No doubt some of the information leaked by WikiLeaks embarrassed every one , like the one on what US thinks of other countries in private.
You have prosecuted Assange on a charge which every one thinks is funny.
This banking Blockade is going to the extreme.
Has the blockade helped?
WikiLeaks releases advertisement coinciding with the six month unlawful banking blockage against it
Censorship, like everything else in the West, has been privatized.
For six months now, five major US financial institutions, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, Western Union and the Bank of America have tried to economically strangle WikiLeaks as a result of political pressure from Washington. The attack has blocked over 90% of the non-profit organization’s donations, costing some $15M in lost revenue. The attack is entirely outside of any due process or rule of law. In fact, in the only formal review to occur, the US Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy C. Geithner found, on January 12, that there were no lawful grounds to add WikiLeaks to a financial blockade.
Wikileaks, mapping of Iraq war deaths (source, where you can zoom in on the map
Horrendous.
May the World be sane enough to avoid these catastrophes.
This follows more or less closely the population density of Iraq, meaning that the war has been equally horrible for everyone, with the exception of some parts of the north of the country where violent death has been somewhat less common:
WikiLeaks has embarrassed the Governments the world over by its exposure of Foreign Relations details of many a country.
As has been pointed out ,there has been wilful wrong doing,outright lying,dressing up of information , deals within deals by Nations.
Also there has been special interest groups for whom there was a specific agenda to be carried out and the leaders have done their bidding.
It also exposed the crassly crude descriptions of world leaders by those in authority.
Does this mean one should ensure all documents relating to foreign relations be in the Public Domain?
Answer is Yes and No.
Those details the exposure of which might be a National Security Threat may be with held.
(this begs the question.who decides on what National Security is ?
This can be addressed separately.)
Other than this, all documents must be in the Public Realm,especially relating to natural Resources sharing, Exports, Duty cut backs Corporates)
In a Democracy such as India, the Opposition Parties have a Duty to perform in eliciting the information on the Floor of the Parliament .
Unfortunately they don’, for they know they have to face same fate when they come to power and they also have things to hide.
Take Bofors issue,Musharraf failing to sign the Agreement,bringing into the open Black Money stashed abroad.
Finally it all comes to Leaders of Integrity and Honesty, which, now ,is at a premium.
WikiLeaks is neither the Russian Bolshevik party nor the American Democratic party. Nevertheless WikiLeaks is readdressing the issue which was left open at the end of the First World War: is diplomatic secret in the people’s interest? Both Trotsky and Wilson moved their agenda forward to some limited extent: the Soviet Union soon became a harsh dictatorship and transparency was so despised under Stalin that even the map of the Moscow underground was a classified document. The practice of publicity had better luck in the United States and in other Western countries. Transparency and accountability started to be common sense in consolidated democratic regimes although state secret still exists and diplomacy is still covered by the seven veils of classified documents. Even in the most democratic countries, secrecy in international affairs continues to be justified by the need to protect the state’s integrity and to guarantee citizens’ security and these aims prevail over the need to guarantee transparency and freedom of expression.
Through WikiLeaks world public opinion was informed of numerous violations of humanitarian law in Afghanistan, of false reports on the legitimacy of the military intervention in Iraq, of the exaggeration of the weapons of mass destruction held by Saddam Hussein. This core information has been peppered with hundreds and hundreds of more exciting but less relevant gossip about political celebrities. Not surprisingly, those holding the secrets have reacted furiously against the leaks, have made what efforts they can to prevent further leaks and threatened retaliation against those who provided the information, those who published it and even those who dared to read it. The prize for the most furious reaction goes to Congressman Peter King, who wanted WikiLeaks to be declared a foreign terrorist organization. These reactions are certainly comprehensible but not justified. If there is the need to fight a war, the citizens, the taxpayers and even more the conscripted should clearly know the reasons for spilling blood on the battleground. Otherwise, as Noam Chomsky correctly pointed out, “government secrecy is to protect the government from its own population”.
Until now WikLleaks’ revelations have not provoked major damage to intelligence mechanisms, either in Afghanistan or anywhere else. It may always be that such revelations can harm and identify specific persons, making their actions and their information services known to malicious people. Excessive transparency can in principle be dangerous for a few individuals, and it should be balanced with the need to protect the privacy of individuals. At the expense of violating the privacy of many individuals, WikiLeaks has allowed public opinion to know that public offices have been used for private purposes, that false information has been released with the explicit aim of diverting public attention, that crimes have been committed without liability. Looking at the outcomes so far produced, it can be argued that the violation of privacy has been minimal compared to the relevance of the information provided to public opinion.
An instrument like WikiLeaks has proven to be helpful not only in making governments and their officials more accountable. It has also proved very useful to check and control the business sector. We have already seen that WikiLeaks has started eating into banking secrecy, with the publication of the greatest tax dodgers’ lists by a banker that worked in Cayman Islands on behalf of the Swiss bank Julius Baer. In this case, it would be difficult to claim that confidentiality on tax evasion and money laundering should be protected in deference of privacy. It is somehow surprising that some Courts, rather than using the occasion to prosecute financial crimes, have preferred to be on the side of the banks and requested that leaked documents should be removed from the public domain.
WikiLeaks raises a more general point that needs to be addressed: is there any effective filter between the load of information leaked out and what is actually published? WikilLeaks today has been a pioneer and it is carrying out an important public function, but it is probably inappropriate that an unaccountable private organization holds so much power. The opportunity to publish classified document has traditionally been a prerogative of all media, but there is no media, to date, that is solely devoted to releasing classified documents. This puts WikiLeakes in a league by its own.
The responsibility to monitor the transparency of geopolitical relations, of financial flows and of other sensitive information should be put in the hands of organizations that are themselves fully transparent and accountable. The empirical research carried out by One World Trust on the accountability of inter-governmental organizations, non-governmental organizations and of business corporations has often provided counter-intuitive results, indicating that institutions such as the World Bank are more transparent than institutions such as the WWF International.# Paradoxically, WikiLeaks risks being an organization more secretive than those whose documents it publishes. “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” said Juvenal and today we can wonder: “Who will assure the transparency of those who generate transparency?”
Ultimately we shall be paying for reading on-line.
Funnily this move could boost the print media.
NEW YORK—In an effort to highlight content of interest to the subscribers it values most,The New York Times announced Monday it would move all articles you could not possibly give a shit about unless you make more than $200,000 into one handy section. “From now on, people looking for helpful hints on renovating a $4 million Manhattan townhouse won’t have to waste time sifting through articles on the crisis of public education,” Times executive editor Bill Keller said of the new section, which will be printed in smudge-proof ink so it doesn’t soil the soft, pink hands of its readers. “They can flip straight to TimesElite for the latest on society weddings, Tuscan getaways, and the rising cost of boat winterization.” Keller added that if the experiment proved successful, the Times might create a similar section for moms in Brooklyn.
Time has decided to dive headfirst into an issue that has bedeviled many a news organization before it: how to cure online readers of their addiction to free content.
But Time’s approach is more a process of weaning readers than forcing them to quit cold turkey. Starting this week, it replaced most of the content that appeared in its current issue with abridged articles and summaries online. The move is meant to drive readers to newsstands and Time’s iPad applications, where the magazine costs $4.99.
Richard Stengel, the managing editor, says Time plans to experiment and will continuously adjust what it decides to keep off its Web site.
“I think we’ll see what works and doesn’t work,” Mr. Stengel said in an interview by phone. “We’ll adapt and change. We’re in the hunt like everyone else to figure this out.”
By pulling its print content off its Web site, Time is taking a step that other American newsweeklies have so far avoided. Whether the move is enough to push more readers into paying for Time content is unclear.
The magazine will continue to make its columnists and vast archives available online. And once an issue is two weeks old, its content will be posted on the site and available to the public.
Time expects its decision to have little effect on its readership online. About 90 percent of the traffic on Time.com involves content that appears only online, the company said.
Another Time Inc. property, People, has left articles from its magazine off its Web site for some time. People’s online editors often try to entice readers by displaying an image of the magazine cover along with an excerpt from the cover article. A small teaser informs readers that if they want more they should go to the newsstand and buy an issue.
Time’s online approach was similar, though it included lengthy excerpts from the week’s magazine articles with the disclaimer: “The following is an abridged version of an article that appears in the July 12, 2010, print and iPad editions of Time.” Eventually the magazine plans to offer an online subscription that will provide readers with access to all Time content.
Edward K. Moran, a media analyst with Deloitte, says Time’s approach is one he expects other media outlets to adopt in the coming months.
“Quite frankly I’m surprised it’s taken this long,” Mr. Moran said. “Everybody wants to jump in the pool, but no one wants to be the first one.”
Mr. Stengel said the decision was an effort to draw a brighter line between what the magazine provided free and what it charged consumers to read.
“We kind of wanted to draw a line in the sand,” he said. “We want to remain a vigorous and important part of the conversation. There are some things that are necessary to be part of that. But we will experiment.”
At a news conference in London on Monday WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was handed two CDs with details of secret accounts held by tax evaders from several countries, including India, by former Swiss banker Rudolf Elmer.
“Assange and WikiLeaks are the best hope we have of getting at who and how much is involved,” said Vineet Narain, one of India’s best known campaigners against the country’s vast “black” or parallel economy, which feeds into the international secret accounts system.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange holds a CD during a press conference at the Frontline club in London, on Monday. An offshore banking whistleblower on Monday personally handed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange two CDs reportedly containing the names of 2,000 bank clients who may have been evading taxes. AFP
Narain said two decades of campaigning against the system, that includes obtaining landmark rulings against corruption from the Supreme Court, had taught him that none of the major political parties is serious about a system which enables the elite to spirit away large sums of money and stash them in tax havens.
In a report released in November 2010 the Washington-based Centre for International Policy (CIP) estimated that an average of 19.3 billion dollars leaves India each year. Since independence from British colonial rule in 1947 India has lost 462 billion dollars by a “conservative estimate”, the report said.
Singh is under pressure to act over numerous instances of corruption surfacing in recent months, but he told media on Wednesday that disclosing details of the secret accounts would violate international treaties on double taxation. “The information will not be made public. It will be a violation of the treaties.
“There are no instant solutions to bringing back what is called black money. We have got some information and that has been provided to us for use in the collection of taxes,” Singh added.
Singh’s plea of helplessness has cut no ice with the Supreme Court which is hearing a public interest litigation on large nest eggs, possibly running into trillions of dollars, illegally maintained abroad by Indians.
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