Comment of the day
by Volker Weber
Thank you for making it easy to never use your software again.
Comments
wow. the stream of comments is giving an obvious message. Hope somebody is able to hear. Common sense is the least common of all senses sometimes.
I find it hilarious, that there seems to be a working cooperation between cloud suppliers, payment processors, banking institutions and data sharing platforms, based on what we call "vorauseilender Gehorsam" (anticipating obedience) in German, as there is obviously nobody asking for action officially, or is there?
I really wonder, why it never seemed to work this way in any given case of child pornography.
Obviously, had this domino-effect settled in for the good cause of preventing payments and publishing of child pornography, I believe everybody would have cheered. Now it seems it does work, but only under completely different circumstances.
Whether Wikileaks proves in the fullness of time to be a net good or disaster time will tell. But this is not a free speech issue.
The data was stolen that's the issue.
If there are no politicians standing on a platform of releasing publicly all sensitive government data and you are not you can hardly complain that the data isn't legally available.
Armin: From the link: "Our decision to remove the data from our servers came in response to a public request by Senator Joe Lieberman [...]"
Jason: How do you know that the data wasn't illegally classified?
What exactly is "sensitive" government data? What does the government have to know that we can't? This is not how Democracy works.
I've said before, and I'll say it here:
Valid reasons for leaks are to expose corruption, expose abuse of power, and in very rare and special cases, to expose stupid policy decisions.
This wikileaks deal meets none of those criteria, so it's just plain stolen data.
and should be treated as such.
The argument confuses me: So all information should be 'free', no matter what the cost to peoples' reputations or lives. But it's OK to name your group "Anonymous" and keep the membership hidden.
@Jason Governments have no problems to buy and use stolen data against their own citizens: German tax authorities bought stolen data of Liechtenstein bank accounts and prosecuted cases based on that data. So did other EU governments. And then there are the secret services, they are about protecting their own and cracking the secrets of others. The argument is always the same, "for the greater good".
So if another government would have procured that data "illegally" and only the US and the others nation government would know about that, do you think this would be any better or worse? Would the US government have publicly accused the thieving XYZ nation? I think not, the US government like any other government would have sworn quietly to revenge that act, but the public wouldn't have been wiser. And what about the danger to the life of the informants in this case?
At least the wikileaks way everybody knows :-)
And why is every western nation suddenly so keen to serve the national US interest? Since when is "espionage" in one country a crime elsewhere? How can a foreigner commit treason to another nation? And since when is publication an act of espionage? Some governments should be quite happy, because there should be fewer leaks for a while.
We really have a fundamental problem, if our politicians act increasingly as if they are not only legislators, but legal interpreters, prosecutors, judges and policemen all-in-one. And we Europeans should have a good look at ourselves and our values. We are giving our financial data, names accounts and transactions happily to the US, no discussion. We do the same regarding the data of flight passengers. And now we help prosecuting people who leaked another countries data which implicate leaks on our side. All this one-sided, no favours returned. Totally absurd, isn't it?
Craig: I am not anonymous, but yes, all information should be 'free', no matter what the cost to politicians' reputations or lives.
The state must respect the privacy of it's citizens. Not the other way round.
I am baffled by the idea that all information should be free. My medical records should not be free. My bank account details should not be free. My government's efforts to negotiate sensitive treaties should not be free. My armed forces should not be put in greater danger in the name of a dubious idea of free speech.
Yes, there have been occasions on which politicians and governments have lied to the people, but there have also been times when they have worked for us and come up with agreements and treaties that protected us, agreements and treaties that required proposals and suggestions that would never have been possible without secrecy.
A world without diplomacy is not a world of free speech. It is a world where action, usually military action, is the only recourse. There is certainly room for whistle-blowers and such, but not for an elimination of privacy and secrecy. Sources compromised in the name of "free speech" are going to dry up and disappear.
Nobody wants your medical records to be public.
This discussion would be much more useful if we stopped using straw man arguments.
Timo, 3 times full ack.
Thank you for the clarifications given, especially about the polemic/rhethoric figure of the strawman attacks.
If the FTD is to be trusted, those disgruntled internet-user and citizens that form a group "anonymous", are all but anonymous. In fact, in spite of enough possibiities to mask the identity, a large majority of the individuals participating are choosing not to appear anonymously, but actually show up using their real IP and credentials.
According tho the FTD those participating are not members of a closed shop but are individuals that meet in chat rooms and elswhere on the net, to discuss and organize themselves.
It is like a spontaneous protest march. Those elites that always think themselves to be more clever or gifted than the rest of the population, should rethink. People know when they are lied to and being screwed, they are not naive and ignorant and they don't fall for simplicistic arguments anymore. And if they do, they do it at least for a much shorter period of time.
This is largely due to the freedom of speech on the net, and the international information interchange.
@Ben: do you store the health records of yours in the cloud?
