Sometimes public release of secret documents serves a useful purpose. But I'd be more impressed with WikiLeaks if it would also obtain and release secret documents from the Taliban, al Quaeda, etc. Except that would probably result in Julian Assange having his head cut off, wouldn't it -- something he likely won't admit he needn't worry about with the Pentagon.
He's Australian, and the Australian army is in Afghanistan, so he could be charged with treason. Apparently they don't have capital punishment for treason in Australian, but life imprisonment still seems like a deterrent to me.
There's been some commentary in Australia about him one day being charged for treason, for endangering the lives of Australian defence force personnel.
In my non-expert, poorly formed, and probably soon-to-be-corrected opinion, this is a long bow to draw. Currently, the Taliban are actively trying to kill Australian soldiers. I'm not sure how you could endanger their lives further without releasing operational plans or secrets giving information about the future, not about public events of the past. The laws seem to be about collaboration with the enemy, which is not what he is doing.
I also am ill-informed on this topic, but i have heard that the Afghanistan leaks included the names of Taliban informers, which would put them in danger, and make it harder to recruit informers in the future. That would seemingly jeopardize Australian soldiers, and could be characterized as collaboration with the enemy.
> I don't think the Taliban have any secret documents to be released.
It was reported a couple of years ago that "Taliban maps, manuals and propaganda have been discovered at training camps in Pakistan showing the sophistication of the insurgent's operations in the country's tribal areas." See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/3441....
The article does not mention whether those were in paper format or digital. It mentioned student notes so I would think it to be more likely that they were in the former format. As such, except for actually posting the documents, I can not see how they can be leaked.
That is very different from the download and send, which protects anonymity much more I would think perhaps, as well as being more convenient.
To address the point of the parent, I do not think Wikileaks chooses which documents to leaks. It is more a supply thing rather than someone sitting on a pile of documents sifting through them to see which serves their own political agenda if they were leaked.
Though I hardly know anything of wikileaks, the wiki part in the leaks sort of suggests that it is kind of like wikipeia, so that anyone can leak whatever they want straight away I guess without going through some sort of filtering system.
Though I hardly know anything of wikileaks, the wiki part in the leaks sort of suggests that it is kind of like wikipeia, so that anyone can leak whatever they want straight away I guess without going through some sort of filtering system.
This is not how WikiLeaks works, though it was the original idea behind it and the source of the name. Today all submitted documents go through a series of reviewers, with Julian Assange ultimately having the final say on what gets published.
>That’s not all, either; Wikileaks claims that its funding has been blocked because it has been placed on watchlists for both the U.S. and Australian governments. It can no longer accept donations through Moneybookers, the site that collected the organization’s donations. PayPal suspended Wikileaks’ account earlier this year.
This serves no useful purpose other than to pump up his ego. As much as some may dislike it there are valid reasons for having secrets and protecting them. WikiLeaks' last document dump endangered lives, what will this one do? I find the involvement of mainstream media like the NYT to be disgusting and bordering on treason.
I am not opposed to exposing abuses, but a massive dump like this isn't about exposing any specific issue. I hope it ends up being a flop like their so called 'collateral murder' video ended up being. But given the size of this leak I can't help but think there could very well be real collateral damage from it.
I'm afraid I've never looked at wikileaks until now, and right now it seems to be down, so I don't know much about it.
But can someone explain to me in what sense it's a wiki if they sit on and release documents rather than just letting anyone add anything at any time? Or is the "wiki" part of the name meaningless?
I believe that it is in no sense a public wiki any longer.
According to Wikipedia, the original Wikileaks "about" page read: "To the user, Wikileaks will look very much like Wikipedia. Anybody can post to it, anybody can edit it."
