[Noisebridge-discuss] Jacob Applebaum detained upon arriving in U.S.

[Neil Kandalgaonkar]

On 8/2/10 12:14 PM, Curly Wurly wrote:

> I don't know how anyone involved with WikiLeaks can sleep at night
> knowing that their actions will likely result in someone's death.
> It's immoral and irresponsible.  Just because someone has the smarts
> to set up something like WikiLeaks doesn't mean they have the wisdom
> to think through the consequences.  This is something newspapers
> wrestle with though, so perhaps in the future those involved could
> simply ask the NY Times, LA Times, or Washington Post "Would you
> publish this?"

This appears to be carefully crafted to cause the maximum outrage on 
NoiseBridge mailing lists. Bravo.

But for fun, let's assume you aren't actually trolling.

First of all, your position is moot because they DID ask major 
mainstream media. The latest release was a sort of co-production with 
the NYTimes, the Guardian, and der Spiegel. Assange notes that the 
mainstream media actually won't cover anything that's already public 
knowledge; they want to be the exclusive source to generate significant 
traffic. Anyway, it seems clear that none of these paragons of 
journalistic excellence had ethical concerns about generating exclusive 
traffic, given the fact that Wikileaks was going to release anyway.

Anyway, here's my position: if you don't like what Wikileaks is doing, 
and you are an American citizen, you only have yourself to blame.

If, like the majority of Americans, you are unclear why your army is 
even *in* Afghanistan or what the end goal even is, but you were 
unwilling or too apathetic to do much about it other than vote for 
"HOPE!!1!" and then go back to your regular life... well, you just 
forced Wikileaks' hand.

If it weren't for the widespread apathy in the USA, it wouldn't fall to 
anti-authoritarian weirdos to have to do these kinds of things. I'm not 
100% comfortable with Wikileaks either, but I'm not 100% comfortable 
with pretty much any media source. At least Wikileaks approximates the 
kind of free press democracies are supposed to have.

-- 
Neil Kandalgaonkar (|  <neilk at brevity.org>