Yup, I agree with you entirely. It would be great, and it's absolutely trivial, anyone could do it. Off you go then, and let us know when it's done. The HN source is available for download, and while no doubt the one PG runs is slightly different I have no doubt that whatever you write can easily be integrated.
It doesn't even need to be automatic. You can just have people say "this" is the same story as "that" - amalgamate.
Shouldn't even be three days - bet you could do it in one.
And yet the concept is rife with potential problems. Which article & title becomes the default, first submitted or highest ranking? What happens if articles get combined that shouldn't be combined? Is there an undo? Who controls that? How simple is merging the discussions?
I didn't mean to imply that this is an easy problem to solve. My point is that there are very smart people on HN willing to figure this out for the rest of us.
If you are a citizen of Connecticut, or, hell, anywhere, please email Lieberman and tell him that his actions and comments are completely ludicrous and, in fact, anti-Democratic.
But these leaks might make him look bad, and that hurts the next re-election.
Welcome to Amerika, where anyone who speaks out against you is branded a terrorist. (I have downmodded this exact comment a number of times, because I never thought it was really true. But this time, that's exactly what's happening! There is a well-established legal precedent in the US that you can publish anything that has been leaked, regardless of how you got that information. The person who leaked it gets in trouble, not the person who tells everyone about it. But now... we want to throw away our freedoms and call wikileaks a "terrorist organization". What the fuck? Terrorists fly airplanes full of people into buildings full of people. This is a collection of documents that say China hacked Google. NOT THE SAME AT ALL!)
I'll give you nice counter-rant. Downvote if you like, but somebody needs to put what you said in context, so I'll play American Joe Sixpack for that purpose.
What did you expect? Did you honestly think you could dump years of State Department cables on the internet and what? Somebody would come give wikileaks an award? They'd win the Nobel Peace Prize? (yikes, that still might happen)
This is not wikileaks reporting that the war is going badly, ie making a point that we are being lied to by showing the lies. This isn't honorable. If you'll remember, when the Pentagon Papers happened the leaker was fully willing to take whatever punishment came to him. As he should have.
This isn't that, either.
This is some asshole with a computer connection hooking up with somebody else with a grievance and destroying billions of dollars of my collective property. His stated mission is to destroy the structure of my country by making it impossible for various nodes of the country to communicate with each other.
No amount of ranting is going to make an anarchist into a superhero. We need leaks for society to function, not crazy self-centered promoters bent on single-handedly redesigning our way of life.
</rant> (wink)
On a more serious note, I told you guys when this happened that there aren't actions without reactions. If Assange is just getting started? Well the other side is just getting started too. Expect more of this.
Wikileaks is putting the governments of the world naked under the scanner the same way most of us are being put under the scanner every time you take a flight.
If we can't have any privacy, the government can't either.
You guys keep hitting me over the head with what's fair or what's right or going on and on about some moral outrage and how wikileaks is needed.
I keep telling you that none of that matters. Consent of the governed isn't about the best way of governing people, it's about the general agreement that things are working this way. Wikileaks has done nothing to change any of that. So it's just an attack on the government itself. Expect the government to react. That's all I saying. For every person you might convince that change is needed, you just created a hundred people wanting to throw the entire wikileaks bunch in jail.
Honestly, I agree with you that individual freedoms are at an all-time low -- in all kinds of ways. It's a travesty and a horrible thing. I'm just telling you that the emotional argument about how screwed up things are isn't going to hold much say when pitted against the way groups of people work. To them, this is an attack and a crime. Hell, it's an attack and crime to me too, and I agree with it. (The two beliefs are not mutually exclusive) Yelling about being surprised at the response here doesn't make much sense to me. You can easily see where this all is headed, and it's not a new golden age of human freedom, as much as one is needed.
Since you agree with the general sentiment (about individual freedoms), but think that expressing outrage here is futile, can you suggest a response that is constructive instead?
Go into politics yourself. There's no better response, it's stand up or shut up with this kind of issue. Far too complex for most people to understand, ramifications of great consequence that are hard to vocalise.
Just don't forget what you were getting into power for when you get there.
Thanks - but I was hoping to hear from DanielBMarkham, basically because his position seems fatalistic to me but it's also intelligently reasoned, so I was wondering if I was missing something.
Incidentally - when was the last time politicians changed world for the better in a major way? (and I don't mean simply voting money to schools or hospitals - I mean structurally).
What do you mean "structurally"? Politician's can't really change things in a major way apart from voting and signing legisislation, can they? Wouldn't that take more of a (benevolent) dictator?
I think that's my point - major reform is almost impossible for politicians to enact without an external force to react to.
If we have structural problems (e.g. widespread corruption) then politicians alone won't fix it.
I can't say that I know whether Wikileaks is going to effective, or that it's going to cause any positive ourcomes, but it seems clear to me that if there is going to be positive action on corruption it's either going to happen as a result of a massive crisis (i.e. the system breaks down), or because a new force shines light on the corruption from outside, forcing politicians to act. Both paths carry a risk of things getting worse rather than better - although so does a slow decline resulting from inaction.
Personally, I'd hate to see any (more?) major breakdowns in society, and the idea of a slow decline is equally tragic. Perhaps wikileaks is doing it wrong, but the idea of a non-government actor exposing corruption - something the media has stopped doing - seems entirely healthy to me.
Pointing out things that are broken is easy, so I apologize if I do too much of it.
Suggesting possible solutions is much tougher.
But you asked, so I owe it to whomever cares to at least give it a shot.
The idea/structure of wikileaks itself is broken, and here's why: for some reason they've went down the road of promoting Assange and going for the big stories. This would be a great idea if you wanted to foment the next Marxist revolution or create a new internet rock-star, but it ain't going to work if you really care about people and want a better world.
If you asked me to create a list of things that should remain secret, no matter how good or bad the government is, at the top of the list would be things like tactical military reports, state department cables, personnel matters, security, and negotiations. For that very reason, these are the "hot button" issues -- the ones that give wikileaks the biggest bang for their buck. So they love those kinds of stories. And they're exactly the issues where they are going to piss off the most people. Wikileaks can't be a publicity hound and also be a force for good. The two don't go together. People will buy into the idea that too many secrets are kept, but there's no way in hell they're ever going to buy into the idea that some guy in Europe knows better than the will of the taxpayer.
It keeps getting back to that -- pissing off people. Whatever a person wants to do to instigate change, he/she has to piss off more people at the way secrecy currently works than he does piss off more people at the leakers themselves. Wikileaks is failing miserably here.
So I'd suggest a truly anonymous version of wikileaks that had an high ethical standard of what they would not publish -- things like alcohol addiction treatment of top government executives, or any top secret cable that mentions sources. (These standards would need to be developed)
A set of public ethics, along with a faceless dump of information, would generate much less initial hype, but would have a greater effect in the long run. You could even have people who "spoke" for the leaking organization but were not associated with it in any way, thereby separating the operation of the group and the publicity of it.
You want to tick me off as a taxpayer over how much secrecy there is? Try dumping the legislative notes of the Agriculture department, how deep they're tangled up in big business and how much they use secrecy to cover for that. Or how much secrecy is used by the FDA to use politics to make decisions on drug approval. There are hundreds of examples like this. And don't make everything so sure to tick off the right-wing in America. This is a structural problem, not a political one, and you'll have right and left wings of politics forever, no matter what your government structure. So leak some stuff on leftist organizations in Europe. Leak some stuff about China. Whatever you do, don't purposely antagonize one group or another. Dish out the medicine evenly.
Assange's argument of disrupting information flow between the nodes doesn't require flashy news conferences and huge PR events. Sure, that's more fun and gives folks a better visceral feeling of making a difference, but if you really want change, you don't need to be emotionally fulfilled, you need to do the things that over 20 years or so will actually change things. So far this aint' it.
I wanted to thank you for this well thought out reply even though the thread is close to dead. I totally agree with you about the kind of corruption that would be more meaningful for them to expose.
Have you considered the possibility that the current leaks are intentionally 'low value', and intended to cause outrage at Wikileaks to be spent early in the game, so that when they release something truly meaningful the story will no longer be about Wikileaks itself?
I've seen this line repeated over and over and over again, and honestly I don't see why this makes perfect sense to a bunch of people yet I haven't seen a good explanation of why you think that?
I want the state department to be able to do its job effectively. I saw extremely little in the cables (if anything) that changed my view of the state department, where is the scandal?
But the state department is now less effective than it was pre-Wikileaks.
Why, as an American, would I ever support that?
I agree if there is a scandal, leak that shit. Blow it up for all to see. But leaking by the original guy who had the clearance as an F U to the government, and now by Wikileaks as an F U to the united states doesn't seem necessary to me.
I loved how Lieberman actually described the issue: "No responsible company – whether American or foreign – should assist Wikileaks in its efforts to disseminate these stolen materials."
Stolen materials? Every wrongfully classified document is stolen from the American public, the rightful owner of all information produced by the government we instituted.
I'm sorry, I generally avoid snarky posts on HN, but that comment literally makes less sense to me than anything I've seen on HN is a long long time. Down vote me to -3000, I don't care, I can't let that one slide.
Do you think the nuclear launch codes should be published? (of course not right? who would do that?)
How about where are nuclear submarines are right at this very moment. (of course not, who would do that?)
Do you think George Washington should have written in the paper he was crossing the Delaware river on Christmas? This country has had secrets since before its inception!
Ok, I guess in your defense you emphasize the phrase wrongfully classified. Everyone agrees too many things are classified (though having a clearance, I was actually shocked how many things AREN'T classified that you would think should be). But lets say I agree on your premise that things that are wrongfully classified should be made available to the public. Who decides what is wrongfully classified? Wikileaks? The guy leaking it? You? I find it interesting that of the thousands of people who had access to these documents, over 99.9% of them thought they rightfully should remain hidden, and one guy disagreed and leaked them. This isn't 100,000 documents leaked by 50 people out of 80, it is 100,000 documents leaked by 1 guy out of thousands upon thousands.
So lets go to the official definitions of classified material to see if they were "wrongfully classified"
Top Secret (TS)
The highest level of classification of material on a national level. Such material would cause "exceptionally grave damage" to national security if made publicly available.
i.e. your launch codes, orders, locations of troops, capabilities of weapons (things you and the people we are fighting don't even know we can do)
Secret
Such material would cause "grave damage" to national security if it were publicly available.
Confidential
Such material would cause "damage" or be "prejudicial" to national security if publicly available.
Restricted
Such material would cause "undesirable effects" if publicly available.
I feel like the fact that the state department has spent the last week running around trying to clean up the diplomatic brush fires that have been caused by this prove that they were right to be classified in the first place. Should the cables have been classified as Top Secret - of course not. And thats why none of them were. Should they be restricted (i.e. noforn or distro d or something similar that says they are not to be released)? I think they rightfully should be. Nothing in the cables were above Secret, and most were simply restricted. They're not wrongfully classified when the definition of restricted is that it impedes your ability to do the job of the state department if leaked, which clearly this leak is doing right now.
Despite your clear emotional involvement in this issue, you've written quite a lot to say very little, Mr/s. Schultz.
My response will be relatively short, and I feel compelled to explain why.
You wrote thirteen paragraphs. The first two are rhetorical metadiscourse. The next three are implied arguments against a straw man. In the sixth paragraph you actually attempted to make an argument, it appears, but you only violently agreed with my point ("everyone agrees too many things are classified"). The next six paragraphs consist of irrelevant information probably copied and pasted. In the last paragraph alone do you make a claim which actually merits my response.
Your claim that the state department "spent the last week clean[ing] up...diplomatic brush fires" is completely unsubstantiated. I've seen little evidence that "cablegate" has caused anything more than mild embarrassment of government officials and a media bonanza.
Your only real contention worth a response is "[Documents are] not wrongfully classified when the definition of restricted is that it impedes your ability to do the job". Part of the government's job is explaining itself and its actions to its citizens: it reports to us, because it exists by our consent. Classification and secrecy exists not so the government won't be required to account for its actions, but in order to protect the lives of the citizens who consent to its existence. According to your interpretation of "restricted" the government should classify all potentially embarrassing information which might be construed negatively by the citizenry, and frankly, I don't think I need an argument to demonstrate the bankruptcy of that claim: given the usual incompetency of the government your principle, taken to its logical conclusion, would have the government classifying nearly everything.
> Do you think the nuclear launch codes should be published? (of course not right? who would do that?)
I believe he spoke about wrongly classified materials. I should hope that neither he, nor anyone else, would think that nuclear launch codes were an example of something wrongly classified.
I don't think he will listen to anyone nor does he have a spine based on previous behavior. Better off hoping there is a leak about him to make him resign in utter shame.
(Off topic) If I remember correctly he currently has the lowest approval rating in his home state of any sitting senator (25% approve, 67% disapprove) and is up for reelection in 2012. Since he has pissed off both sides of the aisle, he won't be receiving national money and I can virtually assure you this is his last term. If that doesn't make him resign, nothing will.
Senator Lieberman called for an independent counsel to be appointed to avoid interference into the investigation by "the people under suspicion"[1]. I disagree with him about the Iraq war and censoring video games but let's avoid the ad hominem attacks.
As an Argentinian who admires the entrepreneurial spirit
of the USA, I'm amazed and appalled at how quickly it is
becoming politically intolerant and borderline fascistic.
I can't help but draw parallels between cablegate and
watergate and wonder if, had watergate occurred nowadays,
would there be Senators trying to declare the Post a
"terrorist organization" and wanting Bob Woodward dead.
Assange should zip all the documents and release them on
Tor. Although I doubt the onion routers could whitstand
that ammount of traffic.
As an American, I agree with you. I remember the days before this was called "terrorism", it was called "muckraking". I worry that as a country we are so used to tagline/twitter/sound-byte news media that we forgot what actual news looks like. Your Woodward example is a good one. Shouldn't the interest and outrage be about the content, and not the source.
What is the muck? What in the cables was surprising?
This is what I got out of it:
-The State Department gossips about heads of other states (so what?)
-The State Department is party to spying on other countries and the UN (really? we didn't know that already? come on)
-More countries agree with us on Iran and North Korea than I thought (shit, maybe our state department is doing a better job than I thought)
This is not watergate. I wish we had half this much attention on other major scandals that have gone on in the last 20 years that were far more important than everything I've seen in here so far.
-The State Department is party to spying on other countries and the UN (really? we didn't know that already? come on)
It's not the same to suspect than to have proof. And this is no little thing: it's another broken international agreement.
-More countries agree with us on Iran and North Korea than I thought (shit, maybe our state department is doing a better job than I thought)
Nope, not really. It has been a surprise (to most, maybe you know more of international politics than nearly everyone else)to know that arab countries wanted the US to go to war with Iran. Not a little thing, too.
This is not watergate. I wish we had half this much attention on other major scandals that have gone on in the last 20 years that were far more important than everything I've seen in here so far.
As an Argentinian, you should be well familiar that your country took in scores of actual fascists from Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy, giving them safe harbor from war crimes prosecutions. There remain entire towns in Argentina where German is the primary spoken language, where still-living Nazis are residing undisturbed.
Calling America "borderline fascistic" because private companies aren't allowed to harbor illegally obtained diplomatic documents is less an accurate characterization of the United States than it is a display that you have little or no understanding of what fascism is. This should be particularly embarrassing because of your country's historical entanglement with fascists.
You could talk to some of your German-speaking countrymen if you're still unclear as to why Godwinning this thread is idiotic.
As an Argentinian, you should be well familiar that your country took in scores of actual fascists...
Perhaps he's arguing from a position of greater experience recognizing fascism as opposed to superiority of non-fascism, as you indicate. He admires America, and now he does less so. Exactly what the historical dictatorships in Argentina have to do with his admiration of America is unclear to me.
Calling America "borderline fascistic" because private companies aren't allowed to harbor illegally obtained diplomatic documents is less an accurate characterization of the United States than it is a display that you have little or no understanding of what fascism is.
And yet, this is not a situation where private companies are being prohibited from harboring illegally obtained diplomatic documents. Both because Amazon wasn't prohibited, they voluntarily (though perhaps with unknown or unspoken and inappropriate pressure) stopped their service from hosting documents and because there is ample historical data to indicate the documents were not illegally obtained by Wikileaks. So who is presenting the less accurate characterization, exactly?
I'm not calling the USA borderline fascistic for this
incident alone, but for a sequence of events dating back
to 9/11.
Actually we got quite late to the postwar Nazi garage sale.
The URSS and the USA[1] got the lot, including the guy who
almost decimated London's civilian population[2].
The best one we could get was Kurt Tank[3].
ODESSA, a former SS officers organization created in 1946
to assist Nazi war criminals, had ramifications in
Argentina. It was mostly backed here by Walther Darre's[4]
family, german companies (e.g. Siemens) and a few
right-wing politicos.
Thankfully, MOSSAD was able to partially correct that black
page in our history in 1960.[5]
Although Peron was quite an intolerant person, he had a
soft spot for human rights and opened the doors to
Jewish inmigrants in 1946. We received 463456 jewish
inmigrants between 1947 and 1951.[6][7]
Also we were one of the first countries to recognize
Israel in 1949.
There is one famous town founded by Germans in 1930,
Villa General Belgrano[8]. Many of their original
inhabitants are survivors from the Graf Spee sinking[9],
although I challenge you to find a fluent German speaking
person there under the age of 80.
If you want to check it out, go during the first weekend of
October so you don't miss their amazing Oktoberfest.
All Nazi related government files have been declassified in
1992, and can be freely accessed. Although they haven't
been digitalized.
After the tenths of thousands of deaths caused by our
last dictatorship[10] in the 70's, we started to develop
a politically liberal, more tolerant and more agnostic
world view.
This led us to be the first country in Latin America to legalize gay marriage and marihuana, among other things.
Sorry for the excessive length of this comment, just wanted
to dispel some common myths about my country.
Cool, they'll have to distribute their content over hard-to-control media (Tor, P2P etc.), thus helping such technologies becoming widespread.
Throw in a P2P-based DNS sponsored by COICA, and those elder, digitally illiterate baby-boomer leaders will have done a lot for a freer Internet, although unwillingly.
Making wikileaks.org inaccessible by default still has tremendous impact. Not that many people have the technical proficiency to use Tor, use P2P software, or even know what the hell DNS, whereas almost anyone knows how to type "wikileaks.org" into their address bar.
> Not that many people have the technical proficiency
This is already addressed another way: Wikileaks started giving access to the leaks in advance to the journalists. This way, they can report about it when it's still news, and they do, because it almost looks like they're doing their freaking job.
Wikileaks needs a robust way to distribute the raw sources, and some PR know-how to make sure they're distilled, in an accessible way, to the layman. They're outsourcing the production of the easily consumed to newspaper, and that's a key part of their strategy. The minority of people who will put the effort to deal with the raw sources can also figure out Tor.
One can even argue that the website's primary purpose is to encourage newspapaers not to censor themselves.
A surprising number of people don't know how to even do that (my mum included, though I've tried to explain). They can type 'wikileaks' into Google though.
Even fewer people know how to take wikileaks.org data and do anything with it. Wikileaks, in general, serves intermediaries. Wikileaks.org is useful for fundraising though...
Nah, BitTorrent is fine for this sort of thing. It's much more illegal to distribute a new movie than it is to distribute a bunch of now-public government documents.
The New York Times posted classified government information a while back -- "Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials."
Do you think their hosting facility should drop them?
The NYT did publish it, but one guesses they did it when the government agency(s) in question permitted them to. Or after someone else broke the story, and NYT would look stupid for not covering it.
"The NYT did publish it, but one guesses they did it when the government agency(s) in question permitted them to."
No, not at all.
The difference here though is breaking a story of huge interest to every citizen versus merely making public previously private and confidential communication between diplomats, indiscriminately.
Maybe you are right, but the point is whether Amazon (or any other hosting company) should act as a judge and decide whether the leak was justified or not.
No, they're acting as a property owner saying "get this shit off my lawn, we didn't ask for you to have your fight here".
Once again, the freedom of speech does not give you the right to abuse other people's freedom to control their own property. Amazon's servers are their property, why do they have to let their brand image go down in the mind of people who are anti-Wikileaks?
Actually that is not true. Documents are not automatically declassified if they are leaked. Intuitively they are, but 'officially' they are certainly not.
Specifically, those who hold a US govt. clearance should not be accessing any of those docs as they could be in (potential) deep trouble.
It is just basic policy on how classified info is handled by the government. The only time automatic declassification happens is when its time window expires (and that can be overridden too). It is usually about 10 years. Otherwise surprisingly it still stays classified even if it leaks all over the internet.
Those who hold a clearance have agreed and signed, under strict penalties, not to process, view, or download classified information on unauthorized machines (their home laptop for instance). In doing so they would be committing a willful security violation -- a serious offence according to the current laws.
Merely leaking something doesn't necessarily damage security as much as publishing it and having the government confirm it as accurate. Imagine if someone leaked "Super Top Secret: You can be invisible to the M1A2 tank by wearing a hello kitty t-shirt inside-out". Without official confirmation (implied by the government officially declassifying the tech report), you wouldn't know for sure, and would attempt to test this theory, and would end up in pieces.
But government officials are throwing around political pressure and making statements in public that confirm what the documents are. How is declassifying them going to do anything worse at this point?
Well, it's one thing to confirm that some of the documents are real and that the principle of the thing is outrageous. It's something else entirely to confirm that all of the documents are legitimate, or to identify which ones are, for example, drafts or notional. And it's something else again to clarify individual statements, give context to conversations, and to discuss which of the revealed facts are current and relevant.
It's not as simple as saying, "these documents are unclassified". You have to look over the facts they reveal and decide which might still be worth the effort of keeping secret, and which it's okay to talk openly about.
There's also the possibility that the documents may contain misleading information or even disinformation written specifically for Wikileaks. I'd be surprised if such a thing has never happened, and surprised further still if it never does. A policy of never confirming or commenting on leaked information means those who would like to make serious use of it must always wonder.
I've read several reports about specific cables saying something to the effect of "this was one piece of intelligence being reported home, but we actually don't think its true". I.e. a bunch of papers ran with the news that Iran had missiles from North Korea we had previously said they didn't have, but it turns out the one cable saying that was incorrect information. (or so they say).
That's a matter of opinion. It may well deserve the opposite, or it may be preferable to protect it but inappropriate to force non-government parties to stay quiet about it once the information has leaked.
Amazon didn't bow to political pressure. It made a business decision to protect its other clients from interruption of services that constant, government-level DDOS'ing would cause.
Government DOSing of Amazon would get a lot of attention... An organized attack bringing down ec2 / s3 would risk the attention of some pretty clever individuals who's businesses and hobbies were affected and produce some interesting fallout.
It will be interesting to see the overlap between those decrying this government pressure to infringe upon the free speech rights of an organization, and those decrying the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United that such organizations are protected by the First Amendment.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959697 - techdirt.com
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959655 - cnn.com
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959633 - arstechnica.com
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959607 - bgr.com
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959335 - npr.org
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959328 - guardian.co.uk
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959308 - readwriteweb.com
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959305 - reuters.com
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959257 - techcrunch.com
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959142 - foxnews.com