Cringely Looks at the WikiLeaks Debacle 163
dtwood writes "Infoworld's Cringely has an interesting take on the Julius Baer bank trying to silence WikiLeaks.org — and how stunningly stupid they've been. 'But the bank's solution is so mind-bogglingly stupid, you have to wonder if these guys need help getting their pants on each morning. First, this is exactly the kind of story bloggers and Net-centric journos crave. Big nasty corporation stomps all over plucky public-serving underdog. Who can resist that plot line? Second, the equation Bank Julius Baer = Money Laundering is now firmly cemented in the minds of everyone who has encountered this story, regardless of whether it's true. Trois: The documents in question, which might have been quickly forgotten alongside the 1.2 million others on the site, are now hotter than the Paris Hilton sex video. Dozens of mirror sites have sprung up, and Cryptome.org and PirateBay have squirreled away copies of the docs for any interested parties. "
Re:Just like the Scientology documents (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the interesting things about journalism is learning how much work goes into those goddamn money mismanagement stories. You have a bunch of journalists, half of whom don't balance their checkbooks terribly well, going over publicly available monetary expenditures line by line by line. They do good work, by and large, but the absurd tedium, the volume of material, and the fact that you may come to the end of two weeks of work with no story, combines to make those stories pretty uncommon. Lot of people get away with a lot of stuff, even when the records are publicly available.
This is a perfect example. Who in their right mind would have gone through this stuff unless they knew that there was a story there? Who could have gotten permission to work on it? But now it's everywhere! There are smart bastards in media outlets all over the country trying to confirm it, and they will, because the stuff is never hidden all that well once people start looking.
Interesting how no one mentions the recent murder? (Score:4, Interesting)
Robert X just doesn't understand (Score:4, Interesting)
He implies that this is a bad thing that the bank would want to avoid. But he has already made it clear that the very reason for existence of these banks is money laundering and tax evasion. Is it that hard to imagine that someone at Julius Baer decided "we don't want the Cayman Islands to be the first thing someone thinks of when they want to do money laundering, we want it to be Julius Baer"? Cringley seems to be playing right into their hands.
Re:It's always entertaining... (Score:5, Interesting)
By playing to the perception of McDonald's being fixated on the bottom line, Kroc linked a more powerful meme into the rebuttal. Unfortunately, there is no comparably strong meme for the Julius Baer bank to use; they are stuck with the association that their actions have built.
Re:Who is stupid? (Score:5, Interesting)
The lawyers think- "Having these documents out is bad. But we could bring a legal challenge to their availability. If having them out is bad, it stands to reason that having a chance to try to get them back in is good."
It almost sounds reasonable, like the government's standard (and always grossly incorrect) estimate of increased tax receipts following a tax hike by multiplying the new rate by people's current reported income almost sounds reasonable.
What these companies need is some management oversight. Before launching a new PR campaign, most companies have a standard procedure of running it past the lawyers. But they should also be doing the opposite; when the lawyers come and say "hey, we could sue this small public-interest nonprofit into oblivion, which would undoubtedly accomplish halting the spread of this information on the internet," management should run that past PR and IT before implementing it.
Re:Just like the Scientology documents (Score:5, Interesting)
This reminds me of an episode of "The Man From UNCLE" that I saw as a kid. A couple had served many years with THRUSH (the bad guys) and were having their retirement party. (on the supposedly non-existent 13th floor of some building) After the party, their boss was taking them out of the building, supposedly to start retirement with a pleasant vacation. The real intent was of course to eliminate them.
The UNCLE guys rescued them once it became apparent that they were going to be executed, and they became a fount of information.
Relevance... Depending on who you are, you don't fire the guy who knows where the bodies are buried. You either take very good care of him, add him to the pile of bodies, or make sure that he put some of the bodies there, and you have the evidence. (The last choice doesn't always work, either - "State's evidence".)
They have a point, sort of (Score:5, Interesting)
The above part is hard to disagree with in itself. No doubt, most documents posted to the site were obtained by breaking a law (hence illegally) and/or some company's internal policy (thus violating contract, hence tortiously — funny, the word itself is not known to my browser's spell checker).
People like lawyers and judges (often — ex-lawyers) are all about law and contractual obligations — there is nothing surprising about their contempt and distaste for anyone encouraging/rewarding either. The judge is neither "stupid" nor "a monkey" — he acted as should be expected.
Cringley's point is about the stupidity of the bank making itself infamous overnight. This is hard to disagree with, but Cringley's sympathy for Wikileaks shows (he even provided the direct link), so it is valid to discuss the case itself.
And the case boils down to the oft-asked, but never answered question: Do we want 100%-effective law enforcement? Judges certainly strive to achieve that, and we pretend to agree. But do we agree? Answering "yes" would mean condemnation of WikiLeaks (pertaining to documents in our and other free countries, at least). Answering "no" could mean making it impossible for you to stop dissemination of some information about you... What if a site posted SSNs and addresses of everyone they could?
WikiLeaks shouldn't have tried to hide — they were asked for contact information repeatedly. It is no wonder at all, that the judge agreed with the plaintiffs and imposed the injunction. He could've found them in contempt too, and imposed a fine in addition...
Re:It's always entertaining... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is actually why NNTP servers now pubish the "NNTP-Posting-Host", to be able to trace back such abuses.
Re:It's always entertaining... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Just like the Scientology documents (Score:4, Interesting)
The authorities in control of the Village (whose identity and allegiance are never made clear) call him Number Six and attempt to find out, "by hook or by crook," why he resigned. These efforts are made even though they have Number Six's letter of resignation, which by implication would have stated his reasons."
What made this a nice twist is McGoohan played a James Bondian hero in Danger Man and left the show to do the Prisoner. It was heavily implied that his character on the Prisoner, never named, was his Danger Man character.
The thing is, all of this spies and murder stuff is a bit over the top for the more typical organization. Someone is going to rat on the Mafia? He'll get whacked. But if it's "just" millions of bucks in a private firm, what are the odds that the principals involved would even know how to contract a hit? That's a bit Hollywood. I think more likely they'd resort to reputation assassination and blackballing. I would have to say, though, with the kind of money involved with a story like the one we're talking about here, I wouldn't be surprised if the principals involved tried to bump off someone. When we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars, there have to be some nasty powerful people involved here. It's not going to be like the penny ante millionaire you read about in the paper who gets busted for soliciting an undercover cop for a hit at the local bar. That local millionaire would be like the Office Space guys trying to plan a crime. I'd imagine someone worth hundreds of millions or billions would likely know the right people to ask the right people to ask the right people to have something done and real discreet-like, the kind of way that doesn't make the papers, the kind of way that schlubs like us wouldn't be talking about it on Slashdot.
Re:Just like the Scientology documents (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, it was very smart on the bank side. (Score:4, Interesting)
If you wanted to advertize their money laundering services, how would you go about that? Publish an ad in newspapers? On TV? Advertize on the webpage? How would you even word such an ad?
Meantime, Viral Marketing is the new wave. It's a grassroots campaign. If anyone is looking where to launder their money, now they know. And that publicity all nearly for free.