It is one of the stupidest things, the knee jerk, automatic reaction on the alleged left that puts on the highest of pedastals entirely private, secretive organizations of people who break the laws by collecting, distributing and publishing stolen information collected by hackers. When the United States government breaks laws, it can be held accountable in many cases. If it violates the law in invading someones' privacy it can be prosecuted, who are you going to hold accountable if WikiLeaks publishes your most intimate and private information as a result of one of its massive, publicity or revenge data dumps?
Someone asked me if I were not worried that slamming Assange and his merry hackers could result in them going after me. Do they even know I'm doing it? I doubt it, but, well, I don't know, should I be worried? And if that's a serious question, doesn't it actually prove the point that these unelected, unaccountable groups of hackers are criminals who, if they wanted, could destroy people and, since they are largely anonymous, no one could hold them accountable? As it is, I'm more worried about the person I share computers with, some times. He didn't ask to be involved with this and I did tell him that it's a possibility, once it was pointed out to me. If he were attacked, he knows it's my fault and I would feel obligated to go off line for good, at least as myself. Of course, by that time the damage would have been done.
In the mean time, here are some instances in which Julian Assange, complaining about the time and expense of "vetting" the stuff he has used and uses to gain fame and, I'd guess, fortune for himself, including the private information they or their contributors have stolen in the past.
WikiLeaks’ global crusade to expose government secrets is causing collateral damage to the privacy of hundreds of innocent people, including survivors of sexual abuse, sick children and the mentally ill.
In the past year alone, the radical transparency group has published medical files belonging to scores of ordinary citizens while many hundreds more have had sensitive family, financial, or identity records posted to the web. In two particularly egregious cases, WikiLeaks named teenage rape victims. In a third case, the site published the name of a Saudi citizen arrested for being gay, an extraordinary move given that homosexuality is punishable by death in the ultraconservative Muslim kingdom.
‘‘They published everything: my phone, address, name, details,’’ said a Saudi man who said he was bewildered that WikiLeaks had revealed the details of a paternity dispute with a former partner. ‘‘If the family of my wife saw this . . . Publishing personal stuff like that could destroy people.’’
WikiLeaks’ mass publication of personal data is at odds with the site’s claim to have championed privacy, even as it laid bare the workings of international statecraft, and has drawn criticism from the site’s allies.
Attempts to reach WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange were unsuccessful; a set of questions left with his site wasn’t immediately answered Tuesday. WikiLeaks’ stated mission is to bring censored or restricted material ‘‘involving war, spying and corruption’’ into the public eye, describing the trove amassed thus far as a ‘‘giant library of the world’s most persecuted documents.’’
The library is growing quickly, with half a million files from the US Democratic National Committee, Turkey’s governing party, and the Saudi Foreign Ministry added in the last year or so. But the library is also filling with rogue data, including computer viruses, spam, and a compendium of personal records.
The Saudi diplomatic cables alone hold at least 124 medical files, according to a sample analyzed. Some described patients with psychiatric conditions, seriously ill children, or refugees.
‘‘This has nothing to do with politics or corruption,’’ said Dr. Nayef al-Fayez, a consultant in the Jordanian capital of Amman who confirmed that a brain cancer patient of his was among those whose details were published to the web. Dr. Adnan Salhab, a retired practitioner in Jordan who also had a patient named in the files, expressed anger when shown the document
‘‘This is illegal what has happened,’’ he said in a telephone interview. ‘‘It is illegal!’’.
Yeah, it's illegal and one thing you know, WikiLeaks didn't have to go in front of a court to justify doing what it did, its "contributors" never got a court warrant to search and seize information, they have no legal procedure to determine which information it should leak and which it should not, they have no accountability at all. And what you can say about WikiLeaks and the people who steal information for it, you can say about other online, secret groups which also do this. You might point out to the stuff you approve of being released as if that justifies the other things but if it were you whose life was destroyed or put in jeopardy by the self-styled transparency crusaders (held up as great heroes by the fans of privacy at the same time !) I suspect you wouldn't see it the same way.
Do read the story at the Boston Globe, what I posted is far from all of it. Assange doesn't much care who gets hurt in his self-written drama centered on himself.
One, a partially disabled Saudi woman who’d secretly gone into debt to support a sick relative, said she was devastated. She’d kept her plight from members of her own family.
‘‘This is a disaster,’’ she said in a phone call. ‘‘What if my brothers, neighbors, people I know, or even don’t know have seen it? What is the use of publishing my story?’’
Medical records are widely counted among a person’s most private information. But AP found that WikiLeaks also routinely publishes identity records, phone numbers, and other information easily exploited by criminals.
Someone should really ask the people who are such fans of both Assange and Edward Snowden, who likely turned over more private information to these unelected, unauthorized, unaccountable groups than anyone else, about this.
Assange is totally irresponsible. He's far more interested in using data dumps to get publicity for himself and his group than he is the mere lives of these people.
Assange insisted WikiLeaks had a system to keep ordinary people’s information safe.
‘‘We have a harm minimization policy,’’ the Australian told an audience in Oxford, England, in July 2010. ‘‘There are legitimate secrets. Your records with your doctor, that’s a legitimate secret.’’
Assange initially leaned on cooperating journalists, who flagged sensitive material to WikiLeaks which then held them back for closer scrutiny. But Assange was impatient with the process, describing it as time-consuming and expensive.
‘‘We can’t sit on material like this for three years with one person to go through the whole lot, line-by-line, to redact,’’ he told London’s Frontline Club the month after his talk in Oxford. ‘‘We have to take the best road that we can.’’
Assange’s attitude has hardened since. A brief experiment with automatic redactions was aborted. The journalist-led redactions were abandoned too after Assange’s relationship with the London press corps turned toxic. By 2013 WikiLeaks had written off the redaction efforts as a wrong move.
Withholding any data at all ‘‘legitimizes the false propaganda of ‘information is dangerous,’’’ the group argued on Twitter.
Has it ever occurred to anyone that if that's their MO then their doing so as, largely, anonymous, largely unknown, unnamed people with unexamined motives and lives is massively hypocritical. If that's their excuse for their massive irresponsibility, lets see them come forward and open themselves, their private records, their medical records, their sexual histories up for as public exposure as they have those of other people.
At the very least the double-talk, double-standards of the left in regard to these groups needs some serious thinking. It really does seem to all boil down to a group of adoring fans favoring them doing to other people what they would never, ever want even their own, elected government being able to do to them with full legal protection and only at the approval of a judge. There is absolutely no integrity in that pose of being champions of privacy and private spying by unaccountable groups who are free to dump private information online. How do we know they aren't practicing high finance blackmail with some of what they've stolen or been given? How do we know they won't, eventually, turn to outright outlaw activity. One of the problems with blackmail is that its victims can't risk being exposed.
This is all a lot more sinister than Hollywood would ever want to lead you to believe, the indy movie makers or the bloggers who have promoted it to their own fame and fortune. It is certainly no less of a danger than a democratically elected government collecting data. We can vote out the government, we don't get a vote on WikiLeaks or its leaders.
Update: No, if I really wanted to "be a little bitch" I'd point out how much the adult Julian Assange resembles the child Ricky Schroder as Little Lord Fauntleroy. I don't know why people use the word "bitch" that way, I've never known a dog of any gender who wasn't the moral superior of easily 95% of the human beings I've encountered. But, then, I'm not a cat.
After your last post on Assange, I realized he was a creature of privilege who likes his position of power from which he can shame others, even endanger them, without himself suffering any inconveniences or, indeed, even trying to take responsibility for his actions.
ReplyDeleteHe is in an embassy in London because he won't stand accountable for what he may, or may not, have done. His ostensible reason for not leaving is that he fears extradition, for what he clearly has done. His justification is that what he reveals negates criminal liability, which is an interesting argument in this age when we supposedly fear the loss of our privacy but cheer when others lose their privacy.
Assange is a coward, and, as I say, in a position of privilege. He can take the work of Chelsea Manning and evade the consequences she could not. He can proclaim himself a victim because he faces extradition to the U.S., and yet he victimizes whom he pleases because he has nothing more than the ability to do so. He wants to play the game of power but he never wants to be held to the rules.
He's a pestilence, not a hero; a criminal, not a savior; a coward, not an exemplar.