It seems to me that Wikileaks is disruptive to Governments in the way that Napster was disruptive to the Music Industry.
While Wikileaks may not survive in the mid term, I believe what it represents may have far reaching, long term consequences. The internet has democratised information to the point that an unhappy individual with mid level trust in an organisation can expose the organisation's "sensitive" information globally with very little effort and thought.
Before the internet an individual could expose this information, but the barriers were much higher. To be a whistle blower you could only influence people immediately near you socially. To reach higher you had to filter your information through news organisations. While there are cases of this happening, the information was still continually at risk of being censored. Would this cable information have been released if a whistle blower took it directly to the NYT, or even a collection of newspapers?
With our current online structure of Twitter, Blogs and peer file sharing it makes sensitive information immediately accessible to millions with no chance of it being censored. To me Wikileaks represents the start of something hugely disruptive to our way of life. It's not possible to scale an organisation beyond several people while maintaining complete trust in each of them. When every piece of information is at risk of being exposed, what position does this place governments in? Is it possible for the current structure of the us government with its extensive lobby groups, international secrets and security through obscurity to continue?
I think its still too hard to see how the bits will fall here, but I do think we're in for an interesting decade :)
When you comment that these cables are mundane in nature, you are assuming that you yourself are indicative of the audience as a whole. If you do not believe that millions upon millions of people will read this, you are mistaken. And many, if not the vast majority, of these readers will have previously been in the dark as to the information contained therein. So to them, this is not mundane; it's extraordinary.
Furthermore, all that we are reading right now are redacted and cherry picked summaries and analyses. Please wait for more data to be released before passing a quick, premature, unframed sigh against what is happening here.
> When you comment that these cables are mundane in nature, you are assuming that you yourself are indicative of the audience as a whole.
I don't think they're mundane -- some are quite amusing, such as the Afghan vice president trousering $52 million.
> If you do not believe that millions upon millions of people will read this, you are mistaken.
I'm sure millions will read them.
> And many, if not the vast majority, of these readers will have previously been in the dark as to the information contained therein.
It's not so much that they're in the dark about the information, it's that they have an unrealistic view of how world affairs are conducted. This might be because they're naive, or because their nationalist sentiments cause them to believe their own country acts more virtuously on the world stage than countries actually do, or whatever. Or it may just be because most people don't pay much attention to world affairs.
But for whatever reason, if someone's bubble is pricked and they later understand world affairs better, that person is more rational. And improving rationality worldwide is likely to be in the long term interest of the human species.
> So to them, this is not mundane; it's extraordinary.
Then hopefully it will cause them to update their worldview.
I don't think these are mundane at all, but I also don't think the US comes out looking very bad. There are surely going to be some relationships that are slightly damaged especially with some allies, but so far, it's nothing too bad.
Other countries on the other hand... I know this isn't hugely surprising, but it's now public that essentially everyone in the middle east is lobbying the US to attack Iran. That's got to mess up some relations there.
Also, some of the back room disses within foreign countries are probably going to screw up their domestic politics.
Very true. Only a tiny fraction of the leaks are published as of writing this and yet the information leaked so far is enough to put my country - Turkey - in political turmoil for months.
I agree, especially as these summaries are written by the NYT, which has (so far) had the least interesting and most pro-American reporting on every Wikileaks leak.
Agreed. These revelations are not so scandalous by US standards but may well lead to the collapse of governments in some other countries, for which the US will be blamed.
A global computer hacking effort: China’s Politburo directed the intrusion into Google’s computer systems in that country, a Chinese contact told the American Embassy in Beijing in January, one cable reported. The Google hacking was part of a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese government. They have broken into American government computers and those of Western allies, the Dalai Lama and American businesses since 2002, cables said.
Nothing new per-se for those that followed aurora or watch infosec, but interesting to see it all itemized together in a state cable instead of a bunch of assumptions & rumors. Look forward to seeing the details on that one.
There are _so_many_ rumors out there, no matter what was leaked in these cables, someone would have come out saying, "No news here, I knew it all along!"
So in so far as they let me know what rumors to choose to believe, they are useful.
"WikiLeaks has put at risk not only the cause of human rights but also the lives and work of these individuals."
This is ironic since one of the biggest contributing factors behind Manning allegedly leaking the documents was probably the fact that the government was kicking him out of the military for being gay. The fact that Obama literally can't even stop lying during his one sentence soundbite condemning the leak is pretty symbolic of why we need WikiLeaks in the first place.
the fact that the government was kicking him out of the military for being gay
If that is a fact, is there a source?
"An Army spokesman, Lt. Col. Eric Bloom, said Manning, who entered the Army as a private in October 2007, was demoted last month for an assault. He said he was not facing early discharge."
I had no idea that the wikileaks and don't ask, don't tell stuff were connected. How deep does the rabbit-hole go? Im glad they're not focusing on Manning's sexuality in the coverage, but it seems to me that the policies about sexuality in the military have some bearing on Manning's motivations for wikileaking. Interesting!
What surprises me most is that Julian Assange has lasted this long. This isn't OBL, where he's living in a cave somewhere -- this guy is known to travel between first world countries. I can understand those countries may not be willing to hand him over, but the US has lots of experience with rendition and I'm surprised some three-letter agency hasn't snatched him up yet.
And this actually proves an important point about the various three-letter agencies: they're not really the nefarious organizations that exist in the imaginations of people who have seen too many movies.
Jason Bourne's CIA would has assassinated Julian Assange a long time ago. The real one just grumbles.
There is little reason to believe that the contents of these cables aren't already known to other governments, given that many soldiers from the rank of private on up had access to them; and that the UK, France, Israel, Germany, etc. also do extensive signals intelligence, crypto, and even good old fashioned human based spying.
Why is it surprising? America can't go against every one who doesn't agree with them. It needs to weigh its options carefully and intelligently. The mere reason that Hugo Chavez is still in power testifies to this fact.
The world is not black and white where we might send CIA or Special Forces to neutralize someone who we don't like. It's definitely more complicated than it seems.
There are other, more indirect ways to neutralize what he's doing. A good one is using the media to sway public opinion, etc. Another one is to discredit the guy by linking him to some "terrorist group/government" and say they're funding him, etc.
Could we call it something more descriptive than "cablegate?" Its also not a scandal in the same way as Watergate - much more in line with the likes of the "Pentagon Papers". Perhaps a similarly descriptive hashtag, like #wikileakscables or #wikileaksdiplomaticcables if you're not bound by 140 characters.
But please - let's raise the level of discourse from sensationalist "Action News" by refusing to use pidgeonhole phrases and instead call things accurately.
Earlier WikiLeaks releases seemed to expose atrocities and human rights abuses by the US military and government, which represents at least a partial justification. What end does this release serve?
Exposure of corruption within our allies. I found things like Afghanistan’s vice president being caught (and released) in the UAE carrying $52 million in cash to be quite interesting. Also the part about Saudi donors are still the driving force in financing terrorism.
I'm a WikiLeaks skeptic so I can't say I really support this. But I am also a diplomacy skeptic. I'm very suspicious of the effectiveness of our foreign policy and the honesty of our leaders in engaging in it. I'd even go so far as to say that the diplomatic aspect of our foreign policy is equally or more damaging and deserving of criticism than the military aspect. So I'll be interested to see what the more frank, non-public side, as opposed to the endless bullshitty platitudes we get officially.
These were crimes of governments which are supposed to be trusted and which should work for the people. What end does not releasing every single one of them serve? Why would anyone want to keep them secret?
> Slovenia was told to take a prisoner if it wanted to meet with President Obama, while the island nation of Kiribati was offered incentives worth millions of dollars to take in Chinese Muslim detainees, cables from diplomats recounted.
It's a little hard to tell from the wording, but that might be explicit evidence that the Obama administration is continuing the Bush administration's practice of extraordinary rendition. That or it's just banal, and the Obama administration is trying to find places to take our prisoners we can't release because of bureaucracy and fearmongering.
I'm under the impression that a cable is something of a formalized document format - like when an enterprise has a formal template for a memo. Link wise, I'm pretty sure embassies use a combination of leased lines and satellites, with link layer hardware encryption and one time pads for messages deemed sufficiently sensitive. They may well get delivered using smtp but every email wouldn't get called a cable, and definitely not over public networks. The name cable obviously just stuck from historical use.
Dates back to when messages were transmitted by telegraph - transmission via cable was for really urgent stuff that couldn't wait for the diplomatic bag.
In short: cables are the official record and communication tool of the diplomatic corps. As several other replies have pointed out, cables are a form of electronic communication, but they aren't emails. That may sound like a meaningless distinction, but in the everyday business of the department it is real. If you work at DOS, you usually have two email addresses--one on the unclassified and one on the classified network. Additionally, you can have access to a system to read, review and send cables. Think of them as official inter-office memos, or something like that. They're formatted in a specific way, and they do not, under any circumstances, travel on any communications systems not completed operated by the US Government. You get the sense of what I mean by format if you look at some of the documents on the NYT site (or sit down, as I have, and read a few thousand cables in a row). If you're the Ambassador to Country X, and you have a meeting with the President of X, you write a memo, in a particular format, with each paragraph classified U/SBU/C/S/TS, and in a pretty particular tone. That memo (cable) then gets sent to, who knows, the Assistant Secretary for the Region X is in, an Undersecretary or two, the OPs center, the Deputy, etc.
even more OT, but an interesting story about decryption and leaking of cables is the Zimmerman telegram - the cable that was decrypted and leaked and caused the USA to enter the first world war - from a time when cables literaly went over the cable. This is from the days before computers, when intelligence and human decryption were used.
So the decryption and leaking of cables is nothing new, but this is a whole new scale. Sometimes I wonder if Wikileaks is now doing the bidding of governments without realising it. It's unlikely now but maybe in the future will be so.
As I understood by reading the articles, they have their own "Internet" through which they communicate via cables, and every cable has it's own strict structure.
As someone who grew in the Mideast and spent some time in the US/EU/Aus, I was often amazed how completely detached Westerners are from the way the rest of the world works.
Left wingers or conservatives, so many guns & money have been sheltering the past 2-3 generations from reality that they genuinely believe most people share their values and goals, and that the world operates similarly to their own surroundings.
If these documents will cause people to start questioning the utter bullshit they are fed by Fox News or Reddit, Glenn Beck or Jon Stewart, then Assange is the most important person alive today. I doubt that would happen, though.
What is interesting about this is not the damage it does, which will likely be minimal as it's really just embarrassing.
What's interesting is the look into the hidden minds of countries. I didn't know, for instance, that so many Arab countries urged US intervention in Iran, or that Israel has been monitoring Iran's nuclear program so closely--as indicated by their pressing warning that 2010 specifically is a key year.
Of course, everyone here knew or suspected China's dirty hands, but it's nice that this calls them out for it.
And it's funny to know exactly how little most countries seem to think of Europe's importance.
Is there a torrent anywhere with the actual text of the cables? Wikileaks itself is being DDOSed, and none of the news sites are reprinting anything but summaries.
The excerpts the NYT is reporting in this story are pretty ho-hum. We'll have to wait and see what else is in there but it looks like another Wikileaks hype job to me. No doubt there's going to be some embarrassing sausage making details in here but it just confirms things we already knew. Pakistan is a complex situation, Karzai's government is corrupt, etc. Wikileaks would be better off releasing this material without the hype and grandstanding.
[+] [-] zemaj|15 years ago|reply
While Wikileaks may not survive in the mid term, I believe what it represents may have far reaching, long term consequences. The internet has democratised information to the point that an unhappy individual with mid level trust in an organisation can expose the organisation's "sensitive" information globally with very little effort and thought.
Before the internet an individual could expose this information, but the barriers were much higher. To be a whistle blower you could only influence people immediately near you socially. To reach higher you had to filter your information through news organisations. While there are cases of this happening, the information was still continually at risk of being censored. Would this cable information have been released if a whistle blower took it directly to the NYT, or even a collection of newspapers?
With our current online structure of Twitter, Blogs and peer file sharing it makes sensitive information immediately accessible to millions with no chance of it being censored. To me Wikileaks represents the start of something hugely disruptive to our way of life. It's not possible to scale an organisation beyond several people while maintaining complete trust in each of them. When every piece of information is at risk of being exposed, what position does this place governments in? Is it possible for the current structure of the us government with its extensive lobby groups, international secrets and security through obscurity to continue?
I think its still too hard to see how the bits will fall here, but I do think we're in for an interesting decade :)
[+] [-] joshes|15 years ago|reply
Furthermore, all that we are reading right now are redacted and cherry picked summaries and analyses. Please wait for more data to be released before passing a quick, premature, unframed sigh against what is happening here.
We're at the beginning of this, not the end.
[+] [-] cabalamat|15 years ago|reply
I don't think they're mundane -- some are quite amusing, such as the Afghan vice president trousering $52 million.
> If you do not believe that millions upon millions of people will read this, you are mistaken.
I'm sure millions will read them.
> And many, if not the vast majority, of these readers will have previously been in the dark as to the information contained therein.
It's not so much that they're in the dark about the information, it's that they have an unrealistic view of how world affairs are conducted. This might be because they're naive, or because their nationalist sentiments cause them to believe their own country acts more virtuously on the world stage than countries actually do, or whatever. Or it may just be because most people don't pay much attention to world affairs.
But for whatever reason, if someone's bubble is pricked and they later understand world affairs better, that person is more rational. And improving rationality worldwide is likely to be in the long term interest of the human species.
> So to them, this is not mundane; it's extraordinary.
Then hopefully it will cause them to update their worldview.
[+] [-] btmorex|15 years ago|reply
Other countries on the other hand... I know this isn't hugely surprising, but it's now public that essentially everyone in the middle east is lobbying the US to attack Iran. That's got to mess up some relations there.
Also, some of the back room disses within foreign countries are probably going to screw up their domestic politics.
[+] [-] utku_karatas2|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kissickas|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] anigbrowl|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trotsky|15 years ago|reply
Nothing new per-se for those that followed aurora or watch infosec, but interesting to see it all itemized together in a state cable instead of a bunch of assumptions & rumors. Look forward to seeing the details on that one.
[+] [-] acgourley|15 years ago|reply
So in so far as they let me know what rumors to choose to believe, they are useful.
[+] [-] steveklabnik|15 years ago|reply
And one with single page: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&v...
[+] [-] ronnier|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Alex3917|15 years ago|reply
This is ironic since one of the biggest contributing factors behind Manning allegedly leaking the documents was probably the fact that the government was kicking him out of the military for being gay. The fact that Obama literally can't even stop lying during his one sentence soundbite condemning the leak is pretty symbolic of why we need WikiLeaks in the first place.
[+] [-] GHFigs|15 years ago|reply
If that is a fact, is there a source?
"An Army spokesman, Lt. Col. Eric Bloom, said Manning, who entered the Army as a private in October 2007, was demoted last month for an assault. He said he was not facing early discharge."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06...
[+] [-] sudonim|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d2viant|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hugh3|15 years ago|reply
Jason Bourne's CIA would has assassinated Julian Assange a long time ago. The real one just grumbles.
[+] [-] patrickgzill|15 years ago|reply
There is little reason to believe that the contents of these cables aren't already known to other governments, given that many soldiers from the rank of private on up had access to them; and that the UK, France, Israel, Germany, etc. also do extensive signals intelligence, crypto, and even good old fashioned human based spying.
[+] [-] jscore|15 years ago|reply
The world is not black and white where we might send CIA or Special Forces to neutralize someone who we don't like. It's definitely more complicated than it seems.
There are other, more indirect ways to neutralize what he's doing. A good one is using the media to sway public opinion, etc. Another one is to discredit the guy by linking him to some "terrorist group/government" and say they're funding him, etc.
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] moondowner|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moxiemk1|15 years ago|reply
But please - let's raise the level of discourse from sensationalist "Action News" by refusing to use pidgeonhole phrases and instead call things accurately.
[+] [-] matthewsimon|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] philwelch|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonknee|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcantelon|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbateman|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] viraptor|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanh|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lukeschlather|15 years ago|reply
It's a little hard to tell from the wording, but that might be explicit evidence that the Obama administration is continuing the Bush administration's practice of extraordinary rendition. That or it's just banal, and the Obama administration is trying to find places to take our prisoners we can't release because of bureaucracy and fearmongering.
[+] [-] tmsh|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d2viant|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d9|15 years ago|reply
Cable/Telegram Used interchangeably to refer to communications (messages) sent electronically.
http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/22249.pdf
[+] [-] trotsky|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anigbrowl|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] linhir|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brc|15 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimmermann_Telegram
So the decryption and leaking of cables is nothing new, but this is a whole new scale. Sometimes I wonder if Wikileaks is now doing the bidding of governments without realising it. It's unlikely now but maybe in the future will be so.
[+] [-] keiferski|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moondowner|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nir|15 years ago|reply
Left wingers or conservatives, so many guns & money have been sheltering the past 2-3 generations from reality that they genuinely believe most people share their values and goals, and that the world operates similarly to their own surroundings.
If these documents will cause people to start questioning the utter bullshit they are fed by Fox News or Reddit, Glenn Beck or Jon Stewart, then Assange is the most important person alive today. I doubt that would happen, though.
[+] [-] Helianthus16|15 years ago|reply
What's interesting is the look into the hidden minds of countries. I didn't know, for instance, that so many Arab countries urged US intervention in Iran, or that Israel has been monitoring Iran's nuclear program so closely--as indicated by their pressing warning that 2010 specifically is a key year.
Of course, everyone here knew or suspected China's dirty hands, but it's nice that this calls them out for it.
And it's funny to know exactly how little most countries seem to think of Europe's importance.
[+] [-] Groxx|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nostrademons|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steve19|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsz0|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hrq|15 years ago|reply
I see here: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13526#Part_1 that there's some structure to these documents, but what transport are they being sent by?
[+] [-] ximeng|15 years ago|reply
http://www.fas.org/sgp/library/quist2/chap_7.html
There are apparently no top secret documents in this leak, top secret documents would include such things as detailed plans for war.
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
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