Its not always about money. I recently (about a year ago) went from being a partner at an up and coming IT firm, to the number 2 IT guy for an agriculture company. Before, I was stressed out, always worrying about this client or that client, income, taxes, ticket systems, just in general had too much on my plate. I left due to business structure and strategy disagreements, but now I am working in a laid back environment where I do a good job, and can still take the time to study after hours. IT guys are far too often over-taxed, over-used, and under-appreciated. That is why I think there needs to be a shift in the work environment for IT people or else we will continue to see this constant migration to the always greener grass.

So if you are a threat if you are an: obese imbecile who is content, an obese intellectual who loves whining, a skinny whining inbecile....

You touch on the main point but miss it a bit. Reza Aslan explains how if you are a Palestinian who lives in a trash heap, you are much less likely to be active in terrorism, poorer people are too busy just trying to survive. It is the middle and higher classes, who have the time to ponder the world, who begin to feel disaffected and then use cognitive dissonance to justify certain acts. The majority of real "terrorists" (minus the average brainwashed sunni suicide bombers, who are often minimally religious) are the middle class, which happens to usually be those who go to school. In the middle east, most middle class parents want their kids to be either a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or scientist.

Haystack and Tor do fundamentally different things, and actually complement each other.

Tor focuses on using onion routing to ensure that a user's communications cannot be traced back to him or her, and only focuses on evading filters as a secondary goal. Because Tor uses standard SSL protocols, it is relatively easily to detect and block, especially during periods when the authorities are willing to intercept all encrypted traffic.

On the other hand, Haystack focuses on being unblockable and innocuous while simultaneously protecting the privacy of our users. We do not employ onion routing, though our proxy system does provide a limited form of the same benefit.

To a computer, a user using Haystack appears to be engaging in normal, unencrypted web browsing, which raises far fewer suspicions than many encrypted connections. Authorities can block Haystack only by completely disabling access to the internet, which gives Haystack greater availability in crises, during which the authorities may be perfectly willing to block all obviously-encrypted traffic.

Translation: The Americans who are Neoconservatives, a political philosophy which supports using modern American economic and military power to bring liberalism, democracy, and human rights to other countries, and are also Facists, which advocates an authoritarian nationalist political ideology that seeks to organize a nation according to corporatist perspectives, values, and systems, including the political system and the economy, are at it again... Put that way, it really isn't that irrational, as those people in particular WERE the driving force for the invasions. **USMC Iraq Combat vet**

Forgot to finish-- I would actually argue that the brunt of their intention was representative of the very definition (which is in itself highly debatable) of terrorism: primarily being to inculcate fear.

No one with a lick of self respect or sense believes "they" really thought it would remove armies from foreign lands. Reza Aslan says they just use things like foreign military bases, palestine, etc, as an excuse, but the mistake many make is assuming those aren't valid concerns all on their own. The leaders of AQ are too smart to think such a dumb thing.

I've been aware of this for quite some time, and will probably be getting the book anyway. What those of you new to the story are failing to understand, is that they are not just purging names. I agree the names should be purged, but in their press release (too lazy to go find it), they state they want to sanitize names, AMONG OTHER THINGS. This is the key here, using the chance they have to go ahead and take care of any other passages that are a little too embarrassing.... Ideally, I hope someone gets the original, redacts only the names, and then publishes it. Comon wikileaks, get on it.

The potential for abuse is the key here. Do they have to provide any kind of solid evidence of their accusations? If not, they could theoretically (though it would raise flags) just randomly pick people whos info they want, make some shit up, and subpoena for their info. Now imagine that on a mass scale (the internet)

The fact that the "pool" in this case the internet, has a few billion people in it....

Really interest take on the subject that I had never considered. Thanks

Allow me to jump if you will. Industrial, your original statement is a good one, where you basically ask for someone to explain why it feels "cowboyish" to you, but then I feel you misinterpret SmallFurry's intention, you even say "Don't pretend that my statement was about sticking my head in the sand suggesting that I don't want to know where corruption exists. My statement was that the manner in which this is being performed is irresponsible and is harming the cause in those that would normally support something like wikileaks." I feel SmallFurry misdirected his statements at you (he even says so) but what he/she is really saying is that it is a growing trend. Right off the bat there has just been some bad communication here. That aside, both of you in last few posts fall into argument mode and lose focus of the original subject, that being wikileaks methods. You jumped from asking questions with an open mind about wikileaks to firmly stating that you don't and will not support them, and I feel your conclusion a bit premature.

If I may, I feel wikileaks serves and will continue to serve a valuable purpose in the information age. They have made two major mistakes, that everyone has focused on, but I feel and hope they will learn their lesson from. These two major mistakes are IMHO a) the releasing of an edited and editorialized video of the apache shootings and b) not taking the extra time to fully purge names from the Afghan war diaries. If we put these two major things to the side, wikileaks generally does a good job, and is the one that they should stick to, of simply releasing documents with no editorializing. They will quickly undermine themselves otherwise, and that is why they have recently felt "cowboyish". I am a former USMC Iraq combat vet, and still have plenty of contacts in State and DoD, a couple of which are at high levels of intel. They all agree with me (and these are clearance holding guys that advise generals and above) that wikileaks has an important part to play here, mostly due to one of the points Small Furry makes, being the major over-classification of material that shouldn't be, and every single one of them actively acknowledges the US disinfo campaign against Wikileaks.

Yeah because in the past false documents are so hard to notice.... *cough* yellow cake*cough*

I see what you are saying now, that having someone interpret it and make some summaries of the information therein would indeed be valuable.

Meant to say one report in each district...