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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (69448)	12/12/2010 1:37:35 PM
From: Hawkmoon	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 218649

They can't both be right. One of them must be wrong. I'm not so black and white on it. Both can be right, because both have different perspectives on the issue. I draw the line where such leaks might place innocent US citizens and/or military personnel, at risk.. But that's my "line in the sand", and others draw theirs differently. Personally speaking, I KNOW there is exists a tremendous amount of information that is over-classified. Part of this is due to the entrenched bureaucracy that advocates classifying everything "just in case" it becomes sensitive at a later date. Part of it is also due to power politics and playing "I have a secret" and if you want to learn about it, you need to have proper access and need to know. That's power. But, cynic that I am, there's also big business interests involved in declassifying that information years down the road. It takes a lot of manpower, reviewing historical intel reports, and making a personal judgement call on whether the information is no longer sensitive... The more stuff you classify now.. the more people you have to hire to declassify it years down the road... And the people you hire are often retired analysts, working as contractors.. Call it "job security".. ;p Hawk

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (69448)	12/12/2010 8:31:27 PM
From: TobagoJack	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 218649

china hasn't and couldn't care less about assange wikileaks is not an issue in china the n.korea wiki-leakie required only a news release and nothing more and assange, sounding about correct, had this to say re china / usa per wiki-leakie time.com "... where does the U.S. fall between the two categories? He said, "It's becoming more closed" as a society, and its "relative degree of openness ... probably peaked in about 1978, and has been on the way down, unfortunately, since." That, he said, was a result of, among other things, America's enormous economy, which calibrates power in the U.S. in economic, or as he said, "fiscal," terms. He pointed out that, today, China may be easier to reform than the U.S. "Aspects of the Chinese government, [the] Chinese public-security service, appear to be terrified of free speech, and while one might say that means something awful is happening in the country, I actually think that is a very optimistic sign, because it means that speech can still cause reform and that the power structure is still inherently political as opposed to fiscal. So journalism and writing are capable of achieving change, and that is why Chinese authorities are so scared of it." On the other hand, in the U.S. and much of the West, he said, "the basic elements of society have been so heavily fiscalized through contractual obligations that political change doesn't seem to result in economic change, which in other words means that political change doesn't result in change." Assange appears to believe that the U.S. has not become "a much-worse-behaved superpower" because its federalism, "this strength of the states," has been a drag on the combination of the burgeoning power of the central government and a presidency that can expand its influence only by way of foreign affairs. (Given the same economic and geographical advantages as the U.S.'s, Russia, he said, would not have turned out as beneficent.) Still, though he cited the Bill of Rights approvingly, he was not overly impressed with the U.S. During the interview, when Stengel asked him about the idea of American exceptionalism, saying, "You seem to believe in American exceptionalism in a negative sense, that America is exceptional only in the harm and damage it does to the world," Assange said those views "lack the necessary subtlety." He did conclude, however, that "the U.S. is, I don't think by world standards, an exception; rather it is a very interesting case both for its abuses and for some of its founding principles."