This is not just your ordinary, run of the mill hypocrisy. No, this is world class hypocrisy on a scale rarely seen.
The Daily Mail UK has the story:
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange tried to hide his bail address from the public in an astonishing move for the man responsible for leaking thousands of diplomatic secrets.
Assange’s lawyers argued that the location – a 10-bedroom stately home – should not be disclosed on grounds of privacy during yesterday’s hearing at City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court.
But the move was dismissed by District Judge Howard Riddle, who ruled not to reveal the address would conflict with Assange’s commitment to open justice.
The judge insisted the address – Captain Vaughan Smith’s Ellingham Hall on the Norfolk/Suffolk border – was read out in open court as usual.
Poetic justice.
Source: Daily Mail UK
View Comments (16)
"This attempt at forcing ‘openness’ upon representatives of a government who were given information in confidence is naive at best."
No, you are naive for thinking the government will work in your best interest if there is no oversight.
The leaks have already exposed the government waging a secret war in Yemen, secretly collecting DNA in violation of international law, and violations of safety codes by BP well before the oil spill this year.
All of these cables were in the public interest and had nothing to do with "saving face" or "diplomacy". Those cables exposed government malfeasance.
You need to stop being an apologist for the corrupt elements of government. We the people demand better accountability from our paid public servants.
"They’re gutless, immature hypocrites that go for the soft target — the relatively few governments that still respect liberty (somewhat). I anxiously wait for wikileaks to post the same type and volume of information about numerous dictatorships/totalitarian regimes."
Your ignorance is showing. Wikileaks has exposed the machinations of several corrupt governments over the past 4 years. The world doesn't revolve around the USA, and Wikileaks does not exist just to embarrass the US government.
"As to respecting privacy — explain why amnesty international criticized wikileaks for not redacting names, putting people in danger. "
More of your ignorance. Wikileaks themselves have published NOTHING from these cables without first having them professionally redacted by journalists from respectable newspapers (Die Speigel, The Guardian, etc).
Unfortunately this is clearly the wrong forum to express these facts. You are clearly gun-toting, country loving, patriotic hands-on-hearts "freedom lovers" who... bizarrely... think that freedom means defending your government. You amaze me with your misguided loyalty. The government is not your friend!
Power corrupts. Politicians seek power. You do the maths.
"No, you are naive for thinking the government will work in your best interest if there is no oversight." -- *your* straw man. I never said that there should be no oversight. The type and how it is applied makes all the difference. Your preferred oversight mechanism is demonstrably contaminated by both political and sampling bias. It is far, far easier to get negative information out of free societies, making them look worse than closed societies.
Governments do all sorts of things in line with their mandates. What you call a secret war is not a war. There was no declaration as such, and if anybody has a reason to complain about having their sovereignty violated, it is Yemen. [crickets].
As far as the memos I have read, they were mostly the internal workings of government, and nothing that I either didn't already know, or had strong suspicions of. As to wikileaks exposing the machinations of other governments, it is clear that either the sampling bias, or the political bias has yielded counterproductive results.
Your assumption that I am an apologist for any particular government or regime is laughable. Any given government is the enemy of the people, and has to be contained. That hasn't changed since hunter-gatherer days. The only effective tools to deal with it so far have their genesis in the American Revolution and the adoption of the current Constitution.
You never answered my statement about amnesty international, except by attempting to change the subject with the statement about my ignorance. Why is that? As to the existence of 'respectable newspapers', I really got a charge out of that. Who watches the watchers? Nobody. The watchers you love so well exist to make a profit, and many believe that they are as corrupt as the governments they are supposed to watch. Hence the name of this website. Having biased entities vet information proves nothing to me but that you have changed your bet from one horse to another. AI didn't have a problem with the information before it was vetted -- they had teh problem with it after it was supposedly vetted. Q.E.D.
Mischaracterizing me and others as defending our government through some kind of knee jerk reaction because we love our country really adds nothing to the argument but does indicate to me that you are biased to the point of being incapable of taking others' viewpoints seriously. If I want to convince someone of something, I try logic. Maybe my logic has flaws, maybe it does not, but it convinces a lot better than changing the subject.
You have to manage governments by results. It is just like managing programmers. I have yet to have a boss who fully comprehends what it is that I do. If they tried to micromanage me, my productivity would sink to zero, since they will inevitably either give me the wrong things to do, or shift my priorities to unproductive subjects. A programmer's manager has to manage by results. I play a mean game of nethack while I'm mulling over problems. Apparently, that is OK, as I currently do the job that used to take 6 sysadmins. If I was ever micromanaged, the surest way for me to get my new boss fired would be for me to do everything exactly as he tells me, and when that has happened in the past, I have made a point of doing so.
Same goes for governments. You have to look at results, and wikileaks only looks at details that may or may not be useful, and even then, only at the details that are handed to them. That makes them dangerously susceptible to being someone else's tool, an accessory to taking down the governments that work better (if only marginally so) than others.
Do you really think that Manning actually had all that access to those cables, and did all that he did without anyone's knowledge? An idiot* like that had to have had help, and the only thing debatable in the mix is who helped him, how, and whether or not he knows (most likely not. I'd prefer my tools to not have information in their heads to incriminate me. Not that I do these things -- I'm just saying.).
Do I think our government is good? Nope. I don't even think they're competent enough to be evil, but they are better than a lot of alternatives out there. Letting someone else's tool take them down doesn't accomplish as much as you are hoping it will.
You also haven't addressed the hypocrisy in anonymous punishing others for speaking freely. [crickets]
That's important -- you're still defending the indefensible, and so any argument you use has no moral foundation. Until you have a good argument about that, I think that your claim on comparative morality is at best tenuous, so preaching to me about good government/bad government is somewhat silly. How would you know? If free speech is only OK when it isn't objectionable to you, then it isn't free, bub.
It bears repeating that wikileaks is someone else's tool, and consequently the people defending it have just substituted one idiot master for another. In the words of Pete Townshend, "Meet the new boss; same as the old boss"
* -- from what I have learned, even his *issues* had issues. Not the best choice for the position he had, or as a channel for leaking information. Any information he provided to anyone was contaminated by a host of biases and prejudices. Anyone that passes contaminated information on is a fool. You do that math.
The personal life of an individual is not comparable to the secret dealings of a democratically elected government. It's not hypocrisy to expect privacy for the former and transparency for the latter.
This isn't new news either; the question of personal privacy is asked in every interview going back to 2006, and the consistent answer is that Wikileaks respects the right to privacy for individuals.
Yeah, except when the federal government sends a cable and discusses said private life. Then it would seem to be fair game.
What you call transparency is an illogical construction. In order to deal effectively with foreign powers, you have to respect what they respect. In this case, it would be things they told you that they don't want repeated. If you cannot do this, then you cannot work with them. Just deal with it. I'd say the greater part of diplomacy is letting people save face when they screw up. Are you interested in peace, or are you interested in promoting conflict?
This attempt at forcing 'openness' upon representatives of a government who were given information in confidence is naive at best. It has all the markings of bullying -- like when anonymous decided to punish their critics for speaking their mind. If anonymous truly believed in free speech, then the DDOS attacks they should have done would have to have been against the people trying to shut people like Rush down.
The fact that they punished free speech tells me all I need to know about the friends of julian. They're gutless, immature hypocrites that go for the soft target -- the relatively few governments that still respect liberty (somewhat). I anxiously wait for wikileaks to post the same type and volume of information about numerous dictatorships/totalitarian regimes. If they and anonymous are half as smart as they pretend to be, then they know all sorts of this stuff and are sitting on it.
The fact that they don't tells me that this is just a fad, and their words about openness and transparency is just excuse making. They don't have the latitude to say I am wrong on this. They have to prove me wrong, and that simply is not possible with the information at hand.
As to respecting privacy -- explain why amnesty international criticized wikileaks for not redacting names, putting people in danger. Wasn't their privacy violated? AI seems to think so. wikileaks had a responsibility to respect their privacy, and when they had an actual responsibility, they fell down like the immature twits they are. When people criticized them, they threw a temper tantrum.
Until I see maturity out of them, I just think they're a bunch of pussies and script kiddies following the fad of the moment, and when they get called to question on it, spout inane drivel rather than actually address the issues of openness and free speech.
In the best of all possible worlds, governments could be completely open and honest with their people, because their people would be capable of dealing with the truth, as would all of the other people in all of the other countries, and they would in turn also have open and honest governments.
wikileaks has had the opportunity for plenty of targets for exposition over the years -- it's just not as easy and fun to attack the enemies of humanity, when you can attack your friends instead. I think of them like I think of the guy that is rowdy and disruptive in church -- he does it there because if he did it down the street at the biker bar, he'd get a pool cue rammed up his ass.
who is the idiot that is putting thumbs down for no reason?
In any case... I hear this is not his home actually. It is the home of a "friend" so perhaps that is why he may be "concerned" for his friend's privacy *rolls eyes*
Charma is a bitch is it not!?
AG Holder indicts Sarah Palin for shooting reindeer (Rangifer tarandus), a domesticated caribou, aka Prancer. Can't find any wrong doing by Julian Assange.
In all the hoopla about assange; what is the status of the scum that originally lifted the documents?? Has he had his day in court and then properly dispatched to the firing squad??
I heard he is in prison and he seriously dislikes it...
I say good. He should dislike it.
Right. Everyone is focusing on Assange, when the actual culrpit has disappeared from the media.
Don't take this the right way, because I dislike Assange and what he did. However, what is the difference between Assange and the NY Times, Der Spiegal, and the others that had a deal to publish selected cables? Assange is a publisher as well. Albeit a distasteful one.
And the whole rape charge is bullshit. It was a crazy ultra feminist wacko that became jealous when a woman she introduced Assange to also slept with him, and it went down hill from there. And then the powers that be latched on to it to find a reason to arrest him.
In the spirit of openness and information that just wants to be free, I propose an AssangePrisonCam. Put it up next to the ManningPrisonCam. Sell popcorn. Profit.
yeah, it is not like he was threatened with assassination or anything...oh wait...
You know, if it had been one of us who had released tens of thousands of classified documents, we'd still be falling into the deep, dark hole we'd have been thrown into!
Why am I not surprised?
Interesting, yet standard; Liberals NEVER live by their own philosophies.