A NY Times reader points out the irony of U.S. government officials attacking Wikileaks:

[url=http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/01/opinion/l01wiki.html?_r=1&ref=opinion]Letters | Secrecy and Diplomacy in the Age of WikiLeaks[/url]
[quote]To the Editor:

As I watch President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and others in the government denounce WikiLeaks’ release of classified material, including, in Ms. Clinton’s words, “private discussions” between diplomats, I can’t help but see some irony.

A government that has supported all manner of intrusions into private citizens’ private discussions and doings, including wiretapping our phone conversations, monitoring our e-mails and what Web sites we visit, and peeking at our naked bodies in airports, is suddenly crying foul when its own secrets are pried into.

When we complain about Big Brother’s intrusions, we’re told that if we have nothing to hide, then we have nothing to fear. Isn’t WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, arguing the same thing?

I certainly don’t support putting our diplomats at risk, but I do wonder if maybe this will give our leaders some perspective on how it feels to have your private business intruded upon by folks who claim to be serving the greater good.

David Nurenberg
Somerville, Mass., Nov. 29, 2010 [/quote]

Mish Shedlock (blogger I frequently cite in the Soapbox MET2010 thread) has several commentaries on "WikiLeaks and the Lies Our Government Tells About the Issue of Secrecy":

[url=http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazon-drops-wikileaks-on-request-of.html]Amazon Drops WikiLeaks on Request of Sen. Lieberman; Lie of the Day from Hillary Clinton; How NOT to Stop Leaks; Why we have Leaks[/url]

[url=http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2010/12/state-secrets-or-blazing-stupidity-us.html] State Secrets or Blazing Stupidity? US a Pawn for Oil Producers? Next Stop "Secret Police"[/url]
[quote][b]The Moral Standards of WikiLeaks Critics[/b]

[url=http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2010/12/01/wikileaks/]New York Times writer Joe Klein writes[/url] "If a single foreign national is rounded up and put in jail because of a leaked cable, this entire, anarchic exercise in 'freedom' stands as a human disaster. Assange is a criminal. He's the one who should be in jail."

[Salon.com writer] Glenn Greewald smashes the blazing hypocrisy of Joe Klein right out of the ballpark with his rebuttal [url=http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/01/wikileaks/index.html]The Moral Standards of WikiLeaks Critics.[/url]
[i]
Do you have that principle down? If "a single foreign national is rounded up and put in jail" because of the WikiLeaks disclosure -- even a "single one" -- then the entire WikiLeaks enterprise is proven to be a "disaster" and "Assange is a criminal" who "should be in jail." That's quite a rigorous moral standard. So let's apply it elsewhere:

What about the most destructive "anarchic exercise in 'freedom'" the planet has known for at least a generation: the "human disaster" known as the attack on Iraq, [url=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/joe-klein-seeks-to-master_b_40479.html]which Klein supported[/url]? That didn't result in the imprisonment of "a single foreign national," but rather the deaths of more than 100,000 innocent human beings, the displacement of millions more, and the destruction of a country of 26 million people. Are those who supported that "anarchic exercise in 'freedom'" -- or at least those responsible for its execution -- also "criminals who should be in jail"?[/i][/quote]

[b]Update:[/b] Mish just added another post which includes the story about the aide to Canadian PM Harper unabashedly calling for Assange`s murder, and a link to the latest noise out of Sarah Palin`s mouth:

[url=http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2010/12/former-canadian-prime-minister-adviser.html]Sarah Palin Compares Assange to Bin Laden[/url]
[quote]Tom Flanagan joins media darling Sarah Palin who thinks [url=http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1334341/WikiLeaks-Sarah-Palin-demands-Julian-Assange-hunted-like-Al-Qaeda-terrorist.html]Assange is like an Al Qaeda terrorist[/url]:

Sarah Palin has demanded that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is hunted down like Osama bin Laden. In an extraordinary outburst on Facebook, the former Alaska governor attacked the White House for 'incompetent handling of this whole fiasco.'
[/quote]
[i]My Comment:[/i] I actually wish Assange *were* "hunted down like Osama bin Laden", in the sense that bin Laden remains a free man and is able to spread his message quite effectively.

[QUOTE="AP"]STOCKHOLM – WikiLeaks' [I]domain name system[/I] provider says it has withdrawn service to the [url]http://wikileaks.org[/url] name.
[I]EveryDNS[/I] says it dropped the website late Thursday after it became the "target of multiple distributed denial of service attacks."
The American provider says in a statement that the attacks have threatened the stability of its infrastructure[/QUOTE]
And this card was now played, too. [URL="http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/212340/wikileaksorg_downed_by_domain_hosting_service.html"]A bit lame[/URL]?
Anybody remembers the numeric IP, perchance?

[QUOTE=Batalov;239811]And this card was now played, too. [URL="http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/212340/wikileaksorg_downed_by_domain_hosting_service.html"]A bit lame[/URL]?
Anybody remembers the numeric IP, perchance?[/QUOTE]The URL and the last working DNS' resolving numeric IP are currently in the sidebar on the right side of Wikipedia's entry here: [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks[/url]

Why were these cables leaked? I mostly ignore the news, so maybe I missed the key point.

IIRC, previous newsworthy leaks were because the leaker felt there was some terrible wrong being covered up that needed to be exposed. There doesn't seem to be any wrongdoing issue here, just an opportunity to embarrass by revealing the blunt and frank private evaluations behind the public face. It feels like yet another step down the news as entertainment decline.

[QUOTE=Batalov;239811]And this card was now played, too. [URL="http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/212340/wikileaksorg_downed_by_domain_hosting_service.html"]A bit lame[/URL]?
Anybody remembers the numeric IP, perchance?[/QUOTE]
[url]http://88.80.13.160[/url] according to the BBC

Paul

[QUOTE=wblipp;239826]Why were these cables leaked? I mostly ignore the news, so maybe I missed the key point.[/QUOTE]

Most of them were just routine daily diplo-chatter and most of the MSM (and not just the American ones) are obsessing about the embarrassing who-said-what-about-whom dirt, but there was some pretty meaty stuff in at least a half-dozen areas I can recall offhand - the ongoing NY Times culling and [url=http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/statessecrets.html]special section on their site[/url] has much more:

1. The real views of many middle eastern leaders vis-a-vis the Iranian nuclear program, and the [url=http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/world/middleeast/29iran.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=world]behind-the-scenes efforts of the Obama administration[/url] on this issue (my opinion of the admin. in this regard actually rose once I saw how seriously and carefully they were trying to walk the diplomatic tightrope here and - unlike the Bushies - actually getting in place some real serious sanctions before leaping into hostilities);

2. U.S. grave concerns about "unreliable ally" Pakistan and the threat of nuclear material there [url=http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/01/world/asia/01wikileaks-pakistan.html?_r=1]falling into the hands of terrorists[/url] - the fact that the U.S. was actively trying to get Pak. to allow it to secretly remove a legacy cache of enriched and dirty-bomb-grade nuclear material was not publicly known. And I think it is certainly good to know stuff like this before the next multi-billions of U.S. taxpayer monies are handed over to the Pakistani government and military:
[quote]Over all, though, the cables portray deep skepticism that Pakistan will ever cooperate fully in fighting the full panoply of extremist groups. This is partly because Pakistan sees some of the strongest militant groups as insurance for the inevitable day that the United States military withdraws from Afghanistan — and Pakistan wants to exert maximum influence inside Afghanistan and against Indian intervention.

Indeed, the consul general in Peshawar wrote in 2008 that she believed that some members of the Haqqani network — one of the most lethal groups attacking American and Afghan soldiers — had left North Waziristan to escape drone strikes. Some family members, she wrote, relocated south of Peshawar; others lived in Rawalpindi, where senior Pakistani military officials also live. [/quote]

3. Many previously unknown details about the weapons flow from [url=http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/world/middleeast/29missiles.html]North Korea to Iran[/url]. If I were a citizen of Europe or Western Russia and environs, I might certainly be interested in knowing that the world looking the other way w.r.to N. Korea has now resulted in Iran having advanced ICBMs which can reach thousands of kilometers farther than their older ones can;

4. The fact that the U.S. implicated the Chinese government in the hacking attacks on numerous multinational companies (Google was the one that went public with this), and did nothing of substance in this regard (the official cover was "rogue hackers at a Chinese technical school") is ... interesting. also note that the attacks are ongoing - just a few weeks ago there was [url=http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/17/bgp_hijacking_report/]another in a series[/url] of "incidents" (which were at first blandly described as "glitches") in which a significant fraction of world internet traffic was "mysteriously" diverted through a Chinese ISP;

5. The backroom dealing w.r.to the Guantanamo prisoners;

6. Rampant corruption amongst our Afghan "allies".

But you say you "ignore the news", so why would you expect to be up on anything but the most-sensational soap-operatic aspects of this? (And why am I wasting my time trying to spoon-feed it to you? Because I'm an idiot, probably.)

But so what? Is any of this really a surprise? Your points all strike me as confirmation of what any thoughtful observer would have suspected. What's the motivation of the leaker?

There's a big difference between "suspected" and "known".

Teh intar-tubes are fighting back
 

There seems to be a growing effort to make sure that WikiLeaks isn't silenced by Joe 'McCarthy' Lieberman and his corporate stooges.

Paul Carvill has added an A record to the WikiLeaks IP on a subdomain within his domain. [url]http://www.paulcarvill.com/2010/12/opposing-government-and-corporate-censorship-of-the-web/[/url]

A number of mass-mirrors of the WikiLeaks cabledump have sprung up. [url]http://www.twitlonger.com/show/79s9r1[/url]

And of course, there are the now obligatory Facebook pages calling for a boycott of Amazon, Paypal and EveryDNS.

[QUOTE=garo;240184]And of course, there are the now obligatory Facebook pages calling for a boycott of Amazon, Paypal and EveryDNS.[/QUOTE]
I was preparing for my annual bout of holiday online shopping late last week, and after reading about Amazon.com`s action vis-a-vis Wikileaks, I diverted my planned purchases away from there, instead buying DVDs used as a second-hand site and buying some things (or similar items) on Ebay. Of course the next thing I heard was that Paypal - owned of course by eBay and which I used to pay for my eBay purchase - suspended the donation link for Wikileaks. Bugger.

[QUOTE=ewmayer;240320]I was preparing for my annual bout of holiday online shopping late last week, and after reading about Amazon.com`s action vis-a-vis Wikileaks, I diverted my planned purchases away from there, instead buying DVDs used as a second-hand site and buying some things (or similar items) on Ebay. Of course the next thing I heard was that Paypal - owned of course by eBay and which I used to pay for my eBay purchase - suspended the donation link for Wikileaks. Bugger.[/QUOTE]A case of epic bad timing is today Amazon announced their own DNS services. Slashdot is all over it and everyone is linking it to the Amazon's politically requested pulling of Wikileaks support. No one wants a DNS so vulnerable to manipulation. Just a couple of days ago a bittorrent top level domain project was lanched.