Wikijerks
whattofix.com
whattofix.com
I respect your opinions, and I certainly respect the strength of your conviction about WikiLeaks. Most people seem to be taking a white-or-black stance on this, but I'm stuck somewhere in the gray.
Regarding the leaked cables (at least the ones leaked so far), I'm finding it hard to believe that the leak has caused permanent or significant damage of any kind. Diplomats will have to work overtime to smooth some ruffled feathers, but I haven't seen evidence of a shift for the worse in international relations.
If the worst outcome of these leaks is "even greater clamping down of information and ... a new age of the security state", then there is something fundamentally wrong, that goes beyond WikiLeaks. It seems irrational to argue that such changes would never happen IF ONLY WikiLeaks wasn't around.
The closest analogy in terms of effect on American policy and society would be 9/11. 9/11 was a barbaric, indefensible act, but the US has vastly over-reacted in the following decade, with no signs of slowing down. How much of the blame for the over-reaction belongs to Al Qaeda, and how much points to a systemic problem with how the US government deals with crises and the tradeoff between security and personal rights?
Now, WikiLeaks hasn't flown any planes into buildings. They haven't killed anyone. They've made state secrets public, which is a serious matter - but, pragmatically, they've embarrassed and caused more work for a number of diplomats, and not much else. That doesn't necessarily make them praise-worthy, but does it really warrant violent or even lethal opposition?
Look, the reality is none of us have any real clue about what WikiLeaks means. All we know is that technology means the rules are changing. I only really see two possible trends for the future - more openness, or more control. I'm not convinced that what WikiLeaks is doing is right, but given the choice of how I would prefer the world to look like in 20 years, I'd pick more openness over more control. Your preference seems to be for more control, since you seem to feel that an assassination of Julian Assange by the US government would be justified.
Edit: saw your comment about assassination. You can disregard that part of my comment, although since Julian Assange is not a US citizen (and neither am I, for that matter), our ideas for what "lethal force" implies in this context are probably different.
Edit2: Have you read "The World is Flat"? It may seem tangential, but I think it has everything to do with people's perception and expectations of WikiLeaks, and the changes implied by this episode.
I respect your right to disagree. Heck, I don't claim to have all of the answers.
Here's the thing: WL is taking it on itself to make those decisions for all of us. Put differently: the government is broken and is making too many things secret. WL has decided that because it is broken, they get to decide what sort of massive response is warranted.
All I'm saying is wait a minute, the entire purpose of my voting is so I can make decisions. If you'd like to point out specific things that are secret that need fixing, I'm with you. Please continue. But if you're saying that you have become the arbiter of what causes harm or not, you are taking on yourself something that you have no right to do, whether you're alex or some WL guy. You're making the same mistake only in reverse.
Does that make sense?
Do you get to write laws that the public gets to vote on directly? No. Who does? The government as a whole.
We just pick A or B and then A or B get to choose their vote, which may or may not be the same but often is similar on sensitive subjects (do not offend the main voting demographic as much as possible so I can get re-elected).
Two wrongs don't make a right is a moral dilemma, but sometimes two wrongs are good for society. E.g. 911 was bad, but attacking Afghanistan was a good response and an appropriate one.
But who are you to decide that voting rarely works and take action on that? That's a completely different level than saying in certain cases things are out of whack.
I agree that the system is structurally broken, perhaps beyond repair. But attacking the way its put together is an act of war. A weird little act of war by a small group of anarchists, but an act of war nonetheless. There is a difference in kind between the Pentagon Papers and the State Department dump. One is for the better good where the leaker put himself at the mercy of the taxpayers. The other is a foreign agency expecting no reprisals at all and attacking the government in its entirity, not just one particular aspect of it.
You'll not get a disagreement from me over how broken things are. I'm just asking each of us to pick one of the options. I don't see any other choices available.
If I'm wrong, please explain how I am wrong. Would love to hear it.
Doing nothing results in no change - this is probably the most illogical argument of all. You also cannot say the government should go after them for releasing information that the government said shouldn't be released without explaining what exactly Wikileaks is harming in doing so. Lastly, you cannot go to war with the government over this because just as voting doesn't work, neither would rioting unless it were national (or say >= 20 states).
The heck if I do.
I'm saying that I personally support the system of voting to enact change, that I believe the only arbitrer of whether something was justifiably held secret or not are my fellow voters, and that by denying us the right to participate in that agreed-upon state of affairs, it is a form of attack. It is not denied by keeping too many secrets -- secrets leak and we make choices. But it is, oddly enough, denied by dumping entire boatloads of secrets.
A just government has nothing to do with it.
I believe the only arbitrer of whether something was justifiably held secret or not are my fellow voters
How can this ever happen if we the voters are never given any view into what is being kept secret? We may as well vote on "should we continue black ops project X-123?". No voter can have any opinion on the question by its very nature.
It seems like this is getting us into a Catch-22.
From what I've seen, you believe that the system is broken in such a way that sufficient voting can fix it. I disagree. Instead of attempting to persuade you otherwise (as it seems you're pretty attached to this viewpoint presently), I'll merely ask - what hypothetical developments and observations would it take to make you believe that your vote is futile?
I am very dubious that the results will work out well, ie, I do not necessarily think voting will fix anything.
But the process of voting is another thing entirely. It holds society together. It gives us a sense of change. It is what allows me to live in a peaceful country. We might go another 200 years with the process of voting working well enough for civilization to prosper. And that's okay with me.
Now if you are asking me under what conditions I would choose option 3? It would have to involve my decision that my family was under imminent threat of harm, or that a majority of my fellow citizens would feel that enough people were under threat to warrant action. I would not take up such a cause simply because I felt strongly one way or another. Mainly because I might be wrong. I'm very good at being wrong, done it a lot. Wouldn't want to make an individual choice to make that mistake with other people's lives unless I absolutely had to, although as a collective decision my threshold is much lower.
This may sound awful, but really, I can't change the relationship from voting to the state. If I could, I would. I can observe that most folks who think they can are idiots and end up doing much more harm than good. They gin up a lot of outrage and passion and then it always ends up in violence and oppression, trading off one bunch of jerks for another. This is the clear pattern of history. I don't mean that personally, I have no idea what your opinion on the matter is.
Ok. And your point is?
If your point is that the U.S. is the de facto world government and you would like to do something to change it, then vote or otherwise go about your own citizenship duties to elect a government which will leak secrets, make deals, or otherwise act to change U.S. policy.
But don't electronically come over here and spread all our state department cables all over the world. I'm sure your government has some sort of rule about attempting to destroy the functioning of a foreign government.
If not, they're about to develop one.
Sigh. I keep getting back to WL being the jerks that I mostly agree with who are going to screw things up for everybody. And you know the worst part of it? A bunch of folks will lionize them for it. We won't have as many freedoms because of their actions, but it'll be okay because we have heroes who stood up for the little guy.
It's depressing, really.
>Does that make sense?
More than you may think. I'm Canadian. The US routinely makes decisions that affect me but that I have no say in.
Now, I want to be very careful here, because I don't want to frame this as "the big bad US got some egg on their face, serves them right" - it's very easy to think this is about the US (and, well, in a literal sense it obviously is), but it's really not.
What nationality is WikiLeaks?
Think about that for a second.
To what extent would you support retaliations against an American member of WikiLeaks by, say, the UK or German government?
Here's the fundamental difference between how we're looking at it. As a citizen of country X, Y, or Z, you have every right to be pissed if an external party leaks some of your country's secrets to another country.
If, however, you think that technology from the last 20 years has set us on an inevitable path to an interconnected world, then that changes things. Your vote as a US citizen affects me, although I have no say in it. My vote as a Canadian citizen affects people in other countries. And we're no longer talking about geopolitical stuff like wars or foreign aid, we're talking about everyday stuff like how my computer works. To what extent should I support your specific government's secrets?
Here, a perfect example:
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5504/125/
Maybe "less secrets" IS the answer, and maybe governments will never arrive at that answer on their own. I don't know. I do know the picture gets a lot more complicated when you look at it on the global level, and not just one country.
I hate the way SA does things. I hate the fact that they support terrorist. I hate the fact they oppress their women. I hate the fact that they oppress their people. I hate the fact they bleed us with oil money (continue on ad infinitum, or until you get a good head of steam worked up over how bad country X is)
Now. I come across a big pile of documents from Saudi Arabia. All of their secret documents. All of the details of all the bad things they've done. All of the little evils. But also some good things. Some things that might hurt people (or not). And some things that I have no idea the importance of (probably the biggest hunk, really).
We're back to the 3 choices again. I can give it all to my own government. I can choose a particular injustice and release documents in support of that (and be willing to accept the consequences) or I can dump them all on the web and effectively declare my own little personal war on Saudi Arabia.
Option 3 is incredible because it didn't exist before. Sure, it used to be done -- there was a big dump of secret documents before WWI that partially led to the instability that caused the war -- but not by a single person.
In this case I'd pick option 1 and be very happy about it. But I could also support somebody picking option 2. This is a personal decision.
Option 3 is a non-starter with me. It is wrong under any circumstances.
That help clear it up?
You guys are so starry-eyed by the new existence of option 3 that you think it's going to solve all these huge problems. I'm telling you all it's going to do is cause somebody with a really big stick to come over and hit you on the head. And then we all suffer because a few guys thought bittorrent and aes could save the universe.
In my alternate universe, the Soviet Union won the cold war and the United States collapsed. The former USA splintered into several regional nations.
The European Union has been absorbed into the Soviet bloc, which now includes all of Western Europe and the Mediterranean.
The Eastern Seaboard of North America from Newfoundland to Florida joined the Soviet bloc and the leaders of these nations are loyal to the Kremlin.
The West Coast of North America from British Columbia through Baja California has deep military and economic integration with China, and is now subject to censorship and social controls dictated from Beijing.
Saskatchewan through Texas and Mexico is now a loose federation of independent nations that is not aligned with either of the two great powers, and is trying to be like Switzerland used to be -- they don't take sides, and they don't stir up trouble. They mind their own business and avoid international disputes.
A free citizen of Kansaslahoma finds a cache of documents showing that the Kremlin and Soviet oligarchs are using their military and financial might to lock up energy resources and systematically transfer wealth from nonaligned nations to the Soviet Union.
1. Giving the documents to the leaders of Kansaslahoma won't help, because they won't stir up disputes with a hyperpower.
2. Reviewing hundreds of thousands of documents by yourself isn't viable, and time is of the essence.
3. You can expose the docs for millions of people in nonaligned states to read and analyze. Maybe Moscow's data controls will be porous enough that some Soviet citizens will learn what their leaders are doing in their names.
Even if your actions don't precipitate a revolution by themselves, you know that you're imposing a lot of security overhead every time they try to communicate among themselves.
So the Soviet military-industrial-financial complex will become slower and less effective in their efforts at world domination.
It is my decision what nation to be a part of. If I am not happy with the nation I am in, my first obligation is to leave and find one that better suits me.
It is not my job to conduct foreign relations or participate in espionage, even against the mighty Soviet military industrial complex.
I thought I was pretty clear on that.
If you found sensitive documents from Saudia Arabia, your conclusions make sense. Saudi Arabia isn't a global power, so you have good choices. You can give the documents to your government. And if your government isn't responsive, you lobby your government, or you become a citizen of another nation.
But in my speculative version, as in the real-life situation, you don't have good choices. Your adversary isn't just a regional player, it's the primary global power.
If you're a citizen of Kansaslahoma (or Sweden, Switzerland, Australia, the UK, Argentina, etc.), your government will not act against the global hegemon due to the power imbalance.
So you can't just go citizenship shopping. If you believe there's a great injustice that must be resolved, your only real options are to do nothing, or to make a direct appeal to the people.
There's a long history in western civilization of what to do in just the situation you suppose. Where would you like to begin? John Locke? Hobbes? Confucius? Jefferson? MLK? Mandela? No matter where we start this journey we end up with individuals making their own choices and taking responsibility for their own actions. There is a fundamental difference between working to change a system by selectively exposing injustices and attacking the system itself. Now you might effectively come up with some sort of scenario where the only recourse is for the individual to choose war, but all you're doing then is picking option 3 from my list, and we haven't gotten anywhere that we weren't before.
What I'm saying is that if you believe the system itself is the problem, then nonviolent resistance all by yourself may not be effective. And if those injustices are perpetrated by a global power, appealing to your small nation's leadership may not be effective.
Many times real change only happens when an individual attacks the system, and usually that individual pays the ultimate price for their convictions.
Take Guy Fawkes for example. He found the situation in 1605 England so dire and intolerable that he tried to blow up the House of Lords and assassinate King James.
I'm not saying it's moral or ethical, but it's how things change.
Guy Fawkes was drawn and quartered, but every year there's a holiday and fireworks for him in the UK. Only history will tell if Julian Assange is a hero or a villian.
I believe you are arguing that the individual should take various forms of action based on his/her best guess as to what the outcome might be. My point was that this is an individual choice based on internal criteria: going around guessing what outcome might happen from this, that, or the other action is not a basis for the choice to take action itself (although it might be a great basis for choosing the type of action) I don't decide to attack an intruder in my home based on some assessment of the possibilities of the various legal options I might have: I attack an intruder because I believe my life is in jeopardy. At the extremes the decision to act in such a blanket manner is an internal choice.
Let's hang it up here. Thanks for the conversation! I hear us both agreeing that the thought experiment was worthwhile. I plan on using that the next time the topic comes up. Maybe we can make more progress then.
That's not what a nation is sunbeam.
I am not arguing that option 3 will magically solve everything - it's very possible it may do more harm than good. However, I'm also not convinced that it should be unequivocally condemned, and the truth MAY be that we simply don't know how it will change things. Like I said at the beginning, I'm somewhere in the gray. I rarely like absolutes.
There is one part of your argument that bothers me, though. On the one hand, you are fundamentally opposed to what WikiLeaks is doing because you feel they don't have a mandate for it, and a change in government policy should come from its own people, not be imposed from an external source (I could go on an obvious tangent here, but I'll stay on topic). On the other hand, you argue that WikiLeaks' actions will have a net negative effect because of heavy-handed government response, resulting in less openness and personal freedom.
For me, the second point severely undermines the first. If you strongly feel that government should and can be controlled by its own people (and not external sources), then the people should be able to prevent an inappropriate government response that is against their interests. If, on the other hand, getting hit on the head with a big stick is an inevitable outcome to a crisis, then maybe you have to leave the door open to the possibility that certain changes can only be forced from the outside. It almost makes something like WikiLeaks seem necessary.
Thank you very much for the great conversation! I lean on my HN friends to help me think through these things, and you guys have been awesome today. Hopefully our conversation has helped other folks sort through this issue also.
The difference between my secrets and the secrets of the government is that the government works for me.
The government governs in the name of the people. I am the people. Government employees are my employees.
If my employees keep their actions secret from me, conspire with diplomats from other countries against me and try to push me into waging wars based on false information, then I should be able to find this out and make it public.
> [Wikileaks] are my enemy, and I support any use of state force against them, up to and including lethal force.
You have the right to "support" anything you want, but the US constitution (in theory!) prevents the government from killing individuals without due process (which includes charging them with crimes based on pre-existing laws, and trying them in an open court).
If you don't approve of the US constitution, then what are you fighting for...?
As far as your employee analogy goes, employees sometimes do need to keep secrets from their employer. For instance, if I tell my lawyer something I expect it to only be shared with other lawyers who are actually working on my case and need to know it. Just because my lawyer is an employee of a firm does not mean that the owners of the firm have any right to secrets I've shared with my lawyer.
The notion that government employees are your employees is simply wrong. You are more like a stockholder, not an employer. Companies are not required to tell their stockholders every detail of the operations of the business, for good reason.
Rarely has an event exposed so clearly the hypocrisies and conflict at the heart of our western democracies.
If it happened in Germany, it can happen here. Germany had Liebniz, Kant, Mozart, Einstein, the Reformation.. no reason to think that we're so much better.
( I really tried to avoid Godwin's law here, but I couldn't. The news debate has rapidly turned from "what is our government doing" to "just how unamerican is this guy, anyways". It's a bad trend. )
This is so disconnected from what danielbmarkham is actually arguing that I've flagged this entire thread as unproductively political.
And the reasoning is that the guy dared to tattle on the government killing people. Identity politics and advocacy for unlimited extrajudicial police power to prosecute said enemies. If that's not fascism, I don't know what is.
Now, if he were using violence to kill Americans, like say a Somali pirate, and no less violent alternative was available and effective, then lethal force would be justified.
However, if we don't want him to discuss our secrets, the solution is pretty simple: keep them secret.
Where the writer's argument falls apart is that
1) Assange doesn't owe the US Government any duty to keep its secrets, unlike a US citizen
2) it's not a commensurate response; embarrassing us is not the same as killing us; there are simple solutions to prevent what he's doing and
3) it would be ineffective because it would make the US look far worse than it already does.
But that's besides the point. He's a hippie! Look at his hippie manifestos! Don't read the leaks or anything, we'll just have a debate on cross-fire about whether he's anti-american.
....
really? I'm going to try to think of something to say about this that doesn't fall afoul of Godwin's law. It might be a while.
So Daniel, here's why I think you're wrong.
Firstly, you're justifying this on the basis that what Wikileaks is doing is analogous to war against the US. But it's really only analogous to it, it's not an actual war. Nobody has been killed in this "war" yet, and I really don't see a reason to start.
Secondly, it would set a bad precedent. By all means we can assassinate Osama bin Laden, but if you scale that back to Julian Assange then who else can we justify assassinating? There's all sorts of individuals making weakly-analogous and ineffectual "war" upon the US Government from various extremal points on the political spectrum.
Thirdly, it's unnecessary. Even in an actual war, we prefer to capture rather than to kill unarmed men where possible. If Assange has broken US law then there's a perfectly reasonable set of procedures we can go through in order to put him on trial.
Fourthly, it would just be a public relations disaster for the US, in ways that I don't feel the need to explain.
In conclusion, Daniel, I know you were being hyperbolic with the kill-Assange thing, but I think you'll agree that under careful consideration of the options that it's probably not the best option.
As has been said a million other places, there's way more embarrassing stuff about other gov'ts than there is stuff about the US in these cables.
But all you see the news media talking about is "whether Assange is unamerican".
Cui bono?
Since he's an Australian, it's not much of a question to ask.
But then, you knew what I meant, right? Glad to see that my typo was the most important part of the post.
Being able to keep it a secret that innocent people were killed because of a poor war campaign is reason enough to not trust the government ALL of the time. Are there secrets that are important? Yes. But nowadays, EVERYTHING is confidential and the only information we get is the stuff that's too big for them to hide (or they want us to see).
I don't think it was ever a secret that innocent people get killed in wars.
Thanks for the thoughtful post.
The logical stretch I think you commit is that you view consent or dissent as largely black and white. I'd argue that it is our civic duty to dissent about all things we disapprove of, both at the ballot box and in our day to day lives.
That entails that we break any laws we disagree with, etc. Of course, the limit to this is the willingness we each have to risk the consequences (if any) of breaking laws.
I don't think we are somehow bound to support or obey all laws just because we haven't yet gotten to the point of renouncing our citizenship or packing up and leaving.
In a majoritarian system like ours, the minority is constantly unhappy. Since we are nearly constantly in the run-up to an election, we must publicize our dissent in order to participate in the democratic process.
Again, civil disobedience puts the individual at risk, so I agree with your point that a person must accept the consequences of his/her actions, but I strongly disagree with the idea that we should accept the majoritarian conclusion of the moment and feel bad about speaking out against bad laws and bad policies.
On the issue of secrecy, I don't hold the belief you describe. Sure, some secrecy is inevitable (and probably helpful). But the US today has way too much. We learned that the military was keeping things secret that bore no relevance to the battle but only to the perception of the battle by the American public. That's not secrecy, that's propaganda by omission.
I think in order to claim that the Wikileaks people are jerks, you have to explain why you think it was appropriate for the US Government to reply that "we don't negotiate" when offered the ability to redact whatever it thought might prevent any harmful consequences of the leaked info. In my view, this response is just as grating as when George W Bush crossed his arms and proclaimed "We don't negotiate with Terrorists" as he attempted to escalate things with Iran.
I see lots of shades of gray. I think they're all covered under option 2.
As far as how the U.S. should have responded, I don't think they had much of a choice: the State Department couldn't tell whether one doc should be secret or not even on a good day. Even with an order from the president it would have been physically impossible for them to go through those docs. Not to mention the precedent it would set -- very bad thing there.
Yes, the U.S. has too much secrecy. Let's vote to fix it. Or let's leak selected stories to fix it. But let's not come up with plans to massively overwhelm the government with tons of formerly secret documents. Not only is it not productive, it is taking up a position of control over other people's lives that we are not entitled to, and it is deciding that the entire thing is so broken as to be worthy of attack. That's not a very good way to get your point across, no matter how right or wrong you are.
This is why I think the impact of the leaks was profound. Suddenly this abstract concept that so many of us had treated with reverence and respect turned out to have been severely misused.
I can personally state that I would never have dreamed that some of the things that were revealed would ever actually take place. Is it really possible that in 2010 the US Government can lie to its citizenry about such important things? Note that propaganda against US Citizens is forbidden by law, and the leaks revealed a massive propaganda campaign.
Only through leaks of this kind can the public accurately understand that there is a need to rein in the use of secrecy (and propaganda) by the government. When kept in the abstract, secrecy is a great tool of statecraft, warcraft, etc. So the only way we could be rational about this was to see firsthand just what is going on.
It's true there might have been a more delicate way to introduce the leaked information, but the biggest threat to Wikileaks' credibility is the notion that it selectively filters/omits information to serve its own political goals. With such a large leak, it becomes almost inevitable that a fledgling Wikileaks resort to leaking such large amounts b/c it currently lacks the credibility to do anything but.
I'm simply saying that part of my arrangement with my government is to conduct our business like it always has, with leaks, scandals, and voting. I do not like the way things have been going: we're turning into a secrecy state that actively deceives it's citizens. But I feel that the way we make changes is the most optimum for the people involved at the current time. Perhaps you are unhappy with my arrangement, but it is my arrangement and not yours. I do not come to your country and interfere with your arrangement.
Now feel free to carry on with your outrage about the lying and propaganda and such. Run videos of soldiers killing innocents. Run ads and make leaks to convince me that my relationship with my government is bad. Do all the things in a free society that help us find our mistakes and fix them. I might disagree with you, but I completely support your right (and obligation even) to make a moral case to others that some wrong needs fixing.
But short-circuiting the system does not do that.
What would the NY Times have done if Manning had sent the cables to it instead of to Wikileaks? Most likely nothing.
The adversarial relationship between the press and government is a core principle of our democracy, and I think it's because I view Wikileaks as being largely journalistic in nature that I feel that the leaks have strengthened our democracy, though at the cost of weakening our rule of law.
But in my opinion the government has already weakened our rule of law by propagandizing us and lying to us.
Democracy is a tenuous arrangement between the rulers and the governed. In my view it is a tradeoff between individual sovereignty and rights. When the government squashes those rights by breaking its contract with the people and propagandizing a war, the tenuous arrangement has been disturbed and a self-respecting public will claw back those rights through an exercise of sovereignty... and while this may be at the temporary expense of the rule of law, it is guided by a principle that we ought to consider at least as sacred.
So I hope our leaders are appropriately chastened and I hope that your wish of reforms and improvements via the democratic process occurs.
Agreed. But twist it a bit. What if the NYT had received 100 docs on the subject of prisoner torture: detailed accounts, videos, reports of the problems it was causing. What would be their response then?
The true power of journalism comes from what doesn't get reported. The NYT wrote a story on Assange that referred to his "dwindling supporters" and made no mention of the odd technicalities in the rape case, and presented him as being an egomaniac. All of these may be true (or false) but the article cited no references for any of the negative claims. Also, the leaks are the story. Assange is not the story, as much as tabloids would like him to be.
2) Even if their selectivity has not been at the correct point on the grayscale, I don't see how you get from there to the necessity of lethal force.
If the survival of the free world were at stake, or even the lives of its supporters, quite possibly.
But if an American embarrassed a foreign government that couldn't hold on to its secrets, I don't think we would consider it justified if it used lethal force. We would rightly consider such a government, that thought interfering with its efficient operation was punishable by death, rather extreme and fascist.
But this would require them to move to making a selective case for injustice instead of just trying to tear it all down, and I don't see them making that change any time soon.
As for the rest of your comment, please see my other replies.
If you do something bad and covert it up, it's a bad secret because it results in bad things and the politicians involved do not want to be associated with the result. Such a thing musn't be a secret. It's wrong to cover up a bad thing because it's hiding something that could hurt you and others in the future. If the government's job should be to keep the society's justice then it's absolutely necessary not to hide bad things otherwise they're lying. So it's not the government's place to hide bad secrets.
Good things don't need to be lauded (humility) and they don't need to be covered up either. Since it's not going to result in a bad thing and hurt the society then it doesn't have to revealed unless you would like to use the good thing. For example, if private stuff in his life is actually private and not hurting anyone else, then he should be allowed to keep the secret if he decides to because it's his own life.
If there is this principle to tell good and bad in people's activities then it solves his question.
A good thing makes a good result, bad thing makes a bad result. A good thing is something that has enough truth inside it to transmit 'what is' accurately. Bad things have too much falsehood to see the things correctly.
imo you should judge things in the world for yourself after you've seen & confirmed what it is like.
Edit: @hugh3 hope that makes more sense
That half of what you said is circular,
A good thing is something that has truth inside it. Bad things have falsehoods in them.
and that half doesn't make much sense.
It is necessary for the government to keep some things secret. The people who elect and pay for the government generally have no problem with this. The problem is that the government itself is the entity that decides which things it's allowed to keep secret, so various government agencies can do things that they shouldn't and then use government secrecy to hide it. The possibility of anonymous individuals with conscience leaking evidence of this kind of thing, when it happens, is an important part of making sure it doesn't. So I fully support this old-school leaking.
Privacy of the individual is not the same as privacy of a government[1], we must take into consideration the balance of power. If you look at things with respect to power it makes sense that the most private individuals want powerful organizations to be more transparent as they have disproportionate power over individuals.
The author didn't clearly explain why he hates Wikileaks but presumably it is because of what was leaked: diplomatic cables as opposed to something that uncovered massive criminal conspiracy.
We haven't seen anything to suggest that these leaks are dangerous to the US. Defense secretary Robert Gates basically said they were embarrassing and awkward but won't have much of an effect on foreign policy[2]. For earlier leaks on the US military shootings he said there was no apparent fallout[3].
[Wikileaks] are my enemy, and I support any use of state force against them, up to and including lethal force.
This is an overreaction. The information was not that valuable or that hostile to the US. Most of it was a confirmation of stuff we already knew. And even if it was serious, I don't want my government going around assassinating people for leaking documents to the media. I don't know how that can justify lethal force. Maybe if it was strategic military routes or something that is obviously not newsworthy.
1: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/03/privacy_and_po...
2: http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2010/11/quotable-secretary-...
3: http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/adam_serwer_archive?month...
Obligatory snark: Oh, look! An abused kissing the ass of his abuser!
I have yet to make up my mind on the whole situation, so I'm open to that thought experiment, but I still have one major unresolved issue for which I have not heard a satisfactory argument:
Why is it okay for the New York Times to publish this information, but it's not okay for WikiLeaks to do it? Are we not distinguishing between the leaking and the publishing anymore?
Because the NYT is an agency dedicated to telling stories -- some of which happen to be political and/or secret in nature. Wikileaks is dedicated to attacking the structure of the government by mass releases of documents covering all sorts of things.
When you have a leaker which wants some injustice fixed and a publisher who publishes to tell that story, you are then able to make some informed judgment on what was best for society, ie, there is a rational conversation. See the Pentagon Papers.
But when you leak 200K documents -- who has the ability to review or digest all of that? I doubt anybody could make a statement on what the impact is or whether the leak was worth it or not. They'll be debating the impact of these leaks 50 years from now. It takes away the conversation between the voters and the government. Which is the entire point, of course. If the purpose is to destroy the relationship between voters and the government, then you are no longer a publisher, ie, you are no longer relating a thematic story with some sort of political or secret overtones. Your right of free speech -- the ability to relate stories, demonstrate, protest, and persuade me of a certain cause is not applicable any more. You can't have any sort of reasonable conversation about how to fix things using 200K documents to do so. This would be like calling myself a musician if I played every note on the keyboard on a thousand instruments at once. I would be something -- noisemaker or something, but not a musician. There is no theme or point except chaos and anarchy.
Beats the hell out of me what wikileaks is, but its not a publisher. Information sprinkler? I'd go with "cyber terrorist", but nobody was purposely killed to effect political change, just massive amounts of information leaked, so the word "terrorism" doesn't work.
It's a very strange semantic place we've ended up.
"The embassy cables will be released in stages over the next few months. The subject matter of these cables is of such importance, and the geographical spread so broad, that to do otherwise would not do this material justice."
It seems they've given consideration to the sensitivity of the material.
But consideration to the sensitivity of the material was never at issue.
Where we get to read posts from users calling for murder.
"Major" you ask? Yes, the value proposition of murder is always a major issue. It should always be reaffirmed as one of the brightest lines a society can draw.
Just FYI, for those who don't know, Sanger confounded Wikipedia and not Wikileaks. Two separate organizations; not related.
I have alerted the author about this.
This thread has degenerated into name-calling (several commenters accusing other commenters of being fascists). Why is that?
how do you know if the government is working in your interest, if nearly everything it does is secret?
Do you know how much it takes for the government to access your personal email address?
Do you think that the government is always right? Do you think that the people there don't have personal interests?
As time passes the government demands to know more and more about you and let's you know less about it, don't you think at some point this becomes a problem?
I wonder what Mr. Markham considers the proper etiquette for blasting people apart with DU.
I would suggest that when one's 14 year old son would assent to a government butchering and eating babies in the name of National Security, it might be time to reconsider one's career as a moralist.
<warandpeace>
This doesn't really wash.
It's not inconsistent to believe that the entire episode as it stands is a good example of a less bad system than if all this information was kept forever under wraps. Let's examine a few of the cases point by point as to why the leaks are a terrible thing;
Point) Secrets are essential to the functioning of a government, without any secrets nothing could get done.
Counterpoint) Wikileaks are not trying to reveal all secrets, if you look at their released documents there are many redacted segments where sensitive names are handed out, for example this one http://cablesearch.org/cable/view.php?id=09TELAVIV1098&h... . This does not entirely excuse the process in one fell swoop, as there are other instances where they have exposed information with a questionable upside and an apparently heavy downside, but it does indicate that they are at least trying for a harm minimisation process. It is clearly not their purpose to cause as much "battle damage" as possible.
Further, although some secrets may be necessary to the functioning of governments, this is not a license that they ought to be able to employ secrets to cover up their messy failures that the public needs to know about if they want to be able to punish a surfeit of these or reward an absence of these. Hiding them leads at worst to an assumption that much more is wrong than actually is, and at best to an assumption that everything is rosy when the world is falling apart behind the scenes.
Point) They should stand up and take what's coming to them like real men, without this they're just being cowardly.
Counterpoint) How does this logic work for North Korea or other edge cases? And if this logic does not work for North Korea or other edge cases, where people would like to have exposure of injustice without opening themselves up for spiteful retribution or the execution of their entire family for not swallowing wholesale evil nonsense, where do you draw the line? If a torrent of information showing government malfeasance is leaked along with a trickle of examples of the actual valid employment of secrecy as a defensive measure, isn't this proof in itself that the ability to maintain secrecy is being abused?
It's actually a sliding scale in the leaking model dependent upon the content of the secrets being leaked, the leak process itself is one that somewhat accounts for this. You have a potential authoritarian conspiracy, members to this potential authoritarian conspiracy, and then the personal ethical and moral considerations of these members. When the degree to which a person feels compelled to disclose the nature of these secrets outweighs the degree to which they feel that it is more beneficial to keep these secrets, leaks happen. This is a hedge against deploying secrets to cover the failings and underhandedness of a given authoritarian conspiracy. Without this hedge, administrators of said authoritarian conspiracy have all the motivation in the world to mark their failings secret and none not to.
If you were to have had access to this trove of secrets beforehand and you had found that the only instances where secrets were actually employed is when it was clearly being used as a shield to protect lives and property, would you feel compelled to leak it? It looks like in instances where secrecy was validly employed in this method, even wikileaks has attempted to maintain that secrecy. That they haven't been perfectly capable of doing so is certainly partially their fault, but the blame cannot be shifted from the original situation in which secrets were primarily used as a cloak for failure.
Point) Ok so if things are really that bad then we should just declare armageddon, armed uprising, down with the tyrants! let the blood run free and fire flood the cities! Rargh, pass me my axe and the skull of the nearest infant that I may swill mead from it!
Counterpoint) Why in the event that you deem the current situation to be bad would you want to replace it with rank chaos and barbarism? This just sets an artificial lower limit for the pain of change. If no tactical movement could be made in opposition to the established powers until the alternative was outright armageddon, all this does is guarantee that eventually you will have outright armageddon. The sensible thing to do is obviously to act with foresight and care and attempt to minimise harm as much as possible, weigh your movements against the potential negative consequences of them and proceed on this basis.
If the only way to improve is to destroy everything in the established order, not only do we guarantee that eventually everything will be destroyed, but we also limit the current less bad circumstance to a natural plateau. This is not a good thing.
</warandpeace>
Well, I guess we're going to find out, aren't we?
You guys can continue the bickering now.
Why leave it up to people who are smarter than you? Aren't decisions concerning the level of force that is used against human beings a matter of ethics rather than intelligence?
> I just have decided that I support whatever decision is made legally.
So if X is legal, then X is good?