To protect this great country which grants rights like due process, we must throw due process out the window.
The US has abused its power as a world leader for too long, and as long as Republicans exist, it’ll continue. Frankly, the US should be weaker, and I’m glad the leaks helped (or so the conservatives believe). I think we should be about 10th in power, behind good countries like Norway and New Zealand.
I can explain it any clearer, and you’re just obfuscating to excuse behavior that’s inexcusable. You also keep ignoring that PFC Manning was an intellligence analyst. Again, millions have access to that network. Of course, Internet Smartypants has all the security answers so obviously the mistake was not hiring you. Give me a fucking break, you’re just acting as an apologist.
If millions have access, then you damn well better not put anything truly secret on there.
Millions may have access to the network without having access to every document available on the network.
You really couldn’t figure that out on your own? Tsk, tsk, tsk… Sad.
Says who?
Now you’re just taking cheap shots that don’t even make sense.
Man, if you can’t follow the very obvious logic from your one sentence to mine, you’re really dumber than I thought. And that’s saying something!
But I don’t blame you for not wanting to engage. Better to yell “Stupidhead” and run away.
Cheney was a US citizen and official who was required to uphold the laws and further the interests of the US. He destroyed a multi-billion dollar anti-proliferation effort and may have got US sources killed (according to DailyKos) in retaliation for somebody interfering with his efforts to lie the country into a useless war that he made billions off of through his Halliburton stock.
Assange, not a US citizen, but a foreign journalist, is publishing documents for which he may have criminal liability, but is not subject to prior restraint. These documents show Prince Andrew being a drunken boor and various people trying to drum up various wars. These secret documents are being republished in all the major media outlets, including the usual government stooge outlets like the NYT, famous for ruining the life of Wen Ho Lee and printing the lies of Judith Miller. If caught, Assange will be tried, but the NYT will not be.
At this point in my life, I trust Assange to publish the truth far more than the NYT. Assange may actually prevent a war with Iran. The NYT helped start a war with Iraq. A useless, bloody, expensive and never-ending war.
Assange may also have the effect of getting the US government to start thinking about security of its supposedly secret documents. If Assange can get this kind of information, do we really believe that other nations with actual resources and intentions cannot? The US public (and world public) is the intended victim of the secrecy. Israel already knows that it wants the Iranian regime brought down, so do the Saudis and others. It is the public, the We The People that does not have access to all these diplomats telling each other things on background.
I want US diplomats to write more diplomatic memos of what they learn. I tell all my clients to assume that all their emails will become public, and a professional diplomat should learn how to write in non-gossip style. You know, diplomatically.
Second, access should be physically restricted to sensitive information. If you give everyone who has a government password access to all information, then this is going to happen.
Third, government is in the habit of making everything secret. It isn’t necessary and it is against the principles of democracy to make most everything secret by default. How about if government decides carefully what needs to be kept secret?
Fourth, now that the past 25 years of the supposed conservatives telling us to pee in cups, have our phones tapped and emails scanned, our bodies felt up and now x-rayed on demand, why can’t we do a little of the same back to the government? Or is all that watering the tree of liberty with blood only supposed to be our blood? If government has nothing to hide, why can’t we see what is going on?
You’ve shown you’re not worth engaging except as a target. If it makes you feel better to say I’ve got nothing, go for it.
I mean, seriously, the death penalty? You scared little bitch.
You don’t get it.
If one lousy PRIVATE can download thousands of secret documents, and hand them over to some dope with a website, what the fuck do you think the Chinese (and the Russians and the Iranians and the Pakistanis and pretty much everyone) have been doing for the last decade or so?
Because this shit’s just the tip of the iceberg. Because we’ve basically been shown that any dope who happens to have a security clearance can sell secret information by the metric ton to any foreign government that has a checkbook.
The point is, these documents may have been secret from you and me and my grandma, but it’s pretty much guaranteed foreign spy agencies get this stuff delivered to them every hour on the hour.
If millions of people can access the network, you might as well put everything on Facebook, because all it takes is one guy about to miss a mortgage payment who knows how to ctrl-c, ctrl-v.
And so your “good news, someone robbed the bank” analogy fails. A better analogy would be “Hey, I noticed an irregularity in our accounts payable, and investigated, and found out that an accountant in shipping has been skimming millions over the past decade. It’s a good thing I noticed this one instance of embezzlement, because otherwise we’d never know about all the other ones.”
An apologist? Fuck me, do try harder.
I don’t give a rat’s arse if Assange gets shot, and Manning is hanged. It won’t help you any, but go for your life. Manning will certainly get done, and so he should. He was serving for the US Army, so his actions cannot be excused. As for Assange, he’s not a US citizen, or resident, or affiliated to you, so not quite sure how you think his actions are inexcusable, but what the fuck ever.
The problem though is that it won’t actually help you. If anything, the two of them are going to be cursed far and wide by enemies of the US for highlighting just how fucking useless the security systems in place were. No, following this fiasco, there’s a vague chance that things might be tightened up. Probably won’t be, considering the US government’s track record on data security, but there’ll be a lot of nervous foreign analysts wondering if the contacts/backdoors they have to data won’t suddenly clam up.
Finally if you really, really reckon that because he was an intelligence analyst there should have been no checks on his access, that no warning lights should have gone off when bulk downloads of hundreds of thousands of embassy documents happened in a short period of time…well to be blunt you’d have to be a fucking idiot to believe that. That may well be the case for you, I’ll let you decide.
I strongly expect that the actions of bradass87 are resulting in massive changes to security procedures, including some of the automated ‘should he really be looking at all this’ checks that have been suggested in this thread.
That said, I think that the espionage situation is not as grim as you would suggest. PFC Manning’s motivations seem to be ethical - ‘speaking truth to power.’ That’s not the sort of motivation that turns data directly over to foreign powers (it just goes through Assange first).
The sort of motivation that leads an individual to perform direct espionage for a foreign power is an affinity or tie to that power or, much more commonly, cash. These motivations are much easier to screen for and detect. The bulk of counter-intel efforts are focused on detecting and preventing espionage by $$ motivated people, the ones most likely to be spying for the Russians, Iranians, Pakistanis, and pretty much everyone else.
Of course, I’m sure that now the Russians are busy planning on how to setup the successor to wikileaks so that they get funneled state secrets for free.
Oh, please. There’s not much to “get”. Yes it suggests that the problem has been there before. Yes, it means that we now have been woken up and can secure things for the age we live in. Yes, there are positive aspects to learning what was done. But those things are beside the point when it comes to judging the actions that little punk and Assange. Don’t you get THAT? We have people that leaked confidential and secret documents—wholesale. People that have not been empowered to do so. We elect people to make these decisions, either directly or through appointment. Their doing so is a giant fuck you to the whole country, and democracy itself.
Let’s try this again: just because millions may have access to the network doesn’t mean that they have access to every document available on the network.
No. It’s more like “Oh shit, someone cleared out a hundred of the safe deposit boxes over the weekend.” High-fives all around. “Let’s go by some lottery tickets, because this is our luck day!”
Script kiddies and their stack overflow exploits?
Methinks thou doth oversubscribe to the theory of network inviolability. 
Sorry to interrupt, but I just read in Le Monde that an international arrest warrant has been issued by Interpol against Julian Assange. I don’t know how this will affect him exactly. Here is the Interpol link: http://www.interpol.int/public/data/wanted/notices/data/2010/86/2010_52486.asp
That sex/rape story in Sweden smells like a trap. I wonder who can be behind it.
If there is a God, please let that town be full of gay married Mexicans.
Why ? You have a problem with these kind of people you homophobic racist little prick ?
For** Snowboarder Bo**
Back to reality, I hear in the news that Assange is claiming Hillary Clinton should resign.
That should make you happy :rolleyes:
No, but the other resident in your newly adopted town does. As a matter of fact, I’m positive that you’re not homophobic, and have zero clue about any racist tendencies you might or might not have. Feel free to stay delusional, though.
Well, I suppose it’s progress of a sort. You’ve at least acknowledged that the problem goes beyond an idiot PFC and an attention whore with a website. That’s good.
As stated repeatedly, Assange has no responsibility to the US, so only a complete fool would think there’s much you can do other than have him offed. It’d be a fairly stupid thing to do from a political point of view, but meh. The PFC is fucked, and so he should be. You shouldn’t do something like that and expect to walk away from it.
What you should be a fuckload more concerned about though isn’t either of these people. It’s the fuckwits you’ve got in charge of your military and government data. If you leave something wide open and unprotected, you can expect people to piss about. Trying to play the problem down by saying that “just because millions may have access to the network doesn’t mean that they have access to every document available on the network” is missing the point in spectacular style. It’s quite clear from this incident that there are low ranking people on your network who can access huge amounts of data they have no need to, without that access being flagged. If you’ve got such glaringly massive issues as this open, care to bet what problems there are that can be exploited by a nation with proper resources?
Let me again try to put this in context for you. China has for the last 4 years been trying to hack information from Oil companies, Google, and other such sources. They were caught because these companies take data security seriously (not too surprising considering just how much value companies like this have to place on their data). Do you really feel that similar attacks won’t be going on against your military and political data? Does this incident here give you confidence that these systems are well protected?