Shanemk:Julian and wikileaks bores me, when will people realize the world is a bubbling goo of irrelevance.

Why so nihilist~

I agree though the WikiLeaking is Leaking just too large an amount of information without formal guidance / help of interpretation. Common people (who don't readily possess knowledge of the diplomatic world. Neither do I) may find this pile of information rather unaccessible.

I invoke the Curse of Knowledge.

How about a Wikia / Wikispace? We can move them to its proper place in Vikipedio after we finish it.

LyzTyphone:I invoke the Curse of Knowledge.

I've been reading the diplomatic cables. Informative and accessible enough for me. It's not hard if you have a modicum of understanding in that target area and use Wikipedia.

Wikileaks does also publish editorials and get's newspapers to write articles on them. The sources are published so it's possible to independently verify claims. Just like in science where the source data is required for a published paper- to verify it's conclusions are correct. Julian Assange claims that journalism should be using the scientific method of publishing sources together with their claims.

That's why mainstream media is such rubbish. They can just claim anything and there's no way to verify them.

I read an excellent quote in the Washington Post some time back, and I think everyone should keep this in mind when reading information from Wikileaks or anywhere else.

Just because something's classified, doesn't mean it's true.

The contents of classified documents are a combination of classified information that the report-writers have access to [which also may not be true], plus the personal opinion of the writer, and the writer's interpretation of what they have read [which may also be wrong].

The only certain thing, when you read a classified report, is that the person who wrote this report believes its contents to be true. And if I started counting the number of people who believe false things to be true, I would surely run out of fingers and toes in an instant!

Shanemk:Julian and wikileaks bores me, when will people realize the world is a bubbling goo of irrelevance.

Now this is worth translating!

biguglydave:

Shanemk:..the world is a bubbling goo of irelevance.

Now this is worth translating!

It may be useful as an exercise, but to be truly worthy of our best efforts at translation, IMO it is better that the original be an example of sweetness and light .

erinja:
Just because something's classified, doesn't mean it's true.

Of course not, but the documents gives you information that was unknown before,and points you can research for.

And we are not talking about the Leak itself in this thread, but of the idear of asange: if you make it too expensive and complex to keep anything secret,the goverments and cooperations will prefer acting transparent

rano:And we are not talking about the Leak itself in this thread, but of the idear of asange: if you make it too expensive and complex to keep anything secret,the goverments and cooperations will prefer acting transparent

I don't agree with this. I think that if you leak loads of secret documents, the response will be to make MORE things secret. On the government end there will be a move to classify things higher than they would otherwise have been classified (in order to limit how many people can view them), and to implement more controls on need-to-know (i.e. rather than putting classified information on a classified network or a shared hard drive for anyone with a clearance to read, password-protecting this information so that even those with the appropriate clearance have to specifically request access to it).

As far as private industry goes, my company has already sent out e-mails regarding proper handling of company proprietary information and reminding everyone of our security policy. I am surely not the only one who has received such an e-mail. I wouldn't call that more transparency, would you?

And quite frankly, regarding the Iraq and Afghanistan reports, anyone who has been paying attention to the news would have seen NOTHING surprising in the released documents. I'm an avid news reader and I certainly found this to be the case.

Regarding the diplomatic cables, it seems to have been more juicy gossip than profound insight.

It does bother me that Assange is treated as a big hero in some circles. Based on what he's said to the media, and reports from people who knew him personally, he seems incredibly egotistical and self-absorbed. If he really cared about making information free he would be attacking nations without a free press, such as China and Russia.

I'm waiting patiently for him to do so. Tick tock, Julian. Put your money where your mouth is.

I don't agree with this. I think that if you leak loads of secret documents, the response will be to make MORE things secret.

Yes but secret to a smaler group, what disables them to have real force.
Again: The idear is not to change something by showing bad things and hope that the guys become more moral. The idear is to make it EXPENSIVE to keep something secret. That has the same effect like a tax on secrets.

Regarding the diplomatic cables, it seems to have been more juicy gossip than profound insight.

The News only show us gossip. There are many realy interesting things. for example about cluster bombs in Afganistan. (Afganistan has signed the UN ban for Cluster Bombs but the USA hasn´t so they still use ist in afganistan)
Just two cables: (remember, every day about 100 Cables more are released, they will find much more in the next months)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cable...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cable...
(the yellow painted parts are importaint)

It does bother me that Assange is treated as a big hero in some circles. Based on what he's said to the media, and reports from people who knew him personally, he seems incredibly egotistical and self-absorbed.

I also dislike the hipe about him.

If he really cared about making information free he would be attacking nations without a free press, such as China and Russia.
I'm waiting patiently for him to do so. Tick tock, Julian. Put your money where your mouth is

Wikileaks already has, and noone cared. Wikileaks exist since 2006 and has already leaked things about scientology, afrikan regimes and many more. The press has never written about it. I think al this Cablegate stuff is manly to get more attention when they leak something in the future.

The main Problem is that our Press is not free anymore. It is freer than anywhere else in the world but not free. They can not write critical storys about a company wich pays the advertisment in the newspapers, and most newspapers and TV Chanels belong to big companies. (Fox News is the best example for political propaganda)
Wikileaks is the result of that development.

By the way: I just want to show the idear behind wikileaks. Im not a real supporter. Wikileaks has done some thigs right but not everything. I personally more like projekts like openleaks, which has no "hero" and just aims to transport information anonymous to the press

rano:I wanna translate Conspiracy as Governance of Julian Assange, because it is a base manifesto of a new movement of these days, which maybe will become very important. The Text is not easy to translate so i thought it would be better to translate it in a group. Is anyone interested to help me?

Is this essay publically licensed ala Creative Commons or something? By that I mean, is it legal to translate it?

erinja:And quite frankly, regarding the Iraq and Afghanistan reports, anyone who has been paying attention to the news would have seen NOTHING surprising in the released documents. I'm an avid news reader and I certainly found this to be the case.

Seriously? The fact that US Apache pilots shot down journos and weren't disciplined over it seems pretty bad to me, and I certainly heard nothing of it until Wikileaks came out with it.

And despite having read and heard about the east european missile defence shield idea, I had no idea that there were extra NATO plans in place which could effectively set up another major European war. I thought we learnt our lesson back in WW1 when the triple entente and central power alliance systems led to a war that the alliance system was meant to prevent.

It does bother me that Assange is treated as a big hero in some circles. Based on what he's said to the media, and reports from people who knew him personally, he seems incredibly egotistical and self-absorbed. If he really cared about making information free he would be attacking nations without a free press, such as China and Russia.

I'm waiting patiently for him to do so. Tick tock, Julian. Put your money where your mouth is.

Hasn't he already done so though? E.g. China's cyber-spy-games and espionage, and Russia being a virtual mafia state. Not as much as with America, mind you, but then again, the US has been painted as the "hero" of the world for a long time now, so it seems like a much more worthy target, where as Russia and China have always been painted quite badly in the west.

Anyway, the point is to alarm and remind the public that their governments are taking more power than what may be necessary and that transparent democracy doesn't quite exist (part of China's reason of why China shouldn't hold "democratic elections" because they don't see how it can be any more democratic than their current pyramid structure voting system). Because, as covered in the Glenn Beck thread, there are some real stultuloj who believe everything the govt/media/etc say and don't realise what an atrocity the world of today is (granted, it's not as bigger atrocity as WW2, but that's no reason to go "well if it's not a world war there's no problem!").

I'm with Rano basically - Assange, well, he's just another guy, I can see that he's trying to go on the whole "sacrafice the self and become the cult figure of the revolution" route but the idea of wikileaks is far more attractive. I'm horrified as is looking at some of the leaks about what we're not told about, and even more horrified that nothing's being done about keeping the public in the loop. So far, the current system is:
Something happens, government creates abridged version without all the details or anything that may be a risk, public decide on it.

However, that means the public can and are deciding blindly since they don't know the full effects and consequences of their democratic decisions.

So, to take Erinja's quote:
Just because we're told something by our governments, doesn't mean it's true.
Having only half the information doesn't help, we need all of it. It's better to have all the information even if some is false so we as a public can properly analyse what we're given, rather than let the government, who also doesn't necessarily have true information, condense it for us and we take it for granted as all we need to know.