Julian Assange (Wikileaks) Arrested In London

[Sionnach Glic]

Tyyr, that approach is actually a pretty damn good one. Wikileaks and the people behind it are, quite simply, unstoppable. Take down the site, another one will spring up. Kill/disappear/arrest the people running it, more will just step up. Much like the War On Terror or Drugs, this isn't a problem that can be solved by just hitting it and expecting it to stop.

No, the best way to stop them is as Tyyr said - discredit them. Feed them crap that's false, then reveal it to be so. And feed them so much of it of varying levels of plausability that they can't tell what's true and what's not. Eventually, Wikileaks would end up being seen as a never ending stream of nonsese, with just a few die-hard loons insisting that what they release is the truth.

[colmquinn]

So basically, someone sees a secret aircraft in the 50 - 60's - u fill em full of ideas of aliens and their flying saucers so the majority of people stop believing in unknown things zooming around the skies and your top secret aircraft go un-noticed. Repeat same procedure for wikileaks, it worked before so i'm sure it'll work again

[SolkaTruesilver]

So basically, someone sees a secret aircraft in the 50 - 60's - u fill em full of ideas of aliens and their flying saucers so the majority of people stop believing in unknown things zooming around the skies and your top secret aircraft go un-noticed. Repeat same procedure for wikileaks, it worked before so i'm sure it'll work again

Hmm.. how about 2 birds with one stone?

Instead of going the stupid crap about Aliens, do it about the Muslim's Mahdi. Like, the muslim who is supposed to come back to life and lead the Muslims against the infidels.

Feed them false information about the US being on his trail, yet he is evading them at every turn, or something like that. Act like the US are trying HARD to repress that information. Some muslims are gonna go batshit crazy about this, and it might actually divert their ideological objectives and might actually divide them. Not only that stupid crap will discredit Assange, it might also create strife against the islamist fringe by reporting weird and contradicting stuff about him.

[Deepcrush]

Personally the "someone else will take their place" argument always seemed weak to me.

Someone takes his place - take them out.

Someone takes that person's place - take them out.

And so on. Eventually, no one will want the job. Same goes for dictators.

Just my observation.

The thing is it does not even have to be someone in this case, nothing stops a guy from just pasting a bunch of this crap up on a message board and letting it run from there. I have no problem with taking the guy out. I just don't think it stops the information outflow. You want to do that you need to change the culture that pervades the US government regarding leaking documents.

Kill him. Don't kill him. I don't think that matters nearly as much as finding and making examples of anyone and everyone who leaks any classified information and doing so publicly.

Close the message board... problem solved. Controlling the internet is a hell of a lot easier then controlling people.

[Deepcrush]

Tyyr, that approach is actually a pretty damn good one. Wikileaks and the people behind it are, quite simply, unstoppable. Take down the site, another one will spring up. Kill/disappear/arrest the people running it, more will just step up. Much like the War On Terror or Drugs, this isn't a problem that can be solved by just hitting it and expecting it to stop.

No, the best way to stop them is as Tyyr said - discredit them. Feed them crap that's false, then reveal it to be so. And feed them so much of it of varying levels of plausability that they can't tell what's true and what's not. Eventually, Wikileaks would end up being seen as a never ending stream of nonsese, with just a few die-hard loons insisting that what they release is the truth.

The war on terror... attacks DROPPED against US targets after we exterminated camps in northern Africa and south eastern Europe. The war on Drugs, imports DROPPED after the USCG and USBP were given free fire orders against drug runners.

The problems with the Wars against Terror and Drugs is that we aren't really fighting to win. Much like that little mess-up we picked up from the French in southeast Asia, we're just there to say we're there. You want to win a war then you have to go all out, until then its all just going to drag out.

[Atekimogus]

The information risks the safety of the free world and as far as I know that's all the reason we need to string him up.

Not that I disagree...but "free world"......*chuckle*, isn't the term a bit outdated or am I just a bit to cynical? Sure, there is always some place even worse,...nevertheless.......

[Deepcrush]

Not that I disagree...but "free world"......*chuckle*, isn't the term a bit outdated or am I just a bit to cynical? Sure, there is always some place even worse,...nevertheless.......

When the day comes that someone is more cynical then me... its time for you to rethink your life.

[Tyyr]

Good lord... Only someone pampered by life in the West could actually look at our lives and scoff at the idea of freedom. You have no idea what actual oppression is.

And from the WSJ, a bit about Assange's real motivations.

Whatever else WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has accomplished, he's ended the era of innocent optimism about the Web. As wiki innovator Larry Sanger put it in a message to WikiLeaks, "Speaking as Wikipedia's co-founder, I consider you enemies of the U.S.-not just the government, but the people."

The irony is that WikiLeaks' use of technology to post confidential U.S. government documents will certainly result in a less free flow of information. The outrage is that this is Mr. Assange's express intention.

This batch includes 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables, the kind of confidential assessments diplomats have written since the era of wax seals. These include Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah urging the U.S. to end Iran's nuclear ambitions-to "cut the head off the snake." This alignment with the Israeli-U.S. position is not for public consumption in the Arab world, which is why leaks will curtail honest discussions.

Leaks will also restrict information flows within the U.S. A major cause of the 9/11 intelligence failures was that agencies were barred from sharing information. Since then, intelligence data have been shared more widely. The Obama administration now plans to tighten information flows, which could limit leaks but would be a step back to the pre-9/11 period.

Mr. Assange is misunderstood in the media and among digirati as an advocate of transparency. Instead, this battening down of the information hatches by the U.S. is precisely his goal. The reason he launched WikiLeaks is not that he's a whistleblower-there's no wrongdoing inherent in diplomatic cables-but because he hopes to hobble the U.S., which according to his underreported philosophy can best be done if officials lose access to a free flow of information.

In 2006, Mr. Assange wrote a pair of essays, "State and Terrorist Conspiracies" and "Conspiracy as Governance." He sees the U.S. as an authoritarian conspiracy. "To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed," he writes. "Conspiracies take information about the world in which they operate," he writes, and "pass it around the conspirators and then act on the result."

His central plan is that leaks will restrict the flow of information among officials-"conspirators" in his view-making government less effective. Or, as Mr. Assange puts it, "We can marginalize a conspiracy's ability to act by decreasing total conspiratorial power until it is no longer able to understand, and hence respond effectively to its environment. . . . An authoritarian conspiracy that cannot think efficiently cannot act to preserve itself."

Berkeley blogger Aaron Bady last week posted a useful translation of these essays. He explains Mr. Assange's view this way: "While an organization structured by direct and open lines of communication will be much more vulnerable to outside penetration, the more opaque it becomes to itself (as a defense against the outside gaze), the less able it will be to 'think' as a system, to communicate with itself." Mr. Assange's idea is that with enough leaks, "the security state will then try to shrink its computational network in response, thereby making itself dumber and slower and smaller."

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange hopes to hobble the U.S. government. Or as Mr. Assange told Time magazine last week, "It is not our goal to achieve a more transparent society; it's our goal to achieve a more just society." If leaks cause U.S. officials to "lock down internally and to balkanize," they will "cease to be as efficient as they were."

This worldview has precedent. Ted Kaczynski, another math-obsessed anarchist, sent bombs through the mail for almost 20 years, killing three people and injuring 23. He offered to stop in 1995 if media outlets published his Unabomber Manifesto. The 35,000-word essay, "Industrial Society and Its Future," objected to the "industrial-technological system" that causes people "to behave in ways that are increasingly remote from the natural pattern of human behavior." He's serving a life sentence for murder.

Mr. Assange doesn't mail bombs, but his actions have life-threatening consequences. Consider the case of a 75-year-old dentist in Los Angeles, Hossein Vahedi. According to one of the confidential cables released by WikiLeaks, Dr. Vahedi, a U.S. citizen, returned to Iran in 2008 to visit his parents' graves. Authorities confiscated his passport because his sons worked as concert promoters for Persian pop singers in the U.S. who had criticized the theocracy.

The cable reported that Dr. Vahedi decided to escape by horseback over the mountains of western Iran and into Turkey. He trained by hiking the hills above Tehran. He took extra heart medication. But when he fell off his horse, he was injured and nearly froze. When he made it to Turkey, the U.S. Embassy intervened to stop him being sent back to Iran.

"This is very bad for my family," Dr. Vahedi told the New York Daily News on being told about the leak of the cable naming him and describing his exploits. Tehran has a new excuse to target his relatives in Iran. "How could this be printed?"

Excellent question. It's hard being collateral damage in the world of WikiLeaks.

[Sonic Glitch]

Good lord... Only someone pampered by life in the West could actually look at our lives and scoff at the idea of freedom. You have no idea what actual oppression is.

And from the WSJ, a bit about Assange's real motivations.

Whatever else WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has accomplished, he's ended the era of innocent optimism about the Web. As wiki innovator Larry Sanger put it in a message to WikiLeaks, "Speaking as Wikipedia's co-founder, I consider you enemies of the U.S.-not just the government, but the people."

The irony is that WikiLeaks' use of technology to post confidential U.S. government documents will certainly result in a less free flow of information. The outrage is that this is Mr. Assange's express intention.

This batch includes 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables, the kind of confidential assessments diplomats have written since the era of wax seals. These include Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah urging the U.S. to end Iran's nuclear ambitions-to "cut the head off the snake." This alignment with the Israeli-U.S. position is not for public consumption in the Arab world, which is why leaks will curtail honest discussions.

Leaks will also restrict information flows within the U.S. A major cause of the 9/11 intelligence failures was that agencies were barred from sharing information. Since then, intelligence data have been shared more widely. The Obama administration now plans to tighten information flows, which could limit leaks but would be a step back to the pre-9/11 period.

Mr. Assange is misunderstood in the media and among digirati as an advocate of transparency. Instead, this battening down of the information hatches by the U.S. is precisely his goal. The reason he launched WikiLeaks is not that he's a whistleblower-there's no wrongdoing inherent in diplomatic cables-but because he hopes to hobble the U.S., which according to his underreported philosophy can best be done if officials lose access to a free flow of information.

In 2006, Mr. Assange wrote a pair of essays, "State and Terrorist Conspiracies" and "Conspiracy as Governance." He sees the U.S. as an authoritarian conspiracy. "To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed," he writes. "Conspiracies take information about the world in which they operate," he writes, and "pass it around the conspirators and then act on the result."

His central plan is that leaks will restrict the flow of information among officials-"conspirators" in his view-making government less effective. Or, as Mr. Assange puts it, "We can marginalize a conspiracy's ability to act by decreasing total conspiratorial power until it is no longer able to understand, and hence respond effectively to its environment. . . . An authoritarian conspiracy that cannot think efficiently cannot act to preserve itself."

Berkeley blogger Aaron Bady last week posted a useful translation of these essays. He explains Mr. Assange's view this way: "While an organization structured by direct and open lines of communication will be much more vulnerable to outside penetration, the more opaque it becomes to itself (as a defense against the outside gaze), the less able it will be to 'think' as a system, to communicate with itself." Mr. Assange's idea is that with enough leaks, "the security state will then try to shrink its computational network in response, thereby making itself dumber and slower and smaller."

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange hopes to hobble the U.S. government. Or as Mr. Assange told Time magazine last week, "It is not our goal to achieve a more transparent society; it's our goal to achieve a more just society." If leaks cause U.S. officials to "lock down internally and to balkanize," they will "cease to be as efficient as they were."

This worldview has precedent. Ted Kaczynski, another math-obsessed anarchist, sent bombs through the mail for almost 20 years, killing three people and injuring 23. He offered to stop in 1995 if media outlets published his Unabomber Manifesto. The 35,000-word essay, "Industrial Society and Its Future," objected to the "industrial-technological system" that causes people "to behave in ways that are increasingly remote from the natural pattern of human behavior." He's serving a life sentence for murder.

Mr. Assange doesn't mail bombs, but his actions have life-threatening consequences. Consider the case of a 75-year-old dentist in Los Angeles, Hossein Vahedi. According to one of the confidential cables released by WikiLeaks, Dr. Vahedi, a U.S. citizen, returned to Iran in 2008 to visit his parents' graves. Authorities confiscated his passport because his sons worked as concert promoters for Persian pop singers in the U.S. who had criticized the theocracy.

The cable reported that Dr. Vahedi decided to escape by horseback over the mountains of western Iran and into Turkey. He trained by hiking the hills above Tehran. He took extra heart medication. But when he fell off his horse, he was injured and nearly froze. When he made it to Turkey, the U.S. Embassy intervened to stop him being sent back to Iran.

"This is very bad for my family," Dr. Vahedi told the New York Daily News on being told about the leak of the cable naming him and describing his exploits. Tehran has a new excuse to target his relatives in Iran. "How could this be printed?"

Excellent question. It's hard being collateral damage in the world of WikiLeaks.

Link please?

[Mikey]

But eh, why miss a good chance to put him in jail, eh?

I've heard a lot of this type of thinking, and it makes my blood boil. Why are there so many sheep in the world who assume the guy is being falsely accused simply because he's loud/a muckraker/all of the above?

#1 - He's not facing charges filed by the U.S., which would be the most likely suspect for a set-up.

#2 - the guy is, by definition of what he does, a proven asshat who cares nothing for the value of human life other than his own but cares very much for his own self-gratification. Why is it hard to believe that he could be guilty of the crimes of which he's accused?

[Atekimogus]

But eh, why miss a good chance to put him in jail, eh?

I've heard a lot of this type of thinking, and it makes my blood boil. Why are there so many sheep in the world who assume the guy is being falsely accused simply because he's loud/a muckraker/all of the above?

Well you must admit that the timing of the accusation and charges against him seem remarkable convinient to discredit him. Is he guilty? I don't know, that is for the judges to decide.

#1 - He's not facing charges filed by the U.S., which would be the most likely suspect for a set-up.

Well don't make yourselfer smaller than you are. You are influentiel enough to give other nations a friendly nudge in the right direction and smart enough not to get your hands dirty yourself when not necessary.

#2 - the guy is, by definition of what he does, a proven asshat who cares nothing for the value of human life other than his own but cares very much for his own self-gratification. Why is it hard to believe that he could be guilty of the crimes of which he's accused?

My personal guess is that he did it. But what are those charges anyway? The spectrum in the various media, tv, newspaper etc. range from rape in the classical sense, to sex without condom, broken condom and sex by surprise (heard on FOX news...no idea how I am supposed to picture that:lol: ).
So yes, he probably did it but I imagine it is far less dramatic than it sounds and is probably morally on the same level as certain presidents enjoying certain forms of relaxations in their office. (Again, that is just my guess and I am prepared to be proven wrong, as said this is for the judges to decide, I don't have all the facts) In both instances I wouldn't care to much by it, seeing as a relaxed president was imho the last really good one you had .

[SolkaTruesilver]

#1 - He's not facing charges filed by the U.S., which would be the most likely suspect for a set-up.

Well don't make yourselfer smaller than you are. You are influentiel enough to give other nations a friendly nudge in the right direction and smart enough not to get your hands dirty yourself when not necessary.

Point in case: Switzerland arresting the movie producer who sodomized the girl, like, 14 years ago.

[Tyyr]

Point in case: Switzerland arresting the movie producer who sodomized the girl, like, 14 years ago.

Except that we did get our hands dirty, Polanski was still wanted in the US, and Polanski screwed up and went to a country with an extradition treaty with the US. So... yeah, not really anything like you're claiming at all.

The "Sex by Surprise," thing is his lawyer's defense and I'm not really sure how sex by surprise is different from rape. Do you have to yell, "SURPRISE!" first?

[SolkaTruesilver]

Point in case: Switzerland arresting the movie producer who sodomized the girl, like, 14 years ago.

Except that we did get our hands dirty, Polanski was still wanted in the US, and Polanski screwed up and went to a country with an extradition treaty with the US. So... yeah, not really anything like you're claiming at all.

The "Sex by Surprise," thing is his lawyer's defense and I'm not really sure how sex by surprise is different from rape. Do you have to yell, "SURPRISE!" first?

But said country never arrested Polanski before you actually started pressuring Switzerland about their shady banking system. You effectively pressured a sovereign nation to arrest somebody for you and send them over.

I guess it's quite different right now, you might be right, as it would mean the US have pressured another country to actually make up/accept to prosecute allegedly shady charges against the man. It's a lot more influence, but then again, I doubt it's outside the US's power reach, specially with scandinavian countries.

[Mikey]

The problem with the Polanski analogy is... we don't have him.

As to the idea of the U.S. somehow using covert influence to force another sovereign nation into inventing fraudulent charges against Assange: that's a pretty big leap of faith there. Before you take that from "wild thought experiment" to "I could actually believe this," I'd hope you'd provide some evidence or even precedent.