The latest on Wikileaks

6 Responses to The latest on Wikileaks

1. martha says:

   December 6, 2010 at 3:59 pm

   I’m not so focused on the collateral damage for precisely the reasons you elucidate – there is more than enough to go around. More I am interested in the intent of Assange … and to that I highlight this piece of the article:

   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.”

   I think having the US government become more restrictive, the highly probably outcome of all this, is not a good thing for any of us, and does not promote transparency but rather inhibit it – it’s a perverse and powerful effect, and one that gives me at least cause for concern.
2. Eric Francis says:

   December 6, 2010 at 3:31 pm

   While people suggest that Wikileaks will have “collateral damage,” what about the 100,000 civilian deaths in Iraq that were caused by the wars that Mr. Assange is exposing?

   The wars were created, and are supported, by lies and denial. To point to Assange and say that he will hurt this or that person who is named in a cable is to miss the point entirely.
3. bkoehler says:

   December 6, 2010 at 1:17 pm

   Eurydike the asteroid is described by Martha Lang Wescott this way: “Dependence on people, issues or behaviors of aspects feels like a matter of life or death; adds to the drama of dependences and reliance (on others or aspecting energies) to axis or aspect pattern”. Eurydike in Julian Assange’s birthcart is at 26 Aquarius 29, accompanied by Arachne (weaver of patterns) and the many pieces of Osiris but most importantly, conjunct the presently transiting Neptune and Chiron. Okay, then there is this other another tiny mythological clue in Mr. Assange’s chart. .

   In mythology, a second Askalaphus (the 1st one being connected to medical/health issues) is known best for abiding in Hades with Pluto, and some say he was the gardener (!). He ratted out Persophene who had eaten pomegranate seeds, which lead to her entrappment forever after in Hades for half the year as a result. Askalaphus was prominent in the Gulf Oil Spill chart and is found in Assange’s birthchart at 25 Pisces 57, conjunct the now transiting Jupiter-Uranus conjunction. Whistle blower or tattle tail? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persephone

   A last tidbit I found revealing in the Assange chart is the location of Prometheus (bringer of fire to humanity) in talky air sign Gemini, trine Hebe (enabling, server to the gods) and Pandora, another mythological lid blower in chatty Libra. The man just can’t help himself I guess. The gods don’t lie. Well, maybe they do sometimes.
   be
4. awordedgewise says:

   December 6, 2010 at 12:50 pm

   Kind of opens up the whole can of worms, doesn’t it.

   Intuition suspected Assange’s intent – or stated intent – would be to show the vulnerability of the internet.

   Certainly we’ve been ignoring points of our vulnerability visavis the web all along the way – no more or less asleep at the wheel than with other current events/issues.

   He has shoved our pointy noses into the crap; what we make of these truths – both about internet vulnerability and the lies that are being exposed – currently feels like a handful of those party-confetti-worms tossed into cyber-air.
5. martha says:

   December 6, 2010 at 9:17 am

   While Wikileaks appears to be about transparency, that is just the surface. Read this piece from the Wall Street Journal regarding Assange’s actual intent, which is less information, not more:

   Julian Assange, Information Anarchist WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange hopes to hobble the U.S. government.
   WSJ December 6, 2010

   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.
6. Lesley says:

   December 6, 2010 at 6:23 am

   Hi Eric

   I thought you would be interested to read these two pieces that appeared in the Sydney newspapers over the weekend:

   http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/australia-to-help-us-over-assange-20101205-18l53.html

   http://www.smh.com.au/technology/security/pm-has-betrayed-me-assange-20101204-18ks8.html

   Best wishes,