21 thoughts on “Living Dangerously”

  1. I don’t think anyone will be able to stop Wikileaks. They have their doomsday device and there’s nothing you can do against peer to peer networks. It’s just like the old ARPANET, it can withstand a nuclear strike.

  5. Balls. Seriously large brass balls.

    Assange may or may not be considered too high a profile for Russian wet work, but I would not be surprised if individuals associated with Wikileaks have bad things happen to them. This isn’t a one-man show, but Assange could quickly find himself alone if he can’t defend his people (which he can’t – not even from Swedish city prosecutors, let alone Russian operatives).

  6. For all the talk against Wikileaks, if they go after Russia in a serious way, then I think I’ll send them a check. Someone has to tackle the tough targets, the real problems internationally, not just easy ones (both physically and morally) like the US. And Russia is a good start.

  7. Realpolitik: I wouldn’t be so hasty to cheese-off the Russians – they may prove to be useful allies in the face of the Sinosphere and the Sunnisphere.

  9. MPM: Anonymous P2P networks mean that you can’t stop the data getting around once it’s out, absolutely.

    But there’s a small problem – if “Wikileaks” becomes completely anonymous, then it becomes hard to trust. Who’d trust it to be a “real leak” if we couldn’t verify it was from “Wikileaks” via a trustable spokesman and that a human being we can “trust” at some level had verified the source?

    (EG, how do we know it’s not planted “fake Wikileak”? Encryption, maybe – but then there’s the problem of duelling keys, each claiming to be “real” and the other “fake” or “compromised”…

    And of course if we have no knowledge of the source vetters and verifiers why trust THEM?

    So far, for all his flaws, Assange hasn’t seemingly provided any false intelligence.)

    And if there’s a live spokesman and visible vetters, well, the FSB has well-tested ways to intimidate (or remove) them, doesn’t it?

    The Russians are not to be trifled with, especially by vulnerable independent parties.

    Brass balls, indeed.

  10. Oh yes, Assange himself would be in danger. But the doomsday device is out there. For all we know it may be a fake, but I don’t think any government can know that either way. It appears Wikileaks may have the USG and who knows else by the balls. Mutually assured destruction. An astonishing development.

  11. Assange hasn’t seemingly provided any false intelligence

    I would be quite surprised if some poison hadn’t been slipped into the stream.

  14. I hold with Brock. If I were an Evil Overlord, I wouldn’t bother with Assange; he’s a little man with a big ego, arrogant to the point of self-delusion. But the charred corpses of the employees of the companies hosting Wikileaks on their servers would be pulled out of the smoking ruins of thedata centers.

    The Internet interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it. But the sysadmins interpret censorship as meaning that they’ll die horribly if they don’t fall in line.

  15. I’m of two minds; however, information wants to be free.

    Our spies (whatever flavor) have a responsibility to keep our secrets. Others don’t. Frankly, I’m tired of our leaders trying to candy coat the world.

  16. But the charred corpses of the employees of the companies hosting Wikileaks on their servers would be pulled out of the smoking ruins of thedata centers.

    The trouble with that is that various nuclear powers might object to your bombing their data centers.

  17. You mean like Sweden, MPM? Or perhaps you’re thinking of the way that the United States turned Beirut and Tehran into radioactive parking lots in 1983?

    If Lavrov or Yang turned up to tell me that I’d be held responsible for a second data center bombing, I’d listen intently and frame my reply carefully. If Clinton told me the same thing, I’d spit in her face and laugh.

  18. OK, imagine that hundreds of thousands of private citizens in the US, France, Britain, India, Israel and Pakistan run Bittorrent nodes in their homes that in addition to porn and such also distribute Wikileaks material on Russia. Tell me what will happen.

  20. A fairly low probability I guess. But the probability of the Russian government succeeding in assassinating you from among hundreds of thousands is tiny. Even if they did manage to trace you which is very difficult, especially through networks like TOR, through use of anonymous mobile wifi, perhaps with forged MAC addresses. This is true even with the cooperation of foreign governments, which they will never get.

    And another consideration: if there are state secrets in the Wikileaks insurance file, then it will not matter how many citizens have a copy, because every self respecting major power and a great many minor ones will have the document already. The secrets that are merely embarrassing (exposing government wrong doing or civil servant wrongdoing) are not worthy of protection, nor would foreign governments ever cooperate with Russian demands for repression. If Russia starts assassinating individuals or destroying internet infrastructure, then that would be an act of war.

    I think they’ve got them by the balls.

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