Tom Slee on Wikileaks

It’s hard to see how something can be uniformly excellent while one part of it is ‘especially good’.

Oops. You objected to “uniformly”, sorry. Still, in common usage, “uniformly” does allow for slight variation, being roughly synonymous with “consistently”.

And it could be that goodness and excellence are orthogonal . . .

Cheers!
JzB

People have a tendency to ascribe the default classification of documents to “classified” as some kind of nefarious thing that makes one feel good about fighting against.

Having worked in a large bureaucracy, I’m a little more sympathetic, I’m not saying it is right but I would probably ascribe this rather to an overworked state department who are afraid of losing their jobs for making a mistake.

Put yourself in a middle manager position where you have a tonne of documents that goes through your desk each month. Yes, most of the stuff is benign and you think to yourself, surely that it should be declassified but even if it weren’t a company policy and you had to take responsibility for the declassification you would probably think twice and classify it “just to be safe” because in the back of your mind, you would be thinking that you don’t want it to show up in a report from the CIA, or worse the press, saying that this was part or instrumental to something bad happening which would result in a black mark or firing or someone being killed. I mean, the probability is low but not zero.

I was listening to Glenn Greenwald on bhtv and I’m paraphrasing but he said that out of 50 documents 49 were uninteresting (i.e., should be declassified) and there was one which was interesting (i.e., should also be declassified). I mean he doesn’t say it but if you follow his reasoning, he implies that there is nothing that shouldn’t be declassified.

Perhaps this radical openness is right. I have a list of names, addresses, and credit card numbers of foreign service employees. Perhaps someone can give me Julian Assange’s phone number so that we can put these up on wikileaks. After all, the public has a right to know.

I think what Tom’s saying is precisely the internet, it doesn’t change things. Once the smoke’s cleared and the slogans about information wanting to be free have died away, the questions we’re debating are still political.

Or:

S [need to keep plan secret] = D [desirability of likely outcome] * P [probability of frustration if revealed]. S and D can be negative.

But like any other first-order moral-political (you might say utopian, or end-state) position, this ignores meta-political issues like democratic control (in one sense, a kind of non-ideal theory). In particular but not exhaustively, a bureaucracy which operates under routine secrecy and impunity not only facilitates but encourages bad behaviour and fosters a poisonous culture. In other words secrecy is not just something overlaid on existing policies and political structures, but feeds back into them.

It’s certainly true that the issue of secrecy is inseparable from wider political questions – but Slee seems to think this just means that approval or disapproval of secrecy is determined by partisan views about the content of the secrets in question.

qingl78 @6 gives a useful insight (thanks, q.): Put yourself in a middle manager position…even if it weren’t a company policy and you had to take responsibility for the declassification you would probably think twice and classify it “just to be safe” because in the back of your mind, you would be thinking that you don’t want it to show up in a report from the CIA, or worse the press, saying that this was part or instrumental to something bad happening which would result in a black mark or firing or someone being killed.

Regardless of foreign policy goals, the means (with associated ramifications, blowback, etc) will be different depending on what those pursuing them can get away with and the toolkit of shortcuts impunity has made their default option. If the govt, CIA, military etc know they can rely on routine coverup and thus not have to cope with too much hangout limitation, smearing of witnesses, etc., that’s not going to be good. (BTW q’s account is in contrast to the anti-conspiracy-theory myth of numerous well-informed and determined whistleblowers with unimpeachable credibility, comprehensive documentation and a ready audience).

But further, the comment indirectly illustrates the wider political issues within which openness/secrecy questions are embedded. Put yourself in a middle manager position is not a good prescription for an in-depth discussion of reform. Slee gestures at this kind of point, but doesn’t really nail it.

But the whole question of Wikileaks is a matter of non-ideal theory, so not reducible to the first order policy questions that Slee says it is determined by, nor even by matters of political organisation, unless perhaps some solutions to the democracy/delegation conundrum should emerge. In the meantime, Wikileaks is an extra-state entity, one element in an actual balance of political forces. It is not a species of open government. The ‘quis custodiet’ regress moves one step (a real step, as in step-change, though possibly still an infinitesimal one) closer to a terminus.

It’s important to recognize that the actual technology which enabled the three major wikileaks exposures was the usb flashdrive. Prior to large capacity flashdrives being available, no disaffected person with SIPRnet access would have been able to download such quantities of data and hand them to wikileaks. Classified computers don’t have writable optical media. All computers have usb ports and short of airport-style security at the entrance of every room with a classified computer in it, flashdrives cannot be kept away from them.

The internet merely (merely!) facilitated distribution of the data.

The projectile travelled at a uniform velocity throughout the time period but halfway through it was moving especially fast.

Classified computers definitely shouldn’t have optical drives which write, but it seems clear from Bradley Manning’s own description of the exfiltration that some of them do.

And, as he says at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/01/us-leaks-bradley-manning-logs, transfer from the unclassified to the classified world was often done by writing a CDR on an unclassified machine and reading it on the classified one (if the classified one had a CD writer then doctrine would have you destroy the CDR afterwards, but it is reasonably clear that doctrine is not being thoroughly followed), which meant you had lots of CDRs floating about in any environment with both networks present, and also that a CDR is presumed to contain unclassified data which is being infiltrated. I would not be surprised if this practice has been stopped and replaced by a less convenient one after the Manning incident.

then the U.S. is quite justified in prosecuting the leaker to the fullest extent of the law.

So: Likely damage to US foreign policy –> the US is quite justified in prosecuting the leaker to the fullest extent of the law? Setting aside the particulars with Wikileaks, this does not necessarily follow. At the very least, wouldn’t it be relevant what the foreign policy in question is? Or does “quite justified” merely translate to “legally authorized”?

The idea that Julian Assange should make every detail of himself public if he likes disclosure so much is ridiculous. Like most “hypocrisy” arguments, it ignores power differentials.

Slee’s point reminds me of one I used to make when polls seemed to show a depressing level of public support for torture: I always thought the support was somewhat soft, reflecting people’s willingness to tolerate torture if their government solemnly tells them it needs to be done, rather than as a general proposition.
On the leaks in general, how much of this stuff (entertainingly snarky gossip aside) did we need the leaks to learn? Insofar as it is substantive, rather than amusing, most of it seems to be readily inferrable from publicly-available information, and clear-headed analysis of the objective interests of the parties.

CJColucci @22, even if the facts revealed by these documents are 100% readily inferrable the additional evidence of these documents makes those inferences more difficult to ignore and dismiss.

Additionally, plenty of obfuscatory commentary and pseudo-analysis exists to confuse any issue and misdirect the public.

Consider the scaremongering about Nuclear weapons, mobile bio-labs, and balsa Anthraxdrones during the prelude to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The evidence pointed the opposite direction (that Iraq had minimal Nuclear, Biological, or Chemical weapon capabilities) and this was fairly well-known to anyone who cared to be informed, but the warmongers claimed to have secret evidence that showed the opposite.

If the actual evidence had been available to the public, then the public may not have supported the invasion as strongly.

The phenomenon of acquiescence to solemn government claims also rests on secrecy and concealing evidence from the public. Had the public had access to the facts of U.S. torture techniques and the actual selection criteria for torture victims then the public would not have supported it to the degree that it did.

Naturally the media is the weak link in turning evidence into a more-informed public. I don’t believe that the U.S. media wants to or is able to do that job.

(elm has got in first with some of this, but)

most of it seems to be readily inferrable from publicly-available information, and clear-headed analysis of the objective interests of the parties.

there are such things as evidence and deniability though aren’t there. Not that the most cast-iron physical and documentary evidence can’t be ignored, finessed or trumped by effective impunity given the right climate (and we are in that climate, no matter what the bulk of the population might jadedly and resignedly believe.)

It’s true that much of the stuff seems relatively uninteresting (o tempora, o mores), and what has been presented as newsworthy is largely but it’s worth considering the filters the stuff has been through:

‘intel’ gathering process (in some cases)

decision by intel agencies etc on what to tell diplomats

diplomats’ own ability to understand or recognise info and its implications

diplomats’ decisions on what is sayable/what their interlocutors want to hear

diplomatic language and habitual circumlocution

the leaker’s selection of cables (Brzezinski – as well as Akhmadi-Najad of course – has voiced some apparent suspicion about that – and it would be a standard espionage move to leak false info (and selective = false), either to promote false beliefs, or to muddy waters, or as a strawman operation (where the info is later proved false, discrediting the source). Alternatively large volumes of uninteresting info may be leaked to keeping WL busy, or to achieve a form of soft discrediting by leak-fatigue. I’m disinclined to believe that the leak was a plant on current evidence though.)

Wikileaks deselection of cables, if any – possibly in consultation with interested parties

And for most people: press decisions on what to publish – which is undoubtedly done in consultation with/obedience to other parties.

I have a colleague whose tenure case was published in full as a worked example in the Chronicle of Higher Education; all records are public, including recommendation letters. I wonder how many folks supporting the Wikileaks approach are bothered by this. That’s not a tiresome hypocricy charge, by the way – I’m just looking at this from a different angle, namely to what degree everything at all times should be in the open.

Quite apart from classification issues, I can think of quite a few reasons why you’d like to keep some things as confidential – for example, you might actually want diplomats to speak honestly about what allied nations are actually doing. I can also easily see things like this as vehicles for distributing manufactured items, or partial releases (as in the climate community emails) which provide a deliberately dishonest picture of what is being said.

geo,
What is the difference? AIUI, open government is founded (at least in part) on the idea that openness is the “natural” state of affairs or something like that, and that evil or ineffective actions actually derive from the corruption of the decision making process by secrecy. It isn’t at all obvious to me how “accountability” could have anything to do with it.[1] Where democracy comes in is in the egalitarianism of everybody’s having the same information. So, it might be, you can do your university job better if the profs and administrators you have to work with share what they know with you.

This is rough and could certainly be improved.

[1] (except at a group level, where certain people might be deemed “not accountable” and expected to share their information with a group not obliged to reciprocate–which could in turn, I suppose, be justified by a sense that the group in question has not shared adequately in the past)

I see wikileaks as a bit analagous to Napster before the shutdown, where the company was basically offering itself as a partner to the music industry. This is where Assange’s discussions of himself as the face of wikileaks comes into, about how someone must be there to take responsibility and etc. Its about branding wikileaks, and situating it within the info leaking space. Note that some of his ex employees are looking to establish alternative info services…competing brands, as it were. And all of these guys are offering themselves as a bulwark against chaos. After all, it would be easy enough to zip the cables and dump them on a server (a la the CRU Hack stuff) or through a p2p site, with nothing redacted. The technology has been around to do this for years. What wikileaks and rivals are offering are competing ethical protocols for whistle blowing; for example wikileaks has cooperated to some extent with the US gov as to the timing and perhaps the content of the leaks (if I am remembering correctly).

Christopher Hitchens on Wikileaks: http://www.slate.com/id/2276857/. Very sad.

Grotesque.

Jim@13

Airport security isn’t nearly good enough. There are flashdrives small enough to wrap up, swallow, and pass safely. (And memory cards even smaller that just need a cheap USB adapter.) Of course, there’s no reason that the machines with sensitive data needed to have open USB ports or have the keyboard and mouse other than locked into theirs securely.

I think one point needs to be made. Wikileaks was/is the messenger of the documents. All of this latest document dump has already been made to the various newspaper departments around the world. Wikileaks, though continuing to redact and edit pieces each day of their own holding, has already given all of the documents in unredacted form to the various press. It is they, for the most part, who are disseminating the redacted and edited versions.

ps: AIPAC has evidently done much of the same thing with US documents.

Tim W.:
I’ve seen the reference to “whistleblowing” before, but I’ve also seen Wikileaks described as political activity: “liberating” the information. A whistleblower doesn’t necessarily object to the existence per se of secrets. What you’re describing isn’t too different from what a journalist normally does, I think, in deciding what parts of what sources are saying deserves to be publicized, and in deciding whether or how to identify those sources. But it feels a little pranksterish to me, as if “the system” couldn’t withstand a little irreverence, or as if a lot of random activity of not obvious utility could shake its foundations.

I also worry that Assange may think he is really a player, and that the threats are idle or in some other way “not real.”

Oh hitchens, what a rambling ideologue you are.

Umberto Eco on Wikileaks, much more interesting than Hitchens.

Just my luck; the day work keeps me away from a computer from dawn to dusk is the day I get Timbered.

Not much to add to the interesting discussion, except maybe for geo @29: “I don’t know much about the Open Government movement, but surely the point is not primarily to improve “efficiency” or “access” but to increase accountability.” I am sure this is the case for some people in the movement, but for others the initiative is more of a commercial opportunity, to write and sell applications based on public data. The two agendas have come together around “openness”, but this seems pretty thin common ground to me.

This latest batch is a bit odd, because unlike previous stuff it’s not clear what the whistle is being blown on

Glad to see I’m not the only one who’s a bit mystified by the infodump. A month ago, if someone had plausibly offered me “psst, a quarter million classified embassy/U.S. diplomacy missives and documents on a USB drive for $100,” I’d have happily paid up. Now I’d hesitate. Folks who would like to see the State Dept hampered, etc, will have a hard time convincing me that this infodump will make a significant difference, except that it might make future (potentially more useful) leaks a bit harder to accomplish.

The things said e.g. about Iran would be so incredibly shocking… if we didn’t have high-level officials like Senators saying the same things. Didn’t McCain claim at least a couple times that the Middle East would support us attacking Iran, in the 2008 Presidential election? Maybe I’m misremembering, a quick search didn’t turn up quotes, but certainly such a sentiment would have fit right in with his belligerence. We have lots of dumb people working for the State Dept who believe the same dumb things that many of our dumber leaders publicly espouse. Shucks. I’d rather have some leaked information about the hiring and entrenchment of Republican loyalists in the Justice Department back in 2000-2008, please and thank you.

It’s too bad the tea parties are kind of in a lull right now, or I’d go ask them what they thought of all this — maybe I just need to try to see it through the eyes of someone who personally, passionately despises Hillary Clinton?

Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.

Although WikiLeaks has so far only published 291 of the 250,000 documents in its possession, and none of the reported 1400 Australian-related ones,

Ohhhh. Premature indeed. I thought it was just my own incompetence, that the only option to acquire the full set that I could find was that torrent with the secret ‘nuclear option’ password, and was unconsciously assuming the vast remainder must have been deemed entirely too trivial or uninteresting. Thanks, weaver. Glad to become aware that we don’t have the full extent of it yet. Crikey’s now bookmarked, and hope springs again.

And there you go. Assange arrested in London. The US State Department wouldn’t have anything to do with it, of course.

sorry about typos – fuck knows why I should expect anyone else to bother reading this stuff when even I get impatient with it, even while I’m still typing. Ho hum. Scroll on.

“I haven’t really seen an issue coming out of Wikileaks yet that wasn’t already under debate. ”

How about the Chagos Islanders? Earlier known as Diego Garcia? Islands in the Indian Ocean that are a UK dependancy, the inhabitants were forcibly removed in the 60s by the Wilson administration so the US could base bombers and comms there. For 40+ years the islanders and their descendants have been agitating to return; the US used the islands as a base for renditions until a short while ago. Now the plan is to turn the islands and surrounding waters into some giant nature reserve and in public the UK Foreign Office has been saying this will facilitate the islanders’ return.

The leaks show the UK Govt assuring the US that the islanders will never return.

Probably Alex H is on top of this, but it was something that I didn’t know and was , I confess, shocked by.
Who’d have thought the UK Govt would continuously engage in ethnic cleansing for two generations and conceal it?

The discussion of the irrelevance of Wikileaks reminds me of this column by Michael Kinsley.

Yes, yes, by 2005, everybody who was paying any attention understood that intelligence and facts were being fixed around the U.S. government’s policy of war with Iraq. But not everybody was paying attention, and there was no smoking gun.

And yes, Wikileaks won’t change anything if the public isn’t inspired to act, but I don’t think Assange can be blamed for that.

Information doesn’t always act instantly. When information has an effect, it’s often because of a constant drumbeat over a period of time.

Tom Slee and Geo: It’s within the realm of possibility that people developing applications are driven by idealism. It doesn’t make much sense that they would be less driven by idealism than people who make lots of FOIA requests or try to get newspapers to shame civil servants who aren’t as open as they should be in principle. Surely, they are more likely to have a moral sense than finance and marketing majors are?

And here’s Todd Gitlin in the New Republic: http://www.tnr.com/blog/foreign-policy/79678/data-isnt-everything-wikileaks-julian-assange-daniel-ellsberg?utm_source=ESP+Integrated+List&utm_campaign=f5d55809dc-TNR_Daily_120710&utm_medium=email. Not awful, but fairly depressing.

Not awful, but fairly depressing

I think the visible failure to even google “ellsberg assange” and look at the top two results pushes it over the edge into “awful” actually.

bianca – I think Government 2.0 is an O’Reilly branding of Open Government (or “Government as Platform”) and it’s been quite successful. Microsoft uses the phrases interchangeably (http://www.microsoft.com/industry/government/guides/OpenGovernment/default.aspx), and the promotion for another O’Reilly event called the Gov 2.0 conference says “At this Gov 2.0 Online Conference, you’ll hear about open government efforts in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Israel” so some at least treat the two phrases as synonyms. Which may be part of the commercial/civil liberties blurring exercise I mentioned.

Anyway, my comment @ 30 was based on Tom Slee’s post, which looks now like it describes what Open Government isn’t succeeding in being, less than what at least some of OG’s actual proponents are doing, though I haven’t read all of the links.

One thing this thing whatever it is or becomes has already accomplished is that from here on out none of those mega-wonk public servant mutants will ever be able to send anything digital anywhere to anyone with the self-confidence of private secure transmission they heretofore obviously thought they enjoyed.
IT security consultant-ninja assurances that “This time it really really is secure!” to the nonce.