I'm very excited to read about the BoA dump whenever they do it. Oh boy!

Wikileaks as a group won't fold over this. Assange is in jail with no web access, but they have not stopped: http://twitter.com/wikileaks

Anyway, even if every mirror came down and every wikileaks.* whatever domain was seized, there's still torrent. And if they block all torrent traffic there, we still have direct encrypted mail to various media contacts. Block that, and we have 65,000~ other communications ports in standard TCP/IP communications, and God knows what else lurking under the surface. All the US has done here is hand them and many a convenient martyr figure in Assange. We'll see the banking data.

All that blocking, by the way, assumes it done globally and all nation-states force their commercial operators to participate. Good luck there. The internet was designed by DARPA and our military to be unkillable. Mission accomplished so far.

I know i'm going to get racked over the coals for this one, but can someone tell me how this issue is an issue of free speech?

The janitor at my doctor's office does not have the right to publish my STD test, nor does the IT guy at my bank have the right to publish how many overdrafts I've gotten in the last year.

Isn't this an intellectual property issue?

Fubar, I certainly hope you don't get racked over the coals, because that's a very perceptive question. Yes, it is exactly an intellectual property issue. The problem is that it's so outside the scope of typical intellectual property infringements that there's no clear law on it one way or the other.

@3 Because you are a private, sovereign individual. You're also a moron, but that's besides the point.

Governments don't have rights and corporations shouldn't have rights. Fuck 'em.

I read an interesting perspective on the whole "secret cache of encrypted documents" yesterday:

"To dodge any and all legal proceedings against him, Mr. Assange is willing to let the whole world know the identities of people whose names are currently shielded in the WikiLeaks documents... if they are killed once outed, Mr. Assange did warn us, didn’t he? The blood is on our hands, not his. Is there any real difference between this and a felon on the run who takes hostages at gunpoint and demands the police stand down or he’ll kill innocents? Is the mindset not just about identical?"

Read the whole thing:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opin…

@3: Are you serious? Your STD test results aren't your intellectual property. What protects them is privacy (10th amendment; case law) and various medical records acts like HIPAA.

I mean, I never copyrighted my bank statement, but maybe I should. I definitely trademarked my fingerprints.

And ummm... it's "raked" over coals, but I don't want this to devolve into another thread about idiomatic expressions.

Did you know that multi-gig flash drives are very very portable?

All your information wants to be free.

@4: To be fair, I have a very specific and old school view of IP. The way the concept has slowly come to be used to limit the flow of information doesn't seem to be what was intended by various copyright acts and treaties. Your interpretation and recent legal precedents may differ.

@6 -- but what is the evidence that the "insurance policy" consists of "the identities of people whose names are currently shielded in the WikiLeaks documents"?

My bet is that ordinary informants etc. would still have their names redacted, but the misdeeds of the powerful would be illuminated. Or, at least, that's what he wants the powerful people worrying about.

Is no one able to debunk this sex-crime BS? It doesn't seem very probable that this man who happens to piss off the world's most powerful also is all of a sudden a rapist. What's the information on why he's being charged?

@13 - his condom broke on one girl and he finished anyway. On the second girl he had a morning wake up sex without a condom even though using one for the night before... (sex by 'surprise'). He was dumb, they were dumb, and there was no rape. Now all of our countries are acting dumb.

"The gigantic dump of raw data... immensely satisfying."

Why? So far, there's been nothing that's so important that it justifies the original leaker risking life in prison, needless to say that it justifies any deaths should a shooting war result from the cables.

"One of our diplomats got drunk with a South Korean diplomat and he said that he'd earlier gotten drunk with a Chinese diplomat who told him China will not defend North Korea." Did anybody doubt that there were Koreans claiming Chinese had told them these things before?

So far it all just seems to be somebody-told-me-something-about-somebody-else. The world has been made no better by its release. If you are entertained about people saying rude things about each other, watch a reality TV show.

@14, there are two other alleged cases as well. One of them is serious -- forced sex against her will. And Swedish law is very complex on the topic of sex crimes.

It's quite interesting, though, to watch all sorts of people explain away how rape charges against someone they like, like Assange, while getting all heated over similar charges against someone they don't (a certain film director, for instance).

@11 You're welcome. Sorry you thought it was "stupid and pointless" - I guess I shouldn't have mind-controlled you into reading it. After all, it's not like I posted a quote to give a very clear idea of what the main point of the article was or anything.

@15: Agreed. All this talk about "information wants to be free" is crap. There is nothing in the information released so far that should surprise anyone who has any knowledge about international affairs. All that Assange has accomplished by releasing most of this stuff is to make the work of diplomats - who in many cases really do try to make the world a little less shitty for people - harder.

#4
The government has not copyrighted these items. Nor can the government copyright any government work. See 17 USC CH 1§ 105 -

"Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise."

@15, that's not true. Unless you think it's no big deal that a Texas military contractor in Afghanistan, which had already been found out committing not-dissimilar crimes a decade ago in Bosnia, paid for drugs and eight-year-old boys for sex on your dime, and we knew about it but can't or won't do a thing about it. No big deal. That's our tax dollars at work, creating a new society over there.

http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairballs/…

How about the fact that the US is launching multiple missile strikes in Yemen, even though the State Department is denying it? Or that Saudi Arabia wants us to bomb Iran? These aren't news to you?

I should have also clarified -
the material is not properly subject to patent (35 USC 101)
the material is not properly subject to trademark (15 USC 22)
the material is not properly subject to trade secret law because
1) "Trade Secret" protections are only available at the state level
2) Disclosure nullifies trade secret claims, so the protection would be over.

The law thus far is pretty clear - the government can only protect information from disclosure through internal controls. The government has No IP rights in government works. Period. End of Story. Try again.

In the immediate, Wikileaks seems to be in some danger. However, when the full weight of its leaks are unveiled, and the informed public has taken some time processing these documents, we are going to see a set of prosecutions against government and big business dwarfing anything we've seen in our time.

So, in the short-term, all those in the seats of power, painfully behind the times in communication technology, are going to do everything they can to attempt to squelch this information and destroy those revealing. Truth be told, everyone within the seat of power is brutally corrupt; those who seek power, after all, are easily corrupted. But, perhaps after a lengthened arch, these matters will turn and invert and you will see heads of state and major corporations hauled in before the triumph as foreign, conquered slaves.

@21, you're funny!

@19 Are those items really surprising to you? I suppose I agree they're a big deal in the sense that they are important, but does it really matter that we now can read a few details about stuff that we know has been happening for a long time? And, more importantly, what are the consequences? Will that contractor be charged with anything? Will the Yemeni government be overthrown? I doubt it. It's all great stuff to read about, but par for the course.

I want the bank files. That has to be the best shit yet.