@burdturgler, fair enough. I'm not so sure he really implied that the political "enhancements" were exactly for sale though.

Generally speaking, it's a whistleblower site -- people are turning over confidential information that they believe is evidence that some sort of breach of legal or ethical standards had taken place.

For example, the climategate e-mails in raw form were too numerous and unfocused for an average person to glean anything meaningful from them at all, unless they spent hours or days reading them all.

Much better to edit them down to the juiciest, most damning bits, and then work through whether the worst of the worst really proved anything.

Other than the obviously biased title "Collateral Murder", a lot of what the editing did here was fill in supplemental information that you might not have been able to glean from watching the raw camera footage.

I'm still not sure it really proves criminal action, either by US military code or international law, but it sure does bring home that war is hell.

As for getting more attention, it kinda defeats the purpose of publicizing things like this, and the risk their informers are taking to provide it, if everyone ignores it.

I'm not sure they've made the right choice by going down this path, but I don't necessarily think they've made the wrong one, either.

@burdturgler, I basically agree with you, but let me play devil's advocate.

If they had just released the video without editorial framing, would it have gotten the kind of attention it has?

Would it have had the same impact on people who watched it?

Before, people scarcely were aware wikileaks existed. How about now?

Was their credibility really damaged? Did the edit conceal relevant information, or lead people to a mistaken conclusion?

They did also release the raw footage, so you can compare as you like, and see if they misrepresented the sequence of events.

The more I turn this over in my head, I'm not so sure they've really made the wrong decision here. They're going to have to be doubly cautious from here on out if they want to maintain credibility, but they've got a long way to fall before they're on Fox's level.

Mostly I think it's a dangerous thing for them to do personally. A fastidiously apolitical organization dedicated to self-concealment and exposure of confidential information has a layer of political protection from violent retribution from the governments and corporations they offend. Becoming a blatantly political organization with the same modus operandi opens you up to a lot more danger, especially if you do something the public doesn't appreciate.

@NetRunner
Nothing in that other video changes the fact that they are editing the documents that they are "leaking" and that is the only thing I object to.

@shole (no pun intended)
Yes, I watched the video. Not the point. Having Wikileaks decide what is the "facts" and what is relevant or "unnecessary" is just as bad as any other media group doing it. The fact that they admit doing it for "political impact" does not help. When someone approaches a video (or any other document) with the mindset of editing it for a specific purpose, then they have made every frame, every image, every sound and every word spoken in their finished product suspect. It doesn't matter how noble their cause. This is the exact sort of thing that media matters and other organizations cover daily. The willful manipulation of reality.

Wikileaks was regarded as a neutral party that anyone from any governmental or political affiliation could release confidential or secret data to without fear. Now they have revealed themselves as an organization that will (in my mind, for money) take any leaked material and purposefully edit it to create the "maximum possible political impact" the "leaker" intended.

I think he misspoke. He said "hottubbing with a girl nearly half my age" but meant "nearly half as young as I". If he meant under half his age, he would have said "less than half". The phrase he was probably looking for is "barely half my age" meaning just over half. Looking into the story, she was in fact 15.

I don't know much about the story, and I'm not defending his actions, but I feel this is important information no one has contributed (and info that has been contradicted in some comments).

The age of consent is defined on a state by state basis in the US. It ranges from 16-18, with the mode (most commonly occurring number) being 16. The breakdown (according to Wikipedia) is:

16 years old in 31 states + the District of Columbia
17 years old in 7 states
18 years old in 12 states

According to 4parents.gov, there are 32 states @16 years old (+DC). Nebraska is the discrepancy (list found here).

If you want to defend him, 15 is not a far cry from 16, which is overwhelmingly the age of consent by state (over 60% of states). If you want to admonish him, the age in the US is never below 16 and is 18 in Utah.

EDIT: Apparently I wandered off and finished writing this a long time after I started it. DirePickle did bring this up, all the while having an awesome handle.>> ^burdturgler:
"I was 28 yrs old" ... "with a young woman nearly half my age".
Now, I'm no mathematician but I'm pretty sure that "nearly half" of 28 is somewhere beneath 14. Maybe it's 10. I don't know. But the most it could be is 13. So a 28 yr old man and a 13 yr old girl are having a supposedly "non-sexual" experience, naked, in a hot tub. Yet, somehow, he is the victim. He decides to run for congress and his ugly secret comes back to haunt him, so he tries to pay off the woman. "She agreed to keep this 25 yr old secret confidential." And apparently, since he wrote the check, that seemed like money well spent to him. Now the payment is a "mistake" because his pedophilia is being exposed anyway. So, having no other choice, he comes out and admits it, and receives applause and hugs all around.

"I was 28 yrs old" ... "with a young woman nearly half my age".
Now, I'm no mathematician but I'm pretty sure that "nearly half" of 28 is somewhere beneath 14. Maybe it's 10. I don't know. But the most it could be is 13. So a 28 yr old man and a 13 yr old girl are having a supposedly "non-sexual" experience, naked, in a hot tub. Yet, somehow, he is the victim. He decides to run for congress and his ugly secret comes back to haunt him, so he tries to pay off the woman. "She agreed to keep this 25 yr old secret confidential." And apparently, since he wrote the check, that seemed like money well spent to him. Now the payment is a "mistake" because his pedophilia is being exposed anyway. So, having no other choice, he comes out and admits it, and receives applause and hugs all around.

Thank you NetRunner, that helps explain a lot. But I've got a couple of other questions -
Democrats passed their bill? My understanding was that one bill passed the Senate and another the House, but that neither has passed both, hence Obama not being able to sign anything. Correct?
I know that the Republicans are doing a lot of double speak about reconciliation and are even accusing the Democrats of using a Nuclear option. Realizing that using Reconciliation is not the Nuclear option, in the past haven't Deomcrats spoken out against both the use of a Nuclear option as well as Reconciliation? Seems like despite their previous objections, on both party sides, either is willing to use the option when it suits their needs.
Come examples on Obama regarding Reconciliation:
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/President-Obama-meet-Senator-Obama-on-reconciliation-86225302.html

It all just seems hypocritical.

>> ^Ghostly:
"SUPERMODEL Miranda Kerr has come to the rescue of the Macquarie Bank broker whose job is under threat after he was caught on TV checking out steamy shots of her on his work computer."


I didn't even know who Miranda Kerr was until this very moment. He should get paid for this kind of publicity.

"SUPERMODEL Miranda Kerr has come to the rescue of the Macquarie Bank broker whose job is under threat after he was caught on TV checking out steamy shots of her on his work computer."

1) Corbett is a truther.
2) Ball is a strong opponent of AGW theory.
3) Their list of "objective" sources are all websites of AGW opponents.
These facts alone make this highly suspect.

I find the whole thing ridiculous. If I cherry picked through the last ten years of your business e-mails I could find a subset with make you look like a scoundrel.

If these e-mails are so damning, then it should be trivial to show, with science, based on the information the e-mails contain, what is wrong with the papers that the CRU has published. But nobody appears to be able to do this.

So far all I have heard is that they "colluded" to withdraw support from journals publishing things they think are shite, and that they kept some information confidential. These are not suspicious behaviors, these are standard practice, and they should be. Scientists need to police journals by not publishing in those with poor practices. Scientists need to protect their data, and the data of others, so that they don't get scooped on publication.

Much broad climate data is public information, reported in many ways, backed up on paper and harddrives all over the world. If CRU is just fudging the "master data" it should be trivial to show that their dataset does not match the dataset as originally measured. Not claiming or talking about evidence for this suggests strongly that they have no such evidence, and wish to influence science, not through scientific evidence, but through public opinion, and just like creationists, that tactic alone makes their position suspect.

>> ^EndAll:
there's a lot more evidence for a conspiracy in witness testimony, evidence already buried, confidential files not yet released, and the like.


If you have any respect for people like James Randi, Michael Shermer, or anyone who uses scientific methods, then you already understand that witness testimony is possibly the most unreliable way of getting at any truth, and more often than not, completely opposite of the truth.

It seems that this would only demonstrate that either the photo isn't a fake, or that whoever faked it was sufficiently informed about the conditions at the time the photo of the head was taken, so as to be able to reproduce similar conditions when taking the photo of the body. Now, that wouldn't seem very far-fetched if both photos were taken with the intention of producing a composite photograph, which, if you're into conspiracies, isn't particularly far-fetched in itself. It wouldn't be all too difficult to arrange if both photos were taken with the same camera, on the same roll of film on subsequent days and then developed at the same time.

But that's irrelevant, really, and so is this whole faked photos and magic bullet bullshit. Distractions - there's a lot more evidence for a conspiracy in witness testimony, evidence already buried, confidential files not yet released, and the like.

It's easy to get worked up over this, call the guy an asshole, the whole shebang. And he is an asshole. But that's all pointless. This will keep happening as long as people expose themselves like the people involved here did. You could make laws against it, but that's not going to get the victim's faces off the net. The only solutions are to develop vetting systems and security procedures for these confidentials sites that aim to minimize the chance of trolling and, for the individual, to simply refrain from posting personally identifiable information on-line. Anything else is just hot air.

i love the "itc confidential and private". cop out.

caution is rarely a bad thing, but media sensationalism in this day and age is becoming tiresome...

that said, i would have worded the summary differently, and imho more accurately:

A warning that the new swine flu jab is [may also be] linked to a deadly nerve disease has been sent by the Government to senior neurologists in a confidential letter. A different, though similar, swine flu vaccine was linked to the nerve disease GBS in the swine flu epidemic of 1976.

you see, the change in wording is very small, yet changes the context quite a bit

as well, the caution (in the uncorrected and sensationalist version) would have the reader assume that 1) modern medicine has learned nothing about swine flu vaccines and GBS in the intervening 33 years, and 2) whereas the first vaccine may have had deadly side-affects through vaccination ignorance, that this new vaccine is being administered with wanton disregard for the public's safety in light of problems with the similar vaccine administered 33 years previously (i.e. we're just the government's guinea pigs)

>> ^Sagemind:
... Asside from being a great word processor...


as long as you don't try to have a single document over 140 pages, or more than 10 figures or references, or try to paste objects from any other version of word, or attempt to export to PDF using Acrobat, or expect it not to auto-generate 337 new styles on it's own, or want you to take a survey to help improve it, or require 500+ MB patches... then yes, it's a great word processor.

----

My question is - why is MS so effin' cheap that they can't provide their employees with a laptop? she's gotta use kiosks, cybercafe's, hotel guest computers, etc etc. Like I would trust any one of those computers to be virus-free and not running a keystroke-logger.... but she goes right in to her sharepoint site, enters username and password, to make those "critical" changes... minutes later, those confidential Microsoft documents are leaked. (don't worry, they'll blame firefox for the breach)

----

all in all, truth in advertising. She's not excited because it's not exciting.