I don't like the NSA, but, impolitic as it may be to admit it here: I like Belarus a lot less.

Yes, you did. You can find it with a simple web search. The accusation is pretty tenuous when you look at the facts.

Would you agree that funneling intelligence to the government of Belarus is a grave accusation?

http://wlcentral.org/node/1412 http://wlcentral.org/node/1186

I don't like the NSA. Am I required to like Wikileaks? I don't.

> Did I miss the part where Wikileaks refuted the allegation

that is, you asked specifically for Wikileaks response, which is contained in one of the links I posted.

I don't believe that wlcentral is Wikileaks itself, and in any case the evidence and arguments they present should stand on their own, regardless of whether one likes Wikileaks or not.

It doesn't bother you that cables that we probably haven't even seen were relayed from Chelsea Manning, through Assange and Wikileaks, through a noted holocaust denier, to the government of Belarus? Again: we don't get to see them. But the functionaries of one of the world's worst dictatorships, and one of Russia's closest satellite states, do get them. In fact: all the sources I've seen appear to stipulate that's true, disagreeing only on why that happened.

I don't like the NSA and have plenty of reasons to be skeptical about the official USG narratives on virtually any subject. But I find Wikileaks to be an incredibly sketchy organization.

Here's former WL staffer James Ball, writing for The Guardian:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/nov...

So far as I can tell, the most powerful rebuttal WL has to Ball is to suggest that Ball is disgruntled and has an axe to grind. But Ball's allegations are specific, and in some cases corroborated!

As for Shamir, it seems pretty obvious that Wikileaks did not do a whole lot of background checking on the volunteers that they used to go through the source material. That's all. There isn't any evidence to suggest that Wikileaks partnered with Shamir in order to convey cables to Belarus, a feat which could have been done far more easily in other ways.

Not central to the point but I think it's only speculation that Shamir gave any cables to Belarus.

At some point, this "Ball had reason to make things up" stuff has to amount to us taking Assange's word for it. Ball signed his name to the allegations, and the Guardian found them credible enough to run. I don't love the Guardian (they are to the left what Murdoch is to the right) but it's not credible to say that the Guardian would simply make things up because they had a falling-out with Wikileaks.

Would your opinion of Wikileaks be impacted if more evidence was presented corroborating Ball's story? If Assange really did knowingly introduce a holocaust-denying agent of Belarus to Wikileaks? How much would that matter to you?

I think that's what happened. I think it's very relevant.

If you think it doesn't matter even if we stipulate that it happened, that's fine, and we can be done discussing that part of the story.

Does it bother you that whenever something comes up about Assange or Wikileaks --- the refusal to present himself to prosecutors in Sweden, the ties to allies of Lukashenko, the Russia Today show and the refusal to publish documents about Russians that he said he'd publish, the accidental doxxing of Afghani Taliban resistors --- there's always some elaborate story that exonerates Wikileaks?

Shamir: The most damning evidence is that he allegedly used a pseudonym. There isn't any reasonable evidence to suggest that Assange knew about his background, or had any reason to believe he would give documents to Belarus, if that did indeed happen.

Why doesn't he go to Sweden? Because he will certainly be extradited to the US (we know that the US wants him, we can debate how practical it would be to get him from Sweden for the umpteenth time).

Why does he have a show on RT? Because RT airs voices critical of the US, there is nothing special about Assange.

Accidental doxxing: I assume that was the result of the Guardian's publishing of the encryption keys. But in any case the standard of journalism isn't to guarantee that no one will ever get hurt, it's if the benefits outweigh the costs.

I'm not familiar with the Lukashenko and Russian documents issues but the rest of this supposedly damning evidence is pretty weak.

https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Category:Russia

  - Category:Russia - 57 pages total
  - Cyprus - 54 pages
  - Latvia - 50 pages
  - Lithuania - 47 pages
  - Estonia - 46 pages
    ------- 
  - Japan: 90 pages
  - Italy: 99 pages
  - France: 128 pages
  - Canada: 153 pages
  - Germany: 278 pages
  - United Kingdom: 384 pages
  - United States: 9729 pages

All of these are very effective deterrents against whistleblowers stepping forward.

That we don't have much information on Russia however should definitely not be read as 'wikileaks is slacking in Russia' or 'the Russian government is not doing much that can't stand the light of day', rather the opposite.

That's not a baseless concern. Wikileaks has an agenda, and it is not simply "transparency".

Their agenda is irrelevant, as is the personality of the people involved, their political affiliations, their haircolour and their dietary and or sexual habits.

And let's hope that others with other agendas and goals will do their bit and release as much or more information as well.

If you only accept facts from sources that are 100% neutral then you end up having to make up your mind without any facts at all, no news outlet, no journalist, no TV station and no editor is able to say that they have 'no agenda', in fact it is entirely safe to assume that anybody that sends facts out into the world has an agenda and wishes to further that agenda by the selective release of the facts that support their cause best.

Wikileaks has been slammed in the past for 'uncontrolled releases', which I thought were actually far more balanced than any kind of editorial control and or selective release.

In that sense they are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

Now the US has a lot of idealism going on, so much so that many people grow up idolizing institutions like the CIA and the NSA. They join these institutions as believers, but day after day they are exposed to more details on the inside that bursts that idealism and one day cognitive dissonance gets the better of them and they choose to collect information to become a whistleblower.

Compare this with other countries where there isn't as much blind reverence cultivated for such institutions. The same talented kids that would grow up under circumstances where they would have a much more realistic view of the good and bad these institutions are capable of. This in and of itself is a major limiting factor in how high you would rise in such an institution, assuming you chose to join in the first place. You can't be a whistleblower if you don't have access to anything to whistleblow about.

Whistleblowing happens when values clash with reality. If values are never really part of the equation, and you have organizations where "the ends justify the means" is not only accepted, but rewarded, then you don't get whistleblowers.

With things like Guantanamo, extraordinary rendition, drone assassinations, and all these realizations from the Snowden docs, I fully expect that idolization bubble to be pretty much popped by now insofar as institutions like the NSA and CIA are concerned. For that reason more than any other I expect whistleblowing to become less frequent for these institutions. If and when whistleblowing drops for these institutions drops, it's will be explained by better security measures, but I would expect it having more to do with those who have the personality to be whistleblowers never joining or rising high enough to have that opportunity.

Movies and TV shows like to use corruption in Russia as a stereotypical movie plot, but that makes it less news worthy for news papers. If there isn't a large interest from readers then there is no ad revenues to be gained, and no interest for journalist to write about it.

Of course one could be conspiratorial and accuse all the large media companies to be pro-Russia or having a curios set of priorities, but I find the simple answer to be more likely. tptacek conspiracy theory need to eliminate those simple answers before I will consider it anything more than a political view.

I guess India is somewhat worse, but you get the idea.

If someone leaked that there is an absence of corruption then that would news worthy, but such false information doesn't seem to be the kind of articles Wikileaks would publish. Logically, if you can't publish about the existence of corruption because everyone knows about it and you can't publish about the absence of corruption because it would be false, then Russian coverage regarding corruption will be lackluster. Maybe they should just post a bunch of empty pages with the title "Russia corruption" to make statistics like the parent posted look better.

I may very well be able to do that, but it wouldn't do anything to disprove the notion that Wikileaks has a pro- Russian, anti-US bias.

I see two simple reasons for the lack of Russian coverage at Wikileaks: either Russians aren't providing material, or Assange isn't publishing it.

More baseless allegations. Isn't that one of the tactics the NSA uses? To attempt to destroy reputations of selected targets?

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipula...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Tomorrow

EDIT: Of course I'm aware that Russia has a different relationship with its media than the UK, Canada, etc. Just pointing out a thing.

It does certainly seem like Wikileaks is mainly focused on publishing anti-US material, but I can think of a million reasons for that which are more plausible than them being in Putin's pocket (which, in fairness, you've merely implied).

EDIT: No idea why you're being down-voted. I've up-voted in case it helps. To everyone else: I know it's become customary to down-vote for disagreement, but in situations like this it discourages dialogue.

RT is an organ of Russian government propaganda.

If the US had a meaningful state sponsored media presence, I'm sure it would be bad too. But nobody should kid themselves about what RT is.

I don't have any examples in mind but I feel like the BBC has never held back on criticizing the government/people in power, and doing reports on gov't scandals and the like.

As a rule of thumb you can use any news service as a source of information as long as you don't use it for information about the government of the country where it originates from and the major adversaries of that government or country.

That makes reading the news and staying current a lot harder and probably will require you to gain language proficiency beyond what you can get at through the English language press.

We can debate whether it's a meaningful or indicative tie. That seems like a live debate. But "the BBC was a mouthpiece for the Iraq War effort" isn't germane to this discussion. I agree that it was too. Believe it or not: it is possible to (a) oppose the Iraq War, (b) believe that it was disingenuously sold to the American and British people through media manipulation, (c) oppose the NSA, and (d) still think Wikileaks is suspicious and untrustworthy. I fall into that a-b-c-d bucket.

Making wild accusations with absolutely no proof would be my guess. Also the bogus moral equivalence he used to kick this thread off.