How WikiLeaks Gags Its Own Staff 236
robbyyy writes "The New Statesman has just revealed the extent of the legal eccentricity and paranoia that exists at the WikiLeaks organization. The magazine published a leaked copy of the draconian and extraordinary legal gag which WikiLeaks imposes on its own staff. Clause 5 of the Confidentiality Agreement (PDF) imposes a penalty of £12,000,000 (approximately $20,000,000) on anyone who breaches this legal gag. Sounds like they don't trust their own staff."
As opposed to the armed forces.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Which threaten court martial and execution for breaching confidentiality, or a lifetime in prison. I'd take a $12 million fine which I can default on, any day of the week.
Do thieves trust other thieves? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:duh, no kidding you IDIOT. (Score:2, Insightful)
Yet all other confidential info in the world is fair game?
*facepalm*
Re:As opposed to the armed forces.. (Score:4, Insightful)
The Armed Forces, where one takes an legally binding oath after volunteering, then volunteers again for the security clearance while taking another legally binding oath.
Dude knew what he was getting into
Re:I like it! (Score:3, Insightful)
Presumably, there are people out there who want to leak documents, but want to be sure that wikileaks will properly redact it so as to protect members of the armed services, etc. This policy is probably in place for their peace of mind. If leakers just wanted to dump stuff onto the internet, anyone could do that. This policy is to make sure that the leak is done right.
Psychological Warfare (Score:5, Insightful)
Discredit WikiLeaks, Shoot the Messenger, Covert Operation Game Plan - as we were warned.
Re:I like it! (Score:5, Insightful)
EXACTLY. Wikileaks can't seem to win. If they ever leak anything, people scream about how they are "endangering lives". If they do anything to control the level of detail in the leaking to address that issue, people (possibly the very same people) scream about how they limit leaking.
Re:I like it! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:If I worked at wikileaks (Score:5, Insightful)
and found something damning (like Assange is a paid lackey of Putin), I sure as hell wouldn't hesitate to leak it to the press. Confidentiality agreement be damned.
Why do these groups think these things hold any power? It's just words on a page.
It isn't meant to stop really damning truth.
It's to stop "volunteers" from profiting immensely by pre-leaking the documents for a price.
A monetary fine is not a a deterrent for someone "doing the right thing".
It does deter people from profiting off the compromising of valuable data and the organization itself by altering the reward calculation.
Re:How Ironic (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll try to explain secrecy within wikileaks once more, hopefully before a hundred other comments spout the same nonsense. Wikileaks gets information from people within the organizations. These documents or memos they receive may have the submitters information on there. Maybe they have an IP, or email address, or mailing address or something that the submitter didn't hide. So wikileaks goes to the trouble of redacting this information from these documents so the submitter doesn't get identified.
Lets say Company A offers to bribe Country B's corrupt government to allow some dumping of chemical waste near some poor neighborhood in that country, but someone gets wind of this information floating around and submits it to wikileaks.
Now when these two entities find out their plan was leaked, they're going to be very pissed off. There may not be that many suspects for this leak, so they might start investigating to see who sent this information. Well guess who has this information? The wikileaks staff! Company A and Country B probably have deep deep pockets and wouldn't mind getting to the bottom of this, and who knows what the hell they'll do to the guy if they ever found out who it is (see : Bradley Manning detainment conditions).
Well the wikileaks staff are still human, and despite whatever moral integrity they have, maybe one of them can be tempted by large sums of money (as my dad used to say, Everyone has their price). So the best solution for the wikileaks organization at this point is to enforce a confidentiality agreement with an astronomical sum of money, as to potentially discourage any of their staff from leaking sensitive information that governments and organizations would love to get their hands on. Make it so whatever they might receive clearly isn't worth the 20M they'd have to pay back (assuming it was enforceable). This agreement isn't there to prevent the staff from disclosing the wikileaks budget, or to hide the fact that Julian assange uses Rogaine, or stays in 5 star hotels for conference visits. This is prevent the leakers from "mysteriously disappearing" because someone at their organization found out what they leaked.
Re:Psychological Warfare (Score:4, Insightful)
For what it's worth, I don't have a fundamental problem with the confidentiality agreement: There is no real conflict with Wikileak's mission here, despite what many other people might claim in a kneejerk reaction. Wikileaks doesn't advocate the indiscriminate release of all information, and with any organisation dedicated to releasing confidential resources while protecting whistleblowers, secrecy is obviously a central fact of live. More so with an organisation that must be under tremendous, even violent, pressure from the US. And while I found the commercial aspects of the agreement a bit odious -- they talk about the financial damages caused by breaking the agreement -- it makes sense since, even though Wikileaks is not for profit, their media partners (e.g. the NYT, the Guardian, der Spiegel) are.
All that said, Wikileaks is more secretive of their own organisation than is good for them, and it would not have hurt to simply be open about this confidentiality agreement: they could have posted it on their websites for potential volunteers to see, for instance. Of coure, if they had done that, everybody would have started shouting about the supposed paradoxical situation of a whistleblowing organisation having secrets themselves (hurr durr) -- ie. what's happening now.
Re:As opposed to the armed forces.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Really? Can you list one nation which has listed Wikileaks as a criminal enterprise? (including the US).
Re:I like it! (Score:5, Insightful)
i'd be surprised if diplomats from other countries don't talk about each other in as bitchy a manner as the americans do. it seems a bit naive to think having bitchings aired could spark an international incident - if anything it can help communication, now that both parties have a little bit less pretense they can talk more openly and productively.
if diplomats are prone to hurt feelings, they're REALLY in the wrong game.
of course, feigning offense and hurt can be good from a propaganda perspective.
on redaction, observations so far have shown that wikileaks have redacted more information than their traditional press counterparts.
aside from the sheer volume leaked, it seems safety per-leak has actually increased.