Skeptic Project

nay

yay.

i'm proud that an australian is kicking butt instead of kissing ass for once.

But it's people FIGHTING FOR THEIR FREEDOM AND LIBERTY AND PEACE! YAAARGH!

But what is this about Tunisia and wikileaks being related? I missed the correlation.

Okay, I can go with that, Senor Dingdong. Certainly, there needs to be accountability measures and REAL whistleblowing when something is bad (not CT whistleblowing).

That said, I don't want Tunisia to start happening all over the place and with all the wikileaks stuff, I see a lot of 'revolution!' talk on the internet that disturbs me a bit, though I certainly realize the possibility of it actually coming to fruition is tiny. I'm extremely averse to violence in the real world (violence in movies, tv shows, video games, etc, doesn't bother me).

Unless it's giant monster violence.

They're not mutually exclusive Matt, ofcourse people want that feeling of stumbling across government information they shouldn't be seeing. It is still the main port of call for whistleblowers and I stand by what I said. Whistleblowers are important to hold powers that be accountable for their actions.

@ Wolfbird, in places like Tunisia and Algeria brutal repression is the norm, I wouldn't worry about revolution carrying over to places where life is generally quite good.

nay, he may be Australian, but he's also a rapist which harasses teenage girls online. His Chemistry.com profile is hilarious. And he's ugly.

I think in a time of war, the greatest duty we have is to give a voice to the voiceless. And so I support Wikileaks in whichever way possible.

I will grant that it's not a good result, what's happening in Jordan and region, because you're right - Jordan is easily one of the most free nations in the Middle East, if not number 1.

@Roxette

If you don't know this already, I hope you aren't surprised to hear that many people think the rape charges were trumped up.

I don't know either way.

What does that have to do with you being wrong about Jordan and Algeria?

Wikileaks is a bunch of boring inconsequential crap.

I want to ask the people who fawn over it, have you ever actually spent any time READING Wikileaks? The crap on there makes Michael Dukakis reading the phone book for 3 hours seem riveting by comparison.

I agree with Muertos. The majority of stuff is brain-drain, fairly inconsequential. What I think is important is the protecting the medium, meaning - an online anonymous tool for whistleblowers to get maximum impact without endangering their own lives.

There already is an outlet. It's called the New York Times.

I think the analysis that Wikileaks is so positive rests on an untenable assumption--that more leaks are always better, that secrecy is never legitimate, and that everything should be transparent. You can't just approach leaks with a rebuttable presumption that leaking a document is a positive social good. That's extremely naive. Leaking secrets in the public interest requires a very capable gatekeeping function, to separate not only positive leaks from ones that will do more harm than good, but also to separate consequential leaks from inconsequential garbage. If there's too much crap out there no one will pay attention to the good stuff, because they'll just assume it's all crap.

Wikileaks utterly lacks this gatekeeping function. Gatekeeping between relevant and irrelevant information, and between socially positive and socially destructive disclosures, is supposed to be what the press does. They haven't been doing that job nearly as well as they should be, but that's no excuse for gleefully abandoning gatekeeping entirely and proclaiming, "Well, it's too hard to separate crap from good stuff, so we'll just assume everything is good stuff and decide not to give a damn about the consequences."

This is why lionizing Assange annoys the piss out of me, because he doesn't understand what he's doing, doesn't seem to care, and certainly doesn't deserve the praise he's getting for doing nothing more than being a webmaster where people can post any old crap they feel like, regardless of content or even whether it's true or not.

@Muertos a lot of the stuff wikileaks sells to the mainstream media is ultimately the material I know of but I do read some of the material as well.

Good point about wikileaks targeting the US, Ez. Maybe that's the reference I saw on TZM's boards about the unmasking of the corrupt and fraud US government.