Leakers pay a price in American culture. The greatest fear of Washington is thinking individuals inside government who know some things are simply wrong; a moral conscience is the only way forward: A former CIA officer has been indicted on charges of disclosing national security secrets after being accused of leaking classified information about Iran…
Wikileaks
Wikileaks is one of the biggest and most important stories in the world, challenging governments and journalists alike. I’ve been writing extensively about the group since 2006, featured an exclusive interview in 2008 with founder Julian Assange and examined the myriad of issues around the website. Assange himself asked me in the early days whether I wanted to be on the group’s board to vet incoming leaks and determine their veracity before publishing. I agreed but unfortunately this never eventuated.
Gaza isolation all about money?
Really: A key Israeli cargo crossing for goods entering the Gaza Strip was rife with corruption, according to a U.S. diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks on Thursday The June 14, 2006, cable, published Thursday by Norway’s Aftenposten daily, says companies told U.S. diplomats they were forced to pay hefty bribes to get goods into Gaza.…
Now the Wikileaks genie is out of the bottle
The US government may have to realise that good citizens and employees may want to speak out and expose the truth: The White House has instructed every US government department and agency to create “insider threat” programmes that will ferret out disgruntled or untrustworthy employees who might be tempted to leak the sort of state…
Australians respect Wikileaks so take a step back
The people have spoken: Australian voters are sharply at odds with the Prime Minister over the release of classified US government cables, a new poll has found. The survey suggests just one-quarter of voters agree with Julia Gillard that the diplomatic cables recently published by WikiLeaks should have remained secret. The findings show 59 per…
Israel told US it would keep Gaza on brink of collapse
The Middle East’s Only Democracy Inc: Israel told U.S. officials in 2008 it would keep Gaza’s economy “on the brink of collapse” while avoiding a humanitarian crisis, according to U.S. diplomatic cables published by a Norwegian daily on Wednesday. Three cables cited by the Aftenposten newspaper, which has said it has all 250,000 U.S. cables…
The philosophy behind Openleaks
Daniel Domscheit-Berg, once of Wikileaks and now working on the OpenLeaks project, spoke last last year about his plans and how to bring truly transparent information: Here’s a rough transcript. Extract: There’s project staff that has to manage all of this, that has to take care of all the servers. There’s the whole public that…
US journalists are scared of being seen as anything other than lovers of power
This would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. Here’s Newsweek explaining why so few major American reporters are standing up for Wikileaks. This supposed obsession with “balance” – which usually means little more than siding with the powerful – is spurious and regarded as such across the world (see here): So why are American…
Ahmadinejad as the moderate
Really: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sought some kind of nuclear fuel swap deal more than a year ago, but faced internal pressures from hard-liners who viewed it as a “virtual defeat,” according to US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks. The report, available on the WikiLeaks website Tuesday, also suggested Iran trusted the United States more…
US: $10k for killed Iraqi civilians
Victor’s justice and an insight into the occupier’s attitude towards “inconveniences” (aka murdered Iraqi civilians courtesy of Blackwater): Just how much is an Iraqi life worth? I don’t know but, in the aftermath of the killing of 17 Iraqi civilians by Blackwater employees at Nisoor Square in September 2007, apparently Iraq and the United States,…