DDoS Attack On Wikileaks Increasing 919
tetrahedrassface writes "According to the Twitter feed for Wikileaks, the attack on the controversial site is increasing and is now at 10 Gigabits per second. In light of the recent release of highly sensitive documents and calls by many lawmakers around the world to swiftly find, extradite, and try suspected rapist Julius Assange for breaches of national security, one nation, Ecuador, has offered asylum."
If you didn't do anything wrong, (Score:4, Insightful)
At least isn't that what the government tells us?
At least someone has balls (and common sense) (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:At least someone has balls (and common sense) (Score:4, Insightful)
His plane will have "engine trouble" on the way to Ecuador and crash. Just watch.
Re:At least someone has balls (and common sense) (Score:5, Insightful)
Biased summary (Score:2, Insightful)
"...suspected rapist..."
way to give subtle bias in favor of the world's superpower against one person...
Personal Attacks & Defamation (Score:5, Insightful)
"suspected rapist Julius Assange"
Their attempt at discrediting the accuracy of the info by repeating the word "suspected rapist" is a bit of an old cliche, don't you think?
Also, does this still work, even with so much data available?
Re:At least someone has balls (and common sense) (Score:4, Insightful)
Assange is out of control. Wikileaks needs to oust him and go back to their original mission, of actually being a whistleblower, rather than just leaking things and hurting national and global security.
Julian Assange should go to jail for a very long time.
Wikileaks isn't a leaks aleaks site anymore (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Gov't Sponsored DDoS (Score:1, Insightful)
They also know that body scanners and related security theatre doesn't work, yet... :)
Mod summary "-1 Flamebait" (Score:0, Insightful)
I don't care how much the CIA is paying tetrahedrassface, unless they're cutting Taco a check too there's no reason to include the bogus-ass "rape" charges in the summary.
Re:Ut Oh! (Score:3, Insightful)
A DDoS is more than a simple /. effect.
Only when your servers are not designed for massive amounts of traffic at a time will you be harmed by the slashdot effect. Usually it happens on /. because we link to some university Website, who is only used to maybe a couple thousand students and not millions of internet viewers.
Wikileaks is in the business of being read by as many people as possible - You'll notice Wikileaks is still UP during all this. This suggests they expected this kind of stuff and likely they have a sophisticated firewall capable of blocking DoS attacks and seperating the legit requests from the bad.
It's not just a popularity thing.
Re:At least someone has balls (and common sense) (Score:5, Insightful)
Jail for what? Guess what: US law doesn't apply worldwide! Incredible, I know!
simple solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:At least someone has balls (and common sense) (Score:2, Insightful)
Julian Assange should go to jail for a very long time.
For what exactly? Has he broken any laws you can name *and* been convicted? And no, just because Palin called him a terruhrist doesn't count, that's actually an endorsement in my book.
Re:Gov't Sponsored DDoS (Score:5, Insightful)
The US government has overthrown democratic governments, it's FBI has assassinated American civilians, the CIA is currently torturing someone to death in a secret prison somewhere in the world, and right now it has the right to extra-judiciously assassinate any person, even US citizens, that it believes to be involved in terrorism.
With these facts, I hardly think an orchestrated DDoS attack seems unlikely.
Re:Ut Oh! (Score:2, Insightful)
Electronic attacks like this are not what this government does
Re-read that a few times and give it some thought, then let us know if you'd like to amend that statement.
Re:At least someone has balls (and common sense) (Score:5, Insightful)
If this was something they were considering, having him whacked, why wouldn't they have done it before this past leak which was the largest ever?
The reason he's still living is that he hasn't exposed anything embarrassing enough to Russia, or another country that doesn't have any problem getting their hands dirty.
Re:Gov't Sponsored DDoS (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, of course. People would be foolish to think otherwise.
There is zero possibility that it could be:
1). Wikileaks creating their own publicity by staging a "DDoS Attack" on their own. They *NEVER* play the victim card, *EVER*.
2). Every single person on the planet trying to "see what the fuss is about".
3). Some indignant hacker with access to a botnet delivering his/her own form of "justice".
4). Some other government (China, Iran, etc...) not wanting their dirty laundry aired.
5). Slashdot.
Only the pure, raw, satanic evil of the US Government - through one of it's "shadowy connections", of course - could ever deliver the sheer bandwidth of *TEN WHOLE GIGABITS* against a website. Why, that's almost one server with a CNA or ten average desktop computer's worth of bandwidth there - or 666 Internet connections at 15mbps... yeah... /sarc
Re:Ut Oh! (Score:2, Insightful)
1. The data centers are in another country - and bombing other countries is an act of war
2. The data center is in a disused nuclear bunker. So you're going to need a hell of a lot of bombing.
Re:Wikileaks isn't a leaks aleaks site anymore (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:If you didn't do anything wrong, (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:If you didn't do anything wrong, (Score:5, Insightful)
At least isn't that what the government tells us?
Right, because you don't have any embarrassing secrets. You don't tell friends things in confidence.
Thanks to this leak (and to the idiotic flubbing of security in the first place), it will be at least a little bit harder for American diplomats to make friends who will tell them things in confidence.
USCYBERCOM (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe that if the US Government wanted to stop Wikileaks, they'd simply bomb the data centers. Electronic attacks like this are not what this government does; It's what its citizens do.
I beg to differ:
"USCYBERCOM plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes and conducts activities to: direct the operations and defense of specified Department of Defense information networks; and prepare to, when directed, conduct full spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, ensure US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries."
Looks like they're "denying the same to their adversaries" (maybe).
Re:I think (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean that Assange *didn't* suddenly become a child molester and rapist exactly two weeks after releasing a cache of classified documents that embarrassed the most powerful country in the world? Are you implying those charges might be TRUMPED-UP as part of an attempt at character assassination?!?!? The hell you say!
Slashdotting (Score:5, Insightful)
The main site seems to work fine after
A) Worldwide mass interest
B) DDOS
C) slashdotting and other causes of sudden increase in traffic.
This should be featured on Discovery's "How do they do it." for sure. I'm peaked.
Re:DDoS is dumb (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Personal Attacks & Defamation (Score:3, Insightful)
"Man steals car"
"African American aslyum-seeker steals car"
"Black illegal immigrant steals car"
All three of those can describe the same story. Do you notice the bias towards the end?
Sure they're all true, but are they linked to the story? Does him being a rape suspect, in any way contributes to this story? Of course it could be "Mothers Against Rape Suspects" DDOSing him, but that's unlikely.
Re:USCYBERCOM (Score:3, Insightful)
There is no strategic value in attacking wikileaks that I can see. The damage is done.
Re:Wikileaks isn't a leaks aleaks site anymore (Score:2, Insightful)
This has been brought up before. Claiming that something is "anti-US" is a weightless statement.
Anti American is whatever politicians want it to be. It's whatever's convenient. There's no definition, no rules and no reasons for it... except for use as a crutch when all other arguments fail.
Certainly, Wikileaks has done a lot of US based leaks, but that doesn't make them "anti-US". It's like saying that pizza hut is an italian resturant because it has pizza.
Actually, that's not even a very good analogy because wikileaks itself doesn't leak the information. It recieves leaks, compiles them and publishes them online.
Wikileaks is a primarily English website. Of course there's not going to be many foreign leaks, the managers don't speak every language in the world. It takes longer for foreign issues to surface.
And of course you're not going to hear about them because you watch news from sources that are English. Go figure, your news reports on issues that are relevant to your country!
So the next time you go complaining that there's no big leaks about Russia or China, go to Russia and China, find some juicy details and send them to Wikileaks yourself.
Re:If you didn't do anything wrong, (Score:3, Insightful)
Suspected rapist? I thought they dropped that charge? Jeeze this article seems a little biased.
Re:Wikileaks isn't a leaks aleaks site anymore (Score:5, Insightful)
...
The US is the "juiciest target" in the entire world?
Or are you one of those people who erroneously believes that the free and democratic nations of the world are actually the world's most egregious oppressors and abusers, and the US sits at the pinnacle of the abusers?
If you think the US is the "juiciest target", I wonder what you'd think if we saw the same level of leaks of communications from, say, Chinese corporations, the Chinese government, and Chinese "diplomatic" efforts...
At its launch, WikiLeaks said it was "founded by Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and start-up company technologists, from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa", and that its "primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East". Instead, WikiLeaks publishes mostly classified information from democracies.
So now, nations like China and Russia have an advantage over the US in the conduct of their international affairs, intelligence, and defense. I can only imagine China's delight with each new release from WikiLeaks.
Steven Aftergood, a veteran crusader against excessive government secrecy and director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy, notes, "WikiLeaks must be counted among the enemies of open society because it does not respect the rule of law nor does it honor the rights of individuals." WikiLeaks doesn't care whether information it obtains is legitimately classified, nor whether it may cause grave harm if released. Indeed, the only thing exempt from this reckless behavior is WikiLeaks itself.
What is interesting to me is that many observers of this phenomenon in free and democratic societies seem to believe it is their own governments that are hiding the most egregious information, which deserves to be exposed via channels like WikiLeaks.
I would submit that individuals who live in the US and other Western nations who believe their governments are "oppressing" them have no idea what "oppression" is.
Re:If you didn't do anything wrong, (Score:5, Insightful)
And rightfully so!
Would you tell something "in confidence" to someone who you expected to write down a detailed report of your statements, and send them into a system to analysed and passed around? Anyone speaking to a diplomat and expecting confidence was naive from day one.
I might have some sympathy here if it wasn't for the fact that the same people who are bitching about privacy are the ones who would think nothing of the invasion of other peoples privacy for their own ends. Somehow spying is better when its public? Better when its the people who pretend to represent us?
Turnabout is fair play, and thats all that happened.
-Steve
Re:At least someone has balls (and common sense) (Score:5, Insightful)
It does if we label it "terrorism"!
It's a magical word that will NEVER EVER EVER backfire on US!
Re:If you didn't do anything wrong, (Score:3, Insightful)
That joke is older than anyone posting here.
Re:its the truth - you just don't like it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Censor...
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Re:Ut Oh! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:USCYBERCOM (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nobel Prize (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Assanges leaks put intelligence sources at risk (Score:4, Insightful)
That's just shifting the ambivalence towards another term, in this case "civilian"
Are informants civilians? Are diplomats?
The USA does not put intelligence sources at risk. (Score:4, Insightful)
An intelligence source is 100% civilian and innocent. An enemy combatant such as a member of the Taliban or Al Qaeda gang member is not a civilian and not innocent. The US soldiers are at war with the foreign soldiers. It's expected that soldiers on both sides of a war are going to die.
Intelligence sources are not soldiers. They are people who have surrendered to the US government. They had the option to surrender to the Taliban, to Iran, but chose to surrender to the US Government. Whether it was because the US Government had the bigger better military or whether it's because they just hate Al Qaeda and the Taliban, they sided with the USA and the USA has a sacred trust to protect their identity at any cost.
Assange thinks he is more important than he is. Exposing intelligence sources is never acceptable. It's as bad as torture which we agree is not acceptable, or killing women and children. So if Assange gets an entire family killed off because of this leak, or several families are ruined, this is okay to you?
But if the USA bombs the wrong house by accident then it's not okay?
Re:Wikileaks isn't a leaks aleaks site anymore (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Assange should feel lucky... (Score:1, Insightful)
...that he decided to spread US diplomatic cables. Imagine if he had gotten a hold of a similar set of Russian ones and publicized them. His site wouldn't be DDOS'ed, he'd be dead.
This is why I consider Assange to be nothing more than an asshole at best (or a terrorist at worst) with an axe to grind against the US, not some messaih out to save the world from Evil(tm) Secret Governmnets(tm). Unless he honestly expects us to believe absolutely no other government in the world has skeletons in its closet, the fact that he only picks on the country least likely to send assassins after him* puts a huge "coward" label on him.
If he had the chutzpa to do this with any other country on the planet in addition to the US, maybe I'd have more respect for the guy. But now? He's just an asshole.
*: Like it or not, America IS most likely the most diplomatic country out there in issues like these.
Re:Forget Assange (Score:2, Insightful)
If any heads should roll over the leaks, it should be those of the guy who stole the data and whatever dunce(s) allowed peons access to the data.
The US allowed it. This is a side-effect to the booming defense/security industry that developed after 9/11. Companies providing these services blossomed which resulted in millions more people requiring security clearances. More people + rushed investigations = more potential for leaks.
Re:If you didn't do anything wrong, (Score:5, Insightful)
And rightfully so!
Would you tell something "in confidence" to someone who you expected to write down a detailed report of your statements, and send them into a system to analysed and passed around? Anyone speaking to a diplomat and expecting confidence was naive from day one.
So you would have no issues with your medical records being made public then?
There are plenty of reasons for diplomats to commit potentially inflammatory statements to paper and have them passed around - detailed foreign staffing reports on who they met, their personalities, comments made and perceptions drawn all help other diplomats to handle foreign contacts better and most certainly will contain information you would never, ever say to that persons face, despite it being 100% true.
Re:At least someone has balls (and common sense) (Score:1, Insightful)
just because Palin called him a terruhrist
I though she called him the TerruChrist.. Funny how Clinton said the leaks where "an attack on the international community" when reading a few pages here and there just improves the US image globally. Which kind of powerful organization is more likely to create enmities around the world, the one which is secretive and which motives are hidden and actions are violent, or the one of which motivations are clearly understood and violent actions reasonable or at least understandable from a their perspective even if trivially misguided, or evil, in the light of common sense and reason? Lack of understanding causes fear, fear causes.. and so on.
He's white. (Score:4, Insightful)
If he were an Arab Muslim, he would already be dead if they had his location. This is because the largest enemy a government like the US has is it's own population, and the assassination of a white well-to-do activist would be far more alarming than another dead Arab.
They are using their diplomatic contacts to try to force him into hiding. If that doesn't work, you can bet they have plans to take him out with rendition or staging an accident. You can step on toes to a certain extent, but once you start getting in the way of business getting done, you can start counting you life down in hours.
The true reason for this release (Score:3, Insightful)
This is just Assange using wikileaks to attack a country he hates.
Re:Wikileaks isn't a leaks aleaks site anymore (Score:4, Insightful)
What about Russia and its corruption and political oppression?
Mexico and its corruption and drug cartels?
What about Ireland and its corporate tax giveaways? Why aren't they looking at how that continued?
How about the collapse of Ireland's banking system? Or, the collapse of Iceland economy?
What about human trafficking in China, mostly female North Korean sex workers.
Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries covering up physical and sexual abuse of foreign workers, including murder?
Sexual abuse of female workers in Chinese factories?
Tacit government approval of child sex workers and tourism in Thailand, Viet Nam, and Cambodia?
Yeah, you are right. The U.S. has all the juiciest stories. In fact, there are no other stories worth pursuing any where else.
Re:If you didn't do anything wrong, (Score:5, Insightful)
You're completely missing the point. When one diplomat tells another something, the expectation all around is that it will get written down and passed to the recipient's superiors. It is NOT expected that it will fall into the hands of someone like Assange who will release it to the world.
Re:If you didn't do anything wrong, (Score:3, Insightful)
Diplomats, on the other hand, make decisions that effect the lives of thousands, if not millions
Even with a harem I'd be surprised if any diplomats are effecting the lives of more a hundred or so.
Re:Personal Attacks & Defamation (Score:3, Insightful)
It doesn't matter whether or not it's true, it's still an ad hominem attack and shitty journalism.
Re:Pied Piper (Score:3, Insightful)
If anything, my reaction is akin to that of the "Bull in a China Shop" experiment on MythBusters [mythbustersresults.com]. You hear that Wikileaks announces a big leak, they hype it up, you get all this anticipation, and when the actual results come out, they're... amusing, fascinating, but not "OMG national security crisis!!1!" (the smashing ceramics) material. The worst we've seen in the cables is that the US spies on the UN and other countries via diplomats, but that's hardly surprising given that they had no compunction against spying against its own citizens for about a decade now-- heck, I'm sure the CIA spied on everyone ever since they were created.
If the intended aim of the leak was to shame governments into greater transparency and openness, I have to say that this leak is doomed to failure. Nearly all diplomats are part negotiator, part politician-- and all politicians never liked to be embarrassed in public. What it will very likely do instead is really mess with relations that have been slowly rebuilt in recent years-- China and Russia come to mind, and don't get me started on how much this sets back the 6-party talks now that the DPRK is warming up their artillery. Now that the Arabs' desire to end Iran's nuclear ambitions is out in the open, I doubt they'll be as forthcoming as they were when the toner cartridge bomb plot was brought to our attention. The great irony of these is that it is not that the content of the leaks themselves were a national security risk if kept secret, but that in leaking the material and messing up trust relationships with countries we'd rather not turn into radioactive glass (MAD), the leaking can easily make endeavors toward peace an order of magnitude more difficult. Now North Korea and Iran can say, "How can we trust you, when you're going to let confidential deals out into the open?"
What's more, this leak tells governments not that they should open up and avoid criticism and ridicule, but that they should keep even more from the public in order to avoid pissing off allies and potential allies.
Assange should never have targeted the State Department-- if he wanted real dirt, he should have kept the focus on the CIA, and Justice and Defense Departments.
Re:At least someone has balls (and common sense) (Score:5, Insightful)
One might argue that doing anything overt to him would only reinforce the belief that the government(s) in question are actually scared of Wikileaks rather than just angry with them; the last thing they want to risk doing is martyring him.
Re:If you didn't do anything wrong, (Score:5, Insightful)
You have essentially just said that diplomats should not be making any full and frank assessments of foreign diplomats, countries or situations. Assessments that may aid others in their work, but may equally insult the subject, or cause the subject to legitimately show insult or withdraw cooperation if said assessment became public.
Take for example the revelation that China is growing weary of North Korea and could soon be in a position to cease supporting the countries government - that has the potential to seriously damage the current relationship between North Korea and China, causing North Korea to stop listening to Chinese suggestions or even back away from the negotiating table completely. In turn, China could make trade negotiations that much more difficult for American diplomats, because of the position they have been put in.
The revelation can be entirely true, but it can still cause severe problems on many sides.
Your stance of "that shouldn't have been kept secret" would have resulted in one of two scenarios - either the assessment from the front line diplomat doesn't get written because they don't want an international spat on their hands, thus analysts and diplomats further up the chain have less information to go on, and future negotiations are that much more difficult or alternatively the assessment gets written, becomes public knowledge and that diplomat gets expelled from China, or all further meetings are cancelled with that diplomat, and you have the aforementioned spat.
Re:If you didn't do anything wrong, (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nobel Prize (Score:4, Insightful)
If two nations can't trust each other, then how on earth do you expect them to be at peace with each other?
This is a solved problem. You set up systems of checks and balances that don't require the nations to trust one another. They can verify what the other one is doing. In fact, if the only way nations could be at peace was for them to trust one another, there'd be war all around.
Re:If you didn't do anything wrong, (Score:3, Insightful)
By that point in the war the Japanese government had outsourced most of the small arms, ammunition, explosive and tool production to homes.
Hiroshima was headquarters of the Fifth Division and the 2nd General Army Headquarters which was the command of all of southern Japan, in addition to being a communications center, storage depot and troop assembly area for 2nd General Army Headquarters.
So how exactly was it not a legitimate military target?
Re:USCYBERCOM (Score:3, Insightful)
Wikileaks isn't done for sure. There will be more leaks in the future.
And above all, they have been building up profile. You and I may have known about this site since the beginning, Joe Sixpack didn't until recently. Everyone knows it now.
I believe these leaks will only increase. Not because there is more to leak, but because the potential leakers now have a platform to leak to. Five years ago there wasn't such a well known and accessible platform to leak stuff onto.
There are always lots of people that have access to classified information. Some need it for their jobs, others inadvertedly are given access, yet others gain access on their own. Especially the second group I can imagine is going to leak more: many people must have toyed with the idea of leaking stuff they found, stuff they shouldn't know, stuff that can be interesting/ embarrassing/ whatever. But they didn't have an easy platform - now they have. Wikileaks is in everybody's mind, giving people ideas, giving them a reason, and giving them the opportunity to have their leaks noticed.
All the more reasons for a.o. the US government to want them shut down.
Re:If you didn't do anything wrong, (Score:3, Insightful)
Well... how about this. If I went around breaking into other peoples medical records, reading them, and passing the info around to the friends of mine who I think could benefit from reading them....
then I wouldn't expect any sympathy for me when mine are stolen and published.
That is more what I am saying. These people use spies, work with spies, and sometimes simply are spies themselves. They engage in it left and right, I see no reason to have any sympathy for them when the tables get turned.
Turnabout is fair play.
Re:Nobel Prize (Score:1, Insightful)
It's called accountability, and it's always beneficial.
Re:If you didn't do anything wrong, (Score:5, Insightful)
However even if it doesn't it shows that Julian is a jackass who uses people for personal gain.
Even if he was married and cheating on his wife, he' still done no worse than many US politicians of the past decade. As a single guy, not in a relationship, I couldn't give a flying fuck who he sleeps with, and I scoff at any US politico who would make something of it.
Re:At least someone has balls (and common sense) (Score:1, Insightful)
I sure as hell don't care about US federal law, unless I'm actually in the US.
Or if you live in a country that has an extradition treaty with the US.
Re:The true reason for this release (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just Assange using wikileaks to attack a country he hates.
Clearly this is why the headline story on BBC news today [bbc.co.uk] is about China's thinking on North Korea, and the headline story in The Independent [independent.co.uk] is about missiles in Iran, both of which are sourced from the Wikileaks cables and neither of which is remotely 'anti-US'. I'm sure there are numerous other examples. It seems that you are being deceived by the US government propaganda machine, which attempts to bias (US) public opinion against things it doesn't like by claiming that they are attacking the democratic beacon of justice and humanity, the great and powerful USA, land of the free etc etc.
Re:At least someone has balls (and common sense) (Score:2, Insightful)
So here, this should make you happy
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1334432/WikiLeaks-boss-Julian-Assange-goes-US-bank-explosive-new-dossier.html [dailymail.co.uk]
Agree or disagree with his process, but Assange makes some very reasonable points in the full interview. Judge for yourself here:
http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenberg/2010/11/29/an-interview-with-wikileaks-julian-assange/ [forbes.com]
Sure, if the US govt's actions were not important more private information would have come out, but right now the US, is by far the most dominant world power, and it is fairly assertive in using its power, so documents revealing its workings carry a corresponding importance. So it seems that Assange has his priorities right.
Also, one thing that I have noticed is that Wikileaks does seem to be listening to criticism, and every release seems to incorporate lessons learned from the previous ones. Wikileaks is certainly worth supporting.
Re:If you didn't do anything wrong, (Score:4, Insightful)
...but we intentionally aimed at civilians,...
I read through the section you linked to, and I saw nothing to back up your assertion. In fact, I found quite the opposite. Maybe you should read your own link:
Leaflets were dropped over cities before they were bombed, warning the people and urging them to escape the city.
Re:Wikileaks isn't a leaks aleaks site anymore (Score:1, Insightful)
I would submit that individuals who live in the US and other Western nations who believe their governments are "oppressing" them have no idea what "oppression" is.
What I took from this entire post is that individuals from "the US and other Western nations" should abandon the fight against oppression simply because of the lack of severity. I would submit that giving an inch would constitute a mile, and there is a reason why we cannot fathom was true oppression is and that reason is largely because we do refuse to stand for even minor amounts of it.
Its on I2P (Score:3, Insightful)
Why does not Wikileaks post all their leaks on Freenet which is somewhat robust to DDoS _and_ provides great encryption and anonymity?
Someone is mirroring the data on I2P which is much faster and better than Freenet, IMO.
Re:If you didn't do anything wrong, (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, most of them. But on the other hand, Arab countries urging the US to bomb Iran probably are quite upset that Iran now knows they did so.
Re:Assanges leaks put intelligence sources at risk (Score:4, Insightful)
The rule is do not harm civilians.
Why is Wikileaks held to this rule and not the US Government?
Re:The true reason for this release (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:If you didn't do anything wrong, (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, you know, when I wrote my emails, I didn't expect them to be read by the government. But they did it anyway. Since they violated my trust and privacy and the 4th amendment without any legitimate authorization, I'm for pulling their pants down around their ankles in public and laughing at their shrunken little parts. Respect is not given, it is earned. And the USG has not been earning in this regard, it has been spending.
So three cheers for Julian, and here's hoping for some real embarrassments in the cables. I mean, besides the ones already known, like the idiocy about trading Guantanamo prisoners for an audience with El Presidente.
Depends on which side you are on... (Score:1, Insightful)
Same here. Heck, "The Founding Fathers" of the country were terrorists.
Of course "the founding fathers" of most revolutions are terrorists when viewed from the other side. However, I'm not sure I'd want to be on his side...
He seems to be a revolutionary against the government of the USA (non-partisan). Although, I'm not in favor of some of the things the government of the USA does, we have a ballot box to fix most things and I don't think the revolution that Thomas Jefferson had in mind had much to do about the dribble coming out of wikileaks these days...
Besides, if that Julian guy is a true revolutionary, he should be comfortable with martyr status and be willing to give himself up for the cause to prove his point.
Re:If you didn't do anything wrong, (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:If you didn't do anything wrong, (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a phrase that one should never stoop to the level of an idiot, because they will go on to beat you with experience. So I am going to try and resist saying something about wishing the foreign civilians that you and your family are to most of the world are killed by not your government or military. You wouldn't be concerned of course, because it is moral and justified.
Or is it that as long as it isn't your tribe being hurt, it is moral and justified?
Attacking civilians is not justifiable. And once you do justify it to yourself, it is easy to just declare a section of your society some kind of non-citizen and wage a war on them. I wonder if you can think of any events in history that might correspond with the kind of thing you are advocating?
Re:The USA does not put intelligence sources at ri (Score:3, Insightful)
You are very biased and have a lot of free time, since you posted at least 15 messages in this thread.
An easy example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame#.22Plamegate.22 [wikipedia.org]
Intelligence sources have been exposed by US government, and most probably a few people have been killed following this 'leak'.
Would you condemn Bush, or only Assange, since he's not american ?
Re:If you didn't do anything wrong, (Score:3, Insightful)
And 90% of stores in America are owned by Americans. 90% of lawyers and doctors in America are American. Americans own a disproportionate amount of property to non-Americans in America, and exploit non-Americans.
So how exactly is ridding North America of Americans not legitimate and beneficial?
Brilliant logic, Watson.