Practical Perspective on the Western Reaction to Wikileaks

The Corinthian

This is not a thread on whether Wikileaks were justified or not in their actions. This is not a thread about the good or evil of governments and their diplomacy. There's plenty of other threads on that and if you want to say your piece, go there.

This thread is about the present reaction and measures being employed by the US and other Western nations to contain or even 'neuter' Wikileaks and its personnel. Not from a perspective of ethics or morality, but a cold-blooded and practical Machiavellian perspective.

Forward aside, I'll kick things off with my opinion.

What we presently have is;

• Assange seemingly hunted down and arrested on sex crimes
• Any company doing business with Wikileaks or Assange terminating their contracts or closing down accounts.
• The actual leaked cables now available on Bit Torrent and effectively cannot be contained.

Now, while I understand the need for a government to make an example of Wikileaks, the actual leak or Assange to deter future leaks, the present reaction seems destined to become a PR disaster in the long term.

Public perception now appears to favour the view that 'bully-boy' tactics are being used to silence Wikileaks and that even the charges against Assange are trumped up and politically motivated (regardless of whether this is the case). Worse still, it gives Joe Public the uncomfortable feeling that our rights can be curtailed or ignored, through means that hardly scream out justice, if we are foolish enough to question the regimes we live under, and not because we have done anything illegal.

Meanwhile the horse has bolted, and in practical terms, none of the measures being taken against Wikileaks will make a blind bit of difference.

Result? It makes no difference to the cablegate leaks and Wikileaks may well collapse as a result of this, but Wikileaks 2.0 will likely mushroom up before long, bolstered by an army of activists galvanized by the martyrdom of Assange, et al. Future leaks will still get out - and people will now be more willing to listen to them and less willing to trust their national governments.

Why, oh why, oh why did the US not go down the route of discrediting Assange and Wikileaks instead? Why did they not engineer a leak with false information or designed specifically to cause collateral damage, so that they could turn around and wipe the media floor with them? By then they could have even introduced legislation that would actually make what Wikileaks did a crime, rather than relying on such indirect tactics - and any sympathy for a discredited Assange and Wikileaks would have evaporated.

They've created a monster, far worse than before and soon they won't even have a single target to discredit, when it is inevitably replaced with multiple groups that operate more like Al-Qaeda than a central, target-able, body.

What the frack are they drinking in Virginia?