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I've made this argument for a long time: any damage to the US from the Snowden leaks was because the government refused to clean house when they became aware of

I've made this argument for a long time: any damage to the US from the Snowden leaks was because the government refused to clean house when they became aware of problems through internal channels. Snowden was merely a concerned employee revealing to shareholders that business executives were willfully defrauding investors and breaking fiduciary duty, to use an analogy. The reason he didn't use internal channels was executives up to the board level had previously targeted other leakers as part of their criminal conspiracy.

samstave 10y ago
literally the best analogy i have heard on the subject. thanks
tptacek 10y ago
This gets to motivations and intent but doesn't really answer the question posed by the article, which is: are insiders who leak carefully and strategically creating better public policy outcomes than the indiscriminate leaks that IT people have been generating?
- rqebmm 10y ago
  Which raises an interesting corollary: is there such a thing as an "indiscriminate" leak? Recent events have shown that WikiLeaks' practice of leaking anything they have has instead created an opportunity for targeted leaks by selectively passing information to them.
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  There's obviously a lot to both positions, but as a succinct answer: I would argue that a mixed policy likely generates the best outcomes -- by instigating a crisis to motivate public interest and movement on the topic, and then sustained, strategic leaks over the following decade(s), once there's an interested cohort (with a baseline of evidence). Ill date myself a bit here by saying that Snowden is the only major leak of my lifetime, but it seems to me that he was able to get traction on the issue when a lot of people had failed to (eg, there were rumors of NSA programs before including from NSA insiders, but little public attention), but what has kept the topic alive is a series of strategic leaks of new information to sustain public attention and keep the debate focused on it being a current issue. So in some senses, I think we need those doc drops of "They're really looking at all your dick pics, hook-up texts, and tracking every illicit meet-up", but I also think that we get a lot more usage out of quieter leaks of key details, once the conversation is happening. That was sort of the point of my analogy: quiet rumors from key staff to shareholders were ignored or suppressed by executive staff until one guy in accounting dropped the whole set of books. This obviously leaked a bunch of business secrets, but Id argue the only way to comprehend the scale of wrongdoing was to see that the entire system had become organized around that illicit activity. It was only in that context we could even start a conversation about the scope of what had gone awry.
- cryoshon 10y ago
  >are insiders who leak carefully and strategically creating better public policy outcomes than the indiscriminate leaks that IT people have been generating? the insiders aren't effecting policy outcomes whatsoever. they're getting snuffed out and swept under the rug. throwing open the barn door is the only way the public gets enough information to clean it out.

samstave 10y ago

literally the best analogy i have heard on the subject. thanks

tptacek 10y ago

This gets to motivations and intent but doesn't really answer the question posed by the article, which is: are insiders who leak carefully and strategically creating better public policy outcomes than the indiscriminate leaks that IT people have been generating?

rqebmm 10y ago
Which raises an interesting corollary: is there such a thing as an "indiscriminate" leak? Recent events have shown that WikiLeaks' practice of leaking anything they have has instead created an opportunity for targeted leaks by selectively passing information to them.
SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
There's obviously a lot to both positions, but as a succinct answer: I would argue that a mixed policy likely generates the best outcomes -- by instigating a crisis to motivate public interest and movement on the topic, and then sustained, strategic leaks over the following decade(s), once there's an interested cohort (with a baseline of evidence). Ill date myself a bit here by saying that Snowden is the only major leak of my lifetime, but it seems to me that he was able to get traction on the issue when a lot of people had failed to (eg, there were rumors of NSA programs before including from NSA insiders, but little public attention), but what has kept the topic alive is a series of strategic leaks of new information to sustain public attention and keep the debate focused on it being a current issue. So in some senses, I think we need those doc drops of "They're really looking at all your dick pics, hook-up texts, and tracking every illicit meet-up", but I also think that we get a lot more usage out of quieter leaks of key details, once the conversation is happening. That was sort of the point of my analogy: quiet rumors from key staff to shareholders were ignored or suppressed by executive staff until one guy in accounting dropped the whole set of books. This obviously leaked a bunch of business secrets, but Id argue the only way to comprehend the scale of wrongdoing was to see that the entire system had become organized around that illicit activity. It was only in that context we could even start a conversation about the scope of what had gone awry.
cryoshon 10y ago
>are insiders who leak carefully and strategically creating better public policy outcomes than the indiscriminate leaks that IT people have been generating? the insiders aren't effecting policy outcomes whatsoever. they're getting snuffed out and swept under the rug. throwing open the barn door is the only way the public gets enough information to clean it out.