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Lawyers cry foul over leak of Julian Assange sex-case papers

Kal'Stang said:
I would just like to point out that while he "might" be dead within a year wikileaks will not be. They will continue to do the work that is necessary.
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I'd like to point out that his stated goal is to expose, and destroy existing diplomatic relations, making countries retreat within themselves. Is this a positive thing for you?


j-mac
 
Harshaw said:
The diplomatic cables revealed pretty much no wrongdoing.
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You must have a really distorted view of what it takes to reach the level of wrongdoing.

Oh? What are these "plenty of possibilities"? Let's see them. And then explain exactly why it's anyone's business except theirs.
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Factors like close relations with officials or regulators. Things that are unethical, but are not technically illegal.

And you seem to have ignored that in this case, with this "private individual," the leaked papers concerned criminal activity.
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He is already being pursued for that criminal activity so there is no logical reason why it should be leaked to anyone unless the intent is to prejudice the justice system in favor of the State.

They're both private and not accountable to YOU.
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Corporations are legal entities and not simply private individuals. Pretty much every major corporation is somehow tied up in the state apparatus and they govern the affairs of thousands of people.

Harshaw said:
Then you either have a very limited scope of what he's said, or you have a warped definition of "good."
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What do you think would be so warped about it?
 
j-mac said:
I'd like to point out that his stated goal is to expose, and destroy existing diplomatic relations, making countries retreat within themselves. Is this a positive thing for you?


j-mac
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Umm..yeah..sure.
 
Demon of Light said:
You must have a really distorted view of what it takes to reach the level of wrongdoing.
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Or maybe you're not paying much attention to detail.

Factors like close relations with officials or regulators. Things that are unethical, but are not technically illegal.
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Entirely internal affair. You may not like it, but it's not your business.


He is already being pursued for that criminal activity so there is no logical reason why it should be leaked to anyone unless the intent is to prejudice the justice system in favor of the State.
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I see. For him, it's just wrong. For those you don't worship, it's fine.


Corporations are legal entities and not simply private individuals. Pretty much every major corporation is somehow tied up in the state apparatus and they govern the affairs of thousands of people.
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Melodramatic much? They "govern the affairs" of no one who doesn't grant them that ability.


What do you think would be so warped about it?
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You simply cheer on his crusade to do harm to entities you don't care for.
 
Harshaw said:
Or maybe you're not paying much attention to detail.
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What details would those be?

Entirely internal affair. You may not like it, but it's not your business.
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Are you seriously saying the relationship between government officials and business is none of our business?

I see. For him, it's just wrong. For those you don't worship, it's fine.
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I do not worship the man, but what he is doing is exposing abuses by government and business so the fact said forces would seek to try him in the court of public opinion to diminish his efforts is quite upsetting to me.

Melodramatic much? They "govern the affairs" of no one who doesn't grant them that ability.
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If it were not for the fact that major corporations are the source of much of our jobs directly or indirectly that might be a good point. Without a job you can't get money. Without money you can't buy goods. Without goods you can't live.

You simply cheer on his crusade to do harm to entities you don't care for.
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His crusade is against the authoritarian qualities of governments around the world. I would said that is a crusade to cheer on.
 
Demon of Light said:
Every document? Probably not, but those are more likely to be the ones that cannot even be construed as harmful.
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Still, you can't suggest the release of the documents was simply in hopes of "exposing wrong doing" if he clearly exposed documents that DIDN'T show any wrong doing.

Except it does as the poster insisted that leaking information from private corporations was no different than leaking information about a private individual. I can think of plenty of possibilities where something should be exposed about a private corporation despite being technically legal.

I don't know what you are talking about there. My argument is simply that private corporations should not be equated with private individuals.
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You'd have a point, if the topic was Private Individual vs Corporation. However the discussion was concerning Government vs Private, and its quite clear and obvious that a corporation falls far more in line with the realm of private, similar to a citizen, then it does with government.

Kal'stang, who the original person bringing up corporations was responding to, was specifically suggesting a difference between a governmental entity and a private one...and a corporation is undeniably in the "private" category rather than the "governmental" one and as such, in the scope of the actual topic, it IS similar to a private individual
 
Zyphlin said:
Kal'stang, who the original person bringing up corporations was responding to, was specifically suggesting a difference between a governmental entity and a private one...and a corporation is undeniably in the "private" category rather than the "governmental" one and as such, in the scope of the actual topic, it IS similar to a private individual
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Well this actually depends on your way of thinking really. According to some people from the TSA thread if a company recieves tax payer money then it is no longer strictly a private company, but a government one at most. A mix of the two at the least.
 
j-mac said:
Is that it? I mean you said that what Assange was doing was positive, so I am asking, do you really agree with his goals?


j-mac
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His stated goals are to bring down authoritarian governments. In that, yes I agree with him. Authoritorian governments always lead to oppression. Are you saying that the US is an authoritorian government?
 
I figured that it would be a good idea to get Assaunges stated goals out in the open here since people seem to be not quoting him correctly...

Our goal is to have a just civilization. That is sort of a personal motivating goal. And the message is transparency. It is important not to confuse the message with the goal. Nonetheless we believe that it is an excellent message. Gaining justice with transparency. It is a good way of doing that, it is also a good way of not making too many mistakes. We have a trans-political ideology, it is not right it is not left it is about understanding. Before you can give any advice, any program about how to deal with the world, how to put the civil into civilization. How to gain influence on people. Before you can have that program, first you have to understand what is actually going on.... And therefore any program or recommendation, any political ideology that comes out of that misunderstanding will itself be a misunderstanding. So, we say, to some degree all political ideologies are currently bankrupt. Because they do not have the raw ingredient they need to address the world. The raw ingredient to understand what is actually happening.
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Wikipedia
 
Harshaw said:
So people keep saying. Yet, where is it?




He's managing to do that, only not quite in the places he expected or that you and your ilk are hoping for.
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He lost his password.
 
Kal'Stang said:
I figured that it would be a good idea to get Assaunges stated goals out in the open here since people seem to be not quoting him correctly...



Wikipedia
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"Gaining justice with transparency". Sounds like the leaking of the charges against Assange meets WikiLeaks goals then.
 
Kal'Stang said:
His stated goals are to bring down authoritarian governments. In that, yes I agree with him. Authoritorian governments always lead to oppression. Are you saying that the US is an authoritorian government?
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What? wait, no I don't think that the US is an authoritarian government. You seem to though. And you also have his goals wrong. As I have posted before, and maybe you can address this.


Mr. Assange is misunderstood in the media and among digirati as an advocate of transparency.p.b[ Instead, this battening down of the information hatches by the U.S. is precisely his goal. The reason he launched WikiLeaks is not that he's a whistleblower—there's no wrongdoing inherent in diplomatic cables—but because he hopes to hobble the U.S., which according to his underreported philosophy can best be done if officials lose access to a free flow of information.

In 2006, Mr. Assange wrote a pair of essays, "State and Terrorist Conspiracies" and "Conspiracy as Governance." He sees the U.S. as an authoritarian conspiracy. "To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed," he writes. "Conspiracies take information about the world in which they operate," he writes, and "pass it around the conspirators and then act on the result."

His central plan is that leaks will restrict the flow of information among officials—"conspirators" in his view—making government less effective. Or, as Mr. Assange puts it, "We can marginalize a conspiracy's ability to act by decreasing total conspiratorial power until it is no longer able to understand, and hence respond effectively to its environment. . . . An authoritarian conspiracy that cannot think efficiently cannot act to preserve itself."

Berkeley blogger Aaron Bady last week posted a useful translation of these essays. He explains Mr. Assange's view this way: "While an organization structured by direct and open lines of communication will be much more vulnerable to outside penetration, the more opaque it becomes to itself (as a defense against the outside gaze), the less able it will be to 'think' as a system, to communicate with itself." Mr. Assange's idea is that with enough leaks, "the security state will then try to shrink its computational network in response, thereby making itself dumber and slower and smaller."

Crovitz: Julian Assange, Information Anarchist - WSJ.com
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So his intent is not a noble one as you would describe it, but rather a direct attack on America.


j-mac
 
j-mac said:
What? wait, no I don't think that the US is an authoritarian government. You seem to though. And you also have his goals wrong. As I have posted before, and maybe you can address this.

So his intent is not a noble one as you would describe it, but rather a direct attack on America.
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Perhaps you should read what he is trying to restrict the flow on instead of reading it second hand.

State and Terrorist Conspiracies
 
Gill said:
"Gaining justice with transparency". Sounds like the leaking of the charges against Assange meets WikiLeaks goals then.
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1: wikileaks goals are not about the individual.

2: How is justice gained by trying to taint the jury pool?
 
Kal'Stang said:
As they were not the target them being named are incidental.



And this makes it right how...?
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Naming them put a target on their backs. Assange has it easy compared to some of the people he put in danger by publishing their names.

Maybe not right, but definitely poetic justice.
 
Gill said:
Naming them put a target on their backs. Assange has it easy compared to some of the people he put in danger by publishing their names.
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Incidental. His purpose was to expose the government. As such he targeted THEM. If he had targeted specific individuals on purpose then you would have a case, otherwise you do not.

Gill said:
Maybe not right, but definitely poetic justice.
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"Poetic justice" does not equal Justice. Poetic justice is based upon a personal view which varies from person to person. Justice is based on law and is set in stone (metaphorically speaking).
 
Kal'Stang said:
Incidental. His purpose was to expose the government. As such he targeted THEM. If he had targeted specific individuals on purpose then you would have a case, otherwise you do not.
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I'm sure their widows will take great comfort in the fact that he didn't target them as individuals.

"Poetic justice" does not equal Justice. Poetic justice is based upon a personal view which varies from person to person. Justice is based on law and is set in stone (metaphorically speaking).
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I have no sympathy of the man, and I use the term "man" in its loosest sense.
 
Zyphlin said:
Still, you can't suggest the release of the documents was simply in hopes of "exposing wrong doing" if he clearly exposed documents that DIDN'T show any wrong doing.
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I most certainly can suggest that because the fact is the organization's purpose is to expose wrongdoing and that is exactly what it did.

You'd have a point, if the topic was Private Individual vs Corporation. However the discussion was concerning Government vs Private, and its quite clear and obvious that a corporation falls far more in line with the realm of private, similar to a citizen, then it does with government.

Kal'stang, who the original person bringing up corporations was responding to, was specifically suggesting a difference between a governmental entity and a private one...and a corporation is undeniably in the "private" category rather than the "governmental" one and as such, in the scope of the actual topic, it IS similar to a private individual
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Actually, no, the argument was that the distinction between government and private as a protection for Assange was invalid because Wikileaks has leaked information relating to private organizations. However there is a difference between that an leaking information concerning an individual especially if the intended purpose is to demonize the individual and prejudice a court proceeding involving that individual. That sort of behavior is typical of the State when it is dealing with dissent.

j-mac said:
What? wait, no I don't think that the US is an authoritarian government.
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Why not? Do you think that having elections mean we cannot possibly have authoritarianism as well?

You seem to though. And you also have his goals wrong. As I have posted before, and maybe you can address this.





So his intent is not a noble one as you would describe it, but rather a direct attack on America.


j-mac
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What I read there is someone saying that greater government transparency will impede the ability of government to behave in an abusive manner and that a way to facilitate such transparency is with leaks.
 
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Gill said:
I'm sure their widows will take great comfort in the fact that he didn't target them as individuals.
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Something which in the YEARS that wikileaks has been around has yet to happen.

Gill said:
I have no sympathy of the man, and I use the term "man" in its loosest sense.
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Good to know that you are hypocritical then.
 
Kal'Stang said:
Something which in the YEARS that wikileaks has been around has yet to happen.
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Hasn't happened according to Wiki Leaks ??? You have no way of knowing whether it has or not.

Good to know that you are hypocritical then.
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If you consider the truth hypocritical, then feel free.
 
Kal'Stang said:
Well this actually depends on your way of thinking really. According to some people from the TSA thread if a company recieves tax payer money then it is no longer strictly a private company, but a government one at most. A mix of the two at the least.
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For me it'd kind of depend on the kind of financial support they're getting.

Is it like a government contractor, where the government is your primary means of funding or you're working on behalf of hte government, then yeah it fits into that quasi kind of situation.

Is it a situation where the government owns the area of location and they've contracted you out to run it...such as contracting a security company to secure the premisis of an office building? Then again, I can kind of see that.

If you get some subsidy because you're manufacturing "green" products and there's a government incentive out there that gives your company money for producing "X" amount of "green" products? Then no, I don't think that company is any more a quasi-government entity than an individual getting a tax credit for buying a hybrid.
 
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