Julian Assange: Hero or Villain?

[wilburbear]

Some say Julian is a villain, I respect that.

I am forced to admit that Julian is an amateur in this area.

The Attorney General of the United States is in charge of dirty tricks for the opposing team. His campaign of villainy against Wikileaks, and the First Amendment, leaves Julian 4 laps down in a 5 lap race.

It's downright exciting to see our nation's chief law enforcement officer work the levers to cut off the air supply for a media outlet.

Al Capone can put on a little pink dress and cry about his fall from the top of the mountain.

 

[dcraig]

Some interesting stuff going down at the moment.

Australian government forced to offer some degree of support to Julian Assange because of amount of public support for him in Australia:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/12/08/3088461.htm


Hackers have brought down mastercard.com and visa.com in "operation payback". Paypal is supposedly next on the list.

 

[wilburbear]

Quote from dcraig:

Some interesting stuff going down at the moment.

Australian government forced to offer some degree of support to Julian Assange because of amount of public support for him in Australia:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/12/08/3088461.htm


Hackers have brought down mastercard.com and visa.com in "operation payback". Paypal is supposedly next on the list.

thanks for posting

this link may be the first evidence of other major u.s. allies breaking ranks with the u.s.

 

[AAAintheBeltway]

I haven't followed this whole story all that closely, and I admit to having mixed feelings about it. There probably is some net benefit from having our officials' unvarnished opinions on foreign leaders or the likelihood of success in Afghanistan being revealed to the public. It may be difficult to pinpoint specific harm from the disclosures, but that doesn't mean there hasn't been some.

That said, the way this came about is horrifying on several levels. One, it is horrifying that one man who seems to be a radical anarchist is deciding what to release. Two, it is horrifying that the government has so little control over its supposed vital secrets that an unstable PFC in the Army can loot and divulge all these documents. Three, it is horrifying that not one official has apparently lost their job over this vast security breach.

Tens of thousands of loyal americans are subjected to invasive searches at airports and forced to give up harmless items like nail scissors, yet the government fumbled away a vast trove of military secrets and no one seemed to care. Only when State Department files that were embarrassing to Hillary Clinton came out did the media pay much notice. Contrast this to the Valery Plame "scandal", where the media went apeshit from the getgo over a minor incident of no real significance.

Another interesting and frightening aspect of this has been the hacker attacks in support of wikileaks. They reveal just how vulnerable our entire internet-based economy is, plus they show how a relatively small group of disgruntled people can foul up things. They didn't have to use the internet either. I don't want to get into examples, but anyone with an imagination can come up with numerous ways that terrorists or anarchists could disrupt life as we know it. It is scary.

I believe they acted from the same basic impulse that animated the Tea Party movement, a visceral disgust with government. It's ironic that this disgust has reached its apex during the administraiton of a President who was supposed to lift us out of such feelings, but those dashed hopes and dreams may be only adding fuel to the fire.

 

[resinate]

I agree. He has not changed course in any meaningful way from the Bush administration. Police state abuses, war crimes, and rampant selling out to special interests continue. The enraged disappointment is widespread.

Quote from AAAintheBeltway:

.... It's ironic that this disgust has reached its apex during the administraiton of a President who was supposed to lift us out of such feelings, but those dashed hopes and dreams may be only adding fuel to the fire.

 

[MarketMasher]

Quote from AAAintheBeltway:

Two, it is horrifying that the government has so little control over its supposed vital secrets that an unstable PFC in the Army can loot and divulge all these documents. Three, it is horrifying that not one official has apparently lost their job over this vast security breach.

Only when State Department files that were embarrassing to Hillary Clinton came out did the media pay much notice. Contrast this to the Valery Plame "scandal", where the media went apeshit from the getgo over a minor incident of no real significance.


I believe they acted from the same basic impulse that animated the Tea Party movement, a visceral disgust with government. It's ironic that this disgust has reached its apex during the administraiton of a President who was supposed to lift us out of such feelings, but those dashed hopes and dreams may be only adding fuel to the fire.

The communication system and lack of security was set up during the Bush Administration. The Obama Administration used it without checking whether or not it was set up properly.

Plame was outed by her own government. That is not the same as being outed by an outsider.

The issue security of data is nothing new.

"Cyber warfare is a huge new battlefront. Some 100 countries now have this capability, and they have stolen over $50 billion worth of intellectual property from the US in the past year. As much as I tried to pin Panetta down on who the culprits were, he wouldn’t name names, but indirectly hinted that the main hacker-in-chief was China. This comes on the heels of General Wesley Clark’s admission that the Chinese cleaned out the web connected mainframes at both the Pentagon and the State Department in 2007. The Bush administration kept the greatest security breach in US history secret to duck a hit in the opinion polls."