LinuxQuestions.org - here is a working link to wikileaks

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I have a certain view on certain things. May I share it?

If you are ashamed of the truth then you will try to hide the truth. Mostly usually.
But if you treat people as stupid sheeps and tell'em what they can and can't see, do or know, then you might be doing the wrong thing.
If you're trying to limit freedom of a human being in all it's rightnessness, then may God have mercy on your soul.
If you are a hypocrite then who can trust you?

And, to finish, if you can't look in the eyes of the truth, then I guess that you have a problem.

P.S.
We had a nice little war in Croatia, 1991-1995 and I'll tell you one thing; there are many things that you can kill, but you can't kill the truth.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jeebizz (Post 4180802)

Much to the chagrin of BigBro :).

Oh, only stopped reading the cables to post that, now I'll get back to browsing cablegate :D.

Oh, now it's really making me suspicious. They only said that so that people would look at it (Streisand effect or what happens when you try to ban or hide things).

Now I'm quite positive this is all gubmint handy-work. I don't even trust this archive that I downloaded, who knows what could be in it, half of me says shred it now.

They know exactly what they are doing.

Quote:

Originally Posted by H_TeXMeX_H (Post 4181082)

Oh, now it's really making me suspicious.

Oh Tex, it looks like you don't trust yourself.

I will just add some info about "Mudge" and Assange so that interested people could maybe understand certain things better.

Mudge

Quote:

Peiter Zatko, started the corporate information security group at BBN Technologies in the 1990s, was chief executive at L0pht Heavy Industries when the hacker space decided to incorporate, and founded security consultancy @Stake, which was later acquired by Symantec. Since 2004, he's been back at BBN, working as division scientist and technical director for the company's National Intelligence Research and Applications department. ...has been tapped to be a program manager at DARPA, where he will be in charge of funding research designed to help give the U.S. government tools needed to protect against cyberattacks. He cut his security chops as a teen-age hacker in the 1980s and managed to stay one step ahead of the law. He ran the L0pht hacker space during the 1990s, where he invented anti-sniffing technology that became the first remote promiscuous system detector used by the Defense Department. He also pioneered work on buffer overflows, which are a basis for many computer network attacks. "L0pht turned the industry on its head," he said. "You didn't have security response teams at major organizations like Microsoft or Intel until we came along." From his many years doing penetration testing and working to break security systems, he understands what it takes to try to defend networks and how to come up with innovative solutions to break through barriers and get around obstructions.

It looks like he didn't break through barriers of Wikileaks so far.

Assange

Quote:

Julian Assange, in 1987, after turning 16, Assange began hacking under the name "Mendax" (derived from a phrase of Horace: "splendide mendax," or "nobly untruthful"). He and two other hackers joined to form a group which they named the International Subversives. Assange wrote down the early rules of the subculture: "Don’t damage computer systems you break into (including crashing them); don’t change the information in those systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks); and share information". In 1993, Assange started one of the first public internet service providers in Australia, Suburbia Public Access Network. Starting in 1994, Assange lived in Melbourne as a programmer and a developer of free software. In 1995, Assange wrote Strobe, the first free and open source port scanner. He contributed several patches to the PostgreSQL project in 1996. He helped to write the book Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier (1997), which credits him as a researcher and reports his history with International Subversives. Starting around 1997, he co-invented the Rubberhose deniable encryption system, a cryptographic concept made into a software package for Linux designed to provide plausible deniability against rubber-hose cryptanalysis; he originally intended the system to be used "as a tool for human rights workers who needed to protect sensitive data in the field." Other free software that he has authored or co-authored includes the Usenet caching software NNTPCache and Surfraw, a command-line interface for web-based search engines. In 1999, Assange registered the domain leaks.org; "But", he says, "then I didn't do anything with it." Assange has reportedly attended six universities. From 2003 to 2006, he studied physics and mathematics at the University of Melbourne. On his personal web page, he described having represented his university at the Australian National Physics Competition around 2005. He has also studied philosophy and neuroscience. Assange was the winner of the 2009 Amnesty International Media Award (New Media), awarded for exposing extrajudicial assassinations in Kenya with the investigation The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances. In accepting the award, he said: "It is a reflection of the courage and strength of Kenyan civil society that this injustice was documented. Through the tremendous work of organisations such as the Oscar foundation, the KNHCR, Mars Group Kenya and others we had the primary support we needed to expose these murders to the world." He also won the 2008 Economist Index on Censorship Award. Assange was awarded the 2010 Sam Adams Award by the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence. In September 2010, Assange was voted as number 23 among the "The World's 50 Most Influential Figures 2010" by the British magazine New Statesman. In their November/December issue, Utne Reader magazine named Assange as one of the "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World". On 12 November he was leading in the poll for Time magazine's "Person of the Year, 2010"

I'm still not convinced. I will keep this insurance file instead of shredding it, and wait for further developments.

Well since so many mirrors are available already, clearly any kind of DoS attack is essentially futile. The US gov can essentially play 'Wikileaks-whack-a-mole' but the site will re-emerge somewhere else. :)

That's what they want.

I am trying to consider that 'possibility', but why would the gov actually WANT their cables and other docs leaked? For what purpose?

Do you think when and if Assange gets around to release whatever 'secret bank docs' next year, will be something that whichever big bank may be, want those documents out?

Maybe it is just too early to tell? Guess we will have to wait and see then...

For political reasons. For sure many many people will view the "leaks", so they can put dirt on people there to say influence elections, or policy, etc.

It may be too early to tell, but I am very suspicious because of all the publicity it is getting. When they want to bury something they bury it good, not apply to the Streisand effect. I don't think they're stupid (like others do). They want to appear stupid, but behind the scenes they are not stupid, not at all.

Well not to totally discount your theory, but it is actually possible that they are just that stupid. How long has diplomatic cables been used? Decades? You would think such material would somehow be secured by encryption and not be subject to any kind of snooping or accidental leaking. Then again, you could be right perhaps they intentionally chose not to secure these cables.

For what purpose, again too early to tell.

I don't think there is a credible link between what wikileaks has revealed so far and increasing the threat to our armed forces or allies. I'm a little torn on the matter, but overall I support what they are doing. There are good arguments for some government secrecy, of course, but by and large I think we have become too opaque, to guarded and I am a big proponent of more government transparency.

Here's a good article from Salon.com on the matter.

And here is a good article from The Economist

I tend to agree with their conclusion: This isn't going to do what Assange thinks it will do.

It is also possible that Assange himself could be inadvertently undermining his own organization just by his 'god complex': http://cryptome.org/0003/wikileaks-dadt.htm

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hangdog42 (Post 4182552)

And here is a good article from The Economist

I tend to agree with their conclusion: This isn't going to do what Assange thinks it will do.

I'm more concerned with the potential chilling effect on efforts to protect real whistle-blowers than I am with the potential effect on US diplomancy. But while embarrassing, there's no world changing revelations and many countries have already stated this won't affect relations with the U.S.

Quote:

Originally Posted by reed9 (Post 4182567)

I guess this is why I'm so disappointed in Wikileaks over this. Usually they've focused on real wrong-doing, but this mess seems to be focused almost entirely on embarrassing the US. There really is nothing surprising or criminal here, it is just diplomacy as it has been done for eons. Does anyone honestly believe that what we're seeing in these releases isn't replicated by pretty much every government on the planet? And you're right, the ability of the US to gather real, useful intelligence has been seriously damaged. In a world as screwed up as this one, that isn't good.