The Big Leak

The Big Leak was Originally Posted on December 3, 2010 by lavarock

Recently we have had rain, some of it pretty hard and they had a flash flood alert over on Kauai (an island hundreds of miles away. We also have had wind alerts here due to a front. I have not seen any leaks yet.

Speaking of leaks, I would be remiss not to pontificate on the recent WikiLeaks issue.

By now you know that Julian Assange, one of the principals of the WikiLeaks website has published secret documents involving many countries. He has been a hacker since 1987 or so. At present he is also accused of sexual crimes, which have nothing t odo with the crime of publishing these documents.

Over the years, Wikileaks has published such documents as toxic waste dumping, a manual on Scientology and Guantanamo documents. In the past, Assange has been awarded journalism awards for his reporting.

His website has been brought down by hackers and denial of service attacks and I would not be surprised that some of those attacks have been caused by foreign governments. We have recently seen a case where we think a foreign country diverted internet traffic into their country.

In WikiLeaks case, they were hosted on a foreign server until an attack all but closed down the site. They moved to a US hosted site and were using a free dynamic DNS service which many of us computer website owners use. Amazon just removed their site from its paid hosting and the DNS service cancelled the domain name redirection. The site is not hosted on a foreign site again, however, you may be required to us a numerical IP address to get to them. That is until the site moves or is finally taken down.

There are many people who think that this guy is right; that displaying this diplomatic data is useful for the world. Those people think Assange is a champion for justice or some such altruistic fight. They are wrong.

Release of these documents in not in the worlds best interest as it causes harm to diplomatic mission all over the world. It is common in diplomacy to say one thing to a country, yet talk about them behind their back to another country.

You would not be popular or a good family member, if during Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner, you announced everyone’s shortcomings to the rest of the family. The first though of your family would be, “Who put this person in charge of determing if this information will help or hurt our family?”

Thus the same thing is involved in these documents. Who put Julian Assange in charge of deciding what is appropriate to publish? He allowed the press to see advanced items and many of them decided to redact certain information to protect peoples lives. Even the press may miss the mark and slip with certain information.

While some may think of this idiot as a modern day Robin Hood, remember, Robin Hood was a thief! He ROBBED from the rich and gave to the poor. He determined who was rich and poor. He took it upon himself to decide how everyone else should act or be held accountable.

Those grandiose thoughts and actions, we treat with psychiatrists. Deciding who we rob from to pay whom, we leave that up to the government.