Re: <nettime> FW: [IP] WikiLeaks sold classified intel, claims website's co-founder

[John Young <jya@pipeline.com>]

This should not be news to those who have followed the world of
hackers -- religion and NGOs. They have been selling restricted 
information from the beginning of their enterprises. Some do it 
as employees and off-the-books agents of governments and 
business and individuals, some do it as rogue entrepreneurs
like Wikileaks, or more commonly, investigative reporters, 
private eyes and holy workers -- and, ahem, high-minded 
scholars.

It is an ancient industry, as old as human intercourse where
cheating and hoodwinking and treachery are obligatory to survive
against those who do the same. Nearly all who do it claim it
to be necessary "because others do it," to protect our tribe,
to protect our hordes of food, wealth, faith and means and
methods of counterspying. And as ever, because we are
superior and thus have the right to be worse than our imputed
enemies -- mostly imaginary, often our own villainous agents 
plotting with others of their kind pretending to be enemies to 
keep their racket lucrative. Religious warfare had to be invented
to excuse the slaughter of infidels. Messianism of Wikileaks is
comical but it has worked multitudes for millennia with imaginary
danger and protection. Do tithe.

Kissinger and Giuliani and Chertoff and thousands of insiders --
call them ph d candidates -- go on to greater wealth outside, 
switching back and forth to keep the flim-flam flowing.

All intelligence operations -- "knowledge industry" -- are 
illicit by design to exaggerate significance and risk, that way 
law (the most devious of all), mundane and heavenly, blesses 
them with powerful advertizing. They are all in cahoots. Wikileaks 
emulates an eternal business model, that is to lie and exaggerate 
about what it is doing. 

Every academic is familiar with these means and method,
avid promoters of it, get some of that old time higher
education, a certificate for excellence, a license to
recruit and train newcomers, a pretense of opposition
ie, high-level critique, ever plotting and dealing for perqs 
and advantages of salary, space, reputation, rank, and

showtime. Selling classified information is what the
knowledge industry was invented for.

Now Wikileaks is a challenge to the highly organized
operations of state, church, university, military, corporation,
NGO (spit), media and unaffiliated (watch out for these
cutthroat mercenaries alway betraying those stupid
enough to outsource to the temps stealing the jewels).

Assange stated at the beginning of Wikileaks it expected
to make big bucks, $5M the first year he wrote on a private 
mail list -- among other pimping messages later published 
on Cryptome.  

The free stuff is meant lure volunteers and promote high-profile 
public service, lipsticked with risk, with the enterprise funded
by selling costly material sold on the black market of worldwide 
spying in the tradition of public benefit ops, id, spies and ever 
more spies. No better customers for illicit information that
those with depthless pockets. Soros and the Kochs have their
lesser-known Internet promoters backing Wikileaks generously.
And they expect good return on their investment, not just the
freebies used to attact attention.

Watch out for the public interest data miners of the Internet,
and leakers and whistleblowers, bandits stealing data, marking 
it up with glamorous titles, ie deeply researched, classified, 
actionable, nation threatening, liberating, etc, reselling publicly 
thourgh gadzillion press operations and secretly through those 
who pretend to avoid limelight. 

Think Archive.org, think Wikipedia, think Google, think this list
and your crafty mangy boil-ridden carcass. Mea culpa.


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