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Cringely Looks at the WikiLeaks Debacle
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wednesday February 20, @12:53PM
from the corporate-policy-will-rarely-win-you-votes-for-genius dept.
from the corporate-policy-will-rarely-win-you-votes-for-genius dept.
dtwood writes "Infoworld's Cringely has an interesting take on the Julius Baer bank trying to silence WikiLeaks.org — and how stunningly stupid they've been. 'But the bank's solution is so mind-bogglingly stupid, you have to wonder if these guys need help getting their pants on each morning. First, this is exactly the kind of story bloggers and Net-centric journos crave. Big nasty corporation stomps all over plucky public-serving underdog. Who can resist that plot line? Second, the equation Bank Julius Baer = Money Laundering is now firmly cemented in the minds of everyone who has encountered this story, regardless of whether it's true. Trois: The documents in question, which might have been quickly forgotten alongside the 1.2 million others on the site, are now hotter than the Paris Hilton sex video. Dozens of mirror sites have sprung up, and Cryptome.org and PirateBay have squirreled away copies of the docs for any interested parties. "
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kan0r writes "The transparency group WikiLeaks.org currently seems to be under heavy fire. The main WikiLeaks.org DNS entry is unavailable, reportedly due to a restraining order relating to a series of articles and documents released by WikiLeaks about off-shore trust structures in the Cayman Islands. The WikiLeaks whistle blower, allegedly former vice president of the Cayman Islands branch of swiss bank Julius Baer, states in the WikiLeaks documents that the bank supported tax evasion and money laundering by its clients from around the world. WikiLeaks alternate names remained available until Saturday, when there seems to have been a heavy DDoS attack and a fire at the ISP. The documents in question are still available on other WikiLeaks sites, such as wikileaks.be, and are also mirrored on Cryptome. Details of the court documents have also been made available."
Firehose:Infoworld's Cringely on WikiLeaks debacle by Anonymous Coward
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Streisand (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Streisand (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Streisand (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Streisand (Score:5, Funny)
Sizzling! (Score:5, Funny)
That's a pretty fancy way of saying "ice-cold".
Just like the Scientology documents (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Just like the Scientology documents (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the interesting things about journalism is learning how much work goes into those goddamn money mismanagement stories. You have a bunch of journalists, half of whom don't balance their checkbooks terribly well, going over publicly available monetary expenditures line by line by line. They do good work, by and large, but the absurd tedium, the volume of material, and the fact that you may come to the end of two weeks of work with no story, combines to make those stories pretty uncommon. Lot of people get away with a lot of stuff, even when the records are publicly available.
This is a perfect example. Who in their right mind would have gone through this stuff unless they knew that there was a story there? Who could have gotten permission to work on it? But now it's everywhere! There are smart bastards in media outlets all over the country trying to confirm it, and they will, because the stuff is never hidden all that well once people start looking.
Re:Just like the Scientology documents (Score:5, Interesting)
This reminds me of an episode of "The Man From UNCLE" that I saw as a kid. A couple had served many years with THRUSH (the bad guys) and were having their retirement party. (on the supposedly non-existent 13th floor of some building) After the party, their boss was taking them out of the building, supposedly to start retirement with a pleasant vacation. The real intent was of course to eliminate them.
The UNCLE guys rescued them once it became apparent that they were going to be executed, and they became a fount of information.
Relevance... Depending on who you are, you don't fire the guy who knows where the bodies are buried. You either take very good care of him, add him to the pile of bodies, or make sure that he put some of the bodies there, and you have the evidence. (The last choice doesn't always work, either - "State's evidence".)
Copy/pasted from the NYTimes (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Copy/pasted from the NYTimes (Score:5, Informative)
Who is stupid? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who is stupid? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Who is stupid? (Score:5, Informative)
http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Full_correspondence_between_Wikileaks_and_Bank_Julius_Baer [88.80.13.160]
Mr. Spiegel is a pretty senior attorney, so I'm surprised by how inept his actions were. There is no need to write so pointedly. There are times when you need to fight, but they are few and far between. Evan's first message did not mention the DMCA at all; it just asked for contact information. His later e-mails began discussing the DMCA, and then threatened legal actions in the U.S., U.K., and Switzerland. Why didn't he just answer politely in the first place?
It's just bad lawyering, in my opinion. Proof is the fact you can still access wikileaks, and you're reading this post because of all the publicity. Backfire!
Re:Who is stupid? (Score:5, Interesting)
The lawyers think- "Having these documents out is bad. But we could bring a legal challenge to their availability. If having them out is bad, it stands to reason that having a chance to try to get them back in is good."
It almost sounds reasonable, like the government's standard (and always grossly incorrect) estimate of increased tax receipts following a tax hike by multiplying the new rate by people's current reported income almost sounds reasonable.
What these companies need is some management oversight. Before launching a new PR campaign, most companies have a standard procedure of running it past the lawyers. But they should also be doing the opposite; when the lawyers come and say "hey, we could sue this small public-interest nonprofit into oblivion, which would undoubtedly accomplish halting the spread of this information on the internet," management should run that past PR and IT before implementing it.
It's always entertaining... (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Ignore it, and hope that no one notices it.
2) Try to get it removed, guaranteeing that everyone in the world will hear about it.
Sadly, this works the same way whether its true or false information...The information trail almost always increases when you try to have something taken down, so while it may have been only 1 data point before, your attempts to bring it down can create many more...In cases like this, a ridiculously large number.
Probably the best policy is trying to brazen it out...Hardly ever is the information that good...You can always try to laugh it off, but trying to bury it makes it look like you've something to hide.
I'm not a huge privacy nut, so this doesn't necessarily bother me, but I wonder if a lot of the free-speech/privacy buffs are starting to feel a little worried. When everything is free, even the most trivial stuff can end up online, and it's pretty obvious that once it's there, it's never coming down.
Re:It's always entertaining... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's always entertaining... (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't need to publicize your rebuttal, however, if it is either incredibly bad or incredibly good, it will get more coverage (or similar coverage) to whatever you are trying to counter. If it's equally silly, it will likely not increase the popularity of either the original information or yours.
Re:It's always entertaining... (Score:5, Insightful)
3. Wash it away in a flood of misleading other information.
That's what politicians and other people experienced at fooling the general public do. For example, look at when controversial laws are passed, it is often during times where the media's minds are elsewhere.
I think the CIA and the NSA have the best grip on this. AFAIK there is no word "Uninformation" in their vocabulary, but the words "Disinformation" ranks highly.
There is no negative to "information", so you can't remove it, mathematically speaking. But you can bury it under more information.
Re:It's always entertaining... (Score:5, Interesting)
By playing to the perception of McDonald's being fixated on the bottom line, Kroc linked a more powerful meme into the rebuttal. Unfortunately, there is no comparably strong meme for the Julius Baer bank to use; they are stuck with the association that their actions have built.
Pirate Bay (Score:5, Insightful)
Dumb question: who is actually incriminated? (Score:5, Informative)
Bank Julius Baer had an IPO pending (Score:5, Informative)
"Cringley" missed a key element of the story. Bank Julius Baer was preparing to take their US operation public via an IPO for about a billion dollars. They filed the prospectus [sec.gov] with the SEC a few weeks ago. "We are an asset management company that provides investment management services to institutional and mutual fund clients. We are best known for our International Equity strategies, which represented 92% of our assets under management as of September 30, 2007." They were going to call the business "Artio" (ticker symbol ART, to be listed on the NYSE). Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch were to underwrite the IPO. [bloomberg.com]
So the last thing they needed was to be the subject of a New York Times story and all over the world press, associated with money laundering. Now the deal goes under a microscope. Their underwriters have to take a second look and the SEC may have questions. Julius Baer will probably have to file a "material event" 8-K report with the SEC. Newspaper and magazine reporters will be looking at Baer. The question will be raised that the rather high returns Baer reports may be achieved via money laundering.
All this is happening in a down market, in which it's hard to do an IPO and in which investors are very sensitive to unexpected risk. The whole deal may evaporate, or be repriced downward.
This was a very, very expensive mistake for Baer.
With regard to point 2... (Score:5, Funny)
If it is true, and if they can continue to get away with it, then that's some great advertising.
Re:I can assure you (Score:5, Funny)
I've seen it. That bank documents are more arousing.
Infoworld's Cringely is NOT the 'famous' Cringely. (Score:5, Informative)
Short story: The guy commonly thought of as "Robert X. Cringely" (in reality Mark Stephens [wikipedia.org],) was actually Infoworld's third writer in the Robert X. Cringely column (and therefore, the third to use the name.) He wrote it for so long, that when he left Infoworld, he got to keep the name, as long as he doesn't use it in another computer-industry magazine. Infoworld has been through a number of people writing as "Robert X. Cringely" since Mark Stephens' departure.
The Infoworld column is pretty standard back-page tech-mag column material, Stephens is the one you think "has been slipping".