An email sent out by Wikileaks published at Cryptome, contains an interesting admission that social media technologies like “Digg” are censored.

On my part, I’ve seen articles I wrote that had been Dugg several times suddenly lose most of the Diggs a few days later. These were ALWAYS articles which referenced the elites, named the names of bankers, AND placed them in the context of an ongoing conspiracy. However, talking about the bankers in terms of “greed” and “Wall Street” alone didn’t suffer this fate.

From Cryptome.org:

“For instance, many Western news organizations, even when reporting
a document, self-censor links to it (but not other links).
Self-censoring organizations include Time/CNN, the News Statesman,
and the Guardian. The “4.0” estate is no better, the Wikimedia
Foundation, Digg and others have all pulled links after, or
before, legal threats….”

Does this tidbit convince me that Wikileaks is perfectly legit? No.

I think the hard work about social media manipulation had already been done by the time Wikileaks got around to it, thanks to Judd Bagley and Patrick Byrne. In 2007 and 2008, their work was published and available at Deep Capture and at The Register (it was enormously influential, though you wouldn’t know it from their Technorati ranking today…again, something I think is likely to be manipulated).

So Wikileaks “revealing” or “confirming” manipulation of the web is again an after-the-fact event…..

That again raises my suspicion that the outfit is more about damage containment and “positioning” than revelation. That is, it’s similar to the choreography imposed on the Goldman Sachs outrage, a choreography  intended to keep the rage within certain limits and direct it in certain ways, in which again 9-11 bashing (by Matt Taibbi) was an integral part. That Goldman choreography, as I commented at The Daily Bell, began long after Goldman had been effectively outed (in articles I wrote in 2006, 2007 and 2008 and in articles by scores of others in 2008). It began in late 2008, with the near-collapse of AIG, when Hank Greenberg’s shenanigans were about to be revealed…and it became an urgent task after the Madoff story started unwinding at the end of the year and the revelations about nano-thermite at the World Trade Center site came out in the spring of 2009.  It was only after the lid threatened to blow off on that that Rolling Stone cobbled together its Goldman “revelations” (mostly from stuff already published) and hopped onto the anti-Goldman bandwagon….some 15 years after it would have really helped….

Ah – investigative journalism. A perfect invention by some psyop team to keep everyone a day late and a dollar short.

Again, I could be mistaken about Wikileaks.

But even if I were,  even if Assange himself turned out to be well-meaning and principled, I’m not enthusiastic about his perfect transparency, leak-for-profit model. I think it has ominous parallels in corporate and state intelligence services. In my reading (and that of some others), it was one of the instigating factors in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. Furthermore, the model depends on flouting the privacy rights of innocent people and private outfits.

So however things turn out, I’ll pass on Wikileaks and the “glamor” of spy v. spy. Means are just as important, if not more, than ends. That’s a lesson the Cold War should have taught us. In fact, I thought libertarianism was premised on it.

It troubles me then to see so many liberty-minded people simply brush off these questions as “spiteful” or “envious”……

In such matters, no one is beyond respectful questioning.