4 ms·

45 years after the Pentagon Papers, a new challenge to government secrecy

35 points by hackuser 10y ago

middleq 10y ago
Modal.
- linkregister 10y ago
  Noscript ;)
Zigurd 10y ago
To set bounds on how much protection of secrets is needed, do a thought experiment: Assume a super-leaker who accesses a repository of ALL significant secrets of law enforcement, military, intelligence, and political aspect of the fedgov. This would cause a loss of human assets of intelligence services, obviously. But what else? What else would be different the next day? Now compare that with what horrors would be revealed: Who profited illegally from a secret matter? What lies have the American people been operating under? Who got away with what? Who died for lack of competent action? Secrecy is so often used to avoid embarrassment at the cost of an informed public, the vast majority of what would be revealed deserves to be revealed. How beneficial would it be to learn these things, in full? The problem with things like "electronic declassification" is that they will err on the side of redaction.
- StanislavPetrov 10y ago
  > Assume a super-leaker who accesses a repository of ALL significant secrets of law enforcement, military, intelligence, and political aspect of the fedgov. Significant to who? A very good argument can be made that there is absolutely no good reason for our government to keep ANYTHING secret. Any behavior the government thinks that they need to keep secret, they should not be engaged in. The harm done to our country and our "democracy" by the secret (and often illegal and unconstitutional) actions of unaccountable government officials is far, far worse then any claimed benefit.
  - hackuser 10y ago
    > A very good argument can be made that there is absolutely no good reason for our government to keep ANYTHING secret. I disagree. As examples, the codes to launch nuclear missiles and also your personal tax returns probably should be kept secret.
    - StanislavPetrov 10y ago
      Considering that the codes to launch nuclear missiles were set to all 0's for decades, your disagreement is a perfect example of why nothing should be secret. http://www.globalzero.org/files/bb_keeping_presidents_in_the_nuclear_dark_-_episode_2_the_siop_option_that_wasnt_april_may_02.17.2004.pdf http://www.globalzero.org/files/bb_keeping_presidents_in_the... Government secrecy is toxic, the very antithesis of how a free society should be run. It serves to hide corruption, negligence, and malfeasance.
  - marcoperaza 10y ago
    If you seriously want to defend this viewpoint, which flies in the face of all conventional wisdom, then respond to superuser2's list. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11919660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11919660
  - tzs 10y ago
    So if a whistleblower tells the government about illegal activities of a business or of an organized crime group, the government should release the identity of the whistleblower and the details of exactly what information they provided? If people tell the CDC details of their sexual contacts so that CDC can track and deal with an outbreak of an STD, the CDC should release the names of the people involved and those sexual details? Or do you think law for cement and public health are not areas that government should be involved in?
- linkregister 10y ago
  The most important secrets are the most mundane to the public: the location and capability of military assets, such as nuclear missiles. Maybe technologies under R&D, such as aircraft, intelligence gathering techniques, or cryptography techniques are at the next level down. The loss of these secrets would seriously weaken the U.S. in diplomacy since adversaries would know the exact limits and shortfalls in U.S. military power. Most secrets, as you rightly assume, aren't in this class. Most of them are analysis literally gleaned from the open internet and combined in a report to a policy maker. I don't think the classification system is a good repository for secret corruption. Tenured federal employees have little reason to hide the impropriety of an elected official; on the contrary, they can get a cash bonus for reporting the malfeasance! In the rare cases when corruption was masked by military secrets, e.g. the Iran Contra affair, the profits were small (in the tens of thousands) compared to the scale of the wrongdoing (the undermining of the rule of law, Congress, and the people). The best way to detect corruption would be to have better aggregation of officials' assets and analysts dedicated to the task. Elected officials and security clearance holders currently fill out an annual financial disclosure, but corruption can easily be obscured from the process.
  - alanwatts 10y ago
    >In the rare cases when corruption was masked by military secrets, e.g. the Iran Contra affair, the profits were small (in the tens of thousands Where did you get that figure? Ricky Ross made billions personally on that racket
    - linkregister 10y ago
      Where did you get the figure that Rick Ross made a billion dollars? He was dealing drugs before the Iran-Contra affair. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Freeway%22_Rick_Ross https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Freeway%22_Rick_Ross Thanks for mentioning him, though. I didn't know much about this particularly interesting part of history.
      - alanwatts 10y ago
        Well, it's on his wiki[1], but most information about this part of the Iran-Contra is questionable, and Ross is very cagey about what he says in his interviews. The last person[2] to really take a deep look into this part of the story killed himself, by shooting himself in the head -- twice. >According to the October 2013 Esquire article, “Between 1982 and 1989, federal prosecutors estimated, Ross bought and resold several metric tons of cocaine. In 1980 dollars, his gross earnings were said to be in excess of $900 million – with a profit of nearly $300 million. Converted roughly to present-day dollars: 2.5 billion gross, and $850 million in profit, respectively. As his distribution empire grew to include forty-two cities, the price he paid per kilo of powder cocaine dropped from as much as $60,000 to as low as $10,000. ” [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/"Freeway"_Rick_Ross https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/"Freeway"_Rick_Ross [2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Webb https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Webb
- superuser2 10y ago
  Oooh, interesting. - Human intelligence assets would be executed, as you mention. Witness protection program participants, too. - Signals intelligence targets would stop using (or feed false information to) compromised systems. - Consequently, the government would lose what little understanding it has of what's going on in the world, threats, likely outcomes of foreign policy, etc. - It would also be incapable of any sort of undercover/sting operation, because every target of an investigation knows they are the target of an investigation. - Diplomats can no longer talk about 3rd parties behind their back. No more conspiracies between allies to keep another nation (i.e. North Korea) in check. No more back channels. - Diplomats must negotiate with foreign leaders in full view of their populations and political opponents. No more reasoning with leaders, brokering secret face-saving solutions. (Giving foreign nations an opportunity to back down without appearing weak is a staple of diplomacy). - The budget required to replicate our military technology (including nuclear arsenal) shrinks dramatically, amplifying threats currently below the threshold of "serious." - The nature of our defenses and locations of troops, installations, ships, etc. becomes public, lowering the bar to a successful attack. - Some of the government's secrets are your secrets too. The full name/DOB/SSN mapping used to authenticate yourself to financial services. Home and family addresses for federal employees like prison guards, judges, and prosecutors. - We've blown confidentiality, but some systems are not read-only. Properties like integrity, authorization, etc. often depend on the confidentiality of passwords and private keys. When the admin passwords enter public record, we have to assume all government databases and infrastructure (taxation, payroll, Exchange servers, PBXes for federal offices, etc) are promptly trashed by bored teenagers (or even better, overwritten with subtly wrong data/configuration for the lulz). How long before the email password of the Secretary of Defense is used to announce a foreign policy change? How long do you think the signing keys for a valid nuclear launch order will sit on Wikileaks before someone uses them? - Do we count the federal reserve? Authentication factors needed to make arbitrary bank transfers are out in the open too.
  - Zigurd 10y ago
    I disagree with most of your points but let's take an example of how TV/propaganda differs from reality: On TV, brave agents would be "incapable of any sort of undercover/sting operation." In reality, a super-leak would end abusive and dangerous confidential informant ops that depend on blackmailing CIs into enticing others into pseudo-crimes. CIs also commit thousands of crimes that they get away with while being CIs. The FBI wastes a good deal of time on these ops, which might have something to do with why, after his co-workers had concrete concerns about the Orlando shooter, the FBI found nothing wrong. Secrecy hides a lot of ineffective, expensive, and abusive practices. In every area you cite, it is likely that secrecy hides more appalling counterproductive corrupt practices than it protects secrets that make us safer.
- bpchaps 10y ago
  It's funny, I got the Chicago mayor's office phone records after a year of fighting for them. When my follow-up request asked for all calls to a particular hourly hotel in 2014, based on the results of my initial win, they claimed that I had all records for that phone number already. The department that gave me the initial records also had their access revoked a week or after the judge wrapped everything up. So, possible deletion of public records and additional layers of obfuscation.. Embarrassment is a weird thing in politics.
linkregister 10y ago
If actually implemented, I could foresee this automation drastically helping journalism. Right now, FOIA requests require the requester to pay for the cost of research and redaction. Potentially one of these costs is going to drop. Also, automated redaction would improve the time it takes to fulfill FOIA requests. Redaction isn't actually a difficult task, just tedious. The redactor (?) has a copy of the classification guide for that topic, and redacts anything from the document that hasn't exceeded its declassification time limit according to the guide.
- bpchaps 10y ago
  I've submitted maybe 75 FOIA requests without a journalist exemption of any kind in the past two years and haven't had to pay a cent. Submit some damn FOIA requests!
  - linkregister 10y ago
    That's awesome! I think I'll submit some this weekend!
    - bpchaps 10y ago
      Kick butt! Shoot me an email at the address on my user page if you ever need any help or just want to share experiences as you go along. :)
hackuser 10y ago
Daniel Patrick Moynhan[1] chaired the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy[2] and wrote a book called Secrecy: The American Experience[3]. His main thesis (IIRC, I read it awhile ago) was that information is an important asset in government. People in government naturally seek to obtain it, hoard it, and only trade it at a price. He argued that much of government secrecy serves that dynamic rather than national interests. He also asserts that ideas suffer from being developed in secret, often in insular echo chambers, where they are not exposed to the light of day of public debate and of outside ideas and points of view - a sort of cathedral vs. bazaar perspective. (Again, IIRC.) ---- [1] Notable sociologist, PhD in International Relations, UN Ambassador, Senator ... few were better qualified as a combination of scholar and practitioner. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moynihan_Commission_on_Government_Secrecy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moynihan_Commission_on_Governm... [3] https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/daniel-patrick-moynihan-5/secrecy-the-american-experience/ https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/daniel-patrick-mo... and https://www.nytimes.com/books/98/10/04/reviews/981004.04tanenht.html https://www.nytimes.com/books/98/10/04/reviews/981004.04tane...

35 points by hackuser 10y ago

middleq 10y ago

Modal.

linkregister 10y ago
Noscript ;)

Zigurd 10y ago

To set bounds on how much protection of secrets is needed, do a thought experiment: Assume a super-leaker who accesses a repository of ALL significant secrets of law enforcement, military, intelligence, and political aspect of the fedgov. This would cause a loss of human assets of intelligence services, obviously. But what else? What else would be different the next day? Now compare that with what horrors would be revealed: Who profited illegally from a secret matter? What lies have the American people been operating under? Who got away with what? Who died for lack of competent action? Secrecy is so often used to avoid embarrassment at the cost of an informed public, the vast majority of what would be revealed deserves to be revealed. How beneficial would it be to learn these things, in full? The problem with things like "electronic declassification" is that they will err on the side of redaction.

StanislavPetrov 10y ago
> Assume a super-leaker who accesses a repository of ALL significant secrets of law enforcement, military, intelligence, and political aspect of the fedgov. Significant to who? A very good argument can be made that there is absolutely no good reason for our government to keep ANYTHING secret. Any behavior the government thinks that they need to keep secret, they should not be engaged in. The harm done to our country and our "democracy" by the secret (and often illegal and unconstitutional) actions of unaccountable government officials is far, far worse then any claimed benefit.
- hackuser 10y ago
  > A very good argument can be made that there is absolutely no good reason for our government to keep ANYTHING secret. I disagree. As examples, the codes to launch nuclear missiles and also your personal tax returns probably should be kept secret.
  - StanislavPetrov 10y ago
    Considering that the codes to launch nuclear missiles were set to all 0's for decades, your disagreement is a perfect example of why nothing should be secret. http://www.globalzero.org/files/bb_keeping_presidents_in_the_nuclear_dark_-_episode_2_the_siop_option_that_wasnt_april_may_02.17.2004.pdf http://www.globalzero.org/files/bb_keeping_presidents_in_the... Government secrecy is toxic, the very antithesis of how a free society should be run. It serves to hide corruption, negligence, and malfeasance.
- marcoperaza 10y ago
  If you seriously want to defend this viewpoint, which flies in the face of all conventional wisdom, then respond to superuser2's list. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11919660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11919660
- tzs 10y ago
  So if a whistleblower tells the government about illegal activities of a business or of an organized crime group, the government should release the identity of the whistleblower and the details of exactly what information they provided? If people tell the CDC details of their sexual contacts so that CDC can track and deal with an outbreak of an STD, the CDC should release the names of the people involved and those sexual details? Or do you think law for cement and public health are not areas that government should be involved in?
linkregister 10y ago
The most important secrets are the most mundane to the public: the location and capability of military assets, such as nuclear missiles. Maybe technologies under R&D, such as aircraft, intelligence gathering techniques, or cryptography techniques are at the next level down. The loss of these secrets would seriously weaken the U.S. in diplomacy since adversaries would know the exact limits and shortfalls in U.S. military power. Most secrets, as you rightly assume, aren't in this class. Most of them are analysis literally gleaned from the open internet and combined in a report to a policy maker. I don't think the classification system is a good repository for secret corruption. Tenured federal employees have little reason to hide the impropriety of an elected official; on the contrary, they can get a cash bonus for reporting the malfeasance! In the rare cases when corruption was masked by military secrets, e.g. the Iran Contra affair, the profits were small (in the tens of thousands) compared to the scale of the wrongdoing (the undermining of the rule of law, Congress, and the people). The best way to detect corruption would be to have better aggregation of officials' assets and analysts dedicated to the task. Elected officials and security clearance holders currently fill out an annual financial disclosure, but corruption can easily be obscured from the process.
- alanwatts 10y ago
  >In the rare cases when corruption was masked by military secrets, e.g. the Iran Contra affair, the profits were small (in the tens of thousands Where did you get that figure? Ricky Ross made billions personally on that racket
  - linkregister 10y ago
    Where did you get the figure that Rick Ross made a billion dollars? He was dealing drugs before the Iran-Contra affair. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Freeway%22_Rick_Ross https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Freeway%22_Rick_Ross Thanks for mentioning him, though. I didn't know much about this particularly interesting part of history.
    - alanwatts 10y ago
      Well, it's on his wiki[1], but most information about this part of the Iran-Contra is questionable, and Ross is very cagey about what he says in his interviews. The last person[2] to really take a deep look into this part of the story killed himself, by shooting himself in the head -- twice. >According to the October 2013 Esquire article, “Between 1982 and 1989, federal prosecutors estimated, Ross bought and resold several metric tons of cocaine. In 1980 dollars, his gross earnings were said to be in excess of $900 million – with a profit of nearly $300 million. Converted roughly to present-day dollars: 2.5 billion gross, and $850 million in profit, respectively. As his distribution empire grew to include forty-two cities, the price he paid per kilo of powder cocaine dropped from as much as $60,000 to as low as $10,000. ” [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/"Freeway"_Rick_Ross https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/"Freeway"_Rick_Ross [2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Webb https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Webb
superuser2 10y ago
Oooh, interesting. - Human intelligence assets would be executed, as you mention. Witness protection program participants, too. - Signals intelligence targets would stop using (or feed false information to) compromised systems. - Consequently, the government would lose what little understanding it has of what's going on in the world, threats, likely outcomes of foreign policy, etc. - It would also be incapable of any sort of undercover/sting operation, because every target of an investigation knows they are the target of an investigation. - Diplomats can no longer talk about 3rd parties behind their back. No more conspiracies between allies to keep another nation (i.e. North Korea) in check. No more back channels. - Diplomats must negotiate with foreign leaders in full view of their populations and political opponents. No more reasoning with leaders, brokering secret face-saving solutions. (Giving foreign nations an opportunity to back down without appearing weak is a staple of diplomacy). - The budget required to replicate our military technology (including nuclear arsenal) shrinks dramatically, amplifying threats currently below the threshold of "serious." - The nature of our defenses and locations of troops, installations, ships, etc. becomes public, lowering the bar to a successful attack. - Some of the government's secrets are your secrets too. The full name/DOB/SSN mapping used to authenticate yourself to financial services. Home and family addresses for federal employees like prison guards, judges, and prosecutors. - We've blown confidentiality, but some systems are not read-only. Properties like integrity, authorization, etc. often depend on the confidentiality of passwords and private keys. When the admin passwords enter public record, we have to assume all government databases and infrastructure (taxation, payroll, Exchange servers, PBXes for federal offices, etc) are promptly trashed by bored teenagers (or even better, overwritten with subtly wrong data/configuration for the lulz). How long before the email password of the Secretary of Defense is used to announce a foreign policy change? How long do you think the signing keys for a valid nuclear launch order will sit on Wikileaks before someone uses them? - Do we count the federal reserve? Authentication factors needed to make arbitrary bank transfers are out in the open too.
- Zigurd 10y ago
  I disagree with most of your points but let's take an example of how TV/propaganda differs from reality: On TV, brave agents would be "incapable of any sort of undercover/sting operation." In reality, a super-leak would end abusive and dangerous confidential informant ops that depend on blackmailing CIs into enticing others into pseudo-crimes. CIs also commit thousands of crimes that they get away with while being CIs. The FBI wastes a good deal of time on these ops, which might have something to do with why, after his co-workers had concrete concerns about the Orlando shooter, the FBI found nothing wrong. Secrecy hides a lot of ineffective, expensive, and abusive practices. In every area you cite, it is likely that secrecy hides more appalling counterproductive corrupt practices than it protects secrets that make us safer.
bpchaps 10y ago
It's funny, I got the Chicago mayor's office phone records after a year of fighting for them. When my follow-up request asked for all calls to a particular hourly hotel in 2014, based on the results of my initial win, they claimed that I had all records for that phone number already. The department that gave me the initial records also had their access revoked a week or after the judge wrapped everything up. So, possible deletion of public records and additional layers of obfuscation.. Embarrassment is a weird thing in politics.

linkregister 10y ago

If actually implemented, I could foresee this automation drastically helping journalism. Right now, FOIA requests require the requester to pay for the cost of research and redaction. Potentially one of these costs is going to drop. Also, automated redaction would improve the time it takes to fulfill FOIA requests. Redaction isn't actually a difficult task, just tedious. The redactor (?) has a copy of the classification guide for that topic, and redacts anything from the document that hasn't exceeded its declassification time limit according to the guide.

bpchaps 10y ago
I've submitted maybe 75 FOIA requests without a journalist exemption of any kind in the past two years and haven't had to pay a cent. Submit some damn FOIA requests!
- linkregister 10y ago
  That's awesome! I think I'll submit some this weekend!
  - bpchaps 10y ago
    Kick butt! Shoot me an email at the address on my user page if you ever need any help or just want to share experiences as you go along. :)

hackuser 10y ago

Daniel Patrick Moynhan[1] chaired the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy[2] and wrote a book called Secrecy: The American Experience[3]. His main thesis (IIRC, I read it awhile ago) was that information is an important asset in government. People in government naturally seek to obtain it, hoard it, and only trade it at a price. He argued that much of government secrecy serves that dynamic rather than national interests. He also asserts that ideas suffer from being developed in secret, often in insular echo chambers, where they are not exposed to the light of day of public debate and of outside ideas and points of view - a sort of cathedral vs. bazaar perspective. (Again, IIRC.) ---- [1] Notable sociologist, PhD in International Relations, UN Ambassador, Senator ... few were better qualified as a combination of scholar and practitioner. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moynihan_Commission_on_Government_Secrecy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moynihan_Commission_on_Governm... [3] https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/daniel-patrick-moynihan-5/secrecy-the-american-experience/ https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/daniel-patrick-mo... and https://www.nytimes.com/books/98/10/04/reviews/981004.04tanenht.html https://www.nytimes.com/books/98/10/04/reviews/981004.04tane...