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Threat to national security, or a much needed dose of insight into the back stage mechanics of international politics?

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A threat? Not at all.. Is it damaging the US reputation.. no more then the Federal Government or CIA has done so far.. Free speech? yeah they have it...

They are just another site that seems to want to pretend to want the truth to come out at all costs only to further their popularity, That seems to have backfired though.

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Originally Posted by Michel Roque:
A threat? Not at all.. Is it damaging the US reputation.. no more then the Federal Government or CIA has done so far.. Free speech? yeah they have it...

They are just another site that seems to want to pretend to want the truth to come out at all costs only to further their popularity, That seems to have backfired though.

Are you certain that it is ONLY a publicity thing?

I get the impression that the motives behind the organization Wikileaks might be deeper than that.

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Originally Posted by Noah Harvey:

Originally Posted by Michel Roque:
A threat? Not at all.. Is it damaging the US reputation.. no more then the Federal Government or CIA has done so far.. Free speech? yeah they have it...

They are just another site that seems to want to pretend to want the truth to come out at all costs only to further their popularity, That seems to have backfired though.

Are you certain that it is ONLY a publicity thing?

I get the impression that the motives behind the organization Wikileaks might be deeper than that.

I've read a few stories behind Wikileaks founding..  I can't say much other then the lack of organization.. They get info from the inside and post it on the site.. But I wonder if they only leave in the Juicy parts and take out the other stuff

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Originally Posted by Noah Harvey:
Threat to national security, or a much needed dose of insight into the back stage mechanics of international politics?

I was reading an article in Svenska Dagbladet about the latter. The main point of the article was pretty spot-on and I'll sum it up:
I think the metaphor the author used was a technological double-edged sword for the government. One side being that the recent technological advances make spying much easier on citizens, which is encroaching on our personal privacy. The reverse to this technology is that it also allows us citizens to do the reverse and encroach on the  government's privacy and bring out some pretty embarrassing bits of information.
The Author then goes onto point out that Julian Assange is labeled a terrorist, which inevitably links him to bad boys like Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, for threatening national security or something. But Assange just runs a website, all wikileaks does is publishes classified information brought to them from  outside sources. Ultimately its the US government's own fault, because its their own personel who are releasing the files. /summary

Personally I think 'national security' is mainly used as an excuse to hide all sorts of nasty secrets from the people, as the criteria as to what constitutes a national security threat is a bit vague. Kinda like the terrorist colour thing.
But I digress:
Wikileaks is not a threat to national security. If anyone is a threat to national security, its the american government for not having better restrictions and safety stuff for all the documents that have been released and those that will be released in the future. I mean, they've managed to keep aliens a secret for 63 years, you'd think that national security wouldn't be so hard.

'Take down wikileaks and you'll have 10 more pop up within the week'
-the article I was talking about.

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Personally, after watching 9 year olds get pepper sprayed in the face by riot police that were trying to beat hippies up, I seriously began to doubt the value of many things that are done in the name of 'security.'


Robert Anton Wilson, via the fictional anarchist Celine, has some very apt statements about the nature of the danger of that which we call 'security.'

From the wiki article on Celine's Laws:

"Reflecting the paranoia of the Cold War, Celine's First Law focuses around the common idea that to have national security, one must create a secret police. Since internal revolutionaries and external foes would make the secret police a prime target for infiltration, and because the secret police would by necessity have vast powers to blackmail and intimidate other members of the government, another higher set of secret police must be created to monitor the secret police. And an even higher set of secret police must then be created to monitor the higher order of secret police. Repeat ad nauseam.

This seemingly infinite regress goes on until every person in the country is spying on another, or "the funding runs out." And since this paranoid and self monitoring situation inherently makes targets of a nation's own citizens, the average person in the nation is more threatened by the massive secret police complex than by whatever foe they were seeking to protect themselves from. Wilson points out that the Soviet Union, which suffered from this in spades, got to the point that it was terrified of painters and poets who could do little harm to them in reality.

At the same time, given the limitation of funding and scale, the perfect security state never truly emerges, leaving the populace still vulnerable from the original threat while also being threatened by the vast and Orwellian secret police."

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What did Benjamin Frankly say?
'Those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.'

or something along those lines. The real question is if there's any realistic (or immediate) solution for the situation we're in.

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at least someone has the balls to tell the truth, salute to Asange