As China ratcheted up the pressure on Google to censor its Internet searches last year, the American Embassy sent a secret cable to Washington detailing one reason top Chinese leaders had become so obsessed with the Internet search company: they were Googling themselves.
The May 18, 2009, cable, titled “Google China Paying Price for Resisting Censorship,” quoted a well-placed source as saying that Li Changchun, a member of China’s top ruling body, the Politburo Standing Committee, and the country’s senior propaganda official, was taken aback to discover that he could conduct Chinese-language searches on Google’s main international Web site. When Mr. Li typed his name into the search engine at google.com, he found “results critical of him.”
That cable from American diplomats was one of many made public by WikiLeaks that portray China’s leadership as nearly obsessed with the threat posed by the Internet to their grip on power ”” and, the reverse, by the opportunities it offered them, through hacking, to obtain secrets stored in computers of its rivals, especially the United States.
As we all condemn the Wikileaks operatives for what they’ve done, and the danger they have put our country in, I continue to be amazed at how often everyone seems interested in reposting these leaks. The New York Times reports them, and then here on this blog some of them are reposted too. I’m not in favor of censorship, but I am in favor of standing united and not playing into Wikileaks’ master plan of spreading this information everywhere.
I’m not understanding how the information Wikileaks has posted is remotely dangerous to our country.
It is the fact that Wikileaks *desires* to be dangerous to our country that disturbs me and why leaks should be stopped from our end. But the actual “information” they have posted — information that in vast majority we all already knew and that is completely unsurprising — doesn’t seem to be a “danger” at all.
Sarah, there is little in this batch which is dangerous directly, but earlier data dumps have included names of people who have helped the US, and their countries. Some of those are known to be dead as the result of the outing. Even in this case, it will make it more difficult to share information with the US since there is, and must be, a reasonable expectation of confidentiality.
Well, don’t get me wrong, APB, I know that the wikileaks guy would like to get his hands on The Damaging Secret — the Big One — and leak it.
But the “these leaks” that Mark Johnson was referring to being reposted — I don’t see the danger. In fact, I think various and sundry people might *wish* for America to be generally embarrassed by the latest “stunning revelations” [which are not] — but I don’t think that happened.
This guy is a toddler with a pistol — but more like a flasher toddler. I don’t know that everyone should be in the hysterics that they have been in over how shockingly dreadful the “revelations” have been. I think people should be concerned more with taking the pistol out of his hands.