. The story says those portions of the conversations aren’t included in the excerpts we published. "Based on that, Greenwald claims that Wired’s “concealment” of the chat logs “is actively blinding journalists and others who have been attempting to learn what Manning did and did not do.” (That’s one sentence. He goes on in that vein for quite a while.) But the Times story is incorrect, as we noted on Wired.com the day after it ran. The excerpts we published included passages referencing both the file server and the encrypted chat room." Bottom line for me: Wired's response was well-reasoned and professional, and answered the fairly wild accusations in the original Greenwald piece.
  - wnoise 16y ago
    That's one claim that Greenwald makes slightly differently: > there is also little in the released portions about Assange using an "encrypted Internet conferencing service" to talk to Manning or specially creating a "dedicated server" for Manning to use. I think that this is a minor distinction -- whether the server was specifically made for Manning, or pre-existing, and only "made available". Details like that rapidly get made up as the news passes around. However: > Lamo's claim -- that Manning told him that he physically dropped off a disk with classified information to WikiLeaks' "intermediaries" in Boston -- is nowhere to be found in the chat logs released by Poulsen. I certainly can't find this portion.
brunoqc 16y ago
> his computer hard drive was confiscated, and he no longer has has a copy That's a bit surprising. I have multiple copies (one offsite) of family pictures, code and documents. I don't think I would have only one copy of the log if I was the hacker guy.
- tptacek 16y ago
  He would have been asked if he had copies and would have been criminally liable had he lied. He's already been convicted of crimes in the past. Would you fuck around in a case like this one if you'd been in his shoes?
wycats 16y ago
As someone with journalism training, I find this argument compelling. If it was a case-study in a classroom setting, the answers would be difficult and the subject of much debate. Choosing to "redact" private parts of a document without otherwise information important to the public is a perfectly reasonable position. While it is easy to say "how do we know it's just private information unless they release it", that sort of reasoning would force journalists to release all of the information they have about any topic, even when they clearly violate the professional ethics of journalists.
- anamax 16y ago
  > that sort of reasoning would force journalists to release all of the information they have about any topic, even when they clearly violate the professional ethics of journalists. Jouornalists don't get to say "professional ethics" - you they to explain why the relevant decisions are correct, and journalists don't get to decide what's correct. Example - it may violate "professional ethics" for a journalist to not reveal that US troops are walking into an ambush, but if certain journalists don't do exactly that ....
  - cookiecaper 16y ago
    Journalists are entitled and indeed obligated to be bound to ethics just as much as the next guy. The argument that everyone is obliged to deliver to the public everything they know about everything, then we will get into problems very quickly. If you don't like someone's journalism, you are free to perform your own counter-journalism; investigate and publish your findings. There's no necessity that every journalist must publish everything they ever learn just because some guy says the journalist should. If that's how you feel journalists should behave, hire a bunch of journalists to behave that way, and perform your own journalism and do likewise.
    - CopyrightTroll 16y ago
      Correction: the journalists who uncover the information that other people are looking for are doing their job. The journalists who hide the information they find, for whatever reason, are not doing the job the customers of the paper are expecting. Journalists can do their job or not, that is correct. Ethics has nothing to do with it. You are thinking of 'fear' of exposing the truth, or 'revenge' for uncovering the truth. Journalists who cannot deal with the truth are bad journalists.
SoftwareMaven 16y ago
You don't get to the point of admitting leaking massive amounts of secret information via chat in a single step. Trust has to be built, and is built by slowly revealing more and more about ourselves: issues with significant others, problems with the neighbors, pains of serving with Don't Ask, Don't Tell, etc (I have no idea what the actual list might look like, I'm just giving examples.). These are things that are highly personal and extremely private. These are the things Wired is saying they aren't releasing right now, and I, for one, appreciate it. Releasing them would just be pandering to the masses. You can argue that Wired is withholding more than that, but I think it fails Occam's Razor. Unfortunately, the more complex the "complex" solution, the more likely it seems that people will gravitate to it: "Wired has released all the relevant pieces and is trying to protect an individual's privacy" - simple. "Wired is withholding relevant information because it is part of some conspiracy involving hackers prosecuted in the 80s" - complex (but, too be honest, who didn't love Angelina in leathers on the back of a motorcycle?).
- jdp23 16y ago
  Very well said all around.
  - spot 16y ago
    Just like Wired Magazine, he does not explain why they don't address Lamo's claims not found in the logs released so far.
chaostheory 16y ago
There's one thing missing in this response: do the non-public portions of the chat logs support the public statements that Lamo has been making or not?
yread 16y ago
It's a pity they didn't clarify some of the contradictions of Lamo's statements. It would be nice to know for example whether Manning did claim to use a dedicated server or not. And Poulsen actually confirmed he was talking to Lamo even before Manning arrest. On the other hand it is quite surprising indeed that Greenwald didn't check the basic facts about Rausch and Poulsen
ditojim 16y ago
TL;DR. Are they releasing the full logs or not?
gwern 16y ago
> The excerpts we published included passages referencing both the file server and the encrypted chat room. Interestingly, if you look at the link http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/wikileaks-conspiracy-case/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/wikileaks-conspirac... nowhere does Manning say anything like 'Assange set up an FTP server just for me which I then used for the video and cables'. What he actually says is that hypothetically speaking, one of the best ways to transmit hot stuff is through SFTP, but he immediately mentions that one could also transmit over HTTPS (plus Tor) to get stuff into the Wikileaks submission queue and discusses general considerations like senior sources getting looked at first. The only way you could read Wired's claim into that excerpt is if you made stuff up or are making a large inference based on other non-public logs. So at least with that claim, Wired is bullshitting readers.
jder 16y ago
Greenwald has posted two responses to this: http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/29/wired_1/index.html http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/29... http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/29/wired_response_1/index.html http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/29... (They seem to be returning 404s occasionally for some reason.)

90 points by Athtar 16y ago

8ig8 16y ago

Wired: How about you just post the fucking chat logs and let the tubes decide right and wrong. Edit (added): Wired just sounds like that a-hole kid on the playground that you just want to punch in the freakin' nose.

fuzzmeister 16y ago
"Our position has been and remains that the logs include sensitive personal information with no bearing on Wikileaks, and it would serve no purpose to publish them at this time." How can the "tubes" decide right and wrong in a situation like this? Once the chat logs on the internet, it's not like the internet can collectively decide that Wired was right, that the remaining logs are personal and meaningless, and erase them forever.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- 8ig8 16y ago
  I guess it comes down to he said, she said. And by nothing more than gut, Wired seems like they need to prove it's a matter of privacy. It just feels fishy. I wish they would do more to dispel the feeling. Wikileaks feels open. Wired feels closed. Wikileaks feels like the future. Wired feels like the past. Personal feelings, of course. My gut is my gut and they have every right not to do anything more. I believe there's probably others that feel the same way, so that's the reason for my strongly worded comment. But you're absolutely right. Nothing can be erased. So a cool mind gets your point.
- robterrell 16y ago
  But whose sensitive personal information is it? BradAss87 or Lamo's? Does it shed light on why BradAss87 would admit to treason to some guy on IM? Does the sensitive personal information identify Manning as BradAss87? Also: will Manning's lawyer get to see the entirety of the logs? I agree that you can't put the genie back in the bottle, but a enormous genie has already escaped.

DanI-S 16y ago

This is nothing more than a despicable smear campaign based on the oldest misdirection in the book: Shoot the messenger. Sounds familiar...

grandalf 16y ago

Greenwald's point is not so much that Wired has committed journalistic errors, but that its decision not to disclose the rest of the chat logs leaves aspects of the case open to wild conjecture. So Greenwald, for emphasis, goes on to do some wild conjecture of his own. Clearly the people at Wired failed to recognize the irony of this and quote Greenwald extensively in their refutations, something Assange cannot do since the full logs have not been released.

btmorex 16y ago
If your point isn't that "Wired has committed journalistic errors", you probably shouldn't name your piece "The worsening journalistic disgrace at Wired". But really, that's exactly what Greenwald was saying and I think this response pretty much refutes it.
- grandalf 16y ago
  There are allegations against Assange that he can't refute w/o the chat logs. That's my point. Wired got up in arms after a few accusations it didn't like.
  - cma 16y ago
    They clearly stated that Lamo's recent allegations were included in the chat logs, and that the NYT piece that Glenn quoted got that wrong.
    - grandalf 16y ago
      How do we know this w/o the full text of the logs?
      - tptacek 16y ago
        Easy. You take the logs that Wired did release, and the information that Greenwald claims wasn't in there that was documented outside Wired, and you see if they're in there. Wired just went on the record saying they are. Go refute the claim.

jacquesm 16y ago

We need more people like Glenn Greenwald and fewer talking heads spewing talking points.

btmorex 16y ago
What specifically separates Glenn Greenwald from all the other talking heads except for your own personal political view? I mean, he's pretty much the definition of a pundit.
- Bud 16y ago
  How about having 10x the intellectual rigor, more integrity, and being right a lot more often? Oh, and having the cojones to stand up for Wikileaks, too. That takes some guts in the current political environment. Glenn's pretty impressive, most of the time. If he proves to have called this one wrong, so be it. But he sure isn't on the same level as your average hack pundit.
  - brown9-2 16y ago
    The definition of "pundit" from Wikipedia: A pundit is someone who offers to mass-media his or her opinion or commentary on a particular subject area (most typically political analysis, the social sciences or sport) on which they are knowledgeable. Greenwald seems pretty clearly to be offering commentary on these events, and not just straight fact/story-reporting. How much you like him or find him honest doesn't change what you call what he does. You can set him apart from other "pundits" but it's hard to say he isn't commentating or offering his opinion.
    - Bud 16y ago
      What was asked was, what sets Greenwald apart from OTHER pundits? I attempted to answer that. I didn't attempt to say he's not a pundit. I happen to think he's a particularly good pundit; others might disagree. As an aside, there certainly seems to be a lot of downvoting based on disagreement in this comment thread.
- 16y ago

lionhearted 16y ago

This sort of thing never winds up reflecting well on people involved, just getting caught up in a personal back and forth and speculating on people's motives and nonsense like that. This part seemed particularly silly to me - Greenwald emails on Christmas and when they don't respond by the 26th, he says they're acting unprofessionally - > Nonetheless, once the Times story — and our explanation — was over a week old, Greenwald sent Poulsen an e-mail inquiring about it, and giving him one day to respond to his questions. He sent that e-mail on Christmas Day. > When we didn’t meet the urgent Yuletide deadline he’d imposed on himself to publish a piece about a 10-day-old newspaper article, he wrote in his column that we “ignored the inquiries,” adding: “This is not the behavior of a journalist seeking to inform the public, but of someone eager, for whatever reasons, to hide the truth.”

wycats 16y ago
What part of what Wired is doing seems amateurish? I thought this response was thoughtful, well reasoned, and professional.
- lionhearted 16y ago
  I could've phrased it better - I meant that that the whole unfolding of events generally doesn't reflect well on participants. Just getting sucked into a mudfight is bad, though their response was good. I'll do a clarity edit. For context, here's my exact edits: Before - This whole thing is coming across pretty amateurish on all sides. After - This sort of thing never winds up reflecting well on people involved, just getting caught up in a personal back and forth and speculating on people's motives and nonsense like that.
- sitmack 16y ago
  At what point did they answer or refute Greenwald's questions about Lamo's assertion about the chat logs? Just answer the fucking question.
- A1kmm 16y ago
  "and the principal is also embodied in the Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics" I'm not usually one to pick on spelling, but when such an egregious error is present in an article by a supposedly professional news organisation defending the professionalism of said news organisation, it is hard for it not to hurt the credibility of their entire writing, fact checking and proof-reading pipeline.

cma 16y ago

Greenwald fucked this one up. That NYT article he relied on was plain wrong, something he should have been aware of given all of his critiques of the mainstream media's handling of the case and since Wired had already put out an article saying that piece was incorrect and that the specific allegations were in the already-released logs. (Greenwald does get stuff right sometimes though: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XInz4i6AV8M&feature=player_embedded http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XInz4i6AV8M&feature=playe... )

CopyrightTroll 16y ago
Interesting opinion, but I do not agree with you. Would you like to try again, or - staying in context - will you just fuck the next comment up as well?
sitmack 16y ago
disagree, they did a point for point counter point. Doesn't bode well for Wired. What dhey didn't do is answer his direct question, "refute or affirm Lamo's assertions about the chat logs." This doesn't require releasing the logs. Wired just pulled a Lawnmower Man without using Nootropics.

winfred 16y ago

I'm not sure what to think of these articles from Salon and Wired. Greenwald did have one question, that remains unanswered as far as I know. Why did Manning contact Lamo?

wnoise 16y ago

Wired doesn't need to publish all of the logs -- just the bits that confirm some key assertions that Lamo made. The idea that they are restricted to publishing the whole thing, or nothing more than they already have is a false dichotomy.

cma 16y ago
Wired did publish those bits. The assertions Lamo made were about things contained in the original logs--as released by Wired. Go read them, and write back if you disagree.
wycats 16y ago
Actually, they're absolutely not taking the position that it's all or nothing: "That doesn’t mean we’ll never publish them, but before taking an irrevocable action that could harm an individual’s privacy, we have to weigh that person’s privacy interest against news value and relevance." The specific request that Greenwald made for partial disclosure missed the fact that the information referenced had already been released, as described by Wired: "The Times story quotes Lamo as saying that Manning described uploading his leaks to Assange via a dedicated file server, and that he communicated with Assange over encrypted chat. The story says those portions of the conversations aren’t included in the excerpts we published. "Based on that, Greenwald claims that Wired’s “concealment” of the chat logs “is actively blinding journalists and others who have been attempting to learn what Manning did and did not do.” (That’s one sentence. He goes on in that vein for quite a while.) But the Times story is incorrect, as we noted on Wired.com the day after it ran. The excerpts we published included passages referencing both the file server and the encrypted chat room." Bottom line for me: Wired's response was well-reasoned and professional, and answered the fairly wild accusations in the original Greenwald piece.
- wnoise 16y ago
  That's one claim that Greenwald makes slightly differently: > there is also little in the released portions about Assange using an "encrypted Internet conferencing service" to talk to Manning or specially creating a "dedicated server" for Manning to use. I think that this is a minor distinction -- whether the server was specifically made for Manning, or pre-existing, and only "made available". Details like that rapidly get made up as the news passes around. However: > Lamo's claim -- that Manning told him that he physically dropped off a disk with classified information to WikiLeaks' "intermediaries" in Boston -- is nowhere to be found in the chat logs released by Poulsen. I certainly can't find this portion.

brunoqc 16y ago

> his computer hard drive was confiscated, and he no longer has has a copy That's a bit surprising. I have multiple copies (one offsite) of family pictures, code and documents. I don't think I would have only one copy of the log if I was the hacker guy.

tptacek 16y ago
He would have been asked if he had copies and would have been criminally liable had he lied. He's already been convicted of crimes in the past. Would you fuck around in a case like this one if you'd been in his shoes?

wycats 16y ago

As someone with journalism training, I find this argument compelling. If it was a case-study in a classroom setting, the answers would be difficult and the subject of much debate. Choosing to "redact" private parts of a document without otherwise information important to the public is a perfectly reasonable position. While it is easy to say "how do we know it's just private information unless they release it", that sort of reasoning would force journalists to release all of the information they have about any topic, even when they clearly violate the professional ethics of journalists.

anamax 16y ago
> that sort of reasoning would force journalists to release all of the information they have about any topic, even when they clearly violate the professional ethics of journalists. Jouornalists don't get to say "professional ethics" - you they to explain why the relevant decisions are correct, and journalists don't get to decide what's correct. Example - it may violate "professional ethics" for a journalist to not reveal that US troops are walking into an ambush, but if certain journalists don't do exactly that ....
- cookiecaper 16y ago
  Journalists are entitled and indeed obligated to be bound to ethics just as much as the next guy. The argument that everyone is obliged to deliver to the public everything they know about everything, then we will get into problems very quickly. If you don't like someone's journalism, you are free to perform your own counter-journalism; investigate and publish your findings. There's no necessity that every journalist must publish everything they ever learn just because some guy says the journalist should. If that's how you feel journalists should behave, hire a bunch of journalists to behave that way, and perform your own journalism and do likewise.
  - CopyrightTroll 16y ago
    Correction: the journalists who uncover the information that other people are looking for are doing their job. The journalists who hide the information they find, for whatever reason, are not doing the job the customers of the paper are expecting. Journalists can do their job or not, that is correct. Ethics has nothing to do with it. You are thinking of 'fear' of exposing the truth, or 'revenge' for uncovering the truth. Journalists who cannot deal with the truth are bad journalists.

SoftwareMaven 16y ago

You don't get to the point of admitting leaking massive amounts of secret information via chat in a single step. Trust has to be built, and is built by slowly revealing more and more about ourselves: issues with significant others, problems with the neighbors, pains of serving with Don't Ask, Don't Tell, etc (I have no idea what the actual list might look like, I'm just giving examples.). These are things that are highly personal and extremely private. These are the things Wired is saying they aren't releasing right now, and I, for one, appreciate it. Releasing them would just be pandering to the masses. You can argue that Wired is withholding more than that, but I think it fails Occam's Razor. Unfortunately, the more complex the "complex" solution, the more likely it seems that people will gravitate to it: "Wired has released all the relevant pieces and is trying to protect an individual's privacy" - simple. "Wired is withholding relevant information because it is part of some conspiracy involving hackers prosecuted in the 80s" - complex (but, too be honest, who didn't love Angelina in leathers on the back of a motorcycle?).

jdp23 16y ago
Very well said all around.
- spot 16y ago
  Just like Wired Magazine, he does not explain why they don't address Lamo's claims not found in the logs released so far.

chaostheory 16y ago

There's one thing missing in this response: do the non-public portions of the chat logs support the public statements that Lamo has been making or not?

yread 16y ago

It's a pity they didn't clarify some of the contradictions of Lamo's statements. It would be nice to know for example whether Manning did claim to use a dedicated server or not. And Poulsen actually confirmed he was talking to Lamo even before Manning arrest. On the other hand it is quite surprising indeed that Greenwald didn't check the basic facts about Rausch and Poulsen

ditojim 16y ago

TL;DR. Are they releasing the full logs or not?

gwern 16y ago

> The excerpts we published included passages referencing both the file server and the encrypted chat room. Interestingly, if you look at the link http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/wikileaks-conspiracy-case/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/wikileaks-conspirac... nowhere does Manning say anything like 'Assange set up an FTP server just for me which I then used for the video and cables'. What he actually says is that hypothetically speaking, one of the best ways to transmit hot stuff is through SFTP, but he immediately mentions that one could also transmit over HTTPS (plus Tor) to get stuff into the Wikileaks submission queue and discusses general considerations like senior sources getting looked at first. The only way you could read Wired's claim into that excerpt is if you made stuff up or are making a large inference based on other non-public logs. So at least with that claim, Wired is bullshitting readers.

jder 16y ago

Greenwald has posted two responses to this: http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/29/wired_1/index.html http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/29... http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/29/wired_response_1/index.html http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/29... (They seem to be returning 404s occasionally for some reason.)