WikiLeaks about to hit the fan

It is no longer a rape charge, but it is now a charge of "sex by surprise". (Which I understand means sex without a condom. Not that I am advocating sex without a condom as a terrific idea, please understand.)

And sex by surprise does lead to many an unwanted pregnancy. So what would you rather see Interpol do, arrest thugs for preying on helpless refugees in Sudan? Get a grip, Olga!

(Which I understand means sex without a condom. Not that I am advocating sex without a condom as a terrific idea, please understand.)

Which I understand means sex without a condom. Not that I am advocating sex without a condom as a terrific idea, please understand.

But why is my opinion about sex important?

What does this have to do with what we are discussing here?

Wikileaks: Lessons For Consumer Privacy

The website Wikileaks recently published hundreds of thousands of confidential State Department cables. These communications apparently reveal the details of conversations with, and personal impressions and assessments of, foreign leaders and diplomats. Many fear that the leak will undermine international relations in profound and unknowable ways. One of the unintended consequence of the leak, however, may be to strengthen the case for a national consumer privacy law.

Intimacy would not be possible without privacy—as Charles Fried, Tom Gerety, Robert Gerstein, and Julie Cohen so effectively show. Privacy means that the individual may choose to whom to reveal the details of her inner life. A decision to trust begets trust, such that I will be more likely to reveal myself to those who reveal themselves to me. Escalating, mutual revelation is how friendships, families, and other intimacies often grow.

What is true of people is presumably true of states. Ground rules of confidence and secure channels of communication spark candor, which in turn breed trust and intimacy. Interstate intimacy has profound repercussions. Trust, won even through gossip, facilitates diplomacy and hence has the potential to avert hard power. As Steven Aftergood of FAS points out, “If Wikileaks were … anti-war, it would safeguard, not disrupt, the conduct of diplomatic communications.”

We should not take this analogy too far: there is a big difference between safeguarding interpersonal/state communications and hiding policy decisions. The former is necessary for effective diplomacy, the latter is potentially destructive to democracy. I certainly have a problem with, for instance, secret negotiations of a binding copyright treaty.

The cables reveal both confidences and policy. Everyone knows that even non-clandestine diplomats must keep their eyes and ears open, but the leaked communications reveal instructions from the State Department for diplomats to secure specific details about their counterparts abroad. Conversations and personal passwords alike can be aggregated and downloaded, converting intimate interpersonal meetings into utilitarian data points. Mixing diplomacy with intelligence gathering may be a poor policy decision in that it undermines the very trust required for intimacy.

But the twin lessons of Wikileaks should be obvious. And, I would argue, apply just as readily to companies and consumers as they do states. First, there must be a space for diplomatic and consumer candor. By consumer candor, I mean nothing more grandiose than a well-earned comfort in revealing to a business who you are and what it is you want, so that they can provide that thing to you.

Second, it is possible and often desirable to separate out functions such as diplomacy and sales from surreptitious information gathering activity. As with diplomats, companies do not earn trust by using every interaction with a consumer to profile them, much less by storing that information in a database that can, and often does, leak out.

Maybe these lessons will finally seep in. It took the revelation of video records of a prominent judge, after all, for Congress to pass the Video Privacy Protection Act. Here, again, we see bipartisan condemnation of the leak as disruptive to national security and damaging to U.S. foreign relations. Couple this rare point of agreement with a bipartisan consumer bill and an incoming Speaker who once filed a lawsuit under federal electronic privacy law and some real possibilities open up.

That's a disgraceful and shameful thing to say for somebody who lives the lifestyle you do ci.

Which governments in which places and in which times would you have trusted?

Finn, I'm sorry, but I can't take this exchange any further than I already have.
I've already said all I've wanted to say. I'd just be repeating the same things, over & over.

About all ci. could achieve without the government is collecting sea shells, nuts and fruit when in season and lying down in a hole when he's feeling bad.

Governments can't afford to be trustworthy and open because being so implicates the rest of us. We get the business done and keep our hands clean.

Christians don't rape, murder and torture. Human nature does that and if you think there's more of it now than there used to be you've been reading rosy-coloured spectacles history and not through a glass darkly stuff.

Non-intellectuals can be identified by them holding on to the dream of lovely theories of benevolence, a cosy option and ideal in the popularity stakes, insulated from the pragmatics of power politics. The crudity of the idealist's separation of theory from practice requires a stupified audience.

What's this "working hard" bullshit? And "saved"!!! Ye Gods. He is spending his descendent's inheritance on "seeing the world" and in between receiving the best medical attention the world has ever seen.

How can it be "his money" without reference to externals.

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.

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.

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."

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.

Is he the new Salman Rushdie?

According to msolga, Assange's answer to charges that he has blood on his hands is that he, allegedly, gave the US government the opportunity to vet the information and tell him what items might cause individual harm. That they did not, puts the responsibility for such harm on them.

If this is true, it is a clever but entirely cynical dodge of personal responsibility, and it's hard to imagine how anyone of good will might accept it as morally legitimate.

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."

9.39pm: Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is expected to appear in a UK court tomorrow after his lawyers said he would meet police to discuss a European extradition warrant from Sweden relating to alleged sexual assaults, Owen Bowcott reports.

Assange is seeking supporters to put up surety and bail for him. He said he expected to have to post bail of between £100,000 and £200,000 and would require up to six people offering surety, or risked being held on remand.

Once he turns himself into the police he will have to appear before a magistrates court within 24 hours, where he will seek release on bail. A full hearing of his extradition case would have to be heard within 28 days.

9.14pm: Mark Stephens, Assange's London-based lawyer, yesterday denounced the Swedish extradition warrant as a "political stunt".

9.23pm: The net appears to be closing on Julian Assange. The US attorney general tonight compounded a week of intense diplomatic pressure on Assange and WikiLeaks when he warned: "We are looking at all the things we can do to try to stem the flow of this information."

The Guardian's Ewen MacAskill and Sam Jones report:

The US attorney general, speaking at a press conference in Washington, said: "The lives of people who work for the American people have been put at risk. The American people themselves have been put at risk by these actions that I believe are arrogant, misguided and ultimately not helpful in any way. We are doing everything that we can."

Government would not exist without people.

. Government is the people.