And big surprise, NYTimes makes it seem like the problem is with Assange not being happy how he's portrayed, rather than it being based on discredited sources, putting people in key roles that never happened, and ignoring that it was a careless and clueless Guardian journalist (David Leigh) who leaked the key to the unredacted Cablegate files in his book, not Wikileaks. Look around and see if you can find that last little tidbit mentioned any time some journalist writes Wikileaks put people in danger.
I don't think it's reasonable to expect a movie about Wikileaks to be any more accurate than, say, a movie about Facebook. Yeah, they took some liberties and made a nice, tidy narrative. It's a movie.
And whose fault is it that the journalist apparently didn't know a password he was given for files for his own use was being reused to secure a public insurance file? It does not speak well to their stewardship of sensitive documents that they were giving out that password to people who are "careless and clueless."
>I don't think it's reasonable to expect a movie about Wikileaks to be any more accurate than, say, a movie about Facebook.
That's why I have a problem with movies like The Social Network and Zero Dark Thirty. It's fine to composite, or eliminate less significant details, or even play some details up for their metaphorical significance. My problem is with movies containing counterfactual plot points that change the entire moral calculus of the events being depicted, often in favor of the status quo.
It's as of you made a movie about the Iraq War, and based a key scene around how they find a bunch of WMD in the desert. Or depict Martin Luther King on the phone to his handlers in the USSR, or delivering "I Have a Dream" at a rally against racial quotas in hiring.
Actually, it wasn't being reused to secure the public insurance file - we still don't know know the password for that. The problem was that other people managed to get their hands on the encryped file for the Guardian journalist under dubious circumstances involving a prominent ex-Wikileaks member sabotaging them.
> the journalist apparently didn't know a password he was given for files for his own use was being reused to secure a public insurance file
I think he got the file from bittorrent so he knew it was public. Not making an ecrypted archive just for him with a new password was Assange's mistake, no doubt about it, but publishing that password in a book takes it to a whole new level.
The fact that Bittorrent is used for distribution doesn't automatically make a file fully public. But as far as I know the file was provided to the journalist in the equivalent of an FTP /pub folder, not via Bittorrent. But Assange never removed the file afterwards and it eventually got backed up and publically-trawled afterwards somehow.
Assange is not blameless in the leak of the unredacted cables. The procedure he picked for handing a copy of the data to Leigh was terrible. Proper use of public key cryptography could have made it much safer.
Given cables were leaked, assuming it was totally Assange's fault, and sources were revealed. Were any revealed sources harmed? If so, would it not have come out at the Manning trial?
It's the same Disney who made racist propoganda during WW2, it's surprisingly blatant if it comes out like WikiLeaks reading of the script signals it will.
(a) The Taliban literally did a press release that the NYT ran saying they were using the documents to find informers.
(b) The Taliban are known --- famous for, in fact --- operating death squads; it is almost their whole M.O. Common sense applies here as well.
(c) No media service and no police force in the world has meaningful penetration into society in places like Ghazni, Helmand, or Paktika province. So you should be aware that you've set an unrealistic bar here.
It's probably not relevant to the case here but I think also worth knowing: Assange told the chief investigative editor at the Guardian, in a room full of named reporters, none of whom appear to have contradicted the Guardian editor's story, that Assange believes murdered informants were collaborators who got what they deserved.
Thanks for your response. I went and looked at the press release: is this what you refer to? [1]
a) and c) such informants were by definition in contact at some stage. It would be trivial to state which, if any, informants had gone to ground, or disappeared. Or even a number or percentage. I don't think that's unrealistic, and I don't think it would have put them in any more danger. It's quite within the power of the US administration to give more info than they have, particularly useful to them securing the most serious possible conviction for Manning.
b) Common sense would then indicate they would announce such to deter other informants.
I agree that it is not relevant, I think I saw the clip in some documentary [2] However he's denied it, and it was Leigh who provided the account.
So even with a shaky premise, that it was all Assange's fault, there seems to be a lack of evidence of anything resulting from it. That's what I'm bothered by. There's plenty of powerful organisations involved who could point to the bodies, and yet none have to my knowledge.
I don't understand why a journalist would not then link to the name of Khalifa Abdullah in the leaks. It means I have to do it. I have doubts that his name is contained within. Also, the point has been made that many of the names are spelled phonetically and that the Taliban probably aren't past masters of English pronunciation.
Strong agree that those documents had the potential to lead to the murder of informants - this alone convinces me that the mass release of those cables without any edits or redactions was irresponsible.
However, I've previously assumed that we (incredibly) made it through the aftermath of the leaks without any of those potential murders taking place, for the same reasons listed in the grandparent comment; the media would have reported it, and the government would have surely cited it at Chelsea Manning's trial. So I'm skeptical but intrigued by your assertion that informants may have been murdered, but that there's be no way for us to know whether this had happened. My (uninformed) expectation would be that we WOULD know, since:
- we had (previously but not anymore?) informants in those places in the first place
- such murders would be (easily?) dicoverable after the fact, especially since the Taliban would have motive to tout them
- the government had a strong motive for wanting to portray the leaks in the worst possible light, and therefore would want to discover and verify such murders
Your observation that we have very little knowledge of these places does make me more uncertain about whether any murders occurred, but at this point we're far enough out from the leaks that the burden of proof lies with anyone asserting that murders probably DID take place, for the reasons listed above. (As opposed to the question of whether the leaks were irresponsible in the first place, which for me is a resounding yes even if we somehow made it through without any murders.)
Why are you arguing about whether anyone was murdered over the releases? The circumstantial evidence that the thread was real is overwhelming, and the poor visibility we have into Afghan tribal culture makes it impossible to settle the argument. Furthermore, by continuing to litigate the point, you help build the argument that Assange bears some responsibility for that threat. Why not instead just say, "sure, bad things happened, but they're offset by the good Wikileaks did", or something like that?
Your assertion that we may never know whether anyone was murdered was a surprise to me, which is why I responded. It seems relevant because whether the good outweighs the bad depends on how much bad was actually done. (Technically what's relevant is how much bad one would expect to have happened in advance, but what actually ended up happening last time will affect our guesstimates of what is likely to happen next time.)
Don't know we also need to know how much good was actually done? Can that be quantified? (Can we name somebody who wasn't murdered because of the leaks?)
Asking how to quantify the good and bad that resulted from a thing is something we can ask about literally anything. It's especially hard in this case, because the potential harm was immediate and personal (people being murdered, etc) while the good was broad long-term (a public with greater insight into what its government is doing, etc). But there are plenty of areas with similar tradeoffs; if raising a speed limit lowers commutes for millions of people but raises fatalities by some amount, then that's equally hard to compare.
A journalist leaked the password given to him by Wikileaks by publishing it in his book. At that moment the encrypted file was already all over the internet.
