Since these kinds of leaks are very difficult to authenticate, there is an opportunity for intelligence agencies to game WikiLeaks by (slightly) altering stolen documents.
I'd take everything in these documents with a huge grain of salt.
I'd take everything in these documents with a huge grain of salt.
We live in a world with a massive amount of networked, easily accessible data. Combine that with terrible security and controls, and leaving the final responsibility of data remaining "safe" to the end user (often times just an anonymous cog in the corporate machine) and we have the perfect mix of problems to result in non-public information being "leaked" to the outside world.
If you've followed the Wikileaks releases (as I have only in passing) you'll realize there is tons and tons of useless, boring information in there, interspersed with some interesting nuggets. Often times it requires relatively complex mining methods to comb through the vast quantities of data. If the government was interested in false-flag information planting, there would be far, far easier ways to achieve it.
Just one guy's opinion.
Although much is made of the high-tech data mining services available to assist with discovery, having used some of them I sometimes wonder if it isn't cheaper and more effective to throw low-cost labour at the problem. Enter law students.
There's always the chance that Wikileaks in total is just a cover operation for all sorts of other activity, plus giving the US and allies 'reason' to act in various ways. We don't have much of a way to know that any of the documents they've ever leaked were authentic. Bradley Manning could just be a fall-guy for false information.
takes off tinfoil hat
I doubt this is happening, but stranger things have happened. I'm sure the CIA has at least considered such...
I doubt this is happening, but stranger things have happened. I'm sure the CIA has at least considered such...
If you want to go all super-paranoid-conspiracy-whatever, we could speculate that all this Wikileaks stuff is total false-flag stuff, and that Bradley Manning was never arrested at all, and is actually vacationing in Bermuda somewhere right now, sitting on the beach, sipping little umbrella drinks while getting rubbed down with suntan oil by hotties in small bathing suits.
And the thing is... who knows, what I just said actually is vaguely plausible - depending on the extent to which you believe that governments do actually create conspiracies to manipulate public opinion, and otherwise do things which would be illegal.
On the one hand, I'm very skeptical. But then you look at history and read about the illegal LSD experiments[1] and COINTELPRO[2], etc., you start to wonder.
When you think about it, none of the information released about the US has created any outrage at all on the part of the American public or media.
The few times there has been any outage it's been the standard "tempest in a teapot" kind of ranting that characterizes most political debate, which is largely done for unrelated/indirect reasons and goes away pretty quickly.
I think that the view of the US Government is that social media has made a widespread propaganda strategy an inevitability. No longer can the US rely on the domestic media cartel's message shaping to be adequate to suppress dissent.
I think the goal is for US citizens to feel free and empowered to use social media, but to have mechanisms in place to use it as a monitoring and intel-gathering mechanism and also to leverage it to wage specific propaganda campaigns as needed. These campaigns are subtle and I don't think we've seen any serious ones so far, though I do think that the so-called Arab Spring social media stuff was a trial run which was likely deemed a massive success.
Wikileaks has not yet proven itself as an institution. I believe that over time it may prove itself to be a solid, reliable entity with effective controls to prevent manipulation, infiltration, etc. We'll see.
If the email archive is published, there are obvious wrong facts about people found by "spot checks"...