Gideon Rachman wrote a somewhat arch “article”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/61f8fab0-06f3-11e0-8c29-00144feabdc0,s01=1.html#axzz182N9peXP last week, suggesting that the US should give Julian Assange a medal for “inadvertently debunking decades-old conspiracy theories about its foreign policy.” I wasn’t really convinced by his argument (I am far from sure that he was fully convinced himself), but “this Bloomberg piece”:http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-22/wikileaks-joins-forces-with-billionaire-lebedev-gorbachev.html perhaps suggests a more convincing justification.
bq. Novaya Gazeta, the Moscow newspaper controlled by former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and billionaire Alexander Lebedev, said it agreed to join forces with WikiLeaks to expose corruption in Russia.
bq. Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, which publishes secret government and corporate documents online, has materials specifically about Russia that haven’t been published yet and Novaya Gazeta will help make them public, the newspaper said on its website today. “Assange said that Russians will soon find out a lot about their country and he wasn’t bluffing,” Novaya Gazeta said. “Our collaboration will expose corruption at the top tiers of political power. No one is protected from the truth.”
I’ve been reading Evgeny Morozov’s “forthcoming book”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1586488740?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1586488740 on how the Internet _doesn’t_ release magically sparkling freedom-and-democracy ponies that transform autocracies into thriving civil societies etc, which has an interesting discussion of Russia. As Morozov notes, there is relatively little active censorship of the Internet in Russia. Instead, authorities rely on friendly websites that they can rely on to pump out useful disinformation. They can also lean on Russian’s widespread (and partially justified – if I had been the victim of Sachs, Shleifer & co’s experiments in creating a market in a vacuum, I would not have warm fuzzy feelings myself) distrust of information and policy prescriptions from the West, to prevent alternative accounts from leaking through from international media. The result is a country where the government is usually able to shape public debate with a high degree of success. Alternative viewpoints are not so much censored as shouted down.
But Wikileaks – precisely because the US government hates it so vociferously – arguably has much better street-cred than any number of Western-funded civil society grouplets. It doesn’t look like anyone’s idea of a US front group . The plausible result is that Russians may be more inclined to trust it than foreign funded media, or, perhaps, domestic news sources which are too obviously biased in favor of the government.
None of which is to say that such trust would be entirely justified if it is given. Precisely because Wikileaks seems independent, it is likely to present irresistible temptations to e.g. intelligence agencies as a laundry-shop for information and disinformation. Nor, for that matter, is Lebedev devoid of political self-interest. But if Wikileaks succeeded in either becoming a major news source in itself, or of transferring some of its legitimacy to news sources which relied on information from it, it would help inject a little diversity into Russian public debate. Not that the US government should be giving it medals still – this would obviously be self-defeating. But to the extent that the US wants to see some opening up of kleptocracies like Russia, it might, in the long run, tacitly end up preferring a world with Wikileaks to one without it.
{ 110 comments }
Nils 12.22.10 at 8:30 pm
Would that Wikileaks didn’t “look like anyone’s idea of a US front group.”
Alas, a counterpoint: http://www.daily.pk/?p=19278
Daragh McDowell 12.22.10 at 8:37 pm
I highly doubt this. Given that a conservative estimate of Russians with little to no knowledge of the intricacies of Wikileaks would run from around 80%+ simply pointing out that Assange is Australian and that WL’s servers are in Sweden, an historic enemy that retained friendly relations with NATO during the Cold War would be enough to forment distrust. Which is probably what the Kremlin and Duma will do. Additionally, the Russians could just glom onto the ‘terrorist’ label the US has started applying to Assange, which resonates with post-Beslan Russia just as well as with post-9/11 America.
There’s also the fact that Novaya Gazeta’s constituency, while important, is small and already pro-opposition. Most Russians, like most people all over the world, get their main dose of news from the TV evening newscast, which is overwhelmingly pro-government and won’t be repeating NG’s ‘scoops.’
Now a couple of people will tag me for hypocrisy because I was decrying WL for not turning its guns on Russia earlier. To which I should say I definitely welcome this development, and think that in time it can provide real change I still have questions about the formation of its media strategy that this new opening just reinforces. Providing Novaya Gazeta with (further) evidence to publish (further) articles demonstrating that Russia’s leaders are corrupt is likely to change no minds, except those in the Kremlin that have tolerated NG up until now.
engels 12.22.10 at 8:56 pm
But Wikileaks – precisely because the US government hates it so vociferously – arguably has much better street-cred than any number of Western-funded civil society grouplets. It doesn’t look like anyone’s idea of a US front group .
There was a US academic (can’t remember his name or institution) interviewed on Al Jazeera who suggested that Wikileaks may have the support of the US government and claimed that a remarkable amount of the material it released is embarassing to other states, not to the US. He also suggested that Assange may have CIA links. I’m not endorsing this — I don’t know the first thing about it — but I’d be interested if anyone here does, or knows who I was listening to. (I’ve never seen it mentioned here, which is odd because the comments section of this site doesn’t usually shy away from conspiracy theories of all kinds, and ‘false flag’ is usually a popular permutation…)
Hidari 12.22.10 at 9:14 pm
#3 There’s a conspiracy theory (and, when one goes into the details, it’s obvious that that’s what it is) that Assange has somehow been ‘nobbled’ by Israel, based on the (unarguable) fact that few of the Wikileaks (so far) have embarassed Israel. So that might be related to the fact that this academic was on Al-Jazeera.
In any case, without wanting to stress the ‘stones-glass houses’ point, when Henry writes:
‘there is relatively little active censorship of the Internet in Russia. Instead, authorities rely on friendly websites that they can rely on to pump out useful disinformation. They can also lean on Russia’s widespread distrust of information and policy prescriptions from the West, to prevent alternative accounts from leaking through from international media. The result is a country where the government is usually able to shape public debate with a high degree of success. Alternative viewpoints are not so much censored as shouted down.’
I’m sorry but this this not precisely the situation in the ‘West’? With the ‘East’ substituted for the word ‘West’ in the 2nd sentence? Of course, allegations that Russia is in some fundamental sense less corrupt than, say, the US, would have to be based on the idea that the oligarchs’ control of the Duma is in some fundamental sense different from US corporate control of the American system, which is, at least, a debatable point.
Incidentally, what the US objects to about Russia is not that it is corrupt, it is that is corrupt in such a way that the US cannot easily manipulate it in favour of US interests.
engels 12.22.10 at 9:30 pm
There’s a conspiracy theory (and, when one goes into the details, it’s obvious that that’s what it is) that Assange has somehow been ‘nobbled’ by Israel … So that might be related to the fact that this academic was on Al-Jazeera.
Just to be clear this didn’t appear to have anything to do with Israel. (I’m not really sure why you think it should, just because it was on Al Jazeera.)
Omega Centauri 12.22.10 at 10:07 pm
Hidari: “would have to be based on the idea that the oligarchs’ control of the Duma is in some fundamental sense different from US corporate control of the American system, which is, at least, a debatable point.”
While both sets of Oligarchs have political influence, and large media disinformation empires, and can largely rely on full spectrum dominance to make the opposition voices irrelevant, there is a fundamental difference. So far at least western journalists are not in danger of being taken out by hit men, whereas in Russia (and sometimes extra-territorially as well) that isn’t uncommon.
Daragh McDowell 12.22.10 at 10:14 pm
@Omega Centauri
Very true. But you might also note that one of the few beneficial aspects of Putin’s rule was his reassertion of state power over the original classic oligarchy rather than subservience to it, which has undoubtedly led to significant rises in the living standard of ordinary Russians. Such an act of defiance by the US Government to its corporate overlords would be virtually unthinkable.
Myles SG 12.22.10 at 11:19 pm
Very true. But you might also note that one of the few beneficial aspects of Putin’s rule was his reassertion of state power over the original classic oligarchy rather than subservience to it, which has undoubtedly led to significant rises in the living standard of ordinary Russians.
And the long-term inability to have any kind of permanent constitutional stability.
Thought experiment: Putin (more broadly, the Russian state) as King John, and the oligarchs as the rebelling English nobles.
Now, suppose that King Putin (er, John) actually won against the English oligarchs (er, barons), and wasn’t forced to grant the Magna Carta.
Which is exactly what happened.
Myles SG 12.22.10 at 11:23 pm
And I think Gideon Rachman does make a reasonable point. There’s a tendency in the third world to think of U.S. diplomacy as sort of run by evil geniuses. Alas it is not run by geniuses of any kind, but mediocre men.
The error, I think, is taking the deviousness of French diplomacy and multiplying the deviousness by three or five, and presuming the resulting level of deviousness to be U.S. diplomacy. In fact, of course, U.S. diplomacy is not anywhere near as Machiavellian as the French one.
Hidari 12.22.10 at 11:31 pm
‘So far at least western journalists are not in danger of being taken out by hit men, whereas in Russia (and sometimes extra-territorially as well) that isn’t uncommon.’
True, but the US does assassinate journalists.
engels 12.22.10 at 11:38 pm
Asked whether he considered Al-Jazeera a civilian target, Blunkett replied, “Well, I don’t think that there are targets in a war that you can rule out because you don’t actually have military personnel inside them if they are attempting to win a propaganda battle on behalf of your enemy. […] Just two weeks after the April 8, 2003, diary entry, a US missile hit an electricity generator at Al-Jazeera’s office in Baghdad. Reporter Tareq Ayyoub was killed and another staff member wounded.
Matt 12.22.10 at 11:48 pm
Daragh- the improved living standards in Russia are almost entirely due to improvements in oil prices during Putin’s period of control, not to anything important he’s done. The worst period of wild lawlessness ended before he come to power, for example. In turn, very little of the profit gained by the state from oil has gone to improvements there, while Putin has become wildly rich himself.
And, these days, there’s usually no need to kill reporters. Witness the recent case where a reporter who asked Putin about his rumored affairs, only to have the newspaper she worked for shut down within days. There are many problems with journalism in the US, (and the illegal targeting of foreign journalists in wars by the US is of course vile) but the comparisons are deeply implausible. (Despite what our friend Hidari/abb1 thinks.)
Daragh McDowell 12.22.10 at 11:49 pm
@Myles SG
That was more of a tongue in cheek comment on my part, but your response does raise an interesting point. There is a Russian Magna Carta between the elite, if an informal and unwritten one – a game is being played and the players know broadly what the rules are even if they aren’t entirely set in stone and written down. There’s a tendendcy among a lot of westerners to assume a l’etat c’est Putin model of Russian politics that just isn’t the case (nor for that matter is it the case in most authoritarian regimes.) The problem is that much of the broader public is kept in the dark as to the identities and interests of a lot of the players (such as Igor Sechin who is arguably as powerful as Putin while being virtually unknown outside of specialist circles) or the discrete and particular ’rounds’ of the game. Conflicts only come into the open when they become unusually intense, and otherwise remain part of the bulldog fight under the carpet. My interest in this case may be parochial, but I tend to think Assange and WL could do more lasting good by highlighting specific intra-elite conflicts and how they’ve played out other than just pointing out that the state is corrupt, which is hardly news.
Having said that I totally agree with your broad point (as I read it) that the Putin regime has failed to implement a law-based state which is a massive demerit no matter how well the proceeds of economic growth have been distributed.
Matt 12.22.10 at 11:55 pm
the Putin regime has failed to implement a law-based state
This seems to imply that they wanted to do so and were unable, but I don’t think there’s any evidence for that. (You’re right, though, to suggest that there’s significant evidence to suggest that there are other power-bases inside Russia other than Putin, but none of them are very attractive. It was also fairly clear that Medvedev was picked precisely because he didn’t have an independent power-base.)
Daragh McDowell 12.22.10 at 11:57 pm
@Matt – I’m in broad agreement with your second paragraph, but not your first. Say what you will, Putin has significantly increased the Russian state’s capacity and decreased the degree to which it is merely a plaything of ‘oligarchs’ and business interests. The increase in oil prices has been a significant factor in the increase in living standards, but so has the creation of a state apparatus that can actually force energy companies to pay taxes (if in a less formal and predictable manner than we would expect in the West) in order to distribute those revenues. I’m also entirely unconvinced about the allegations that Putin has $42Billion squirrelled away in a Swiss bank account. Its entirely possible hes made some money through corruption, but funnily enough the old Russian spooks do have a code and power rather than cash seems to be Putin’s driving ethos.
Matt 12.23.10 at 12:00 am
It’s not the swiss bank accounts where Putin has his money- it’s mobile phone companies. (I always forget which one he’s the big share-holder in- not B-Line, but one of the other ones.) (And of course Sechin, who you mention above, is an oligarch now, as are the other siloviki- they control the oil, after all.) And that money is going somewhere, and it’s not to, say, the schools, or the roads, or things like that. They are all still terrible, and getting worse.
Daragh McDowell 12.23.10 at 12:00 am
@Matt 14 (with apologies to Henry for clogging the thread.) If it appeared that I was implying desire than my apologies. I’d say Putin wanted something that he would regard as a ‘law-based’ state but not what we would recognise as one (i.e. his ‘dictatorship of law’ speech.)
And as for power bases, I think you’ll find that there are several powerful factions amongst which Putin largely plays a balancer/overlord role rather than being a direct member. Medvedev was picked because he has strong support in the Liberal and Technocrat clans while being tolerable to the Siloviki because they don’t find their external opponents threatening. And so far he’s exceeded expectations in his influence.
Hidari 12.23.10 at 12:14 am
‘(Despite what our friend Hidari/abb1 thinks.)’
Oh puh-leez.
Henry 12.23.10 at 12:42 am
Please, no more. Hidari is quite easily distinguishable from abb1 – I do _not_ want to see this thread descend into another exchange of personal abuse.
Mobile Maven 12.23.10 at 12:42 am
The firm you’re thinking of is Altimo, a subsidiary of Mikhail Fridman’s Alfa Group.
Matt 12.23.10 at 12:50 am
Alright- I might be mis-remembering who it was that Lemuel gave very good reason to believe to actually be abb1. Simply, Hidari’s views here are largely the same ones ‘ol abb1 use to present over and over. (There’s probably enough about Putin here, too. I should thank Daragh for his very useful comments, even when I disagree in part with them. They, at least, are informed and helpful.)
Myles SG 12.23.10 at 1:09 am
Say what you will, Putin has significantly increased the Russian state’s capacity and decreased the degree to which it is merely a plaything of ‘oligarchs’ and business interests. The increase in oil prices has been a significant factor in the increase in living standards, but so has the creation of a state apparatus that can actually force energy companies to pay taxes (if in a less formal and predictable manner than we would expect in the West) in order to distribute those revenues
I think what you are saying is that with Putin, Russia had become a functioning oligarchy rather than a dysfunctional and hemorrhaging one. As opposed to Louis-Putin XIV de Bourbon-KGB vs. the oligarchy.
Which might be a good point. I don’t know enough to judge. I don’t even know who Sechin is. I personally was fascinated, and repulsed, by what could only have been described as the exceedingly vigorous prosecution (or persecution) of Khodorkovsky, which I found really, really creepy. Of course, K. isn’t the Winnie the Pooh either, but the way he went down was rather brutal and primitive.
(i.e. his ‘dictatorship of law’ speech.)
This sounds remarkably like the arbitrary and capricious Legalism of the Qin Dynasty.
Henry 12.23.10 at 1:11 am
Matt – we usually can figure out sockpuppets from IP addresses and I am quite certain that Hidari and abb1 are different people (they also seem to me to have quite different styles of engaging with others, despite some shared political positions). My personal approach to moderating threads – other CTers have greater or lesser levels of tolerance – is to try to accommodate a very wide range of views as long as people are not obviously trolling are being dishonest, while sometimes jumping into comment threads if I feel the need to get people to calm down, or if (sometimes to my discredit) someone says something that particularly annoys me. I try not to moderate based on people’s political views except when these views seem to me to be completely disconnected from reality, or when there is a persistent pattern of dragging comment threads down. It does not seem to me that Hidari does that in the same ways as abb1 (who I do not think was a troll – but surely had a very specific idea of what debates on CT should be about, and an insistence in dragging them in his preferred direction) used to. And in fairness to abb1, he has not to my knowledge ever sought to sneak around the ban under a pseudonym in the way that some other banned commenters (Dan Simon, Seth Edenbaum) did.
bianca steele 12.23.10 at 2:10 am
None of my business but it seems about as likely that Hidari is abb1 as that Assange is working for the CIA.
Straightwood 12.23.10 at 3:00 am
How grateful I am that the US is not a kleptocracy! Men like Dick Cheney and Angelo Mozillo are our bulwark against crooked cronyism. Corporations like Halliburton and Xe (Blackwater) “win” huge, no-bid contracts because of their splendid efficiency and impeccable honesty, unlike the sinister enterprises of Putin’s Russia. We should never forget the crucial difference between the US and Russia. In Russia, the government controls the gangsters, but in American the finest flowers of our business meritocracy control the government.
peter ramus 12.23.10 at 4:07 am
Here’s Bruce Sterling’s take on Manning, Assange, geeks and diplomats.
Watson Ladd 12.23.10 at 4:34 am
Last time I checked the US didn’t kill journalists it didn’t like by hiring thugs to go beat them to death. Let’s be clear: Putin murdered his own civilians, pinned it on Chechnya, sent in troops to execute people and make mincemeat of the bodies with high explosives without judicial scrutiny. He also has a continuing chemical weapons program that has produced a new class of weaponized opiates. This is all pretty well documented. here, here
The Creator 12.23.10 at 6:28 am
Hold on a moment, Comrade Ladd.
It has already been pointed out that the US murders journalists with artillery fire, missiles and tank guns rather than with service pistols and clubs. To my mind this is not a massively valid distinction.
The United States has certainly murdered its own civilians on occasion.
The United States has certainly sent troops into areas of its territory which attempted secession and killed large numbers of people. (Not to mention its murderous unprovoked aggressions against other countries.)
The United States certainly has a large and ongoing chemical weapons programme.
What you appear to be saying is “Death to Vladimir Putin — he is almost as bad as Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, William Jefferson Clinton and George W Bush!”
I do not think that was quite what you meant to say . . .
Tim Worstall 12.23.10 at 11:36 am
“So far at least western journalists are not in danger of being taken out by hit men, whereas in Russia (and sometimes extra-territorially as well) that isn’t uncommon.”
Quite. And I write as someone who has been working in/with Russia for near 20 years now.
And comparisons of US corruption with Russian strike me as risible (again, I also work in/with American companies). Yes, it’s true, if you try to attach yourself to the Federal Government teat (say, research contracts, business grants) you’re going to a lot better by contributing to the right Congressman’s re-election campaign. But in the Russian business world your very first question before doing anything at all is, “OK, who do I have to pay off?”. That corruption in the US (or the UK for that matter) exists I agree, for some value of the word “corruption”. But it exists in a specific sector, it isn’t all pervasive as it is in some other places.
This is more than just a marginal difference. It’s a fundamental difference at least to me working in several of these different economies. The ability to decide whether to enter that bribe taking sector or not (we don’t) is different from having to be bribing to be in the country at all (yes, of course we have in Russia in the past).
Barry 12.23.10 at 1:31 pm
peter ramus 12.23.10 at 4:07 am
“Here’s Bruce Sterling’s take on Manning, Assange, geeks and diplomats”
I’d correct that to “Here’s Bruce Sterling’s increbidly bad, rambling and ignorant take on Manning, Assange, geeks and diplomats”.
Brautigan 12.23.10 at 2:28 pm
As Morozov notes, there is relatively little active censorship of the Internet in Russia. Instead, authorities rely on friendly websites that they can rely on to pump out useful disinformation. They can also lean on Russian’s widespread (and partially justified – if I had been the victim of Sachs, Shleifer & co’s experiments in creating a market in a vacuum, I would not have warm fuzzy feelings myself) distrust of information and policy prescriptions from the West, to prevent alternative accounts from leaking through from international media. The result is a country where the government is usually able to shape public debate with a high degree of success. Alternative viewpoints are not so much censored as shouted down.
That is awful. Thank God I live the U.S. where we have free speech and democracy and such.
Straightwood 12.23.10 at 2:39 pm
That corruption in the US (or the UK for that matter) exists I agree, for some value of the word “corruptionâ€. But it exists in a specific sector, it isn’t all pervasive as it is in some other places.
Corruption is indeed “all pervasive” in the US, but it is sophisticated and refined. The American people demand a high degree of fit and finish in the misdeeds of corporations and political leaders. There must always be a plausible cover story and a minimum of mess. Professor Juan Cole was denied an appointment at Yale University because the corrupt administration of Yale yielded to pressure from powerful pro-Israel alumni. Wikileaks funding was cut off by Mastercard without any legal basis because of pressure from the government. Goldman Sachs received vast sums from the US Treasury to make good risky bets that failed because of many “friends” in powerful government positions. In each case, no beatings or assassinations were required.
It is a strange thing to make the definition of corruption a stylistic matter, dependent on the quantity of blood and pain involved. This makes beating a man while robbing him of $100 dollars a deeply corrupt act, while stealing $1 billion from the taxpayers without touching a hair on anyone’s head is considered a normal use of discreet influence.
Modern American corruption is the supreme triumph of stealth technology. Never has so much been stolen from so many by so few, with so little regard for justice.
bianca steele 12.23.10 at 3:19 pm
Doing things according to rules that you don’t like or are immoral tends not to be called corruption, just like requiring licenses and fees tends not to be called corruption. A certain amount of complaints about “government restrictions on activity” seems to come from people who are pretty sure that if they could rely on personal connections, they would be the people who’d get privileges, and complaints about “corruption” from people who liked it better when they could just pay off the local mob boss aren’t especially attractive.
No doubt doing things according to rules can also become “corrupt,” and it does seem reasonable that reinserting “the personal touch” and things along that line could prevent bureaucracies from doing so.
bianca steele 12.23.10 at 3:21 pm
Which has nothing to do with the OP but is just a response to the previous commenter’s kind of odd leftish defense of a very slightly tweaked version of Tea Partyism.
Straightwood 12.23.10 at 3:34 pm
The biggest problem with widespread corruption in the modern world is systemic instability. Since each corrupt player is operating with a shortsighted and primitive model of self-interest, the collective consequences of a system built on deceit and bad faith are unheeded and unknown until some massive blowout ensues. In the “advanced” economies of the world, these crises are growing geometrically larger with each cycle of collapse. The destructive consequences of the latest US financial debacle are ten times greater than the damage caused by the precursor corruption-induced disaster, the S&L crisis.
We are approaching a threshold of damage that will necessitate survival-motivated reform. Probably the next collapse will cross this threshold. We will then likely see a major societal attitude adjustment toward institutional corruption.
Watson Ladd 12.23.10 at 4:25 pm
Wait, when has the US target a journalist with artillery fire? When you want to kill a hundred people, call in an airstrike. One person, call in an assassin.
As for succession I am not saying that the Chechnians did not have the right to succeed. I am rather saying that the persecution of the war is excessively bloody. Small fries to be sure, but the US did not murder civilians on either side in the civil war, and indeed did not even try the traitors who it defeated, men who waged war in defense of the indefensible. Chemical weapons research is probably not going on in the United States. I haven’t seen any leaks about it, while Russia used a weaponized opiate on civilians in a theater with blatant disregard for human life.
As for the irrelevancy of this debate to the main topic, I feel that we cannot have a discussion about the decline of liberal values such as governmental transparency while maintaining that the US and Russia use the same methods to surpress speech.
Chris E 12.23.10 at 4:26 pm
“Which has nothing to do with the OP but is just a response to the previous commenter’s kind of odd leftish defense of a very slightly tweaked version of Tea Partyism.”
This sounds like a very strange comment to make – there is a superficial similiarity based on some of their targets.
“No doubt doing things according to rules can also become “corrupt,—
Unless you consider the system as a whole – i.e who writes the rules – then this is not a very useful measure.
engels 12.23.10 at 4:27 pm
When you want to kill a hundred people, call in an airstrike. One person, call in an assassin.
What if you want to kill one person (or shut down a TV station, say) but you don’t really give a shit if a bunch of other people get killed in the process?
Tim Wilkinson 12.23.10 at 4:37 pm
RE Wikileaks nobbled – as a long-time Wikileaks-watcher (before it was cool, which means it is now the case that it was then super-cool, etc), I personally don’t find it very plausible that it is controlled by, still less set up by, any other clandestine agency, fwiw.
In addition, since it publishes documents rather than unattributed testimony, its output is to a large degree open to being contested and cross-checked. Most of its output has been in the form of official documents the authenticity of which is not contested, even though in many cases you might expect it to be were there much hope of doing so successfully. Of course authentic doesn’t mean veracious and critical faculties need to be applied.
But the most recent, highly miscellaneous, dump, is rather different from previous whistleblowings, and could indeed have been planted. It might be quite difficult for Wikileaks to check that they hadn’t been passed a biased and censored sample of cables. One thing I have noticed is that there seems to have been relatively little talk about searching for the leaker. So far as I can see, it seems to be assumed, but not emphasised still less substantiated, that Manning was responsible.
Tim Wilkinson 12.23.10 at 4:42 pm
“So far at least western journalists are not in danger of being taken out by hit men, whereas in Russia (and sometimes extra-territorially as well) that isn’t uncommon.â€
There is no doubt a difference. As an aside, I note the usually outspoken and ‘conspiracy-minded’ Polish press have seemed rather cowed (observable reticent anyway, I’m told by Polish contacts) in their discussion of the recent event in which half the government were killed in a Russian-maintained plane in a fairly remote area of Russia, the investigation being taken over personally by Putin. As well as suggesting that the press actually take the possibility of a silent coup very seriously, rather than not seriously, because they are normally not shy about speculating about the possibilities (this comes under the ‘editing phase’ in prospect theory, I believe), this indirectly highlights another difference.
The BBC etc are fond of saying that Russians and Poles love conspiracy theories (which in one way or another actually means unfounded or unjustified CTs), though also of pointing out that there is a lot of conspiratorial stuff going on over there. As well as the obvious possibility that a greater prevalence of conspiratorial activity leads to a higher level of conspiracy theorising (that’s with and without pejorative connotations), there’s also the possibility that a once conspiracy-orientated discourse rises above a certain threshhold of currency, there us far less motivation to be careful in maintaining plasuble deniability, firstly because there is no critical mass of public trust to be maintained, and secondly because the standard of plausibility is so high that meeting it becomes much more costly.
So there may be quite a complex set of causal relations going on, and if the above is in the right lines, one implication is that the apparently much lower incidence of killings in the US or UK may be in some (smallish) part due to greater effort towards and greater success in keeping such things hidden. Which, in the context of initial conditions, in turn makes them easier to hide because the level of suspicion among the public (and of acknowledged suspicion among the media and other opinion formers) is decreased when apparent past incidence of foul play is lower.
But as I think others have intimated, if as is very plausible the rate of political violence against the press is lower, one important reason may be far better-developed, well-established methods of social control of the press, which largely forestall any need for openly brutal retaliation and suppression.
Which is not to say that people don’t get bumped off, it’s just that if they were, it would tend to be done in traffic ‘accidents’ and the various other ways that a halfway competent dirty tricks agency kills people when they don’t actually want to draw attention to it.
There are at least two possible good reasons, usually interrelated, for killing journos – one is to silence them or halt their investigation, the other is to send a warning to others. Where overstepping by investigative journos is generally under control, the latter motive – which requires at least that deniability not be too plausible – is likely to be less prevalent, thus open killings are less likely to be carried out.
And there is a dogwhistling component – deaths which do not appear suspicious to the casual observer/typical journalist may well be heard and understood, or at least strongly suspected which in deterrence terms is nearly as good, by those nearer to events, such as close colleagues.
Straightwood 12.23.10 at 4:46 pm
There seems to be a fundamental confusion between methods and results in this discussion. It is irrelevant whether a ballpoint pen or a dagger is used to secure a corrupt result if the damage to society is the same. In America we have abundant evidence of bribed politicians, defrauded investors, and illegal wars, but some argue that we are less corrupt than crude dictatorships because our corruption is accomplished by more elegant methods. This is profoundly mistaken. It is the resultant damage to society that is the true measure of corruption, not the method by which corruption is accomplished.
I repeat myself 12.23.10 at 4:47 pm
“Eminence, the punishment you have decreed will cause much
misery to this scum, yet it will last only a short time, then
release him to a land beyond the sufferings of the human body.
Why not mellow him in one of the subterranean vaults for a few
days, then send him to life labor in one of your buried mines.
To one such as he, a life spent in the confinement of the stygian
pits will be an infinitely more appropiate and lasting torture.”
The noble cupped his drooping double chin in the folds of
his briming palm, meditating for a moment upon the rationality of
the councilor’s word’s, then raised his shaggy brown eyebrows and
turned toward the advisor, eyes aglow.
Kaveh 12.23.10 at 4:56 pm
@30 I have to agree, except I thought Bruce Sterling’s take was very well-written–an excellent piece of fiction. If he’s really a kindred spirit with the Dwight Schrute-like Assange he depicts here then he probably has the same problematic love-hate relationship with authority. There is a part of him that wants power to exist only in absolutely powerful, highly rationalized forms, like the state, or else to not exist at all. He can’t conceive of anything good coming out of the crowd, because “people are stupid”. The problem with this view is that in the past the world has functioned with much more porous borders and less effective states (or at least without superpowers), relying more on social control through norms and peer pressure, and it can probably manage to function that way again, at least for a time, until the emergent world culture produces something more stable.
Kaveh 12.23.10 at 5:07 pm
@36 Wait, when has the US target a journalist with artillery fire? When you want to kill a hundred people, call in an airstrike. One person, call in an assassin.
They blew up an al-Jazeera office in Iraq with a missile. And that was not even the only case of al-Jazeera personnel being hit by US fire. I think a lot of people don’t think of that as bearing on the degree of press freedom in the US, because al-Jazeera is an Arab network, so “our” press freedom is still not compromised. Of course, Iraq was already under US occupation at the time. First they came for the communists and all that…
Straightwood 12.23.10 at 5:14 pm
until the emergent world culture produces something more stable
The nation states will do anything to prevent supra-national political entities from emerging. Global laws governing climate change, pollution, human rights, labor practices, and product safety would shut down countless local power bases and corruption franchises. That is why the political evolution of the Internet will be bitterly contested, and why anyone who uses Internet tools to embarrass a nation state will be branded a terrorist.
Myles SG 12.23.10 at 6:25 pm
Corporations like Halliburton and Xe (Blackwater) “win†huge, no-bid contracts because of their splendid efficiency and impeccable honesty, unlike the sinister enterprises of Putin’s Russia.
I think it’s time for a update/corollary of Godwin’s Law, as I think the above is actually rather disturbingly a common occurrence. That is:
IF you have to claim moral equivalency between the U.S. and various miserable regimes such as Russia (and North Korea, Syria, Libya, Cuba, etc.) on the basis of Halliburton, then you are not arguing sincerely with a fair mind, but are in fact dissimulating, and risibly.
Myles SG 12.23.10 at 6:27 pm
The nation states will do anything to prevent supra-national political entities from emerging. Global laws governing climate change, pollution, human rights, labor practices, and product safety would shut down countless local power bases and corruption franchises.
The logical consequence of global free trade, as a result of global governance, which I am guessing you must detest horribly, escapes you. That is, unless you wish for a global feudal system in which you have global governance but not the global movement of peoples and goods and money.
bianca steele 12.23.10 at 6:58 pm
@Straightwood
I would want to distinguish between “corruption” in the sense of “no longer doing your job, engaging instead in bribes, rent-seeking, nepotism, and cronyism,” and in the sense of “no longer knowing what your job was supposed to be in the first place.” But it sounds like your objection to Juan Cole’s not being hired is that the “elite” university administration listened to other members of the “elite,” not that there is prejudice against Juan Cole‘s beliefs.
Whether or not Mastercard was representing themselves truthfully or not, saying someone is “corrupt” because they are following the law (especially federal law) is skating on thin ice, not very close to the meaning of the word–and is basically Tea Partyism.
Natilo Paennim 12.23.10 at 7:02 pm
I’m not a Russian scholar, but I know a little bit, enough that it seems to me that the main difference between Russian and US corruption is the levels at which they play out. In Russia, now as before, you need to make sure every petty bureaucrat is greased. In the US, the petty bureaucrats are just bypassed by people with money who want to get things done. Why dole out a whole bunch of little gifts to people with marginal amounts of power when you can simply reward a few of the higher-ups and get everything pushed through faster and more efficiently? Nobody in their right mind would walk into a US DMV and try to bribe the counter worker to expedite their driver’s license renewal. But if you want to get a new condo complex built, it’s not hard to figure out just what you’ll have to do to make the zoning board go along with your plans.
And the same goes for journalism. Only a crazy person would take out a hit on a prominent US journalist who was investigating something too thoroughly. It would look bad and make the situation worse for the target of the investigation. Instead, if you’re rich enough, you simply create a foundation or a think tank that funds the opposite opinion, and the editors and news directors are forced to give your perspective equal time.
The overriding principle of corruption in the US is “Why rent when you can own?”
Straightwood 12.23.10 at 7:10 pm
moral equivalency between the U.S. and various miserable regimes
I am not attempting to claim “moral equivalence.” What I am asserting is that there is massive corruption in the US government/corpocracy that rivals that of Russia in economic terms. Halliburton is hardly unique. There are literally hundreds of “security” contractor firms delivering questionable services arranged under dubious circumstances as part of the anti-terrorism hysteria bonanza. While it is indisputable that Americans live more comfortably than Russians and that history has been far kinder to America, that does not alter the sad spectacle of the normalized corruption that pervades US society.
Straightwood 12.23.10 at 7:14 pm
Whether or not Mastercard was representing themselves truthfully or not, saying someone is “corrupt†because they are following the law (especially federal law) is skating on thin ice, not very close to the meaning of the word—and is basically Tea Partyism.
And just what would that Federal law be that Mastercard is following in cutting off Wikileaks? Would it be the same Federal law that would require them to cut off payments to the New York Times?
Tim Wilkinson 12.23.10 at 7:15 pm
US forces also have a long record of ‘rescuing’ reporters who go off-piste and get captured – by mounting a frontal military assault on the place they are held, with the predictable consequence that they end up dead along with everyone else.
The initial reports always claim with suspicious promptness and certitude that the captors (whose motovations, demands, etc, are never explored) chose that moment to kill their hostages. Suspicious to me anyway; it seems to be accepted without question every time by the press and politicians. The fact that US troops did the killing is trickled out later.
The lesson is clear: if you are not satisfied with being ’embedded’, but instead decide to try and find out what is actually going on, then you had better fear being captured, since in that case it’s not so much that you are on your own as that your demise will actually be brought about (hastened or authored) by US forces. That’s if they don’t just shoot you (accidentally, recklessly, randomly, intentionally – you know the risks) and cut out the middleman.
bianca steele 12.23.10 at 7:33 pm
Straightwood@50:
I think it was pretty well established on the other thread that no one is under an obligation to do business with Wikileaks or with anyone else, so deciding not to do business with them doesn’t seem to be corruption all by itself. I think if they decided not to do business with someone you yourself dislike, you wouldn’t call that corruption either. You said above that your issue is that they made their decision “under pressure from the federal government,” so it seems like doing what the federal government wants is what you are calling “corruption.” Maybe I missed part of your argument.
Tim Wilkinson 12.23.10 at 8:30 pm
Following ultra vires orders (I think these are called ‘illegal’, in a technical sense) from members of the federal government is participating in a kind of corruption.
Discrimination in choosing who to do business with is well-understood to be unacceptable in some cases, and refusing business for political reasons may well be called corrupt. Doing so under a dishonest pretext is more clearly so (and thus distinct from, say, embargos).
And the rights and wrongs of participating in a concerted campaign to starve Wikileaks of funds are not determined just by the question of freedom of contract, whether you call it corrupt or not.
The routine practice of issuing standard terms that are ridiculously expansive, and presenting them as enforceable to those who are unlikely to be able to challenge them is corrupt, too (this was brought into focus in the case of Amazon’s TOS-based excuse.
As an aside, even if that kind of abuse of the system of contract doesn’t apply, a legal system which is set up to favour powerful oligopolists with in house lawyers, and allow grossly unbalanced standard terms to apply pro proferentem so to speak, might also be called corrupt.
In circumstances in which the behaviour of lawmakers and in particular the justice of the laws they pass is at issue, corruption cannot be restricted to cover illegal behaviour.
The trouble is that there is so much corruption, and it is so pervasive, that there’s a tendency to restrict the scope of the term ‘corrupt’ so as to cover only some of it – corrupt meaning something like ‘more corrupt than average’.
But in fact there are standards for what is corrupt which are in many cases pretty well-understood and widely accepted (whether hypocritically or not).
Some other putative categories of corruption are more contested, but the question of what actions are corrupt can’t be settled just by stipulative fiat.
Straightwood 12.23.10 at 8:30 pm
it seems like doing what the federal government wants is what you are calling “corruption.â€
If the government told your bank to stop doing business with you, without legal cause, and the bank did their bidding, would you call that corruption? In the United States, we have a concept called the rule of law. The Federal government cannot order corporations to do things at its whim. For example, the government cannot order a utility to turn off your water or electricity. The law is above the government, which is charged with faithfully executing the laws. That is why Federal officials swear an oath to the Constitution, which is our supreme law.
The measures taken against Wikipedia by US corporations were all extra-legal, since Wikipedia was not, and has not yet been, charged with any crime. Oppressive, illegal actions taken by corporations in complicity with government are corrupt.
bianca steele 12.23.10 at 8:56 pm
If the government told your bank to stop doing business with you, without legal cause, and the bank did their bidding, would you call that corruption?
Not necessarily, though if I worked for a Halliburton competitor and the government told my ISP to slow down my home connection, to prevent my doing work from home in the evenings and on weekends, I would call that corruption.
If the government told your bank to refuse to pay a check you sent to an online gambling site located outside the US and thus not subject to federal law, would you call that corruption, too?
bianca steele 12.23.10 at 8:57 pm
I may have used a forbidden word in my previous comment.
Straightwood 12.23.10 at 11:41 pm
bianca@56
The government can intimidate corporations, vulnerable to future government regulatory or legislative treatment, into doing its bidding. This was plainly the case with Amazon’s decision to stop hosting Wikileaks. A telephone call from Senator Lieberman’s staff precipitated this decision. Senator Lieberman has no legal power whatever to interfere with Amazon. Such intimidation is not sanctioned by the law, and is regarded by me and others as a form of corruption. Evidently you disagree.
bianca steele 12.24.10 at 12:19 am
Straightwood:
This seems to be going off-topic. Also, I see you didn’t answer my second question, so I think I will conclude that you are one of those Rand Paul style libertarians, and I will expect that any minute you will start saying it’s “corruption” for the government to require driver’s licenses. But anyway:
I don’t get where you’re coming from. What do you mean by “legal power to interfere”? I doubt there are government rules about who is allowed to pick up the phone. I don’t know the details of what happened, but there are some preexisting laws and regulations in some cases, and I assume that businesses have discretion to take action preemptively (rather than waiting for an official injunction or some kind notice that they’ve been breaking the law), based on information they have publicly and privately. That isn’t corruption unless it was done improperly.
Straightwood 12.24.10 at 12:36 am
That isn’t corruption unless it was done improperly.
Quite so. I believe you understand that when politicians act outside the law to persuade a corporation to take punitive action against an individual or an organization that this is corrupt behavior. Perhaps you should better acquaint yourself with the Amazon/Wikileaks affair before discussing this subject further.
engels 12.24.10 at 2:22 am
Abb1 and Seth Edenbaum may both be here more often than some people realise, but those who haven’t figured it out for themselves arening going to be given the answers.
Watson Ladd 12.24.10 at 4:47 am
Okay, so the US is creating a new realm of digital McCarthyism and globally freedom of the press is under attack. This is something very different from beating up a reporter on the street no? Besides, it is clear that US pressure has not been very effective, nor has it been consistently applied. While Joe Lieberman is a shmuck whose calls for a boycott have been nothing more then asking for the creation of a new digital mob rule by the strongest, he hasn’t ordered any deaths, at least they haven’t shown up here Furthermore, Lieberman is showing constraint. It is not the US government that has moved away from the rule of law, but the US population who can express the fascistic tendencies that becomes the sole form of politics under capitalism. They fear freedom and ask for it to be destroyed.
Natilo Paennim 12.24.10 at 6:25 am
This is something very different from beating up a reporter on the street no?
So we’re into “No true Scotsman” territory now? “Attacks on reporters aren’t attacks on reporters unless they feature a thug in a balaclava hitting a reporter with a pipe.” And “corruption isn’t corruption unless it involves cash bribes”. Never mind that it’s vastly more effective to simply own all the official media-of-record than to have to maintain a bunch of pipe-hitting thugs — you can even make a tidy profit. It’s easy enough to manipulate the media when you endow the journalism schools that teach “balance” to all the important future journalists. One hand washes the other. Corruption may be more crassly obvious in Russia, but it’s hardly more pervasive. In fact, the US version of corruption and media suppression is all the more powerful because it is insidious and unacknowledged.
Tim Worstall 12.24.10 at 10:47 am
“Nobody in their right mind would walk into a US DMV and try to bribe the counter worker to expedite their driver’s license renewal. But if you want to get a new condo complex built, it’s not hard to figure out just what you’ll have to do to make the zoning board go along with your plans.”
That’s the sort of difference I was trying to get at up above, as someone who does work in these various different economies.
A (true) tale from the past. Coming into Heathrow on a flight from Moscow. The baggage carousel wasn’t working. So one Russian off the plane makes straight for the Customs and Excise men hanging around, opens his wallet and asks how much to get the baggage belt working?
This was, according to his lights, entirely reasonable, even expected, behaviour. Who do I have to pay to get something done around here?
In the US/UK systems, you only open your wallet when dealing with the top of the political system and then in terms of re-election funds.
I maintain that’s more than just a difference of the extent of currption, it’s a different system altogether. Certainly, operating in those two worlds feels entirely different.
PHB 12.24.10 at 11:33 am
When all is said and done, an awful lot of the WikiLeaks material does appear to be awfully convenient for the US to make public and so far none of it appears to be very damaging.
If nothing else, Wikileaks is giving wagging tongues something to wag about. The Right wing noise machine has gone pretty quiet of late. And at the current rate it will be 20 years before the full corpus is released. Anyone heard much from the birthers lately? Press doesn’t seem to have quite as much time for them. Doesn’t see to have been a followup lie either.
I don’t see why Assange himself would need to be a part of the conspiracy though, the only person they would need is Manning. It will be interesting to see if a military judge declares a mistrial on the basis of the pre-trial treatment. That would be another repudiation of the Bush era and get them off the hook.
Involving Assange would only give the US control over the dissemination schedule. Much better to have someone who thinks that they are serving a different purpose.
If the disclosures are not disinformation, it will be in the administration interest to convey the impression that they are.
It is really not hard to see why the disclosures do not have embarrassing details though, they were only Secret. Diplomats writing the cables knew that they could be read by any low level clerk. So anyone posted to Israel would know that if they wrote anything critical, there was a good chance it would end up known to Israel and AIPAC would be doing their usual ‘another country’ witch-hunt dance. And their fools in Congress would be craven enough to call for the author’s head.
So the really interesting stuff is going to be Top Secret, compartmentalized intelligence or not committed to paper at all.
Tim Wilkinson 12.24.10 at 2:56 pm
PHB yes I think this is right, and the latest lot is different from the stuff that has gone before.
Its biggest effect perhaps is to change the terms of the debate from ‘do whistleblowers need somewhere to leak to, given that under the status quo ante, both the risk of exposure – and bad consequences arising from it – is too high, and the independent chance of having their revelations publicised not high enough?’ to ‘should every government secret be indiscriminately published to everyone in the world?’.
This is actually a huge propaganda coup for the US, and since it could have been predicted/planned, adds further weight to the case for saying this batch of leaks was planted.
There is also the cable from a US spy (sorry, diplomat squatting in the Swiss embassy) which claimed that Michael Moore’s film Sicko had been banned in Cuba. That was untrue and presumably obviously so to the source of the info. It could be an example of disinformation, though I’m more inclined to think it was down to one of the filters mentioned previously, possibly even a real ‘Our Man in Havana’.
It could also be a sophistication of the ‘saying what they want to hear’ phenomenon, which has incorrect information that may be useful for propaganda, but it’s understood that it must be passed on ‘straight-faced’ so that those who might want to quote it can do so without actually lying. This also intersects with the point that this stuff is known to be not that secret, and is accordingly not going to be entirely unguarded.
Watson Ladd 12.24.10 at 3:16 pm
I think we have to understand that there is a difference between the realizable bourgeois demand for freedom of speech in the sense that the state cannot use violence to surpress information and the as yet unrealized demand for an effective political discourse. Put quite simply none of the commentators on this blog have to fear the police for what they say here, while the same would not be true in Russia. That we have no audience is not caused by the state or by the owners of the media, but rather by the structure of society with its authoritarian mode of thought. To ascribe this state of affairs to a particular group of people is to make particular people reified just as the Jew stands in for capitalism in anti-Sematism. The realization of effective discourse cannot be a liberal demand because it requires going beyond the bourgeois right that we already possess, even as its diminishment appears to be a real factor.
Straightwood 12.24.10 at 3:29 pm
If this were a US plot, Bradley Manning wouldn’t be under solitary confinement in order to force testimony against Assange. What has happened is a spectacular instance of the instrumentality effect. Daniel Ellsberg had to sweat over a copy machine for days to capture a fraction of the volume of the Wikileaks cablegate disclosure, which Manning was able to execute with a few dozen mouse clicks.
Internet technology has tilted the playing field dramatically against big hierarchical institutions and in favor of small, dispersed entities. Wikileaks appears vulnerable because of Assange’s prima donna personality, but it is still publishing, and more powerful whistleblower protective technology is waiting in the wings (Ian Clarke’s Freenet). Nation states are on the losing end of a major disruptive change in the structure of political organization.
engels 12.24.10 at 4:55 pm
Put quite simply none of the commentators on this blog have to fear the police for what they say here
A person commits an offence if—
(a)
he publishes a statement to which this section applies or causes another to publish such a statement; and
(b)
at the time he publishes it or causes it to be published, he—
(i)
intends members of the public to be directly or indirectly encouraged or otherwise induced by the statement to commit, prepare or instigate acts of terrorism or Convention offences; or
(ii)
is reckless as to whether members of the public will be directly or indirectly encouraged or otherwise induced by the statement to commit, prepare or instigate such acts or offences.
(3)
For the purposes of this section, the statements that are likely to be understood by members of the public as indirectly encouraging the commission or preparation of acts of terrorism or Convention offences include every statement which—
(a)
glorifies the commission or preparation (whether in the past, in the future or generally) of such acts or offences; and
(b)
is a statement from which those members of the public could reasonably be expected to infer that what is being glorified is being glorified as conduct that should be emulated by them in existing circumstances.
Sebastian 12.24.10 at 5:27 pm
This thread seems to suggest that the premise of the post is wrong. Even in the west, Wikileaks can be dismissed as a US government op. That strongly suggests that Russia will be able to push well in that direction.
Substance McGravitas 12.24.10 at 5:31 pm
Proportionality: how many people are dismissing it as that? There are a large chunk of folks in the US who are willing to buy Obama=commie fascist, yet political life goes on.
bianca steele 12.24.10 at 6:05 pm
From Assange’s perspective, I don’t think it matters whether the leak was intentional on the part of the US government, in whole or in part. He seems to believe there is (literally, effectively–not only conceptually) a higher law to which he is obedient and the US is disobedient but also subject. So why would it matter whether he was manipulated or the US was? It wouldn’t change his belief that he is “doing important work”–as he’s been quoted saying–and that anything that thwart “the US” is the right thing to do.
Vigilantes are distasteful and dangerous regardless of what side they think they’re on, and conspiracy theories are more likely to be plausible but wrong than to be accurate. Vigilantes with conspiracy theories are frightening.
Jake 12.24.10 at 6:41 pm
It’s true that many of the leaked cables that have ended up in the press seem not particularly embarrassing to the US government. Is this because the cables were a plant, or because the newspapers that have published the cables have refrained from printing the really juicy ones due, perhaps due to government pressure?
Myles SG 12.24.10 at 7:21 pm
It’s true that many of the leaked cables that have ended up in the press seem not particularly embarrassing to the US government.
Or is it because there’s simply not much there within the State Department that is embarrassing? I have dealt with the sort of people who become State officers, and they are not people able to stomach committing great villainies. They aren’t going to be brilliant diplomats either, but that’s another topic.
geo 12.24.10 at 7:31 pm
Natilo @63: This is an almost unimprovable summary of Chomsky & Herman’s “Manufacturing Consent.”
Barry 12.24.10 at 10:09 pm
“Vigilantes are distasteful and dangerous regardless of what side they think they’re on, and conspiracy theories are more likely to be plausible but wrong than to be accurate. Vigilantes with conspiracy theories are frightening.”
Where ‘vigilante’ = ‘person who publishes material embarrassing to a government’.
bianca steele 12.25.10 at 3:28 am
I guess a vigilante is someone who takes on some kind of authority role he hasn’t been appointed to. He sees himself as representing the law, acting like a cop. He thinks the government isn’t able or isn’t willing to enforce the law the way he thinks it ought be enforced. That the government thinks he’s breaking the law hardly makes him not a vigilante.
Also, I didn’t only have Wikileaks in mind, but also the people who decide who ought to be subject to DDOS attacks, who don’t seem to me to be that different from “conversation hackers” who mess with people’s minds for fun except that they choose their victims in a supposedly “principled” way.
Straightwood 12.25.10 at 5:02 am
I guess a vigilante is someone who takes on some kind of authority role he hasn’t been appointed to. He sees himself as representing the law, acting like a cop. He thinks the government isn’t able or isn’t willing to enforce the law the way he thinks it ought be enforced.
This is a good descripton of Senator Lieberman’s role in persuading Amazon to stop hosting the Wikileaks website.
Kaveh 12.25.10 at 5:27 am
@76 This comment is a veritable horde of zombie arguments. I think it bit some other comments upthread and infected them.
So are newspapers “distasteful and dangerous” when they publish leaked info? Journalists are not elected, are not accountable to the electorate, in fact are specifically exempted from such accountability.
This is a cat and mouse game that’s enshrined in the very notion of press freedom. Once info gets out to journalists, they can publish it. If we don’t like what they’re printing, the most we can do as political actors (e.g. as voters) is demand that the government change how it deals with classified information so that leaks don’t happen. As consumers we can boycott news organizations we don’t like, but we can’t demand that the government censor or punish news organizations (well we can demand it, but the gov’t still has no right to do it). Even if everybody agrees they should be censored, that doesn’t matter. This is really really basic first amendment stuff.
@67 Blowing up the Al-Jazeera office in Baghdad with a missile might seem like it’s in a different category from what assassination of Russian journos because it took place outside the borders of the US, but when your principal misdeeds are waging illegal wars far from US territory, or when the US gov’t goes after Assange (but not the NYT) for publishing info that embarrasses the US, then you need a different metric to determine how much of a threat the US poses to press freedom. We, unlike Russian journos, are not going to be arrested for what we write, but only because we’re physically in the US or other friendly nations. But for that same reason, we (at least most of us) don’t speak Arabic or Pashto, and aren’t witness to some of the more horrible things the US gov’t does. And I don’t think we can be all that sure that journalists who are on the front lines are free from violent retaliation by the US.
Also, the one news organization that often does get close to the battlegrounds of American imperial wars, Al-Jazeera, was completely shut out by US cable companies when they wanted to make their English channel available in the US. Even if/though that wasn’t the action of the US government, I think it’s a lot closer to what we intuitively think of as corruption than the more general condition of not having the political discourse we would like to see in the country. For that matter, we’d have better political discourse if people had better access to information.
Tim Wilkinson 12.25.10 at 1:04 pm
bianca @71 is an excellent example of the way in which this latest batch of leaks is good for the US govt. Before this, no-one had any such argument – the leaks were all standard whistleblowing leaks. WL’s commitment to publishing what it is given means this is one of the ways in which it opens itself to being discredited (along with such standard techniques as the straw man op – i.e. passing false info which can be shown to be false after it has been accepted).
Myles SG @73: This testimony, part from anything else, seems to include a variation on the ‘I’ve know him and he’s a nice guy’ fallacy – in this case perhaps, ‘the people I hang around with are all pretty straight kind of guys’. There’s a further more important fallacy, which stems from assessing peoples’ conduct by ther own standards. No doubt very few in the State department see themselves as villains, even when they are engaged in (playing their allotted part in) some really quite foul projects – there is always some way in which a given aim can be assimilated to the National Interest, Defending Freedom, etc.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this is the extent to which actual motives (e.g. passing on false info that may be useful as propaganda) are left implicit – and in some cases possible even mentally compartmentalised – as a matter of routine, and official exuses and pretexts become internalised. Doing that kind of thing without overshooting and becoming functionally deluded is an important skill. One layer above ‘need to know’ is ‘need to acknowledge to oneself’. Then there’s ‘need to mention’, ‘need to be explicit about’, ‘need to commit to paper’ etc.
The ‘there’s simply not much there within the State Department that is embarrassing’ is reasonable enough, if ‘there’ means ‘in diplomatic cables’. And that, incidentally, begs the question who exactly would want to take the risk of leaking the stuff.
Jake @72 – there’s a range of ways in which this stuff has been filtered – see the link @ my #66.
Sebastian @69 – I don’t think anyone here has suggested that WL is anything other than what it appears to be, have they? Nor that there is much appetite for such theories in the West (in terms of crude prejudices, this would be an odd combination: anti CIA and anti-WL).
There has been a half-memory of one Western academic possibly saying something along those lines. WL has been around for quite a long time before the big US leaks and the cables got it into the news. In case it’s somehow not clear, the closest of the possibilities I myself was exploring was that the latest batch is a plant, and I suppose the more remote sub-possibility that some of the cables have actually been doctored or fabricated.
Watson Ladd @62 – That we have no audience is not caused by the state or by the owners of the media, but rather by the structure of society with its authoritarian mode of thought. Shurely, the latter is something actively pursued by the former? Isn;t this obvious?
To ascribe this state of affairs to a particular group of people is to make particular people reified just as the Jew stands in for capitalism in anti-Sematism.
Nice.
1. Who plays the part of teh Jew in this analogy?
2. How do you differentiate the role of the police (as a group) in Russia, which you do treat as an agent, from the government and the media in the US, which you don’t (because antisemitism etc).
3. This is a pretty classic bit of anti-‘conspiracy theory’ theorising; reasonable claims about what is done by the government etc (whether or not it is depictyed as some kind of ultimate author of its own actions), i.e. Ordinary Decent Conspiracy Theories, are assimilated to vague, diffuse and emotional outsider myths – which, incidentally, have tended to be developed, fostered, propounded and promoted by powerful interests throughout history – recent hits being the Muslim Menace, the Red Terror, and yes, the International Jewish Communist Bankers’ Conspiracy to Sap and Impurify All Our Precious Blood, Soil, Folk, etc.
Myles SG 12.25.10 at 10:06 pm
There’s a further more important fallacy, which stems from assessing peoples’ conduct by ther own standards. No doubt very few in the State department see themselves as villains, even when they are engaged in (playing their allotted part in) some really quite foul projects – there is always some way in which a given aim can be assimilated to the National Interest, Defending Freedom, etc.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this is the extent to which actual motives (e.g. passing on false info that may be useful as propaganda) are left implicit – and in some cases possible even mentally compartmentalised – as a matter of routine, and official exuses and pretexts become internalised. Doing that kind of thing without overshooting and becoming functionally deluded is an important skill. One layer above ‘need to know’ is ‘need to acknowledge to oneself’. Then there’s ‘need to mention’, ‘need to be explicit about’, ‘need to commit to paper’ etc.
The ‘there’s simply not much there within the State Department that is embarrassing’ is reasonable enough, if ‘there’ means ‘in diplomatic cables’. And that, incidentally, begs the question who exactly would want to take the risk of leaking the stuff.
Fair enough, but my point was essentially that there’s a wide distance between the unintentional follies of Whitehall and the intentional villainies of the likes of Francis Younghusband. And they are generally perceptible. It merely seems that State does not have very many Younghusbands. And even Younghusband is an entirely different breed from Palmerston, who was as aggressively interventionist as it gets.
What would be truly embarrassing to State, rather than the standard-issue stuff, would be if it were indicated by leaked cables that it was acting the part of Palmerston while being Younghusband.
Which is why conspiracy theories about State are so nutty; one is presuming conspiracies when Occam’s Razor dictates that in fact unintentional, unthinking folly was usually a more likely culprit.
Myles SG 12.25.10 at 10:13 pm
To be more succinct, I am mystified at the urge to attribute motive to everything State messes up, to attribute deliberate action to the lack of embarrassments, to create a coherent narrative of malfeasance where the simplest explanation would have relied on common, bureaucratic and human cock-ups. One can easily commit incompetence and folly without vile or debased motives.
Isn’t the simplest explanation for the cables not being embarrassing for the U.S. government’s views and so on, that it simply doesn’t much hold those views that would be embarrassing? Why go the extra step and presume a conspiracy where a stronger explanation would require none.
Watson Ladd 12.25.10 at 10:32 pm
I just don’t see Wikileaks as having the power to reveal things that Amnesty doesn’t already know about Russia. It would be great if we could get a smoking gun, say Putin ordering the murder of journalists on videocamera or a memo about beating up protestors. Short of that there is not much that will confirm that Putin is doing these things.
In the US no such smoking gun exists because these things don’t happen. The whole absence of politics can’t be blamed on surpression because it doesn’t happen. Want to prove me wrong? Find a corpse! The whole idea that an elite has mysterious magical powers to surpress the people is nothing more then fatalism. It makes the problem of overcoming capital into one of butchery, efficiently organized. What is forgotten is that the elite has its own constraints, that it is part of society and bound by the same rules. Why does this magic power to suppress dissent apply to everyone but you?
Henri Vieuxtemps 12.26.10 at 12:48 am
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Webb
Tim Wilkinson 12.26.10 at 1:39 am
MSG @81
there’s a wide distance between…unintentional follies…and…intentional villainies
As an attempt at serious analysis this is appalling. Intentional…unintentional is one dimension, innocence..villainy another, folly…shrewdness another. And few if any events fall at the extreme of any of these scales.
And they are generally perceptible.
Any evidence for the proposition you are asserting, the absence of the imperceptible?
[…]
Which is why conspiracy theories about State are so nutty; one is presuming conspiracies when Occam’s Razor dictates that in fact unintentional, unthinking folly was usually a more likely culprit.
1. To repeat, the kind of staff involved are going to be playing an allotted part in any especially grim stuff – no-one is suggesting that there are a load of cartoon villains motivated by pure evil, devising their own plans and chatting about them in routine dispatches. Except those who want to change the subject.
2. Occam’s Razor is used as a kind of tie-breaker between competing metaphysical ontologies or scientific theories, though it has never been clearly established as independently valid. Something functionally equivalent might be motivated by a principle of simplicity in nature or fundamental reality, but that would still not oversome the fact that it is inapplicable to questions of empirical history, in which the question of what counts as simple in an appropriately context-free, real, sense is far more difficult to decide than the relatively tractable matter of what actually happened. Mention of Occam’s Razor in such contexts is generally a way of dressing up an appeal to what seems plausible, or ‘common sense’, or obviousness, etc., in impressive technical garb.
(If you are going to appeal to a default principle here, it should be the principle of indifference, which states that in the absence of any information indicating otherwise, equal probability (numerical credence) is to be assigned to alternative possibilities that are jointly exhaustive. This too is a provisional, default response to a lack of useful information – an attempt to find some salient way of handling ignorance. It too applies only when one reaches the most basic level of analysis or abstraction, and is thus of limited application. It too is a (slightly embarassing) consequence of the positions we adopt, rather than providing a heuristical method for deriving those positions. But it does at least actua;lly have some relevance to inductive rather than abductive reasoning)
Tim Wilkinson 12.26.10 at 1:40 am
& @82:
Isn’t the simplest explanation for the cables not being embarrassing for the U.S. government’s views and so on, that it simply doesn’t much hold those views that would be embarrassing? Why go the extra step and presume a conspiracy?
Whose presuming anything? The point is that the content of the published cables, as represented in the press, being on balance convenient or at least harmless has some relevance to the possibility that the cables were a plant. I’ve previously mentioned a range of other reasons for it, many of which, such as the failure to approach them critically, are predictable and thus do not displace or undermine a ‘planned leak’ scenario. In some cases, such a failure actually reverses the impact of the cables. For example, when diplomats’ parroting of the official line are taken at face value as
But if the cables are less damaging than one should expect ex ante, then that constitutes some (possibly weak) evidence for a range of propositions, one of which is that the cables were selected as suitable for a deliberate ‘leak’ – and a knowledge of standard propaganda and ‘psyops’ tactics renders that possibility far from remote, in all the circumstances.
I was very pleased to see that Nate Silver had produced an article which makes use of a simple inductive model to discuss this kind of topic – and that it seems to have attracted considerable interest, suggesting that there is some appetite for a rational approach to this kind of question, the kind epistemically responsible discussion I’m always going on about.
But the lack of very discrediting revelations is not only (nor, I would now say, primarily) relevant as indicating that the cables are unrepresentative of routine State dept cables. It is mostly that it makes the material much less likely to be leaked in the first place, the idea being (for the umpteenth time) that this latest batch does not fit the previous whistleblowing model, and its main impact is to keep WL busy with material which gives a more or less subtly bad impression – it can be presented as gossip, as wanton interference in legitimate government secrecy, as a manifestation of anti-American vindictiveness, and above all not as serious and indisputably justified whistleblowing.
Tim Wilkinson 12.26.10 at 1:42 am
Watson Ladd @83
The whole absence of politics can’t be blamed on supression because it doesn’t happen. Want to prove me wrong? Find a corpse!
Want to prove yourself right? Look for corpses!
And investigate the circumstances in which they attained their necrotic state. That will involve effort and being called a paranoid conspiracy theorist, and is not likely to provide conclusive evidence to the tantalising standards required by ‘conspiracy’-deniers. (If it were not so likely to be a self-defeating prophecy, I’d predict some fairly blatant backpedalling and goalpost-shifting in response to Henri’s link, for example.)
Absence of evidence – where this is inevitable, due to failure to make a bona fide attempt to investigate is not evidence of absence. But I’m not (this kind of point does unfortunately have to be belaboured) suggesting that journos are being silently murdered left right and centre. For one general observation, a successful deterrent threat will never have to be fulfilled. For another more directly relevant point, there are many alternatives to murder when it comes to silencing journos. Discrediting them, ruining them in one way or another, hounding and harassing them. Concentrating on violent murder rather than other methods of achieving the same result actually represents the kind of febrile fetishisation of evildoing that conspiracy theorists tend to be accused of (and this is not surprising – this is basically strawman stuff, sensationalisation done on the conspiracy theorists’ behalf).
And of course the kind of journo likely to be on the receiving end of this kind of thing are independent investigative ones, not the incurious purveyors of répétage that populate the higher echelons of the profession, which makes things a lot easier.
Isn’t there once again a fairly obvious application of double standards here, when you’re happy to acknowledge that Short of [say Putin ordering the murder of journalists on videocamera or a memo about beating up protestors] there is not much that will confirm that Putin is doing these things.?
The whole idea that an elite has mysterious magical powers to surpress the people is nothing more then fatalism.
Isn’t the idea that the elite is peculiarly well-placed to use rather unmysterious powers to suppress the people (though not infallibly or in some way entirely indetectably)? The level of strawmanning that’s found in this realm of discussion is quite unparalleled – though a familiarity with the history of the discourse at least since the onset of the Cold War makes it somewhat understandable that this should be the case. (And yes, there is an element of state ‘conspiracy’ – propaganda – involved in that phenomenon.)
What is forgotten is that the elite has its own constraints, that it is part of society and bound by the same rules.
But a private individual who acted on Realist foreign-policy principle, for example, would be functionally a psychopath. Of course society is characterised by widespread skullduggery, deceit, criminal conspiracy etc – often carried out by people who are personally no different from anyone else. And so far as actually bumping people off goes, we’re not talking State-dept pen-pushers, are we. We’re talking about domestic black ops. The desk jockeys just have to toe the line and keep their mouths (not to mention eyes, ears and minds) shut.
Why does this magic power to suppress dissent apply to everyone but you?
Oh, give it a rest. Dissent is an utterly different matter from the uncovering of smoking guns. General ruminations on some blog, as opposed to observably getting too close to exposing some discrediting information (remember that limb of your two-step?), are not going to attract any more unwelcome attention than perhaps an automatic record in the depths of some NSA database.
(Sorry to go on at length. Not sorry enough to refrain, the shrewd observer will notice.)
Sebastian 12.26.10 at 2:33 am
“But if the cables are less damaging than one should expect ex ante…”
On what basis did you have ex ante expectations about how damaging they should have been?
Is it possible that you were wrong about them, rather than that the cables are wrong because they don’t confirm them?
Is it likely?
bianca steele 12.26.10 at 3:32 pm
Kaveh @ 79
When I read the word “vigilante” I usually have a definite picture in mind, which doesn’t often include printing information in newspapers.
PHB 12.26.10 at 3:42 pm
MSG @81
Mention of Occam’s razor is irrelevant in this context. Occam’s Razor is only relevant when making a choice between competing theories. The logical approach here is to conclude that we have insufficient data to make a judgement. We certainly have no pressing need to make an immediate judgement.
Back in the 1980s, Occam’s razor would probably lead one to conclude that ‘CIA conspiracy theories’ were all false. Yet now we have hard evidence and indeed admissions that yes, the CIA did spend its time attacking and bringing down democracies (Operation Ajax in Iran), it did spend its time undermining democracy movements and did spend its time propping up dictators. We have also discovered that the CIA and FBI both spent a very good deal of time and effort subverting domestic US politics.
I was at a security conference a few years back and was having a discussion on the lines above with another speaker at the reception during which I asserted that every US President who had taken office since WWII would have been best advised to simply shut down the CIA completely as their first act on taking office. He then introduced himself as a former deputy director of the CIA. After thinking for a while he agreed.
Occam’s razor does not work when analyzing activities of intelligence organizations because they are designed to misinform.
bianca steele 12.26.10 at 4:33 pm
Tim Wilkinson:
Somewhere in your most recent clump of comments you seemed to suggest that something like Occam’s razor would lead us to conclude that the most parsimonious model of the leaks would have them intentionally coordinated by the US government. Denying anything untoward has gone on does seem useful from a “law and order” perspective, and prevents a “Manichaean” picture where the bad guys have as much power as the good ones. But to the extent revulsion from manichaeanism is driven by distaste for that picture in theology, this revulsion just might be less than useful, and especially since I don’t know understand why a Brit would choose “the United States” as the ultimate hegemon.
Watson Ladd 12.26.10 at 11:16 pm
@ Tim
You are asserting that an elite is suppressing the population. How? What evidence do you have for this? And what makes this different from the ordinary function of society? When a strike is broken by military force this is a surpression of the right of the workers, but also the protection of private property. As for accusations of double standards I simply looked at the Amnesty International country-by-country report and found Russia had press freedom issues involving the failure of the police to protect journalists, while the US did not. Somehow the United States is so good at suppressing human rights that even Amnesty International cannot find them out.
For the purpose of clarification of our positions I would summarize our disagreement as follows. You would argue that there is an unseemly coordination of governmental and corporate interest that limits oppositional views and conceals government misdeeds. I am arguing that there is no such conspiracy in the sense that any limitation of oppositional views is due to their own stupidity. The government is more then capable of attacking the opposition. That it does not is simply because the opposition abolished itself, following Stalinism by the unorganized betrayal of antiStalinism.
Myles SG 12.27.10 at 2:20 am
I give up. I am debating with a Truther, or a Truther fellow traveller.
There is literally no way this debate could be made rational.
chris 12.27.10 at 8:46 pm
As for accusations of double standards I simply looked at the Amnesty International country-by-country report and found Russia had press freedom issues involving the failure of the police to protect journalists, while the US did not. Somehow the United States is so good at suppressing human rights that even Amnesty International cannot find them out.
Amnesty International tends to focus on the incidents that involve actual bloodshed, partly for the obvious reasons of human psychology and partly because it helps them not tread so much on the toes of the genuinely globally powerful and the parochial sympathies of supporters in wealthy countries (which is where they obtain the means to continue existing).
For reasons already elaborated on this thread, the resulting perspective may be somewhat incomplete.
For another more directly relevant point, there are many alternatives to murder when it comes to silencing journos. Discrediting them, ruining them in one way or another, hounding and harassing them.
Wasn’t there once a highly respected journalist named “Dan Rather”? What happened to that guy? It wasn’t violent, but it sure was effective as a method of removing him from the public discourse — perhaps even *more* effective than a bullet, which might have been seen as a kind of vindication of his ideas.
Tim Wilkinson 12.27.10 at 9:09 pm
Sebastian: “But if the cables are less damaging than one should expect ex ante…â€
On what basis did you have ex ante expectations about how damaging they should have been?
I suppose one consideration to be taken into account when sketching out a prior probability distribution over the alternative degrees of ‘damagingness’ of a leak would be a presumption that someone must have thought it worth running the risk of leaking.
Is it possible that you were wrong about them, rather than that the cables are wrong because they don’t confirm them?
Possibly wrong? About the ex ante (objective) probabilities? I should cocoa.
But rather than ‘that the cables were wrong’, you should say ‘that the cables were less likely to be a genuine case of whistleblowing than one should expect ex ante’, I think. Lots of other evidence goes into the mix too, of course – for example, if the cables were to contain a high proportion of surprising, dubious or discreetly untrue information that is in fact useful to the USA.
Or if there is no sign of a hunt for the leaker.
Then you get started on the bluffs and double bluffs and it’s rabbit to duck, duck to rabbit…
——
PHB: Occam’s Razor does not work when analyzing activities of intelligence organizations because they are designed to misinform.
Yes – Occam’s Razor aside, this is a very important – crucial – point. Standard methods of historiography, science, hermeneutics, etc are largely geared to a world that is, if not exactly cooperative, at least not actively recalcitrant.
Once deception and concealment are (likely to be) involved, most of our heuristics and methods need to be revised or discarded, especially the laziest – most convenient – ones.
This is not a welcome prospect, and may go some way to explaining – even justifying, in some sense – much of the widespread resistance there seems to be to acknowledging that such dodgy stuff goes on. (Well, that and a more straightforward interest in not rocking the boat, the influence of ideology, and a bunch of stuff that falls under the rubric of social psychology.)
Hence such conspiratorial behaviour, or claims of it, is:
1. depicted as something one should not pay much attention to – because doing so is to indulge in morally, intellectually or psychologically insalubrious (and perhaps compulsive, contagious or cult-like) behaviour (MSG petulant little outburst above might be placed in this category)
2. dealt with, one case at a time, as exceptional, thus inconsequential (but of course the properties of being exceptional and inconsequential are not indefinitely aggregable)
3. explained away as coincidence or cock-up (however implausible this may be)
4. viewed as primarily a moral issue, which is then resolved without remainder once No True Villainy is discovered, or when some conception of the National Interest, etc., can be found to cover the behaviour in question
5. simply dismissed as too hard to assess, unproven, etc (which handily leaves one with the default Pollyanna position)
6. In more sophisticated circles 1. found unsuitable for systematic theorising; 2. (perhaps plausibly) depicted as merely epiphenomenal, ontologically derivative, not fundamentally explanatory, etc, and thus a vulgar distraction; 3. treated on that basis as though not real in a quite ordinary sense.
—–
bianca – I wasn’t arguing a case, certainly not on the basis of Occam’s razor, which I don’t regard as even applicable to this kind of subject matter. (There is never an exact explanatory equivalence between distinct but conceptually commensurable empirical hypotheses that, thus no place for tie-breaking by appeal to formal simplicity.)
I don’t have any firm beliefs about power ratios between bad guys and good guys – it’s not an organising principle I’ve ever considered. Wishful thinking about ultimate hegema(?) is right out. Also wouldn’t describe a US plant of info as a case of ‘nothing untoward going on’.
—–
Watson Ladd –
You are asserting that an elite is suppressing the population
No I’m not.
(And what makes this [viz., an elite suppressing the population] different from the ordinary function of society? Why would one wish to establish such a difference? This seems like a variant of point 4 above.)
What I am asserting is that ‘elite’ interests have considerable control over the preponderance of press coverage (playing the percentages is quite adequate in most cases – even some quite smoky guns can be spun, obfuscated or drowned out given an adequately compliant MSM). And I’m asserting that you are wrong to be confident that investigative journalists – those who come close to uncontrollably smoky guns – are not targeted by a range of means, up to and including murder.
What evidence do you have for this? I’ll divert this to apply to my actual assertion. Unfortunately much of the evidence is of a kind that you may be inclined to reject, when it’s about events in the US/UK. To add to Henri’s example of an ‘implausible deniability’ public execution – and to everything else that’s already been said in the thread so far, here are some links dug out from among my ill-organised bookmarks:
warm up with something on embedded journalism
and strange tales from far away places
Though those accounts are subject to stringently conservative presumption against foul play, of course. Some of those categorised as ‘crossfire’ are probably murder.
does this get shoehorned into the ‘ordinary operation of society’ category?
I suppose convictions and arrests don’t count either.
I think anthrax probably does though.
And here’s a years worth of (stringently conservative) accounts of miscellaneous shenanigans.
Whistleblowers apparently being bumped off can perhaps be shrugged off as a bit off-topic.
And then there’s spooks in the media…, which is presumably not violent enough to bother about.
What can happen if you don’t play ball is a rather rare eventuality one may suppose, so we shouldn’t concern ourselves with it.
To wind down, some comparatively very low level stuff from the UK.
Somehow the United States is so good at suppressing human rights [sic] that even Amnesty International cannot find them out.
You say modus tollens, I say modus ponens…
…You would argue that there is an unseemly coordination of governmental and corporate interest that limits oppositional views and conceals government misdeeds. I am arguing that there is no such conspiracy in the sense that any limitation of oppositional views is due to their own stupidity. The government is more then capable of attacking the opposition. That it does not is simply because the opposition abolished itself…
Again, dissent is an utterly different matter from the uncovering of smoking guns. And a stupid population is quite compatible with – even conducive to – a ‘conspiracy’, as you call it. I agree that The government is more then capable of attacking the opposition, and that to a large extent violence and the threat thereof can remain latent. The US is after all rather better established and equilibriated than the infant Russian Federation.
As for accusations of double standards…
The double standard I pointed out is a matter of method, not of outcomes: It would be great if we could get a smoking gun, say Putin ordering the murder of journalists on videocamera or a memo about beating up protestors. Short of that there is not much that will confirm that Putin is doing these things. [Russian crimes are elusive]
In the US no such smoking gun exists because these things don’t happen. [US crimes are absent]
Tim Wilkinson 12.27.10 at 9:42 pm
chris – previous slab (currently in mod’n) posted before seeing yours.
Yes, Rather a good example. You’re absolutely right that a bullet is likely to be seen (by those willing to see state murder behind it) as confirmation of the damagingness and thus, plausibly, the truth of the decedent’s revelations. Basically, once he’s gone public, it’s too late to shove the genie back in by violent means.
Though the statistical aspect of opinion dynamics (dogwhistles, esoteric v exoteric message, etc) might mean that one constituency is calculated to be almost impervious to such evidence, while another (‘conspiracy theorists’) is irrelevant and can be allowed to think what they like – and of course there may be many in another category, cognisant of the likelihood of murder but unwilling to acknowledge that fact openly, ince that would reveal them not to be Serious People.
This last category are especially likely to be the target of the other motive for killings (or indeed character assassinations): pour encouragé les autres.
PHB 12.27.10 at 11:39 pm
MSG @93
You give up because you have no argument but decide to casually hurl insults on your way out.
If you bothered to actually read the history of the CIA (Legacy of Ashes is the most recent) you would know that the actual achievements of the organization have been almost entirely detrimental to the interests of the US people and certainly against those of the world in general.
Myles SG 12.28.10 at 12:36 am
You give up because you have no argument but decide to casually hurl insults on your way out.
Hardly. I give up because this is starting to turn into a Scopes trial. This is insane and deranged.
Tim Wilkinson 12.28.10 at 1:06 am
“This is insane and deranged.”
No, probably just an aggressive response to cognitive dissonance.
In any case, the assertion is unlikely to convince. It instances a relative of the Liar paradox: the self-diagnosis bind (cf. ‘catch-22’, in Heller, J., Catch-22, passim.).
Watson Ladd 12.28.10 at 1:16 am
So why doesn’t Russia use these more effective methods? Why do opposition journalists exist such as Amy Goodman? If you want to silence someone who uncovers dynamite methods short of murder will not work as Pentagon Papers shows.
Tim Wilkinson 12.28.10 at 1:04 pm
Well, I’m more interested in why my recently adopted putting-the-accents-into-Gallicisms habit has gone so haywire – something to do with using HTML entities, a distinctly non-WYSIWIG approach.
Oh OK then, one last push. (A bit long again; if it goes into moderation, sorry for inconvenience of hoiking it out Henry – should you choose to do so, of course.)
Watson Ladd: Why do opposition journalists exist such as Amy Goodman?
Why wouldn’t they?
If you want to silence someone who uncovers dynamite methods short of murder will not work No objection from me here. But if – however rarely – murder is required (by the ‘national interest’, regrettably, etc), why would one think that is it never carried out? Why wouldn’t one instead draw the conclusion that among apparent accidental and natural deaths, there are likely to be some well-executed – well, executions?
…as Pentagon Papers shows.
Not a good example, even murder would not have helped (and indeed would if anything have been counterproductive, see above.) Ellsberg (as one might expect) played it perfectly – he gave no sign of what he was up to until he was ready to release the evidence. Think about what the average investigative journalist looks like from the point of view of those who know where all the evidence is, and can monitor their progress minutely – it is like looking down on a rat in a maze.
In Ellsberg’s case, there were no hints that he was onto something big, no teleph0ne calls broadcasting the progress of his investigation – indeed no investigation such as would trigger a sequence of alarms. He was not even under suspicion until it was too late and he had everything copied and disseminated. Very much a proto-wikileaks operation. The only point at which he might have been suppressed, shall we say, was when he arranged to meet journalists – and even by that point, he’d spread things fairly wide IIRC – he no doubt had a very good understanding of the dictates of self-preservation: keep your cards close to your chest until you are ready to go public, then go as public as you possibly can.
For someone conducting a visible investigation, getting in touch with journalists with the promise of something big – without revealing what it is – is pretty stupid. Better check those brakes. That’s even assuming the journalists are to be trusted – and at least in recent years, military whistleblowers have IIRC found that mainstream news outlets have tended to react to attempted leaks by picking up the phone to the Pentagon and saying ‘I have [name rank and serial number] here, and he’s saying [complete disclosure]. Do you have any comment?’ – which is not ideal, and one of the reasons for WL’s existence.
But not only did Ellsberg make sure the genie couldnt be stuffed back in (and that those wishing to stuff it knew that, of course!), thus removing the primary motivation for murder; he also, importantly, was a leaker, not a reporter. He wasn’t offering testimony, but exhibits which could be authenticated and spoke for themselves. So even discrediting him would be largely futile – there was no testimony to discredit (though such an ideal rational choice model is not the only consideration: irrelevant smears might still be useful vis-a-vis the ‘stupid and ignorant’ constituency).
We see the same problem in the case of WL – there is little scope for discrediting the information – so indirect and strictly irrelevant means have to be used to try and change the subject – the information shouldn’t have been leaked because it’s dangerous, irresponsible, treasonous, etc. Or poisoning the well (rather than the potentially quite legitimate tactic of discrediting testimony): the source is a megalomaniac, a sex pest, argues with his mates, is a misfit turned Batman-villain, is anti-Americanic, has a funny name, etc. The only purpose for ‘suppression’ techniques such as violence, abuse of the criminal process, etc is as a punishment. And while there is some evidence that irrational vindictiveness – pure retaliation – does occur in some such cases (generally where intelligence insiders are concerned), in general the only motive for this is as a deterrent to others, which of course requires publicity – at least to some audience.
(And that’s where you get a range of ‘implausible deniability’ tactics, which vary in scope, from the more or less automatic chilling effect on those willing to see or suspect fould play in an otherwise perfect crime, through deaths which are rather obviously suspect, but for which no tangible evidence exists, right up to the Al Capone-style public execution in which the only deniability is specifically tailored to the criminal process, to preserve impunity. Even impunity has degrees, whether in its reach – the buck can stop with an Ollie North – or its extent – Scooter Libby can cope with a few weeks in prison if he knows his mate happens to have the handy power to pardon him. If impunity can be achieved by extra-forensic means, such as corruption (I’ll pretend that Libby’s is not such a case, for bianca’s benefit), then even that level of deniability can be dispensed with.
And there’s even a tendency for mere impunity to confer a more substantial deniability – since the outcome of criminal cases is treated as one of society’s uncertainty-resolution techniques, lack of a conviction can actually count as additional evidence of innocence, over and above the defence case – or as providing positive evidence even though an acquittal (or decision not to proceed) was based purely on lack of evidence. This is especially the case so far as posterity and future historians are concerned, since official records of the criminal process are nice hard evidence with a built-in verdict (and this is especially important because deliberation about current events is informed by appeal to precedent and prior probability. If all the strong evidence of past misdeeds is wiped out by being collapsed into a series of not guilty verdicts, then the view of current events is systematically biased to favour, well, innocence – i.e., the opposite (contrary), rather than the mere complement (contradictory), of guilt.
————
So why doesn’t Russia use these more effective methods?
You mean, why does Russia use so much murder? (I’ll assume this is right, with the caveat that the difference may not be as pronounced as you think, since it looks to me as though reports about Russia in the Anglo press are much more likely to use the word ‘suspicious’ ouside quotation marks athn when discussing superficially similar events.)
The following largely a summary of points made above:
1. There is less public trust, and possibly such trust falls below a threshold, so that costly attempts to maintain appearances have far less utility.
2. The Russian Federation is young, and its security apparatus grew out of the KGB. The relevant techniques have not yet had time to bed in.#
3. Murders may look suspicious to us, but if the background rate of murder, and especially of professional murder by non-state actors, is high (I don’t know but would rankly guess this to be the case in Russia), they will look far less so.
———
Incodentally, as suggested above, there may in some cases be relatively little need for trust of WL:
* documents can be authenticated to some extent
* failure by the authorities to deny the content or impugn the authenticity of docs is going to provide some indirect authentication
* some secrets (‘dynamite’ as Watson puts it) are steganographic – they rely on being entirely concealed from view, and once they’re out there, they either provide leads to confirmatory evidence, or join the dots of existing facts in a eureka-moment kind of way. In other words, they are more a matter of ideas, inference and synthesis than new facts, evidence or original research.
chris 12.28.10 at 3:48 pm
since the outcome of criminal cases is treated as one of society’s uncertainty-resolution techniques, lack of a conviction can actually count as additional evidence of innocence
Unless there’s a sufficiently strong ex ante bias against you (say, a certain black football player), in which case you remain “obviously” guilty even after your acquittal.
ISTM that in sufficiently notorious cases the interpretation of the outcome of a criminal trial is going to be so strongly shaped by confirmation bias that it won’t even matter what the actual outcome *is* — people convinced the defendant is guilty will claim an acquittal is a miscarriage of justice, and people convinced the defendant is innocent will condemn a conviction as a kangaroo court or show trial. A low degree of public trust intensifies this effect.
bianca steele 12.28.10 at 7:40 pm
Almost missed this: @Tim W.: If impunity can be achieved by extra-forensic means, such as corruption (I’ll pretend that Libby’s is not such a case, for bianca’s benefit), then even that level of deniability can be dispensed with.
You misunderstand me. Getting a buddy off with a slap on the wrist, just because he’s a buddy, is corruption (and heaven knows what was going on in Judith Miller’s head). What I’m objecting to is trying to redefine the word “corruption” to mean something like “actions that are perfectly well within the rules I accept as valid, but that are done for an end I consider immoral (knowing perfectly well that the other side will call my allies’ actions corrupt).†This risks redefining “cronyism†as a virtue.
I object especially to redefining a word like “corruption†that was likely being used to justify the action being condemned. I don’t know much about marxism, but I guess such redefinitions are probably a standard part of Marxist practice, as a way of undermining “the hegemony,†and to me that practice seems counterproductive–in a variety of ways. For one thing, it risks confusion about how broadly something is understood, and by whom, and what is the significance of its being understood; and it risks confusing differences that arise from different underlying premises with differences that arise from political opposition.
Anand Manikutty 12.28.10 at 10:46 pm
@ PHB #90 –
I was at a security conference a few years back and was having a discussion on the lines above with another speaker at the reception during which I asserted that every US President who had taken office since WWII would have been best advised to simply shut down the CIA completely as their first act on taking office.
That is interesting, because I would have thought that computer security folks could make a reasonably good case that certain types of information *must* be secure, and so the government must have a role in protecting at least types of secrets. For instance, you wouldn’t want your health records to be made public, and the government must protect individuals from foreign governments which may wish to make health records of individuals public against their will. Indeed, part of the reason the CIA has so much interest in cryptology is because it is interested in figuring out ways to keep secrets secret.
The computer science professor and cryptologist Richard Lipton made a post recently arguing that it might be possible to prevent something like Wikileaks by means of deliberate disinformation. Such a strategy of disinformation could potentially be a viable one in some sectors. For instance, if you are the Dean of a business school and your finance professor has just lied to a graduate student, you could confuse everyone by making multiple copies of all emails, each one subtly different from the other, so that no one really knows what happened in the particular case of the graduate student.
However, I do think that there are serious limitations to such a campaign vis-a-vis governmental secrets. Indeed, the reality in the field of cryptography is that it may be very difficult using existing technology to make such leaks impossible.
Tim Wilkinson 12.29.10 at 1:04 am
Ways to reduce leaks would involve such strategies as:
* To reduce radically the circulation of leakable info – perhaps so that only those directly implicated, or heavily vetted, etc., have access to it (the ‘who’)
* To monitor physical and electronic systems so as to prevent, or in a diachronic deterrence model, to detect and punish, the physical act of leaking (the ‘how’)
* To avoid having information kept in anonymously leakable form, e.g. using only oral (and unrecorded) communications (the ‘what’)
* Not to have information that people feel the need to leak in the first place, e.g. by not doing deeply dodgy stuff (the ‘why’)
All these things are done already to various degrees when it comes to seriously important secrets, but they have significant costs, obviously. This is something I think Assange recognises – part of the idea is to increase the cost of secrecy so that it is used more sparingly, and indeed so that the kind of thing that necessitates secrecy is also done more sparingly. A culture of secrecy is in many ways pernicious, and a source as well as a necessary consequence of dodgy dealings.
Anand Manikutty – But leaks aren’t really much to do with cryptology. They occur when people who are entrusted with information decide to make it public. The leakers are precisely those who have not been denied access to it, by cryptography or any other means.
(As I’ve observed before, the recent batch of cables is anomalous because it is not clear what the whistle is being blown on. And this has radically shifted (and confused) the terms of the debate. In the case of standard whistleblowing though, WL is performing a function that current whistleblower-protection legislation acknowledges, but fails to deliver.)
bianca steele – yes, I don’t know why I felt the need to slip that in. But Libby was pardoned quite ‘properly’ – by presidential prerogative. And directing your complaint at trying to redefine the word “corruption†to mean something like “actions that are perfectly well within the rules I accept as valid, but that are done for an end I consider immoral gains plausibility but loses breadth of application – in particular I’d say that this charge – basically one of special pleading – doesn’t apply to those you were initially arguing against, re: WL, govt employees, Amazon etc.
chris – yes, people are often unwilling to accept verdicts, often on the basis of prejudice. But:
1. I think that verdicts of criminal cases are far more likely to be accepted faithfully in certain circles which include the vast bulk of opinion formers, Serious people and (as suggested) historians. Which is of far more consequence than the resignedly apathetic mutterings of the powerless and the marginalised.
2. going by the advertised standard and burden of proof, at least, one is prima facie more justified in doubting acquittals (viewed as proof of innocence) than convictions (viewed as proof of guilt). That’s probably not quite right, but there is at any rate an asymmetry there.
Tim Wilkinson 12.29.10 at 1:06 am
Something went wrong there. This para:
Anand Manikutty – But leaks aren’t really much to do with cryptology. They occur when people who are entrusted with information decide to make it public. The leakers are precisely those who have not been denied access to it, by cryptography or any other means.
Was supposed to be at the beginning, rather than half way down.
Anand Manikutty 12.29.10 at 4:37 am
@ Tim Wilkinson –
But leaks aren’t really much to do with cryptology. They occur when people who are entrusted with information decide to make it public. The leakers are precisely those who have not been denied access to it, by cryptography or any other means.
That is precisely my point. There actually is a way to use cryptology for the problem of leaks.
Consider the following problem formulation : you have a principal DF and an agent MD. MD (Minion for Disinformation) lies on behalf of the principal DF (Disinformation Functionary) over a communication medium that has the ‘permanence’ property (that is, when messages are sent over the medium, permanent copies of the messages may be made by third parties). Neither MD nor DF has any control over who makes copies of messages sent over the communication medium. What can DF and MD do to protect themselves?
Richard Lipton argues that one could have multiple versions of a single message, subtly altered so that it would be hard to tell which one was authentic. MD’s actions may seem despicable. If MD is communicating contractual terms or something to that effect, it may in fact even be illegal. But this also has more positive applications. For instance, this may be applicable for communicating numerical data (financial data or design specifications) .
I was also making the point that there are some types of secrets that people do care about and so the government does have a role in protecting those secrets. So, yes, if it is really the chair of doctoral programs communicating something to a student, what the chair did is despicable, but if it actually just involves protecting other types of data, it may actually be a good thing. In fact, there was a rumor in the Valley that Apple ‘manufactures’ leaks with specific codes so that it is possible to see if there are any parts of the organization from which leaks may be occurring.
Tim Wilkinson 12.29.10 at 10:15 am
Anand Manikutty –
this is opening a big new can of proliferating worms, but basically that sounds like either:
1. a cryptographic decoy technique, resembling chaffing and winnowing, in which case it is irrelevant since leakers are those who are (as some people have to be) granted access to plain text information, or
2. a method of providing false evidence for the inauthenticity of leaked documents – something that can certainly be done, but has tended not to be, possibly for cost/benefit reasons (for one thing, once you start actively denying things you have to keep doing it), and possibly because post hoc denials are unconvincing, or because the infomation can be independently verified, or a variety of other reasons, good and bad, including for example just not having had time or expertise to decide on such a strategy, who knows.
But there’s a universe of inceasingly convoluted possibilities like this, among them the possibility of false leaks being planted. And the media are, as you might expect, not much good at thinking forensically about such things – they don’t even seem clear-headed enough to distinguish between reality and the surface content of a government telegram. Not very surprising, I suppose, given the ingrained habit of uncritically repeating govt statements.
The idea of differentiating material to trace the source of leaks is of course a well-established counter-espionage technique, but in general more suited to finding moles than one-off whistleblowers. (Traditionally, customised information has been used for the purpose – which implies an ongoing leak (otherwise it’s too late) and, generally, that the leaker can’t tell true from false info (not typically the case with whistleblowers) – though in the case of documents rather than ‘pure’ info, non-semantic or very subtle markers can be added instead, of course. But the risk of discovery is part of what (normally) keeps leakers honest.
that there are some types of secrets that people do care about
No doubt – and WL says it will accept restricted or censored material of political, ethical, diplomatic or historical significance. It also says it has a ‘harm minimisation’ procedure, of course.
the government does have a role in protecting those secrets
The government will try to protect its secrets; the personnel it has to entrust them to may find them unworthy of keeping. When it comes to deciding what should be publicised, I’m inclined to put more trust in low-ish level employees who risk a lot and stand to gain nothing personally and in a proper application of journalistic ethics, than in the routine, arrogant secrecy of governments which seek to avoid scrutiny by those they serve.
Tim Wilkinson 12.29.10 at 10:17 am
‘serve’ -> ‘supposedly serve’, of course.
bianca steele 12.29.10 at 4:27 pm
The AM/TW debate is interesting, but it occurs to me that “WL is not about cryptography” is true in a way Tim probably didn’t intend. WikiLeaks seems to have a lot of support from the open source community–not just because there is some overlap between open source and “the hacker community”–and the reason doesn’t seem to me to be what the open source community wants to open up is classified information. Their reasons are different from that, and I don’t think the coverage is getting at this.
Moreover, AM’s explanation of how a deceptive system could be designed is not true metaphysically in the sense that he is describing the only good design for such a system, or the workings of some actually existing system, and I’m sure he does not mean to preclude the existence of other designs that do the same thing, any more than he means you to understand him to be telling you how to build one or to use his description for a paper you may have due in your systems class.
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