Another Globe story on Wikileaks and Sen. Kerry

[TayTay]

The short version: "In Kerry’s case, there did not appear to be major embarrassments. The cables, written by State Department officials present at Kerry’s meetings, used a dry, diplomatic tone, and at times it is difficult to determine whether the full context was included. In most instances, Kerry signed off on the typed message."

Sen. Kerry is an official of the US government. (Duly elected and sworn) He HAS to officially condemn these leaks. It would not be proper to do otherwise, given that he is Chair of the Foreign Relations Committee.

There is a lot of noise on DU right now about the Wikileaks release. Most of it is content-free and involves choosing sides on whether it was right or wrong. I have mixed feelings on that, as I have written elsewhere.

Most of the press coverage of this has been speculation on whether or not the gossip contained in the leaked documents is embarrassing. This is the least interesting part of the discussion. I don't care about the gossip parts.

I do wonder if the incoming House Republicans will try to pass legislation to restrict the freedom of the press, even global press, to print leaked information. (The next Wikileaks bombshell, scheduled for next year, allegedly involves banks and financial institutions.)

I wonder if the current corporate press corp is so corrupt and lazy that this type of wholesale leakage of secret documents is how information is going to come out in coming years. There are reams of information out there on corporate American and on the government that the press has not written about. And there are many, many people, more and more each day, with a grudge against institutional power who have access to secrets.

I think this is just the beginning of a fundamental shift in how investigative journalism will work in the future.

EDIT: Good discussion on this on DU General board

[beachmom]

1. How about if the NYT or WP or NBC News tries to scoop Wikileaks?

Now there is a thought. Get the info first, and write a story. Instead of waiting around for it to be spoon fed to them.

As to the other points, I found the BG article interesting but not remotely surprising. Sen. Kerry is the "real deal". What you see on TV is largely who he is in private. Okay, maybe a bit more "sailor" language in casual conversations, but other than that, no difference.

I don't get how the GOP House can do much of anything about Wikileaks, other than symbolic. Assange has already made sure the site is housed in "safe" countries and all other kinds of safety measures. I am not sure about blocking the website in the U.S and whether that is possible. As much as I dislike Wikileaks, I am 100% against censorship. It's more Wikileaks' lack of judgment that turns me off.

[TayTay]

2. That would be fantastic but

It would also be expensive and it would involve changing the model for how stories are acquired.

That is extraordinarily difficult. Some of my favorite reporting comes from people like Tom Ricks, who used to write for the Washington Post before they cut him in a downsizing effort. Ricks was a great reporter because he had spent years on the military beat for his paper. That made him a knowledgeable man with wonderful sources and a deep knowledge of his subject.

It also meant that he had people he protected and an established way or point of view at looking at stories. I loved the guy, but I also understood that he was telling me things flavored from his point of view.

The Wikileaks method of getting information out explodes the Tom Ricks of the world. No amount of careful cultivation of sources, gathering of information or protection of confidentiality matters in the Wikileaks exposures. This information is released into the wild without a lot of context. (The current reporting on these leaks is idiotic. It is gossip-centered because very few news outlets have the trained personnel who can intelligently comment on the context of the documents.)

What happens next? The model for investigative journalism as a corporate sponsored entity is breaking down and going away. Information still "wants to be free" so how is that going to happen? I contend that we will see more and more Wikileaks-style release of private information and the next wave will focus on corporate secrets. There are a lot of employees and former employees of big companies with axes to grind. This type of doc release is only just begun, imho.

[beachmom]

3. I guess my warning is against internet utopian thinking.

I feel what happened to the music industry is Exhibit A of how taking out the "bad guys" has not helped at all. It's a "be careful what you wish for" scenario. There was a lot of utopian thinking when downloading songs happened, that we wouldn't need record labels anymore, that ANYONE could make it, that musicians could making a living without help, the DIY culture, and so forth. None of that, or very little, has happened. Meanwhile, other corporate structure remains in place: FM radio, which is providing narrower playlists and less new music. Every year sales go down, with 2010 the worst sale year on record. The Great Utopian Dream never materialized. This is what is happening with newspapers. The Huffington Post is really a bad website, and I haven't been impressed with their investigative reporting so far.

For me, it's about supporting what is still good: my local paper (on the Kindle), the New Yorker, the Atlantic, NPR/PBS and voting with my feet against what is bad (I do not watch cable news EVER). I do not "take a look" at right wing websites or gossipy ones.

[TayTay]

4. Interesting example

My daughter has just signed up to be the Press person for a band operating out of Boston that plays various places on the East Coast. Her area of expertise is helping the band utilize it's facebook, twitter and internet fan base into doing publicity for them before appearances. They are struggling, as new bands are wont to do, but they are developing a means to get their music out there and make the club appearances successful.

What is success in music? Is it propping up an industry that focused just on supporting mega-bands and individual performers at the expense of vast numbers of other performers who didn't measure up to standards? The old model of music distribution was rife with corruption and favoritism. There are individual performers who made enormous sums of money, but that system was also exclusionary. (How many $100 plus a ticket concerts can people go to?)

What is a successful music distribution system? Does it include getting music out on YouTube? Does the music matter, or do the numbers of people who buy the music matter? Is the system faling or being re-invented? Is the loss right now a loss by the corporate music industry that no longer controls all distribution?

Is music still being made but being distributed by a different system?

[beachmom]

5. Oh, what an exciting job for your daughter!

If she isn't doing so already, this is a must read for music business (big or small) people:

http://www.hypebot.com/

It is far more optimistic than I am about the future.

The music industry has a similar story to tell as the newspaper industry well told by David Simon at John Kerry's hearing. They were already in decline as far as creativity goes by the '90s due to mergers resulting in big conglomerates that had to please Wall Street every quarter with Big Hits. The internet only finished them off despite all their whining about piracy (which IS a problem but is hardly their only problem). But what makes me pessimistic is that it wasn't just the big guys who took a hit but independent labels as well. Not only that, but digital downloads in addition to CDs are starting to decline. What we're left with is streaming which is NOT lucrative at all, and is dependent on an internet connection or a smart phone. Maybe one day it will be profitable when we get a critical mass of people listening but at the moment, I constantly am reading about music streaming start ups either on the brink of going out of business, have already gone out of business or been acquired (by Apple who promptly shut them down. RIP lala.com). A "success" story is Pandora Radio which has made a profit for one quarter only.

Big music labels, which we all know are evil, nevertheless used to develop great artists. Like the Beatles. Now they don't have the cash to do that. You are in and out with two albums if you don't break out. Doing it on your own is still extremely difficult, and many who have succeeded like Radiohead did so after having been broken by big labels before they went out on their own.

As to your last question, yes, music right now is succeeding for bands who are tenacious and creative enough to at least get a good review at Pitchfork and by fans like me willing to do some due diligence to find out about them. But I feel like I am the exception. Most people still find out about new music on FM radio, which is really depressing since barely any good stuff is played on it except college radio (and there it is hit or miss). I will be listening to some great band I found out about and realize that nobody else has heard of them in my family and friend circle except me. So the art marches on, but who will hear it?

P.S. -- with MySpace in decline there has been nothing to replace it. Facebook has no music functionality nor Twitter either. That needs to be fixed in the future. But the major labels (who are not dead yet) are a big pain when it comes to licensing.

[ProSense]

6. Not a fan of these leaks.

Diplomacy is important work and it requires confidentiality and relationship building. People who can respect lawyer-client confidentiality, which is airtight, should be able to understand the difference between whistleblowing as a means of exposing crime and corruption for the greater good and simply revealing confidential information.

Embarrassment is a low bar for compromising foreign policy.

Transparency is a good thing, but diplomatic negotiations requires some level of confidentiality. Diplomacy is not being conducted in an environment in which all parties value Democracy and transparency. If people believe they can't speak freely, that is not condusive to diplomacy. The world is not paradise, and there are people in it who don't trust each other and those who would do others harm.

The other thing is that the bulk of the material was not top secret or secret information. Based on the NYT note, less than 5 percent of it was classified.

Josh Marshall

This is sort of a side note on the larger Wikileaks question. But in reading various commentary on the Cables story I see again and again references to government secrecy, over classification and so on. But very few of the documents seem to have been highly classified or even very far up to secrecy totem pole. Indeed, if I'm understanding the origin of the leak -- or as much as we think we know about it -- the reason these cables were accessible is because they were not highly classified. And thus in the post-9/11 effort to make sure information could flow freely between different parts of the government -- connecting the dots and so forth -- they were placed on a system where a lot of people in government could access them. As I said, this doesn't necessarily speak to the big questions people are talking about. But this whole question seems more like one of confidentiality -- the fact that the nation's diplomats do not immediately release their internal communications -- than 'secrecy' per se.

Still, it's not that the information isn't interesting or revealing. For example, it offers some insight relevant to climate/energy policy.

[beachmom]

7. Okay now, THIS is a funny read (h/t from Time magazine's TV critic):

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/28/world/20101128-cables-viewer.html#report/canada-08OTTAWA136

SUBJECT: PRIMETIME IMAGES OF US-CANADA BORDER PAINT U.S. IN
INCREASINGLY NEGATIVE LIGHT

OTTAWA 00000136 001.2 OF 003

1. (SBU) Summary: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)
has long gone to great pains to highlight the distinction
between Americans and Canadians in its programming, generally
at our expense. However, the level of anti-American melodrama
has been given a huge boost in the current television season
as a number of programs offer Canadian viewers their fill of
nefarious American officials carrying out equally nefarious
deeds in Canada while Canadian officials either oppose them
or fall trying. CIA rendition flights, schemes to steal
Canada's water, "the Guantanamo-Syria express," F-16's flying
in for bombing runs in Quebec to eliminate escaped
terrorists: in response to the onslaught, one media
commentator concluded, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that
"apparently, our immigration department's real enemies aren't
terrorists or smugglers -- they're Americans." While this
situation hardly constitutes a public diplomacy crisis per
se, the degree of comfort with which Canadian broadcast
entities, including those financed by Canadian tax dollars,
twist current events to feed long-standing negative images of
the U.S. -- and the extent to which the Canadian public seems
willing to indulge in the feast - is noteworthy as an
indication of the kind of insidious negative popular
stereotyping we are increasingly up against in Canada. End
Summary.

Although kind of weird (really? Our State Dept. is worried about plot lines in Canadian television?), I have to agree with the Time critic that this is deliciously snarky writing. He laments that he didn't become a diplomat. :)

Edit: the dispatch was written 1/25/2008 during the Bush Administration. I HOPE the Obama Administration isn't so thin skinned.

His piece is now up:

http://tunedin.blogs.time.com/2010/12/02/wikileaks-and-the-canadian-tv-menace/

Best line:

I am starting to develop the theory that the WikiLeaks document dump will produce a rush of applications for State Department jobs. Security concerns aside, the juicy revelations have the effect of making career-diplomat work seem awesome: who knew that the U.S. had a cadre of professionals writing wry, snarky cables from the four corners of the globe? It's like blogging, with job security and benefits!

Anyway, I thought everyone could use the comic relief.

[TayTay]

8. two good stories on the wikileaks meta-story

I like Al Giordana. I think he's right in his commentary on the latest post on his site, The Field

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton can shout all she wants about the WikiLeaks revelations being somehow “an attack on America.” The New York Times can betray its own Pentagon Papers heritage and former street cred when its columnists like David Brooks mutter inanities like “I don’t think we should have access to the cables.” Amazon can banish WikiLeaks from its servers. INTERPOL can hunt down Assange, deport him to Sweden, which can then extradite him for prosecution in the US. The Justice Department can lock him - or his sources - up in Guantanamo or SuperMax and none of it will stop the institutional bleeding. Behold: Big media’s tourniquet around State and corporate power has shredded into tiny pieces of torn and bloody gauze.

An old order is coming unglued before our very eyes. WikiLeaks is more a symptom than a cause of this gigantic shift away from a big media controlled world of public opinion. It is the latest chapter among many that came before it and many more to come next. And it can be understood by studying a simple law of nature: Life finds a way.

In the 1993 motion picture Jurassic Park (based on the 1990 Michael Crichton novel), that was a phrase repeated over and over again by a nerdy scientist type, played in the movie by Jeff Goldblum: “Life finds a way.” Now, here is a related phrase that we splice upon that credo: “Information is life.” Oh, isn’t that catchy? Aside from that it will probably be stolen by Apple or Microsoft as its next ad campaign slogan, it also happens to be true. Indeed, information behaves very much like life itself. It reproduces, it mutates, it evolves, it can be hunted down, captured, locked up, and even be killed but eventually it always comes back to life anew, just like other forms of life. Understanding that basic truth of our era gives you a front row seat to how the WikiLeaks story – and the rest of the history of our lifetimes - is going to play out.

Also, the current stories about the Wikileaks info has buried the lede under a manure pile of gossipy idiocy. Al points out a story http://www.slate.com/id/2276190/">in Slate about what Sec Clinton has done and how that might play out. given the subject of this group, these might have long-term repercussions for a certain Senator:

How embarrassing are the WikiLeaks leaks? A secret cable from April 2009 that went out under Clinton's name instructed State Department officials to collect the "biometric data," including "fingerprints, facial images, DNA, and iris scans," of African leaders. Another secret cable directed American diplomats posted around the world, including the United Nations, to obtain passwords, personal encryption keys, credit card numbers, frequent flyer account numbers, and other data connected to diplomats. As the Guardian puts it, the cables "reveal how the US uses its embassies as part of a global espionage network."

...

There is no way that the new WikiLeaks leaks don't leave Hillary Clinton holding the smoking gun. The time for her departure may come next week or next month, but sooner or later, the weakened and humiliated secretary of state will have to pay.

[beachmom]

9. Well, the story about diplomats essentially doing spy work was in

the very first article I read about Wikileaks. So if one is a reader, then this was not only not buried, but was the most explosive part of the story that I read in my very conventional newspaper. It did not, however, tie Hillary's name to it. Of course, she is HEAD of the State Dept. so of course this is her baby and she is responsible for it.

Look, Al Giordano is right that this is HOW IT IS. I'm just saying it is not necessarily "good". It's like piracy of copyrighted materials. Despite everything, it continues unabated because it's so easy for the stuff to travel through the internet, and there are plenty of people who want free stuff. Some can even say it is "good" because it takes down media corporations. But the "bad" is that creators and writers don't get paid either. Little guys get hurt, too. And, corporations will act even more viciously when cornered aided by their government allies. You think suing grandmothers and single Moms for copyright infringement was ugly? Let's see what happens next.

Troubling times we live in ...

[TayTay]

10. This info about Sec clinton is out in public

where other state departments from other countries can see it. This effects how she can do her job. This is beside how the info was reported in the US. That genie doesn't go back in the bottle.

Hollywood is shaking in their boots because they are already bleeding billions from Internet theft of copyrighted material. The question is, can it be stopped. The answer is no. The model of distribution will change.

We are in the midst of an information revolution and that revolution is good and bad.

[beachmom]

15. Oh, Tay, have you seen this video by Jay Rosen? REALLY good.

http://vimeo.com/17393373

He is not yet at a place where he can opine whether Wikileaks is good or bad. Instead, he is still trying to figure out what it is. He speaks rather slowly and sips on a cocktail (nice touch, actually), but the revelation he comes up with is that Wikileaks would not exist if it wasn't for the fact that the Watchdog Press in America is dead.

The Guardian took notice of his video:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/2010/dec/02/wikileaks-us-embassy-cables-live-updates

Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University, thinks aloud about WikiLeaks. He speaks very slowly for a New Yorker but he has some interesting things to say about WikiLeaks as a stateless news organisation.

In this ongoing stream from the Guardian, they link to this bloggingheads that call Clinton's moves "Nixonian":

http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/32649?in=00:00&out=69:11

It starts at 24:50 (Mickey Kaus & Robert Wright).

[karynnj]

13. The papers I read did tie Hillary Clinton to it because it went out over her signature

The question though is whether this was just considered so routine that it was just stamped "Hillary Clinton" by the department - scary in itself - or if she personally signed off on it. There seemed to be an attempt to minimize it - suggesting it was ignored. That doesn't convince me. It was either routine and a long term practice - and Bush DID get caught tapping ambasadors on the security council in the run up to Iraq or someone set this out as a goal and had it approved up the line, likely to Clinton.

Where I disagree with Giordano is that I seriously doubt she will be asked to resign. I watched the press conference she did - and if anything, I think, bizarrely, it helps her. She was pretty good and spoke of calling her peers and leaders and spoke of how they understood. She spoke of how this was raw material coming in to DC where she and Obama made policy. This was really the first time where I have seen her where she really came across as a powerful foreign policy maker.

As to the spying, we have not repealed the torture bill and have done little to investigate anyone involved with torture. If we won't go after that, we certainly will not dismiss any SoS over the spying. That the SoS is HRC makes it even less likely, as it would tear the Democratic party apart - and Obama would consider the political impact.

[karynnj]

11. Here is a leaked Pakistan one with Kerry

Kerry looks very good here, working to get Pakistan to work with India.
http://www.ndtv.com/article/wikileaks%20revelations/treat-india-and-pak-equally-said-gilani-to-us-70079?trendingnow

[Mass]

12. It is always amusing to see the disconnect between abroad and in the US.

Economic Times calls Kerry foreign policy czar.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics/nation/Have-security-arrangement-with-India-for-nuke-deal-US-told-Pak/articleshow/7028248.cms

[karynnj]

14. It is interesting as India and Pakistan likely DO know who seems

to move policy relative to them. The same with Sudan, where Kerry is cautious to always speak of Obama and various administration people.

Here, it would be highly controversial to see Kerry as the or a "foreign policy czar" as his constitutional role is part of a separate branch of government. I suspect that the truth may lie in between the two opinions. Kerry is clearly influential, but there are internal administration battles he lost to Clinton - including Honduras and Afghanistan. It is normal that the credit and blame for foreign policy rests with the President and to some degree the SoS.

In addition, there is a huge propensity to assign nearly all credit for things to the administration. For instance, a brother-in-law who has been a subcontractor on various US AID projects was telling me how the State department under HRC has moved towards (among other things) development as a tool and how this will really be Clinton's most important legacy. I did mention that the concepts and much of the legislation that was behind that shift was written and discussed in the SFRC well before Clinton was actively involved, but implementing it well will indeed be her legacy. (The fact is those were ideas Kerry pushed for years - and he Biden and Hagel were clearly behind trying it in Pakistan. )