it’s like a life-or-death game of “paper or plastic bags” at the supermarket.

Yep, In the coming year I’m gonna be working that catchphrase into as many conversations as I can. no shit.

I agree that I’m torn on the sanctity of the need to know for the security of the country and the need to expose the assholes in our government.

It’s called journalism.

No, it’s called politics. Journalism implies a developed editorial perspective, (a la NYT et. al). Has Assange ever written even one op-ed piece? Not he is selectively releasing information in manner damaging to his political adversary the United States.

The legitimate complaints against the manner Wikileaks has operated are trivial at best. (See Glenn Greenwald)

If Hilary Clinton is spying on Ban Ki-Moon (and she has been) I’m not going to quibble with the way somebody reveals that information.

You worry about WikiLeaks motives? Here are his motives: He sees that there is a conspiracy in the United States Government that is acting unjustly. He believes exposing their secrets will force them to operate more carefully and thus less effectively. He’s trying to drive unjust elements in the USGovt underground. With calls for information on SPIRnet to be less widely available he is already succeeding.

With the tens of thousands of innocent people the USGovt cavalierly kills on an ongoing basis, any nonviolent way of impeding their operation (including tax protest) is just, welcome and necessary.

If the American government succeeds in shutting down wikileaks then freedom on the internet is effectively dead.

Freedom of speech doesn’t stop when you don’t agree with what people say.

WikiLeaks has attempted to position itself as a news organization. The US and popular press are trying to re-position WikiLeaks not as a news organization, but as a front for personal actions undertaken by a guy who should get no protections as a news organization, cuz he’s a guy. Who will win this legal maneuver?

It’s a very interesting debate: at what point are an individual’s actions individual or as press?

Whether you agree or not with the goodness or badness of the release of classified documents, we oughta recognize this debate beneath the debate. Do we want a free press or not? And how do we define “press”? How do we define an individual’s responsibility within the press? At what point is an irresponsible person hiding under that useful definition of a press organization? Or at what point is an innocent individual scapegoated for the actions of an unscrupulous news organization?

This is why anecdotes make terrible evidence.

In truth, I don’t think a *purely* transparent government is entirely feasible either. But if Fox News has taught me anything, it’s that you have to push for the most extreme, batshit insane version in the direction things ought to go in order to effect compromise somewhere in the realm of sanity. Because right now you and I have no privacy rights at all in the eyes of the government, while the guy who leaks their offhand gossip is hunted down like a dog.

OOOoooouch……..

Wikileaks should adopt as their motto “The Truth Will Set You Free”, so as to make these spookettes think for a minute.

There may be 100,000 memos that show the US in a marvelous light, fostering incredible international cooperation in subtle ways that we never see. I’m not supposing there are, but we have no idea about that. Assange motivation is destructive in nature, regardless of whether productive results occur.

it would be one thing if it could be demonstrated that wikileaks actually hindered our ability to keep americans safe

It is a huge assumption if you accept that the demonstration must be positive instead of negative. We don’t know the degree of harm to America, Americans, its legitimate interests, and people cooperating with this country. Much of that may never become public.

You assert there’s a requirement to show harm; I would assert (with equal validity) there’s a requirement to assume harm based on the detailed information about informants, operations, and so forth.

So it’s just not about the freedom of information and transparency, it’s just a game of tit-for-tat. He is using this information as a bargaining chip.

Man… dammit… if he just had a few trillion dollars to pay off all the corrupt elitists he’s exposed… don’t you hate it when you don’t have a few trillion dollars?

Right. And right now, because the government doesn’t trust me not to be a terrorist, the NSA is archiving every byte of my web traffic and the TSA is groping me for explosive dickbombs every time I fly. Well, fair’s fair, as individuals we should be equal. So turn yer head and cough, Lieberman, let’s see them cherries.

I am rather taken aback that you claim this “does no” harm the United States

It’s not his claim. It’s the Pentagon’s. They straight-up said no lives were on the line here. Unless by “harm” you mean “mild embarrassment at seeing our dirty laundry aired in public,” in which case you DO know that it’s Hillary Clinton you’re linking to, right?

indiscriminate release of information

Which this isn’t. They are, in fact, scriminating.

generally referred to as “mud slinging” or “dirty politics”

Good heavens, man! He’s slinging mud? That kind of tactic hasn’t been politically acceptable since, oh, about a month ago! I say death to the treasonous somewhat rude dog!

(strange, I swear I commented on this piece 10 minutes ago)

While I don’t trust Assange’s motives, I would much rather have some of the dirty laundry aired than none of it. So far the US govt has behaved like a child throwing a tantrum, operating outside the law to punish someone that they cannot through the normal legal channels.

The real harm done done to the US govt. by the leaks is not in the content itself, but how the US govt has behaved in response to those leaks.

If Hilary Clinton is spying on Ban Ki-Moon (and she has been) I’m not going to quibble with the way somebody reveals that information.

If we were not spying on Ban Ki-Moon, I would have been outraged at our intelligence agencies. For goodness sakes, we spy on *everyone* and we’ve been doing it for a long long time.

If there had been some new information in these leaks that exposed something truly un-American, then fine, release that information and only that information.

The vast majority of these leaks serve no purpose other than to embarrass world leaders who had frank conversations with the Americans. They undermine the effectiveness of our diplomatic relations without giving us anything more than gossip. It is entertaining gossip, but it is gossip nonetheless.

Further, the idea that you were going to see evidence of mass corruption within leaks generated by American diplomats was silly to begin with. These are all from the American point of view.

A lot of people are taking them as truth which I also find somewhat funny. By releasing the cables slowly as Wikileaks has been doing, they are delaying cables that contradict earlier ones. For instance, the NYT ran an article about North Korea sending Iran missiles based on *one* cable… then finally Wikileaks got around to releasing other cables and it looks like maybe there isn’t enough evidence to believe that it actually happened.

“When a government can’t get what it wants by working within the law, the right answer is not to work outside the law. The right answer is to accept that it can’t get what it wants.”

It’s so simple and smart and yet so hard for politicians the world over to understand.

Now, I chalked most of this up to underpaid old-media journalists who don’t know google from gimp, but there are a lot of people who have in the past seemed like they legitimately do research now spouting the same kind of nonsense. Perhaps things really have changed.

One owns an apartment building full of tenants and doesn’t want to scare them in case the deal falls through. Another one owns a grocery store and doesn’t want her clientele to fall off out of fear the store will be closed. Another one has family members opposed to the sale, but they don’t own the property and the seller is adamant about keeping privacy and secrecy about any discussions with the city.

In this case, a real estate transaction, complete transparency of the government would work against the best interests of the people. These discussions should be private.

The final decision on what property to purchase, once the deliberations by the governing body are completed… THAT is public, transparent and in the hands of the people. But the courting process, delicate as it is, well… I don’t want transparency there. That is the point at which I have trusted my elected officials to act in my best interests. They don’t always, but I don’t want to take away that possibility that they will.

Certainly people should have no illusions about those unsavory, clandestine realities — diplomacy isn’t a sewing circle, folks — but, it is far, far preferable to war.

To whatever extent Assange’s actions have hampered diplomacy, they are reprehensible; to whatever extent they have improved it, laudable.

And the substance of the cablegate leaks? As Alex Cockburn amusingly phrased it this weekend, “[t]he bulk of them merely illustrate the well-known fact that in every capital city round the world there is a building known as the U.S. Embassy inhabited by people whose prime function is to vanquish informed assessment of local conditions with swaddling cloths of ignorance and prejudice instilled in them by what passes for higher education in the United States, whose governing elites are now more ignorant of what is really happening in the outside world that at any time in the nation’s history.”

David Samuels did well in recently denouncing in the Atlantic his fellow reporters’ animosity toward Wikileaks and Assange:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/12/the-shameful-attacks-on-julian-assange/67440/

Mirrors etc:
http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20101205161448286

Reason is counter-productive when you’re trying to have a rational argument with a raving fucking lunatic. Just by engaging him directly, you’ve lent enough credence to the thinking that he might be right for an average bystander to assume the truth must lie somewhere between you two. That’s been the Democrats’ problem for the last two years: they compromise, and compromise, and compromise, thinking that this time the Republicans really are going to meet them halfway.

No, no, fighting insanity with insanity is the only sane thing to do. There is nothing sane about the government’s secrecy policies. Trying to be reasonable and saying “well, gosh, I agree that there’s a good reason for secrets in certain cases,” only encourages folks like #42 to change their tune to “well then trust your government this time too, citizen! GO BACK TO BED AMERICA!”

Agreed. The problem is that we have the foxes guarding the henhouse now. It is also incredibly difficult – some might say impossible – to keep a branch of the government independent enough to review that very government.

Freedom of the Press is the best we have. And Wikileaks is serving that function. They may not always report on what you want, but the function is legitimate and needed.

And it’s not like the New York Times or any of your local papers are subject to any greater checks and balances than Wikileaks. If anything, their corporate ownership makes them much more suspect.