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and we definitely widely differ in the notion that some creepy euro techno guy knows best what information is important to our national security
Sleazy, would you feel better about the role of Wikileaks if it was not him alone making decisions on what to release, but he instead worked with legitimate news agencies to determine what material needs to be redacted or omitted entirely?
It's not even about that for them. No matter how much care was taken in not releasing sensitive information, it's about breaking this covenant with the state. It's not all that hard to determine what kind of details might put people's lives in danger: places, dates, names relating to sensitive operations in warzones etc. can all be identified and removed by people who know a bit about the circumstances. Out of curiosity, can anyone actually name an example of a death or endangerment resulting from the wikileaks info. being released?
Again, there's no attempt at a moral justification, just a bunch of status quo based reasoning "It's always been like that" "he knew what he was getting into". I just think the punishment should be proportionate to the actual harm caused by the crime itself, rather than having a broad mandate for the authorities to execute anyone who reveals information that they don't wish to to be revealed.
i've typed why several times
because i believe that governments have a right to classify information. implicitly that means that they can also enforce this through law which implies that no one external to those in the government would be able to legally release this information because it's classified. it's a simple matter of logistics and common sense to reach my conclusion if you assume that governments have the right to classify information.
where to draw the line in the sand for what can be classified, how to regulate this to ensure it's not abused, ect... those are separate matters and not something that i know enough about to even comment on whether it's currently being done well or abused. but that doesn't change my feeling that a government has a right to classify information.
so then right back at both of you, why do you feel a government doesn't have a right to classify information? surely there's a point where they can keep things private. locations of nuclear weapons, the codes? the president's security details, etc... how can you say that a government can function with out classified information?
also, i maybe missing part of the story here. was something actually wistleblown here? i didn't think anything good was released by these guys but as i said in my first post, i haven't been following too closely.
Topic: Julian Assange surrounded by police. (Read 12676 times)