http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10757263

Well? Is wikileaks the for runner of the shadowlands info hubs or is it a dangerous irrisponsible faction? Or all of the above. I read the article at the BBC and all i could think was trageting these guys sounds like a run.

Depends on who you ask. Us folks with a soul: Shadowlands. Corporate suits: the latter.



And thats why in 2070 Joe Average doesn't know drek about the existence of Shadowland

It just keeps getting more Shadowrun-ish... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/02/wikileaks_insurance/

Isn't it high treason to release classified material and put informants' lives at risk?

The government doesn't need runs against people who openly commit high treason.

By American law one can only commit treason against his own country, an Aussie can't betray the US


PS: And charging every incident of "oops, we didn't redact that guy's name" as treason sounds like a lot of work for the Attorney

But they can commit another crime as a foreign entity. Those who leak the information would likely be charged for treason.

Then the Aussies can charge him for treason.

If he commited treason against Australia.

Obviously.

If nothing can be done about it, I think laws will be passed to prevent it in the future. Looking at how much legislation the US got pushed through that allows them to look into financial, travel and telecomms data all over the world, they're probably going to get most of their allies to play along with this one too - especially since most of them are also appalled at it.

I don't think anyone is interested in a return of terrorist sympatizers getting people killed. The only difference between WikiLeaks and something like Rote Armee Fraktion is that WikiLeaks kills with information and hides in legal cracks.

You mean people like Dick Cheney?


Well the problem is, if you would accuse them of treason they would have the possibility to defend themselves.

That means if you get a judge who does not wipe his ass with the constitution there gone be a lot of problems for people formaly in the Bush administration.

Since most of the issues are international other countries would be forced to investigate (their own affairs) as well. (Since they were all involved to a certain degree. Espacially true for europe)
Such things tend to be neither controllable nor containable.

Treason is a touchy subject if your own administration betrayed the constitution. And trailing journalist for bringing out such truths out is like opening pandorras box. A lot of nasty things could get out of it. (There are several countries involved in the war in Afghanistan. And the support for it is extreamly low. So to tip the balance by such actions ain t very wise.)

Well, that's the government line: "We are rubber-stamping all this stuff as 'state secret' for your own best, trust us" and "if you disagree with us, you are supporting the TERRORISTS!!!!!!!!!!!!11111111111"...

As far as Treason charges go, It really wouldn't be practical to try to apply them to a foriegner. Espionage charges could be used. You can still be hanged for that. However, if it becomes clear that Wikileaks used basically normal journalistic techniques, and that these leaked documents were genuinely leaked and NOT stolen, than Wikileaks bears no responsibility or blame. The person who leaked them does. That person could be charged with treason or espionage.

Or the Govt. could just forget about all those legal technicalities and dissapear these people. Alternatively, the Govt/CIA/NSA acquires them as assets and uses them to leak only the information that the Govt wants them to leak.(This may have already happened.)

That's what happens when you go extreme like WikiLeaks. Instead of sticking to releasing information relevant to the public, they chose to release the names, adresses and in some cases even GPS coordinates of informants, Taleban who had contacted Americans about negotiating cease fires, and such. WikiLeaks could have published stuff like that Apache guncam footage, and civilian casualty rates and friendly fire incidents and whatever forever without any real response. But now they damaged both the war effort and the peace effort, and people are going to die because they talked to the US troops and trusted them to keep it secret. So a legal response will probably come, and my money is on the politicians erring on the side of security and secrecy rather than the public's right to know.

Uhm, no. Wikileaks and their media "partners" put quite some effort into removing information on informers and similar sensitive data. Yes, they failed at some points, but as I said earlier: If every instance where names got out due to sloppy editing, not removing metadata from Word documents, simply putting another layer with black boxes into a .pdf, or a myriad of other unintentional screwups was considered treason, treason sentences would be more common than parking tickets in DC.

The issue is that it is sensitive data, which means it falls under different rules from your typical word document.

And if the Army for example releases a redacted document which can be un-redacted by simply hiding the layer with the black boxes we are talking about sensitive data, too. That very same thing happened with the report of that Italian journalist who nearly got shot after being released by her kidnappers, and it was neither the first nor the last incident of that kind.

Which means it was sloppy and that those who did it probably got in trouble. Just because it happened doesn't mean it is right or good. A certain amount of responsibility must be accepted when dealing with something so dangerously sensitive. If Wikileaks wishes to use the information, then they best not make mistakes.

i see wikileaks more like the nexus. The various shadowlands where supposed to be more hidden then wikileaks is (tho the poster-bloat that it gained over the years of writers adding shadowtalkers as they pleased didnt exactly give that impression), tho they often fed data back to the nexus for distribution and safe keeping.

Hey everyone, I'm a long time lurker but politics tends to get my blood boiling so I decided to come out of the shadows to put my two cents in.

A couple things need clarification:
1) As others have mentioned, you can't commit treason against a country that is not your own.
2) There have been fewer then 40 cases if treason in the united states in its history and very few of them convictions. As such, there is a very low possibility that any charges will be filed, let alone anyone being convicted of it.
3) Julian Assange (apart from being Australian) isn't the founder, owner, or the person who personally leaked this information. He's simply the spokesperson for Wikileaks and on their advisory board.
4) The information leaked is not only old, but they very specifically didn't release about 15000 documents that actually WERE a security risk. Yes, I'm basing that on something Wikileaks has said but they've made similar claims before and have proven them. As such, I have no reason to doubt it. Rather then repeat what the pundits are saying, I'd like anyone to point out specific reports from the leak that hurt either soldiers currently on the ground or civilian informants. If someone can, I'd be happy to admit I'm wrong.

The reason the US government is having a fit over this is because it makes them look bad. These reports paint the efforts in Afghanistan in a very different light then what is officially released and paraded through the mainstream media. This might hurt the war effort but not because it puts anyone in danger: It might hurt the war effort because it could lose what little popular support it had. To use a parallel: The Vietnam War.

One of the reasons that the Vietnam war was so horribly un-popular was the fact the war was covered in depth by the media. In previous wars, all that reached the general public were radio broadcasts (highly controlled and non-visual), government released statements, and (highly sanitized) pictures. For example, most of the truly graphic pictures from WW2 didn't come out until well after the war. Vietnam, however, not only had extensive coverage while the war was going on by independent (read as "Non-Government") sources but the coverage was highly critical of the war as a whole. This painted a VERY different picture then the one that was being officially released. Not only were there uncensored photographs being released, but television coverage that showed the american people the true horrors of the war. Many agree that one of the deciding factors in the Vietnam War was the press coverage. If it weren't for the media covering the My Lai Massacre, the Tet offensive, the bombing of Cambodia, and the release of the Pentagon papers, we probably would have been in that war a LOT longer and/or sent in far more troops.

However, as a caveat to the above, I have to say that I really don't expect anything to come of these leaked documents. The information is too old to cause any noticeable (military) effect and the american public has (at best) a short attention span for anything they don't like. Of course the politicians will rant and rave, the pundits will rand and rave, but in the end very little will change.

PS. After reading over what I just typed, I can just tell I'm going to be making a LOT of friends around here. /sarcasm.

Mm, you forgot cultural climate for Vietnam. Large factor of the time as well.

You mean like dropping bombs on Canadians performing training after the US Military had been informed about it?

Hadn't heard that little tidbit. Source?

Of course those leaks can become a major screwup for national interests, and life-threatening for the individuals in question. But my point is that people who frequently store their secret info (like schematics for nukes) in glass houses shouldn't throw stones at anyone who unintentionally makes such info public.

I disagree there. It means the glass house should be traded up to something stronger, and punishments must be doled out or it happens again.

In any case, probably derailed the topic enough. The idea of wikileaks is good. I just feel the execution needs some work and I'm uncertain of their sense of responsibility.

Your not making a enemy out of me. I like when people know what they are talking about and can actually give examples.

I read somewhere that a newspaper had checked on the names that where mentioned and only one of those where dead, and he had died a few years ago long before this leak came out. (Sorry I do not have source for this).

I'm also wondering about the role my homecountry Iceland has in this Wikileak site. They wan't the country to be some sort of Safe Haven for investigative journalism but we are getting pressure from the US government. What's going on with the freedom of speech clause in their constitution. I doubt the american public is happy if their goverment is not following the constitution.

April 16th, 2002 Friendly Fire Incident.

And again July 8th, 2006.

Which leads me to wonder, what does the US Air Force have against the Canadian Armed Forces?

Probably tired of getting teased about our beer

Maybe it has something to do with the war of 1812, where the Canadians burnt down the White House? The Brits like to think they accomplished it, but the Canadians did the burning. Heh.

Thanks for the links, CanRay. My dad never had anything against the Canadians, so it must be more of a recent thing. (I'm sorry it happened, though.)

Everyone looks the same on an IR camera.

In 2003 the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said the public had a right to know the facts upon which the Enron investigation was based.

They published the e-mails. All of them, even if they had nothing to do with the investigation. We're talking private messages from one person to another about who was having an affair with whom or about prostitutes in Vegas.

Much of it can still be obtained by http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~enron/ which also points to the Salon Story about the event.

In doing so, our government publicly showed that justifying an investigation was more important than the lives of individual people, such as low level enron employees.

Wikileaks is doing the same thing that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission except they're actually making an effort to limit what's being disclosed instead of just releasing everything.

Moral of the story, don't talk about your affair, or your hookers on corporate email systems?

indeed, one could observe the management of the media from the 91 iraq war onwards. Every in the field reporter was carefully approved by the US military before allowed to attend, and anything that was done while the media was present was planned for maximum positive press.

so for them, wikileaks and similar are PR nightmare, a rogue element that needs to be discredited asap.

makes one wonder what kind of PR blitz war the AAAs can field, especially now that one AAA is basically a overgrown marketing machine.

only any format that may leave a record. even voice, when carried by devices, can leave a record.

one would have thought they knew that after the issues of blue on blue during the 91 iraq war.

To put it in perspective, the Aztechnology we all know and love (to hate) has one of the highest consumer confidence/popularity ratings of any corporation by 2072.

This is the Aztechnology that hit the Yucatan with a 'Scorched Earth' policy, bombed the Olaya into subservience and now sells tempo cut with other drugs in their pharmacies.

People love them. Their PR is that good. Horizon's is better.

sounds like ol' aztech have steve jobs brain in a jar and wired to their marketing department mainframes.

I think it was Thomas Roxborough up until recently. Now he's a blob in SPAAAAAAAAAAAAACE.

This entire thread veers several times into real world politics and is just itching to do the same going forward.

It's easy to justify an underdog. Again, because it was done in the past does not make it right, by any party, to do it now.

Wikileaks isn't Shadowland because it releases its information to the media and public in general. Shadowland took a certain amount of computer/hacking skill to even find in the matrix.

Unfortunately, many Americans don't give a damn about the Constitution. They want their bread and circuses, legalities be damned. Which is why things are f'ing screwed up here nowadays. It's going to take a few generations to clean up the crap from the last 50-80 years of government in the US. There's a lot of baggage that needs dealing with (not to mention the addditional crap that is added every day). But as long as our wonderful government can keep The People in a state of apathy, the Gov can keep doing as it's doing, rules & laws be damned.

BTW, our constitution is taught nowadays in a highly sanitized state. They pay very little time on certain Rights, Privileges, etc. Many places don't even talk about the Amendments or why they were instituted let alone the context behind them. our own history books marginalize the works of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Adams, Patrick Henry, George Mason, and so forth.

Thankfully a segment of the population is waking up. That is scaring the establishment as they are getting adherants from the ranks of the Establishment. People are getting fed up and they are starting to hold their elected representatives and Senators accountable. I just hope it keeps up. We really need to shake up Washington.

This ties in well to SR. How so? Think of the US Gov as another megacorporation. You can see they are just as bad as S-K or Aztechnology. We don't need to get to 2050+. We're already there. The People are disenfranchised. If you are not a citizen, you don't have rights / don't exist (not necessarily a bad thing considering but that is another discussion). The corp tells you what to do, how to do it, when, where, why, and who.

How is that any different than being a wageslave to a corporation?

I think I'll avoid this one a bit due to timely Radiant intervention and reminders.

I'm reading that 100s of informants are named. Below is an excerpt from wikipedia.

Am I the only one who thinks that this guy Assange is really far out? The public gains nothing from getting informants identified, and even if they did is that really worth real people having to flee or get killed? And because some informants lied to NATO, how does that justify naming other informants for the Taleban to target?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Logs#Informants_named

Informants named
The leak reportedly names hundreds of Afghan informants. The Times offered as examples[50]
a 2008 report that includes a detailed interview with a Taliban fighter considering defection and ends with "[t]he meeting ended with [named person] agreeing to meet intel personnel." Both his father's name and village are also included in the report;
a report that read "[named person] said he would be killed if he got caught interacting with any coalition forces, which is why he hides when we go into [named location]".
The London-based paper also found that a man killed by the Taliban two years ago after being suspected of spying for American forces was named in the logs and described as "highly pro-Government of Afghanistan and Coalition Forces. He should be taken seriously in his claims of insurgent knowledge." Another report gave the names, father's names, tribe, village and GPS co-ordinates for homes of individual villagers while stating that "[named person] wanted to help us as much as possible... [but] they were afraid that the people in the next village would see them talking to Americans."[51]
Jane Harman, chairwoman of the Congressional Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence, said that the Taliban had been given "its new 'enemies list'."[52] Ahmad Nader Nadery, a commissioner at the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, said that revealing the names and villages of people who interacted with U.S. troops was irresponsible. Julian Assange responded to the criticism by insisting that any risk to informants’ lives was outweighed by the overall importance of publishing the information. He also asserted that many informers in Afghanistan had "acted in a criminal way" by sharing false information with NATO authorities and that the White House did nothing to help WikiLeaks vet the data. Assange also felt that the U.S. should have had tighter controls over sensitive information, saying "[t]he United States appears to have given every UN soldier and contractor access to the names of many of its confidential sources without proper protection.[53]
The U.S. Secretary of Defense and former CIA director Robert M. Gates said that the announcement by the Taliban that they were going through the dispatches proved that the disclosures put at risk the lives of Afghans who had aided American forces. "Growing up in the intelligence business, protecting your sources is sacrosanct".[54]

Which was precisely why Allied military was informed of the Training Exercise that was going on in 2002. Still got bombed.

If I had my druthers, I'd have had JTF2 "Visit" the US Air Force bases and demonstrate why it's not nice to bomb your allies. 500 Pound Bombs make great End Tables, don't you think?

Detonator not included. We're polite that way.

(Heck, considering JTF2s reputation, they could probably visit the Secretary of the US Air Force's Pentigon Office to do the same redecoration.).

In the case of the 16 April 2002 "Tarnak Farm incident", the U.S pilots were using "Go Pills"—government manufactured and issued amphetamines—the forerunner of Shadowrun's combat drugs.

ah yes, those. I was wondering if those where still in use. Iirc, us military is the only ones using amphetamines, the rest make do with caffeine pills.

hmm, SR corp military with kamikaze as part of the standard field kit.

@DireRadiant: I understand the Dumpshock TOS, but Shadowrun is a game based on intrigue, dirty dealings, government and corporate corruption, and casual murder. Trying to push politics out of a game that is based on politics seems futile. How do I separate Shadowrun grit from messy historical fact? Can I, for instance, talk about genocide in Darfur if I speak of it context of the Congo Tribal Lands? How about Fallujah if I want to talk about how the American use of white phosphorus and chemical warfare left behind a legacy of cancer and birth defect rates as bad as Hiroshima? I'm sure that the background count there in 2070 is fantastic for the shedim. Or am I supposed to assume that if I say something that someone else might find offensive, even if they are offended out of ignorance, I should shut up? I know that Dumpshock doesn't want to be a forum for political arguments, and needs to avoid being a platform for hate speech, but how far are you planning on taking that?

I personally don't have any issue with politic discussion.

However, the terms of service are not developed out of any imaginary issues with political discussion on these forums, but from years of demonstrated problems with these discussion on these boards.

If you wish to continue discussion on the tos, please post in the appropriate forum board.

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showforum=6

Thanks. I'll do so.