"We have always been at war with WikiLeaks."

[Tony Scharf]

On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 2:20 AM, The Dong <dong at f2s.com> wrote:
> If they have nothing to hide, they have nothing to fear ;)
> If it's good enough for the rest of us....
>
>

Thats what really pisses me off about all of this.  The belief that we
have rights to privacy but that people working for the government
don't.

In the US, the courts have repeatedly confirmed that the government
has the right to keep certain information secret.  The citizens also
have the right to petition the government through the Freedom of
Information Act documents and information that has been previously
classified.  The process by which the wikileaks documents were
released was not the legal one, involving a guy in Iraq copying a
random selection of files to a CD-ROM drive when no one was looking
(actually, they were looking...he disguised one of the disks to look
like a Lady Gaga CD and pretended to be listening to it on headphones
while the data was copying...or so the story goes). He was granted
classified clearance as part of his job, and part of that is taking an
oath that says you wont do exactly what he did. The reason so much of
the info is mundane is he didnt even know what he was copying!  He
just grabbed as many folders as he could fit on his media.

Wikileaks, for their part, arent releasing all the cables.  They are
just releasing a few at a time after they vet them.  What their
criteria are, I dont know.  My guess is they release anything that
gets them additional press, and wont piss off any government power
that might just out and out kill them.  As far as they are concerned,
they arent doing anything illegal.  The shit storm in the media with
american politicians calling for Julian Assange's assassination is
nothing more than conservative politicians trying to grab headlines.
The exact same shit storm occurred 40 years ago when the Pentagon
Papers about the Vietnam war were revealed.  The difference there,
however, was the documents were released by the NY Times, not a group
of foreign nationals (which really nails the coffin for Bradly Manning
- it takes illegal handling of classified documents and turns it into
a charge of treason). The poiticians said the same things, the media
said the same things and ultimately the courts will say the same
thing:  Assange did nothing illegal in publishing the documents,
manning violated his oath and will spend a long time in jail, and all
of this will be old news when the media and the politicians cant milk
it for anything else.

Tony