Why the US Govt Should Be Happy About Wikileaks

angry tapir writes "WikiLeaks' leaking of classified information should be considered a blessing for the US government, and other governments should take heed of the lessons when it comes to information sharing, according to Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) research associate, Professor Mike Nelson, who spent four years as Senator Al Gore's science adviser and served as the White House director for technology policy on IT, and was also a member of Barack Obama presidential campaign."

Yeah, so bad

[afidel]

Yeah, be embarrassed is so much worse than having ~4,000 of your citizens killed and entering a trillion dollars worth of wars. Remember that one of the primary findings by the 9/11 commission was that a primary cause of us not catching the cell was lack of information sharing.

Re:It depends on the objective.

[m50d]

Democracy means he has to burn down parliament first, which puts a bit more of a barrier to entry in place.

Re:If You Are Right

[metacell]

If invading Iraq was the safest course of action, why did the Bush government have to mislead Congress with outrageous claims about an army of unmanned drones ready to strike against America?

From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:

In October 2002, a few days before the US Senate vote on the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution, about 75 senators were told in closed session that the Iraqi government had the means of delivering biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction by unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) drones that could be launched from ships off the US' Atlantic coast to attack US eastern seaboard cities. Colin Powell suggested in his presentation to the United Nations that UAVs were transported out of Iraq and could be launched against the United States. In fact, Iraq had no offensive UAV fleet or any capability of putting UAVs on ships.[90] Iraq's UAV fleet consisted of less than a handful of outdated Czech training drones.[91] At the time, there was a vigorous dispute within the intelligence community whether the CIA's conclusions about Iraq's UAV fleet were accurate. The US Air Force agency denied outright that Iraq possessed any offensive UAV capability.[92]

It's not just in hindsight the government's course of action looks insane; even back then, a lot of people pointed out how they systematically picked and chose intelligence reports to support their pre-determined conclusion.