Justice Department Report Notes Defense Department Sucks At Protecting Whistle Blowers

from the interesting-timing... dept

As large segments of the US government go ballistic over the Wikileaks issue -- potentially caused by a military whistleblower -- is it any surprise to find out that the government is admitting it sucks at protecting whistleblowers? The Justice Department has put out a report saying that the Defense Department has pretty much failed in its effort to protect whistleblowers in the military. The report also found that the military has also seen nearly double the amount of "retaliations" for whisleblowing as it had in the past.

Of course, what's most interesting about this is that this is the sort of thing that leads to situations like Wikileaks. If the Defense Department can't protect whistleblowers who go through the official process to report problems, those whistleblowers are going to go to third parties... like Wikileaks.

Filed Under: defense department, justice department, whistleblowers, wikileaks

Operation Payback And Wikileaks Show The Battle Lines Are About Distributed & Open vs. Centralized & Closed

from the the-soul-of-the-internet dept

Back in October, I wrote a thought-piece on how "the revolution will be distributed," comparing Wikileaks to Anonymous' "Operation Payback" (whose tactics I disagree with). I noted that the two were very different, and were focused on very different issues, but that both were essentially about distributed and open systems taking on systems that were centralized and closed -- and that the folks in those centralized and closed systems didn't seem to understand this. Thus, all of their reactions did little to fix the challenges they were facing.

It seems that my comparison of the two operations was a bit more prophetic than I expected. In the wake of the latest Wikileaks saga, Operation Payback is getting attention for pointing its DDoS takedown efforts on Visa and MasterCard for their decision to disallow any payments to Wikileaks via their cards.

I still disagree with the tactics of Operation Payback -- which I fear will be counterproductive and could lead many people to think this is all about some "rowdy kids" rather than people with a serious agenda. However, it is rather telling how much attention they're getting. The folks behind Operation Payback point out that they're not affiliated with Wikileaks, but:

We fight for the same reasons. We want transparency and we counter censorship. The attempts to silence WikiLeaks are long strides closer to a world where we can not say what we think and are unable to express our opinions and ideas.

Again, I'm struck by the simple split many have here: it really is an argument between those who believe in distributed and open vs. centralized and closed -- and I'm still not sure if the folks supporting centralized and closed even realize this. Their response, to date, has been to act as if they're fighting a centralized system. They focus on things like Wikileaks' domain and its founder -- as if that's the issue. They target the centralized pieces. And even if you make the argument that Wikileaks needs Julian Assange to stay together, if it were to shut down, it wouldn't take long for a ton of other, similar offerings to spring up in its place. And, they would probably be even more effective (and potentially more damaging).

While I don't necessarily like "war" analogies, what we're seeing is very much a battle between the way people want to see information flow, and one side seems to be still fighting the last war.

Filed Under: anonymous, centralized, closed, distributed, open, operation payback, wikileaks
Companies: wikileaks

Wikileaks Payment Company Plans To Sue Visa & Mastercard Over Cutoff

from the priceless dept

With Visa and Mastercard refusing to take payments for Wikileaks, the company that was providing payment services to Wikileaks, Datacell, has announced plans to sue both credit card companies to try to get them to go back to accepting payments. There's no indication of exactly what law Datacell thinks these firms broke. Unless there are more details, this does sound like a bunch of shouting in the wind. As much as I disagree with Visa and MasterCards' decisions to cut off Wikileaks, they are private companies and can refuse service to anyone, no matter how petty it makes them look.

Filed Under: payments, wikileaks
Companies: datacell, mastercard, visa, wikileaks

Imagine If The NY Times Had Ignored Wikileaks Cables

from the how-would-that-have-looked dept

Yesterday, Senator Joe Lieberman said that the NY Times should be "investigated" for publishing articles with some content from the State Department's leaked cables. In response,one of the reporters, who worked on the articles about the Wikileaks release, David Sanger, points out the obvious: how would it have looked if the NY Times ignored the story:

"The Times knew that this material was going to be out there anyway. We didn't get the initial leak," he says. "If we had done nothing — if we had ignored it -- I think it would have looked strange. I think that also would have been irresponsible. It is the responsibility of American journalism, back to the founding of this country, to get out and try to grapple with the hardest issues of the day and to do it independently of the government."

Sanger also notes that the role of reporting in such cases is to try to put that information in context:

"We had to explain how this changed America's position in the world," he says. "Just as in the publication of the Pentagon Papers decades ago, when we had to explain how those documents, which also leaked, enabled us to understand very differently a war that America was in very deeply."

This is an important point, though I think he overplays how much people actually relied on the NY Times reporting for such info. There are some folks out there who say that "Wikileaks isn't journalism" but I agree with Mathew Ingram that Wikileaks is absolutely a media entity. It's just that, as with other areas of other industries, the roles may be shifting. Wikileaks gets data out there and then anyone can help add the context. That seems a lot more valuable than the traditional gatekeeper system where we only get to hear what the gatekeepers want us to hear.

Either way, having the NY Times ignore the story because Senator Lieberman doesn't like it would have looked a hell of a lot more questionable than it doing its job as a part of the press and actually reporting on the info that's out there.

Filed Under: journalism, wikileaks
Companies: ny times, wikileaks

Want To Know Why Visa & Mastercard Cut Off Wikileaks? Because Its Latest Leak Was About Them...

from the everywhere-you-want-to-be dept

Visa's slogan used to be "Everywhere you want to be," but apparently one place it did not want to be was on Wikileaks. We've already covered how both Visa and MasterCard cut off Wikileaks quite quickly, with MasterCard even going so far as to claim that it did so because of illegal activity by Wikileaks -- despite no charges or convictions for any actual illegal activity.

Just a day later, it seems, we may have some new insight into why this is. Chris Rhodes was the first of a bunch of you to send over the news that the latest cable leak shows that US diplomats worked hard on Visa and MasterCard's behalf in Russia, where the Russian government was working on a new national payment card system, that would likely deprive Visa and MasterCard of transaction fees in Russia. Convenient timing.

Filed Under: russia, wikileaks
Companies: mastercard, visa, wikileaks

How Political Pundits Get Confused When They Don't Understand That Wikileaks Is Distributed

from the good-luck-there dept

We've mentioned Marc Thiessen's rather hilariously clueless position on Wikileaks a few times in the past. He's the former Bush speech writer, who has advocated "shutting down" Wikileaks and was reasonably mocked for the cluelessness of that statement. He's also advocated using the US military to hunt down Julian Assange. His latest is a response to those who mocked his idea of shutting down Wikileaks. He claims that he's absolutely sure it's possible. His reasoning? The whole Stuxnet worm thing:

Some say attacking WikiLeaks would be fruitless. Really? In the past year, the Iranian nuclear system has been crippled by a computer worm called "Stuxnet," which has attacked Iran's industrial systems and the personal computers of Iranian nuclear scientists. To this day, no one has traced the origin of the worm. Imagine the impact on WikiLeaks's ability to distribute additional classified information if its systems were suddenly and mysteriously infected by a worm that would fry the computer of anyone who downloaded the documents. WikiLeaks would probably have very few future visitors to its Web site.

Ah, cluelessness in its pure, distilled form. This is why we noted a few weeks back how the political class doesn't seem to understand the difference between centralized systems and distributed systems. It's demonstrated simply in this one paragraph that seems to assume that Wikileaks is centralized around its website. Frankly, I don't know if I've ever even gone to the Wikileaks website directly. The website is somewhat meaningless for what Wikileaks is doing.

Filed Under: distributed, marc thiessen, wikileaks
Companies: wikileaks

State Department, Once Again, Asks Wikileaks To 'Return' Leaked Cables

from the that's-not-how-digital-works dept

Earlier this year, we all had a good laugh over the demand from the Pentagon that Wikileaks "return" the leaked documents it held. Lots of people pointed out that they were digital copies. You don't "return" stuff that's digital. All this demand did was make the Pentagon look totally clueless about how digital information works. It looks like the PR geniuses at the State Department have decided to do the same thing. They've put out a demand that Wikileaks "return" the remaining diplomatic cables in its possession.

Once again, this just makes the State Department look clueless, out of date and confused about the internet. First of all, you don't "return" digital documents. But, more importantly, Wikileaks has already shown that it has no intention of doing any such thing -- and making such a request just looks silly by the State Department. It's foot stamping rather than doing anything productive. Given the State Department's ridiculous PR over this whole Wikileaks thing, is it really any wonder why those old attempts by the US government to hire PR people to convince the people we were invading that it was for their own good turned out so disastrously bad?

Filed Under: digital, documents, state department, wikileaks
Companies: wikileaks

So WikiLeaks Is Evil For Releasing Documents... But DynCorp Gets A Pass For Pimping Young Boys To Afghan Cops?

from the wtf dept

One refrain we keep hearing against Wikileaks is that the cable releases aren't really "whistleblowing," because they're not really revealing anything. However, it seems like each day there's another big revelation of rather horrible things being done (and covered up) by the US government. The latest, pointed out by Boing Boing, involves a report from a cable that US-based private security contractor DynCorp, who was hired by the US to train Afghani police, was apparently supplying drugs and young boys for a sort of sex party.

The details are horrifying. The Afghani interior minister apparently went to US officials to warn them that reporters were sniffing around this story, and urged them to try to kill the story. He specifically warned that this would look bad if the connection to DynCorp was made clear (he called them "foreign mentors"). Apparently, US diplomats told him not to worry, and the eventual story was in fact watered down greatly (until now, of course) calling the whole thing a "tribal dance," rather than a party where young boys wear "scanty women's clothes" and "dance seductively" before being "auctioned off to the highest bidder" for sex.

Oh, did we mention that DynCorp makes $2 billion per year -- 95% of which comes from American taxpayers.

And US government officials are declaring Wikileaks as an organization to shun and not to work with? What about DynCorp? Are their DNS providers pulling the plug? Are their banks shutting down their accounts? Are they being denounced by Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman? No? Why the hell not?

Filed Under: afghanistan, wikileaks
Companies: dyncorp, wikileaks

Columbia University Tells Students Not To Ignore Wikileaks

from the good-for-them dept

Columbia University got some attention last week for telling students in its School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) that the Career Services office had heard from an alum in the State Department suggesting that students who hoped to work for the State Department should avoid discussing the Wikileaks cable leaks publicly. As we noted, this seemed ridiculous. The folks who are most interested in international diplomacy are the folks who are most likely to be discussing this very issue. Thankfully, the University has apparently realized how bad this looks and has sent out a second letter saying that it supports free speech and open discussion and encourages people to freely discuss whatever it is they want:

Freedom of information and expression is a core value of our institution. Thus, SIPA's position is that students have a right to discuss and debate any information in the public arena that they deem relevant to their studies or to their roles as global citizens, and to do so without fear of adverse consequences. The WikiLeaks documents are accessible to SIPA students (and everyone else) from a wide variety of respected sources, as are multiple means of discussion and debate both in and outside of the classroom.

The Wired article linked above also notes that a professor in the program, Gary Sick, who has been a noted critic of Wikileaks, was an even bigger critic of the original email that was sent out:

"If anyone is a master's student in international relations and they haven't heard of WikiLeaks and gone looking for the documents that relate to their area of study, then they don't deserve to be a graduate student in international relations."

He apparently also told Wired that asking students to ignore the whole thing was "absurd." If only the actual folks in the federal government viewed things the same way.

Filed Under: columbia, free speech, wikileaks
Companies: wikileaks

Leaked State Department Cable Shows 'Behind The Scenes' US Embassy Involvement In Swedish Copyright Issues

from the no-surprise-there dept

It's long been common knowledge that US diplomats have had a heavy hand in other country's copyright laws but, with the Wikileaks release of State Department cables, we're finally seeing some actually confirmation of that. We've already covered the US's involvement in Spain's proposed copyright changes and now a Swedish television station claims to have a cable (not yet released by Wikileaks) that shows heavy "behind the scenes" involvement by the US Embassy in Swedish copyright law. The key points are that the US diplomat admits that public perception is (quite accurately) that the raid and subsequent trial of The Pirate Bay was due to pressure from the US government and that public perception was in favor of The Pirate Bay and against the US government's position on copyright law. Thus, "this delicate situation made it difficult, if not counter-productive, for the Embassy to play a public role on IPR issues. Behind the scenes, the Embassy has worked well with all stakeholders."

Why do I get the feeling that "all stakeholders" seemed to leave out the public and actual content consumers who were (as stated) very much against the US government's position on copyright laws. However, the cable also lays out six specific items that the US Embassy hoped the Swedish government would follow through on with regards to copyright law... and apparently five of the six have since been implemented. So despite the public being very much against these ideas, the US government (at the urging of the US entertainment industry) directly meddled in Swedish copyright policy.

Filed Under: copyright, sweden, the pirate bay, us embassy, wikileaks
Companies: the pirate bay, wikileaks