List of facilities 'vital to US security' leaked

I'm having a hard time reconciling people's viewpoints over here. Most people are intellectually inconsistent over Wikileaks.<p>If a leak fits with people's opinion on wars or something similar, it's supposedly alright to leak; if it doesn't fit with one's opinion, it's bad and irresponsible? I think this goes to show that most people just view leaks on certain topics as means to an end on that specific policy subject.<p>It's not like that. Only leaking "politically correct" material is not going to happen. Either you stick up for the unmitigated leaks or you don't.<p>If you think a middleman (newspaper, whatever) has to assess whether or not a leak is potentially damaging or "not worth" leaking, then I think you haven't come to terms with what leaking is also about: exposing the truth and not relying on whatever authority to establish what is alright for the general populace to see and what is not.<p>P.S.: If this is so important for the US government, why is it only SECRET/NOFORN? Also, according to Michael Chertoff, this list was/is used by US government agencies to prepare themselves for disruption.

I read through the Canadian "Critical Foreign Dependencies" List, and what struck me, is how difficult it would be to really damage any of the elements on the list, unless you were a state power.<p>Canada James Bay Power Project, Hydro Quebec, Part of the St. Lawrence Power Project, between Barnhart Island, New York, and Cornwall, Ontario Seven Mile Dam, Canada Chalk River Nuclear Facility - big industrial targets that would require a lot of effort to really do damage to. Also, there were a lot of obvious targets that are already well known "Border Crossing", "Atlantic Cable Landing".<p>Pretty much every one of the Canadian items (and many, many, many more) are discussed fairly openly in Canadian Newspapers in terms of how attractive they might be to terrorists, so nothing particularly interesting there. If anything, I was disappointed, significantly, at how _little_ is considered a Critical Foreign dependency.<p>The Alberta Tar Sands aren't considered a Critical Foreign Dependency?

I'm finding a hard time seeing how this leak is a positive thing. At least leaks related to violations of human rights and international law have legs to stand on.

This is massively irresponsible and smacks of the Wikileaks team trying to 'get at' the US government for reasons unknown. This is really the sort of information that could put lives in danger. Whatever good Wikileaks attempts to do is immediately overshadowed by such a stupid and naive leak such as this.<p>I hope the people responsible are brought to full justice when an innocent person dies because they work at a facility that has just become a target for terror.

I saw this this morning and it seemed like the first example of something that should severely not be leaked. I wanted to contact them privately and directly and bring their attention to it but there turns out being no discernable channel to do that.<p>These especially struck me as dangerous;<p><a href="http://cablesearch.org/cable/view.php?id=09DOHA214&#38;hl=%3Anewest" rel="nofollow">http://cablesearch.org/cable/view.php?id=09DOHA214&#38;hl=%3...</a><p>Specifically;<p><i>2. (C) There are three main industrial facilities of interest that if destroyed, or if their production is disrupted, could have an immediate effect on U.S. national economic security. In order of priority, these are Ras Laffan Industrial City (RLIC), Mesaieed Industrial City (MIC) and port complex, and Dukhan Industrial City. All three industrial centers are under the control and supervision of Qatar Petroleum (QP), a semi-autonomous government organization whose Chairman, Abdullah bin Hamad Al-Attiyah, is also the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Energy and Industry. Natural gas production is primarily centered around the coast and offshore areas in the northeast of Qatar, in and round Ras Laffan; while, oil production is concentrated on the western coast near Dukhan as well as offshore platforms. </i><p>In both the #startups and #wikileaks channels on freenode people variously assured me that they had already considered it or I was just being a troll. I suppose it really is naive to expect unmitigated good to come of this episode, but I really wish they would not hand ammunition to the opposition in this fashion.<p>I wish there was a way to privately contact them to ask them to reconsider a particular release without drawing attention to it in a public fashion.<p>P.S. I will happily edit this message to omit the sensitive information directly in the event that anyone can tell me how to bring the necessary attention to it in a more private way.

This is weird to me. I just get the feeling that... a lot of these miscellaneous commercial facilities are replaceable- not only that, but the market forces acting after an attack would encourage new facilities to be built or new locations of the resource to be discovered (in the case of cobalt).<p>I also feel that the ideologies might not line up really well with this. "We are going to destroy the American infidels... by destroying a Danish insulin factory!" The symbolism gets kinda lost.

Perhaps not all information should be released, however, in the end perhaps it's only whistleblowers that can uncover certain things and force decision makers take back certain laws.<p>(Fictional?) example with body scanners: The company making those has a real interest in the terror threat never going away. The shareholders expect that. The politicians get elected with money from security companies. Thus: The terror threat will never go away. UNLESS a whistleblower shows the truth and the population gets upset.<p>Whistleblowers are important for democracy.

This is ill judged and shows Wikileaks to be immature as the motivation could only have been some form of juvenile revenge, this has probably damaged their credibility beyond repair.<p>Little or no public good comes from this, any more than disseminating pictures of the keys to <i>your</i> front door or publishing your bank account details would somehow be justified "in the interests of openness".<p>Comments about this being OK because "security through obscurity" is a bad thing merely show the commenter to incompetent at thinking, preferring instead to spout cliched slogans, rather like the book waving Maoists of old.

I wish Wikileaks would stick to exposing corruption / human rights violations / warcrimes etc. This release seems only to increase the vulnerability of the USA (not to mention the civillians simply working at these targets) to unsophisticated attackers.

I'd be interested to see how Assange responds to this. It's going to determine my opinion about him, and put a lot of doubts to rest for better or worse. I'm sure other people feel the same.

This article actually makes a lot of sense to me: <a href="http://www.infowars.com/is-the-internet-911-under-way/" rel="nofollow">http://www.infowars.com/is-the-internet-911-under-way/</a>

And I should believe that the location of "the most critical gas facility in the world" has been a secret all along. :D