5 ms·

Glenn Greenwald dissects Adrian Lamo's role in the arrest of whistleblower

25 points by mcantelon 16y ago

tptacek 16y ago
This is over-the-top political hyperbole that has more to do with keeping point scores than actually analyzing events. My politics are closer to Greenwalds than, say, Glenn Reynolds, but I found this writeup nauseating. What exactly is Greenwald's point? That Adrian Lamo isn't a superhero? Ok! Stipulated! That Kevin Poulsen might have had reasons other than national security and journalistic ethics to run the stories he ran in the fashion he ran them in? Ok! Stipulated! Lamo bad. Poulsen bad. Ok. But it does not therefore follow that Manning is good. Or that Wikileaks is acting ethically and performing a vital service. Greenwald has no new facts to add to our understanding, only opinions about whether it's plausible that Manning could have had access to truly damaging information. Greenwald's opinions about how the DoD manages classified information aren't relevant, because Greenwald has never seriously reported the IA practices in the DoD. Greenwald also chooses to highlight the notion that Manning was leaking information "to the public", instead of "making bank by selling it to China" (wait, I thought it was implausible that he had valuable information?), and that he may be a whistleblower "in the purest sense". But Manning broke an extremely serious set of laws and betrayed his explicit duty to protect that information. If he's right (spoiler alert: he's not), we'll soon know when Wikileaks orchestrates its next media tour around the Manning documents. All Greenwald is doing here is trying to assign people to roles of "good guy" and "bad guy". He's no more trustworthy than Wired is. And this story isn't about good guys and bad guys.
- MichaelSalib 16y ago
  Greenwald's opinions about how the DoD manages classified information aren't relevant, because Greenwald has never seriously reported the IA practices in the DoD. I thought the US government has itself admitted on numerous occasions that a great deal of classified information should not be classified. I mean, the whole Apache episode does seem relevant here: the military classified and then caused the disappearance of footage that made them look bad, even though there was no reason to hide that footage from Reuters. Or at least, no reason relating to operational security. Obviously, making sure that no military officer ever be held accountable for their conduct is a very good reason to classify everything in sight. I thought it was implausible that he had valuable information? Who said that? The closest claim I can think of is that it was implausible that analyst had access to information that was operationally relevant to national security.
- MichaelSalib 16y ago
  What exactly is Greenwald's point? I took away three main points: (1) That we've heard only one side of the story so far, and that side has come from a man who seems obsessed with getting news coverage. (2) Lamo has said contradictory things to different sources; that suggests that Lamo is lying. (3) Lamo admits to lying to Manning in order to convince him to share this information with him. Specifically, he told Manning that he was a journalist and that their conversation would be confidential because of journalism shield laws. He also told Manning that he was ordained minister and their conversation would be held confidential because it was considered a confession. If you have to lie to people and abuse social trusts in order to get them to confess, then you have no scruples whatsoever. I can't see why we should trust anything that Lamo says at face value. I mean, do we have independent confirmation about the 15,000 cables? Or is that just another of Lamo's (many, many) lies?
  - tptacek 16y ago
    I had a hard time articulating what bothered me about Greenwald's article originally, but thanks to this comment I've put my finger on it. This article is about fake sideline controversies. It's premise is that we care about whether Lamo was serving the country or his own interests, and that we've been poorly served by the media in making that determination. But that's not a controversy at all. In reality nobody cares why Lamo turned the guy in. What we care about is that (a) a career military IA agent fed confidential information to Wikileaks, an organization that --- by design --- nobody knows anything meaningful about, and that (b) he got caught. These aren't even value judgements. They're just the atoms of newsworthiness in the story. People with actual access to real secrets will feed things to random people on the Internet, and it is possible for them to get caught when that happens. Lamo and Poulsen's motivations are a sideshow designed to get us all hyped up about the good-guy-bad-guy narrative, so we can conclude the story with a warm fuzzy "wikileaks good, big governments bad" feeling. Big governments may indeed be bad, but we have to use our brains, our judgement, and our own sense of ethics to make those determinations. Editorial sleight of hand can't do it for us.
    - madair 16y ago
      Activism for transparency is not a value judgment? Analysis of information suppression by governments in relation to events and information which affect the lives of billions seems like a value judgment too.
- madair 16y ago
  Lamo bad. Poulsen bad. Ok. But it does not therefore follow that Manning is good. Or that Wikileaks is acting ethically and performing a vital service. Fortunately Greenwald gave us his actual reasoning, rather than the logical reduction which you provided here. You might not agree, but don't give us tripe about his reasoning.
  - tptacek 16y ago
    His contribution to "Wikileaks good" here is that Wikileaks didn't compromise its source, Lamo (and to a lesser extent Poulsen) did. But that's a straw man argument. Nobody is arguing that Wikileaks is bad because it might rat out its sources. What frustrates me about Greenwald's overall take on Wikileaks (not just in this article) is that it takes Wikileaks supposed ideals at face value. He's actually not arguing for Wikileaks; he's arguing for the idea of a Wikileaks. Unfortunately for all of us, in the real world, human beings with normal human incentives are going to have to run Wikileaks, and we have to consider Wikileaks as it actually exists and not simply Wikileaks "as a long-term force for positive change in the world".
    - samd 16y ago
      What are some of the ways that actual-Wikileaks differs from ideal-Wikileaks?
      - tptacek 16y ago
        A real simple one is that an ideal-Wikileaks would only safely shuttle information from leakers to the public, and not reframe and editorialize the information to favor Wikileaks own political agenda. Another one would be than an ideal-Wikileaks wouldn't have a critical operational stakeholder going on media tours, which make Wikileaks less about the information itself and more about the personalities of the people running Wikileaks (which are ultimately irrelevant), and, more importantly, which create situations in which the security of the whole endeavor could be compromised by a single arrest. There are lots of others I'm sure I could come up with. The fact of the matter is, for all you know, Wikileaks could be a very elaborate 4chan hoax. You know nothing at all about this organization or its true motivations, which is as it must be, since a "transparent" Wikileaks would immediately be shut down.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
wrs 16y ago
Oh look, Wikileaks leaks. http://cryptome.org/0001/wikileaks-costs.htm http://cryptome.org/0001/wikileaks-costs.htm

25 points by mcantelon 16y ago

This is over-the-top political hyperbole that has more to do with keeping point scores than actually analyzing events. My politics are closer to Greenwalds than, say, Glenn Reynolds, but I found this writeup nauseating. What exactly is Greenwald's point? That Adrian Lamo isn't a superhero? Ok! Stipulated! That Kevin Poulsen might have had reasons other than national security and journalistic ethics to run the stories he ran in the fashion he ran them in? Ok! Stipulated! Lamo bad. Poulsen bad. Ok. But it does not therefore follow that Manning is good. Or that Wikileaks is acting ethically and performing a vital service. Greenwald has no new facts to add to our understanding, only opinions about whether it's plausible that Manning could have had access to truly damaging information. Greenwald's opinions about how the DoD manages classified information aren't relevant, because Greenwald has never seriously reported the IA practices in the DoD. Greenwald also chooses to highlight the notion that Manning was leaking information "to the public", instead of "making bank by selling it to China" (wait, I thought it was implausible that he had valuable information?), and that he may be a whistleblower "in the purest sense". But Manning broke an extremely serious set of laws and betrayed his explicit duty to protect that information. If he's right (spoiler alert: he's not), we'll soon know when Wikileaks orchestrates its next media tour around the Manning documents. All Greenwald is doing here is trying to assign people to roles of "good guy" and "bad guy". He's no more trustworthy than Wired is. And this story isn't about good guys and bad guys.

MichaelSalib 16y ago
Greenwald's opinions about how the DoD manages classified information aren't relevant, because Greenwald has never seriously reported the IA practices in the DoD. I thought the US government has itself admitted on numerous occasions that a great deal of classified information should not be classified. I mean, the whole Apache episode does seem relevant here: the military classified and then caused the disappearance of footage that made them look bad, even though there was no reason to hide that footage from Reuters. Or at least, no reason relating to operational security. Obviously, making sure that no military officer ever be held accountable for their conduct is a very good reason to classify everything in sight. I thought it was implausible that he had valuable information? Who said that? The closest claim I can think of is that it was implausible that analyst had access to information that was operationally relevant to national security.
MichaelSalib 16y ago
What exactly is Greenwald's point? I took away three main points: (1) That we've heard only one side of the story so far, and that side has come from a man who seems obsessed with getting news coverage. (2) Lamo has said contradictory things to different sources; that suggests that Lamo is lying. (3) Lamo admits to lying to Manning in order to convince him to share this information with him. Specifically, he told Manning that he was a journalist and that their conversation would be confidential because of journalism shield laws. He also told Manning that he was ordained minister and their conversation would be held confidential because it was considered a confession. If you have to lie to people and abuse social trusts in order to get them to confess, then you have no scruples whatsoever. I can't see why we should trust anything that Lamo says at face value. I mean, do we have independent confirmation about the 15,000 cables? Or is that just another of Lamo's (many, many) lies?
- tptacek 16y ago
  I had a hard time articulating what bothered me about Greenwald's article originally, but thanks to this comment I've put my finger on it. This article is about fake sideline controversies. It's premise is that we care about whether Lamo was serving the country or his own interests, and that we've been poorly served by the media in making that determination. But that's not a controversy at all. In reality nobody cares why Lamo turned the guy in. What we care about is that (a) a career military IA agent fed confidential information to Wikileaks, an organization that --- by design --- nobody knows anything meaningful about, and that (b) he got caught. These aren't even value judgements. They're just the atoms of newsworthiness in the story. People with actual access to real secrets will feed things to random people on the Internet, and it is possible for them to get caught when that happens. Lamo and Poulsen's motivations are a sideshow designed to get us all hyped up about the good-guy-bad-guy narrative, so we can conclude the story with a warm fuzzy "wikileaks good, big governments bad" feeling. Big governments may indeed be bad, but we have to use our brains, our judgement, and our own sense of ethics to make those determinations. Editorial sleight of hand can't do it for us.
  - madair 16y ago
    Activism for transparency is not a value judgment? Analysis of information suppression by governments in relation to events and information which affect the lives of billions seems like a value judgment too.
madair 16y ago
Lamo bad. Poulsen bad. Ok. But it does not therefore follow that Manning is good. Or that Wikileaks is acting ethically and performing a vital service. Fortunately Greenwald gave us his actual reasoning, rather than the logical reduction which you provided here. You might not agree, but don't give us tripe about his reasoning.
- tptacek 16y ago
  His contribution to "Wikileaks good" here is that Wikileaks didn't compromise its source, Lamo (and to a lesser extent Poulsen) did. But that's a straw man argument. Nobody is arguing that Wikileaks is bad because it might rat out its sources. What frustrates me about Greenwald's overall take on Wikileaks (not just in this article) is that it takes Wikileaks supposed ideals at face value. He's actually not arguing for Wikileaks; he's arguing for the idea of a Wikileaks. Unfortunately for all of us, in the real world, human beings with normal human incentives are going to have to run Wikileaks, and we have to consider Wikileaks as it actually exists and not simply Wikileaks "as a long-term force for positive change in the world".
  - samd 16y ago
    What are some of the ways that actual-Wikileaks differs from ideal-Wikileaks?
    - tptacek 16y ago
      A real simple one is that an ideal-Wikileaks would only safely shuttle information from leakers to the public, and not reframe and editorialize the information to favor Wikileaks own political agenda. Another one would be than an ideal-Wikileaks wouldn't have a critical operational stakeholder going on media tours, which make Wikileaks less about the information itself and more about the personalities of the people running Wikileaks (which are ultimately irrelevant), and, more importantly, which create situations in which the security of the whole endeavor could be compromised by a single arrest. There are lots of others I'm sure I could come up with. The fact of the matter is, for all you know, Wikileaks could be a very elaborate 4chan hoax. You know nothing at all about this organization or its true motivations, which is as it must be, since a "transparent" Wikileaks would immediately be shut down.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

wrs 16y ago

Oh look, Wikileaks leaks. http://cryptome.org/0001/wikileaks-costs.htm http://cryptome.org/0001/wikileaks-costs.htm