TechStuffMany people were surprised by how quickly the conflict between business, government and wikileaks escalated into virtual warfare, but what does it mean for the future? Listen in as Jonathan and Chris recount the recent history of Wikileaks.
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Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With tech Stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello again, everyone, Welcome to tech Stuff. My name is Chris Pollette and I am an editor how stuff works dot Com. Sitting across from me, as always, is senior writer Jonathan Strickland. You took an oath if you recall when you first came to work for me, And I don't mean to the National Security Advisor of the United States, I mean to his boss, and I don't mean the president. You gave your word to his boss. You gave your word to the people of the United States. Your word is who you are. Actually it seems like three words. Oh no, I'm sorry. I was just just the one. So, yeah, today we're gonna talk about a pretty sticky subject. Yeah, this is gonna be a pretty complicated subject as well. Yeah, and it's no surprise that's sticky, because things often are sticky after a leak. You like how I did that? Yeah, I am suffering sleep deprivation, but I can still make a bad pun. So we're gonna talk about wiki leaks. Now you've probably heard about this site if you're not already familiar with it from visiting visiting it. Wiki leaks is a site that has been in the news quite a bit. In fact, the day that we're recording this podcast, news about wiki leaks is exploding across the internet. Yeah, it's still coming fast and furious. Um only in the day we're recording this. It's only been a few days since. Uh the site posted two twenty new cables uh from the United States government in a batch of a much much larger batch of different communications, right, like hundreds of thousands of communications. Um. So and by cables, we're specifically saying messages. Yes, and I kind of thought that was funny, but that uh, we're still using that term to describe these different messages. These these types of messages have been around, uh for literally hundreds of years. Uh. The United States step that United States correspondence around the world. Um, we're talking people like diplomats of different varieties, uh, intelligence officers pass these these different kinds of cables back and forth between one another. Some of them are are coded, Uh, some of them are not coded, but they're still coded. Yeah. Some of them are listed as secret, but they're not necessarily top secret. It's essentially meant for, you know, for the people to whom the cables concerned, Right, it's not not meant for general public consumption. Yeah. And and in a lot of cases it's uh, it's not meant for the consumption of the people they're talking about. Two. And in some cases they're just completely not flattering. You know, the ambassador from so and so, it's a real nimrod, Right, he's kind of or or he's flabby. Yeah, there there's some there's some personal attacks in them. Well, let's let's really talk about what wiki leaks is. First of all, it is a nonprofit organization. Um. It's its main outlet is its website, which, depending upon when you listen to this podcast, may or may not be available when you try to navigate to it. This morning, when I tried to navigate to it, Uh, it was the the official website u r L was was gone. Like if you try to go to it, and said that there was something wrong. Um and sometimes that just happens, was essentially the message. But there were there are lots of mirror sites up there that still we're working, so I could still navigate to Wiki leaks it's just I couldn't go to the official U r l r UM and I think it's it's important to note um, at least, I think it is important to say that this is not affiliated with you know, the wiki media, right, you know that that started Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons and so many of the other wiki sites. It uses a wiki, right, it's using the Wicki as the foundation for the website. So I don't know if there doesn't seem to be a lot of con I'm having trouble talking today, a lot of confusion about that. But I think it's important to notice that despite the fact that it's got Wicki in there, it's not like a trademarked words. It's two separate entities. This is nothing to do with the Wikipedia folks. Now, this is this actually comes from someone else, not inside the United States. Um. His name is Julian, Yes, Julian Assange. He's founder and editor in chief of Wiki Leaks, also sort of the public face of the site. Yes, yes, he is. Indeed, he's not the only one working on this. It's not a one man operation by any stretch of the imagination. But he he's sort of the he's definitely the personality that is, for better or worse, connected incontrovertibly with wiki leaks. Nice, thank you. I had to slow that down because I wasn't sure I could pronounce it. I'm also having trouble with my words today at any rate. So Julian Assange, he finds he's one of the founders of the site or the founder of the site. The site launched publicly in two thousand seven. Um it's really just been in the news in UH or it really started to take off in the news, but in two thousand seven was when it was when it launched. Uh and it's a project of the Sunshine Press. Now. The purpose of wiki leaks is again it's a nonprofit organization. It's purpose is to be a place where you can uh leak information. You can drop information that's important that is being hidden in some way, that's not being um uh distributed to the general public, but is other but it's very important information or it's supposed to be right. I mean, the idea here is that the governments are performing actions and and uh and distributing, distributing information that's above the heads of the citizens. And the philosophy of wiki leaks is that's a bad thing. That government should be much more transparent, particularly a representative government, which presumably is representing the interests of the people. Right, you're talking about people who elect specific individuals to represent them in an official government capacity. Well, if this if they're if the government is not transparent, you don't know if your representatives are doing a good job or not, or or doing what you want them to do. It may turn out that the government is acting in a way that is against the wishes of the people it represents. And then you have to ask yourself is this a legitimate government? Now? These are big ideas, and I'm not saying the Wiki leaks answers them in any way, shape or form, but it's kind of their philosophy that information needs to get out there, and they are a kind of a dump been ground for information, right Right, That's that's really what I think most of the debate is at this point is is this uh, is this leaked information serving a higher purpose and serving the people? And um, you know this isn't It's not limited to the information from the United States. There there are other sources of information as well, and some of the information that has been leaked from the United States government also affects other nations. So this is something that's that's affecting people the world over. Now. UM, as a former newspaper reporter, I can tell you that, UM, this is a role that in the United States has been typically carried out by the press, by the by the news media, UM, and has has been uh also done in the past by and several pretty high profile cases. UM. You know, I can think of several off hand, and I'll bring one up later. UM when we get into the actual source of this particular information, because really Wiki leaks, though it has been around, it wasn't until they got some information from one particular person, well one allegedly from one particular person that would be a private first cup Private first class Bradley Manning, who uh who has been basically charged with supplying confidential information including two fifty one thousand, two D eighty seven cables, UM, which apparently were gleaned from a military database or databasees and smuggled out theoretically, why I say, I should say, allegedly on a CD labeled Lady Gaga. Yeah, this this raises some questions about security within the military, you said, or what was his rank? Again, Private private first class. He's a noncommissioned officer, right, Private first class, and so you think, okay, well, at least on some level, you would assume that the information person could access would not be critical information because he's not really of a rank that would allow him to see information that's classified above secret. Right. However, you would also think that there wouldn't be an easy way to get that information off of the system and then into someone else's hands. In fact, the a lot of government offices and clean the military are now looking at systems that would not allow you to to pull information and put it onto another form of media. So you wouldn't be able to use it like a USB drive or UM burn it to a disk because the system and self would prevent you from doing so. Yeah, I would like to point out that I misspoke. What's private first class is not a non commissioned officer, but he's a private first class. Okay, Yeah, I'm glad so all of you to me. I knew I had misspoken as soon as I said it, And I am just gonna say I am mostly ignorant of the military. Um. Other than the fact it, I am very thankful for them. So yeah, That's why I didn't jump on there and correct you, because I didn't know any better. Anyway, one of those things that I knew as soon as it was itching in the back of my head said something that, so, alright, so we've got this the site where it's hit the news because all these different all these messages that really were not meant for public consumption are now out there and available. Now, that doesn't mean necessarily that we automatically go through and read them all. A lot of newspapers did because you know, this was right for picking through this and seeing what was actually interesting on there. So a lot of the a lot of the fallout from the whole wiki leaks situation really comes from secondary uh sources, right, like like other newspapers and things of that nature. Well, that's true, um see, some of the information was also leaked directly to some of the publications as well, right, Um, I believe, if I'm not mistaken, the New York Times was one of those, uh they got their own copy of these documents. And I feel compelled to point out too that a lot of these cables, especially diplomatic cables, um, they're released anyway, but they're usually released later uh, frequently when the people involved are dead, so that we can't hear about how flabby they are. We can't hear their reactions exactly exactly. Uh yeah, they Sorry, that was another misstatement on my part. I'm doing great today, man, because considering I'm the one who hasn't had any sleep for so long, it's no never mind anyway. Um that's what I get for changing the day that we podcast. Um so yeah it um. You know, these these documents are usually published years after the fact, and in this case, these these documents are much much more uh fresh than those I believe the number I read was the mid seventies. Is now where they're being published, where they're up to in the East, documents typically like the official publication, and these documents, and some of them are probably not are held back even longer, depending on how sensitive they are. And that's that's a good point because some people maybe under the impression that the documents that are on Wiki leaks are um are really recent, like within the last couple of years, and some of them are. I mean there there are there are documents specifically about the war in Afghanistan and and uh and the war in Iraq and things of that nature. Um, So there are some that are more recent. It's just this most uh, the fresh batch that hit Wiki leaks is not among them. They those are older documents. But before we get too embroiled in the whole government thing, Wiki leaks doesn't just publish uh messages about governments. They'll also doing about companies, about individuals. Really, it's anything that kind of I guess that that wiki leaks feels is being um just ingenuous, or is trying to hide something, something that that the site feels people should know. They'll they'll go ahead and publish it now, maybe not to the extent that everyone at wiki leaks wishes the site did. And and that tortured sentence was really a way of saying there are some people who had worked for wiki leaks in the past who felt that perhaps Assange was taking a very uh, a very specific approach that they didn't they didn't agree with. And the main thing, the main argument was that Assange's m O was to wait for these really big leaks like the two plus thousand UH cables to come out and then would release them in a in a big batch, and it gets a lot of a lot of publicity and a lot of attention towards Wiki leaks. Uh. The argument that the people who left WikiLeaks say is more important is you should be publishing the smaller stuff too. It doesn't attract the attention of the big leaks like the cables, but it's equally as important to people to know that information. Right, So they're they're essentially accusing Assange of ignoring the smaller stories in favor of the big stories and uh. And so some of them left, and a few of them are planning on launching essentially a competitive site to wiki leaks that would pick up where Wiki leaks leaves off. Chief among them would be Daniel dom scheit Berrick, one of the one of the fellows who was working on wiki leaks in Germany. He left UM and is publishing a novel, a book, not a novel, but a nonfiction book in January of about working for wiki leaks and sort of the kind of inside baseball on what it was like working for the website and what led to his decision to leave UM. It sounds to me like he still believes in the the official philosophy of wiki leaks. He just doesn't feel that the site is carrying that that philosophy to fruition. He thinks that they've they've sort of lost their way. At least that's that's what I glean from the interviews I've read. I have not spoken with him personally, so I can't really be certain. But at any rate, so you've got this website that's publishing a hundreds of thousands of documents that we're not necessarily meant to be read by you and I, and uh, that's drawn some attention, to say the least, um, and it's drawn a lot of criticism as well. And some of those criticisms range from, uh, this is irresponsible, and it puts the United States in danger and other nations at risk as well by revealing information that was not meant for everyone to to access. And because it's on the Internet, it's not like it's just going to one audience, it's going out to the world. Now, there are some countries that have said that they aren't going to pay any attention to the documents that are on wiki leaks, so they're not going to um give it the satisfaction I guess, like like China has specifically said that it's going to block wiki leaks, which not surprise. Really it's China, but it's gonna block Wiki leaks and they're not going to pay attention to the messages that are listed in there because they think it would be more harmful than good. Now, whether that that claim is true or not, I can't say, you know, whether they'll they'll truly not look at the messages. Who who's to say besides China, and you know they're claiming one way. So but anyway, there are other people, specifically politicians in the United States, who have said that the behavior of Assange and the Wiki leakus psych site in general has been very irresponsible, to the point of possibly being treasonous or out of espionage. Uh. These are serious charges and um, depending on your point of view, they could be punishable to pretty big extremes. In fact, I think a few politicians of more or less called for Assangea's head, you know, I think they would. I think in their mind they would put it on a pike and set it out in front of Hudson Bay and say this is a warning to all of you. Um, yeah he has Yeah, it could end up in a with a lengthy prison term. Um. Anyway, at least according to to uh, the information I read from a Flaherty from the ap right. But let but the charges that he's brought up on are not related directly to wiki leaks, and and some have argued that you can't. Really what would you charge him with for WikiLeaks because according to the site's philosophy, again, they do not solicit information. They offer a dumping ground for information, but they don't go out and ask for it. So in other words, he's just saying, hey, I'm just here, and I say it said that I will accept any information that comes through my door, but I'm not going to go out there door to door and say, hey, do you have any secrets for me to tell? So really that that would suggest that the responsibility lies on the people leaking the information, not on wiki leaks for accepting it, right, I mean, what do you charge someone for hearing a secret? It's not like it's their fault necessarily. I mean, they may say that I've got I've got ears and I'm willing to listen, but that's different from going out and seeking out secret information. So really that there are those who support wiki leaks who argue, well, the fault lies with people who are leaking this info, so you can't really charge Wiki leaks with anything. They're also those who say, well, even if Assange is guilty of the allegations against him, which again don't have anything to do with wiki leaks, those are they're actually it's a it's a charge of rape, a charge of sexual molestation, and a couple of other related charges. And these are very serious charges. They don't necessarily mean that Wiki leaks is going to go away if Assange is convicted of these charges. So, you know, even I think there's some people who support WikiLeaks who go to a true extreme and say that the charges against Assange are manufactured and that's some sort of conspiracy and it's all designed to try and make Wiki leaks go away, right, Yeah, well it kind of makes me think of al Capone in a way about you you go after whatever you can get on him. Yeah. Yeah, So there there are those people who who think that that's what it is, that's the United States government pressuring Sweden to pursue these claims against Assange in order to get him out of the way. I I'm a little skeptical of that. First of all, I think that that's placing way too much um way too much skepticism against the people laiming these these allegations, right, it's it's dismissing them entirely, and I think that's irresponsible. What needs to happen is there needs to be a true investigation that's objective to see if the allegations are if they hold any weight, because because otherwise you're you're saying that these the women who are claiming these allegations against Assange, that they don't matter. And I think that's just as horrible as some of the other allegations being thrown out by Wiki leaks supporters. Now, uh, that doesn't necessarily mean that the allegations are true, of course, and also it doesn't mean that if Assange were convicted that Wiki leaks would disappear. There are other people to carry on Wiki Leaks. If Assange left, you would just have a different spokesperson. Yes, And as a matter of fact, apparently there is some kind of and this is going to be sort of weird, because it is possible that before this podcast goes out, um, some this this actually will be triggered. Um. But they he and don't take me literally here. Apparently he has referred to a thermonuclear device which is not actually a thermonuclear device, but basically it's a mega something. There's a giant file somewhere in the Wiki Leaks system that if something happens to the website, it is supposed to be triggered. Now it's sort of unclear based on the research that I've done, whether it's a giant blast of leaks that will be published somewhere in the world that will basically dump all the information at one time, or if it's some kind of code um either I guess to prevent another attack or attack the attacker or something. Um. It's sort of unclear what exactly what it is. But Assanja said that you know, if you come after us and and completely take down the site, you know there is something waiting for you. There will be consequences. That's not doing a many favors either, not helping him in the eyes of his critics. Um. Now, So, so we've gotten to the point where we think that Wiki Leaks would stay around even if Assange goes away. Well, there are enough supporters to third party supporters who are willing to mirror the site where I don't think that's going to be an issue. Right now, some things that are issues. Are the site uh subsists on donations? Yes, well, a lot of the the avenues for donation are getting cut off. There have been reports that MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal, among other financial services, have ceased payments to Wiki leaks. That's correct, I've heard that. So now you're talking about, all right, well, this can't have anything to do with the the allegations against a Sane because why would you why would you connect the company with the man, Right, It's two different entities, right of course, in the United States here, if it's a company, it is treated like a person. Right. But and then that's the same thing though you say, all right, well, the company is one person, Assange is another person, and you can't you know, you can't charge both for the crimes of one. But when you when you stick yourself out there too and make yourself the face of the company, you start running that risk that you will be identified that closely. So if if you do assume that the charges against a Sane truly have nothing to do with his role in Wiki leaks, and let's go ahead, we'll just say that that's well, we'll assume that's true for the sake of this argument um, it's harder to say, all right, well, what's the justification for cutting off the avenues for financial support to wiki leaks. That probably has more to do with the political aspect, in the financial aspect of the site than anything else. So if Assange was gone, I would imagine that those block blockades would still be up and uh and at least PayPal, the president of PayPal, said in an interview the reason why PayPal shut off payments to wiki leaks was because the State Department said that wiki leaks was performing illegal activity and therefore it was against the terms of service for PayPal, so they followed suit and they shut down. So well, if the State Department tells us it's illegal, we have to follow with what they say. So in this case, it does look like it's government pressure to try and cut off the financial support for wiki leaks, which that gets pretty thorny. That's a that's a touchy, touchy subject, because again, if wiki leaks is not truly doing anything wrong, if they're just receiving information, if they're not seeking it out, then it becomes sort of a First Amendment thing as well. Are you suggesting that the First Amendment does not apply in this case, and and if so, why, and what is your what is your grounds for this assertion? Is that constitutional or not um. In the meantime, because of these actions, we've also seen some vigilante justice being carried out online by by people who either support or oppose Wiki Leaks. In one case, we have denial of service attacks hitting wiki leaks itself and bringing the site to either a crawl or crashing it at times, carried out by by presumably by a hacker who goes by the handle the Jester, and the Jester has claimed responsibility for these attacks uh that brought wiki Leaks to its virtual knees. Meanwhile, there's another group that is essentially identified as Anonymous. You may remember we've talked about Anonymous a few times in the past, and Anonymous is targeting the various financial services and companies that oppose Wiki Leaks. So they've presumably done distributed denial of service attacks against things like, you know, like MasterCard and PayPal. So we've got this ugly guerrilla warfare going on in cyberspace among two different camps. The really crazy thing is these hackers are not necessarily state sponsored at all. It's not like there's a government behind these hackers. These are a lot of individuals who have a strong opinion about the subject and they're acting on it. It's anarchy really when you look at it, I mean, right now from our perspective, you know, from our experience, it just feels like, oh, this one side is really slow or gosh, that's annoying. You know, the site is down. But when you think about it behind the scenes, if you were able to kind of get a virtual look at what's going on, it's some of the fiercest fighting and I've seen in an online capacity. And in a way, you might say that this is an indication of what true warfare is going to be like from here on out. It's going to have not just state armies battling one another, but it's going to have concerned people on either side of issues, acting on their own on behalf of whatever side they support, and using basic computers. I mean, this is not like cutting edge technology about any stretch of the imagination. If you have a decent computer, you can create a bot net and you can direct it to attack whichever site you want, and I may not like the attack might not last very long, depending upon the defenses of that site, but you can do it, and it's truly terrifying to me that that this is happening. Well, um, you know, did you want to talk about some of the content that was on there, because just speaking of that reminded me of a topic that we've brought up several times in the show and back on Tech Stuff Live, and we still had Tech Stuff Live going. Was the attack on Google. Yes, and apparently the the wiki leaks documents that that are already been posted. Uh, clarified who was actually behind that attack? If you if you remember back when this was making the news, the the story was that Google's site in China was Google was going to start providing unrestricted search results in China because the company had come to the conclusion that following China's rules was sort of fundamentally against their philosophy China. As a result that there was an attack on Google websites. There was some data stolen quite a bit actually from Google, and it was stolen by hackers, and China claimed that it had the government had nothing to do with the attacks. The attacks were carried out by others, individual hackers who were acting on their own, not not state sponsored. Turns out, according to the Wiki leagus documents, not so much. Yeah, according to WikiLeaks documents, China is not quite as innocent. Now the Poet Bureau uh directed the attacks, according to the information. Now that that's something else too. I don't know, how whether there's any way to verify the information that has been posted in these cables. They you know, it's already been pointed out that some of them are actually kind of fluffy and and personal. They're not necessarily you know, espionage, heavy duty uh high classified information. So I don't know for sure whether you know. That's why I'm sort of hedging on that is because according to these documents, right, and wiki leaks does claim that they put every single submission through a very rigorous um uh examination to make sure that it's true. And part of that part of that is as they say, well, how much would it cost to create a fake version of this? The more it costs, the more likely it's not a fake, because it becomes prohibitive. Right, But if it's, if it would be cheap, it would be really easy to make a fake version of that story, Well then you're like, all right, well this this is less reliable. We have to really look into it and see if we can truly source this. So, yeah, they lay out their process pretty clearly on the or page, so you can actually read how what you know, what process they follow to try and verify a document's veracity. But that being said, we still don't really know, right, I mean, we can you things, things go into a spectrum of believability. Well, that's true, and it's certainly judging by the reactions of different governments around the world to some of the information that has come out, I'd say that a lot of it is the information that's been posted so far is probably has a high degree of accuracy. Like NATO, you know, trying to apologize to the Russians about the Baltics. Yes, yes, apparently, and this isn't This is another instance where it's not necessarily the United States government, that's of all, of course they do, you know, they are involved in NATO, but NATO, um, apparently they were. They leaked a defense plan and NATO is going, yeah, we're really sorry. Yeah, a defense plan in the case of essentially an attack by Russia. Right right. So, So here's the thing. Some people argue that the information Wiki leaks reveals is stuff we all know it's just stuff we don't say. So in other words, like you think about it, it makes sense that we would have contingency plans if random country attacked random other country, right, I mean that just makes sense, especially if there's, you know, an antagonistic relationship between the two nations. There have to be contingency plans. If there are no contingency plans, you are you don't have a good defense system, right. You have to make those plans so that you know how to react in case the worst happens. So we all know this, everyone knows it, but you don't say it. When you say it, then it becomes a problem. And it's it's so crazy because you because everyone knows it already, Like wait, we all know, were we just having a shared hallucination that we all are ignorant of this information? And somehow it doesn't exist until someone says something that's human beings. We some crazy people. That's all I have to say about that. Um, you know it's funny because as I was poking around doing some research for this, uh, I came across the name of somebody from our past that a lot of us either may not have heard of, depending on their age, or had forgotten about somewhat since his name hasn't been in the news as much. Daniel Ellsworth remember him, Yes, he uh. He used to be in the in the Marine Corps in the United States. Um. Later on he uh he went to work for the Rand Corporation in the nineteen sixties and he ended up working on the McNamara study of United States decision making in Vietnam. Uh. And then came across and and supplied some documents known as the Pentagon Papers to some newspapers, including The Times and the Washington Post. UM. And he actually uh posted um and I'll quote here. Uh. The truth is that every attack now made on Wiki leaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time. So there there is a precedent for sensitive information being leaked to the media of whatever kind of media, you know, to public media and it being spread. Now. I mean, not all the media have been okay with posting this. Um. The Times is among those that are are posting sort of selectively, uh some of the information. Well. And and it's a totally different world now too, because it's now possible to distribute this information on a much wider scale than ever before, and much much more easily than ever before. It takes less effort to share that to share even more information than you could in the past. Yes, so, and plus there's a there's a ready built audience in there. We've got an audience of people who, to some degree or another, are disenchanted with the way government runs things. And not just the United States government, but this is true and very in many countries around the world. You have as enchanted audience, and they're eager to look at this information because it's natural. Right. You get this sort of suspicious feeling that things are not going the way they should be, or they're being directed in a way that is somewhat or at least seems at least on a surface level, to be somewhat sinister. And it doesn't help that you have proclamations from the government claiming that it's going to be more transparent going forward, and that there that that's their philosophy, is transparency so that they can prove that they're acting on the best interests of the citizens. And then when things like this come out, it seems to contradict that message, and so it it breeds even more distrust and it breeds more confusion and anger, and so it's really I mean, it's hard to say who would be at fault. I mean you could argue that, okay, well, Wiki Leaks is at fault because it's letting the information be available. But then you could argue weight this information exists, whether it's available or not, the people who are at fault or the people who generate this information who are causing these things to happen. And but then you think, well, yeah, but who puts those people in power? Technically it's us And then you say, well, yeah, but look at the choices we have no matter who we put in power there, it just becomes this this domino effect until you finally sit down. You're like, I need some chocolate and I'm going to turn on some music, maybe the Monkeys, and I'm just gonna listen to something happy and I'm not gonna pay attention no more. Well, I think that in these cases, the release of information like this is one thing, But whether or not it fosters a discourse of some kind, whether people are talking about I see what you did there? Um no, But I mean that's that's one of the things that I think you could say about releasing it to a major news outlet is whether or not there is any framing of the information, whether it's being released on its own, or whether there's a context built around the information that explains what's going on and um sort of a dialogue going on about it. Um. You know. So it's I it's kind of interesting because there's I think that really makes a difference in the way people react to it. Um. And then there are the people who are just information junkies who are just completely fascinated. Uh. You know, they're not necessarily the uh um people who are either skeptical of the government's plans and the people who support it, but they're just going, huh, that's weird. I have to say, some of this stuff that that's come out has been really fascinating, just just on it completely the middle of the dial spectrum, just going that's really really interesting. You know that people are even talking about this stuff, Like the unification of Korea is one of the things that's come out that that people have been talking about, uh, the possibility that North Korea might cave and uh, they might be able to unify Korea's in the different countries of the world how they they interpret that, um, and I just never considered that as a possibility in my lifetime. So it's it's pretty interesting. It's again, I agree with you, some of the information that's available on wiki leaks is uh not necessarily the most useful, and you kind of wonder why even bother hosting it because really, you think about you'd think, ultimately, the only thing I see this doing is ticking people off. It doesn't it's not helpful in any way. It's not like it it's not like it revealed. Again, a lot of these are the unspoken truths that I was talking about. It's stuff that we all kind of know on some level, but to see it written down makes it some somehow more real. Someone In some of those cases, I just don't see any real sense in that, Like I mean, yeah, sure it's there and it's embarrassing, but it's not like it's a betrayal of trust on uh, you know, the government's part for on behalf of the citizens you know so well. Of course, everybody interprets information differently, so something that may be completely benign to me maybe very inflammatory to someone else. Yeah, un Like that whole cable about how bald guys are just total jerk wads. I mean, that was just mean spirited. I told you, I'm sorry I wrote that. Yeah, all right, well whatever, no takebacks, you know what, We're gonna have to wrap this up. But anyway, Yeah, the Wiki leaks story, it's gonna keep on unfolding. I mean, by the time this podcast publishers will probably be you know, dozens more developments. But it was something that we felt that we really needed to tackle. We had a lot of requests from various listeners to talk about this topic. Yeah, I feel like there's a lot that we haven't said, and I'm I'm interested to see more of what comes out about it in the weeks to come, because there's it's very likely that this will continue for some time. Yeah, I'm sure we'll do a follow up on wiki leaks in the future. I mean it it's really brought a lot of issues on the Internet to life, not not just ones directly connected to wiki leaks, but free speech issues and journalism issues, cyber terrorism issues. I mean, there's security problems. There's just so much that Wiki Leaks has brought to light, directly or indirectly. So it's really been a fascinating and somewhat disturbing story to follow, and they're they're important issues to talk about. So yeah, yeah, I'm glad we have the opportunity to do that so far for for today. All right, well we're gonna wrap this up. If you guys want to pipe up and let us know what you think of wiki leaks, or you have other topics you'd like to suggest, you can follow us on Twitter and Facebook are handled. There is tech Stuff hs W, or you can email us. That address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com and Chris and I will tell you again really soon. Don't tell anyone. For more on this and thousands of other topics, vinit how stuff works dot com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The house Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready. Are you a
