No Secrets: Julian Assange’s Mission for Total Transparency
June 7th, 2010This is a very interesting piece about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
Via: The New Yorker:
He had come to understand the defining human struggle not as left versus right, or faith versus reason, but as individual versus institution. As a student of Kafka, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, he believed that truth, creativity, love, and compassion are corrupted by institutional hierarchies, and by “patronage networks”—one of his favorite expressions—that contort the human spirit. He sketched out a manifesto of sorts, titled “Conspiracy as Governance,” which sought to apply graph theory to politics. Assange wrote that illegitimate governance was by definition conspiratorial—the product of functionaries in “collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population.” He argued that, when a regime’s lines of internal communication are disrupted, the information flow among conspirators must dwindle, and that, as the flow approaches zero, the conspiracy dissolves. Leaks were an instrument of information warfare.
…
“To be completely impartial is to be an idiot. This would mean that we would have to treat the dust in the street the same as the lives of people who have been killed.”
“Assange’s mother believed that formal education would inculcate an unhealthy respect for authority in her children and dampen their will to learn. “I didn’t want their spirits broken,” she told me. In any event, the family had moved thirty-seven times by the time Assange was fourteen, making consistent education impossible. He was homeschooled, sometimes, and he took correspondence classes and studied informally with university professors. But mostly he read on his own, voraciously. He was drawn to science. “I spent a lot of time in libraries going from one thing to another, looking closely at the books I found in citations, and followed that trail,” he recalled.”
thanks Kevin and ltcolonelnemo, i’ll be reading that article with interest.
“US military detains soldier linked to Iraq video”
The Army has arrested a 22-year-old soldier in Baghdad in connection with the leak of a military video that shows Apache helicopters gunning down unarmed men in Iraq, including two journalists, defense officials said Monday.
“The classified video was taken from the cockpit during a 2007 fire fight and posted this April on the Web site Wikileaks.org. It was an unflattering portrait of the war that raised questions about the military’s rules of engagement and whether more should be done to prevent civilian casualties.
“Spc. Bradley Manning of Potomac, Md., was being held in Kuwait, U.S. forces in Iraq announced on Monday. Manning had been deployed with the 2nd Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division in Baghdad.
“The statement released from Iraq said only that Manning had been arrested for “allegedly releasing classified information.”
More at the link
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100607/ap_on_re_us/iraq_us_attack_video