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Is anyone else getting just a little bit sick of WikiLeaks? The basic concept of providing transparency is good, but I think they are taking things way too far

Is anyone else getting just a little bit sick of WikiLeaks? The basic concept of providing transparency is good, but I think they are taking things way too far. I hadn't even thought of the issue of the Taliban being able to read the records themselves to find out who the informants are. Just because something is a secret doesn't mean it has to be exposed, and I think that is the fundamental problem with Wikileaks. Some things do more harm out in the open than they would locked away.

riffer 16y ago
What Julian appears to me to be trying to do is to reduce the ability of large bureaucratic militarized organizations to dominate innocent individuals. Secrets exist for many purposes, but their primary impact on history is to permit groups of people to organize in order to persecute other less organized groups of people. Ultimately, it was the combination of industrialization and secrets that made it possible for nation states to directly the cause the death of 160 million people in the 20th century. In these situations, the ability of individuals to influence the course of events is essentially nil. That's why you and I have not stopped the millions of murders in Darfur, the same as our parents did not stop them in Rwanda 17 years ago, and so on. In this context, it really is not reasonable to argue that we would all be much safer if nobody was revealing the secrets of those who have too many secrets.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- Alex3917 16y ago
  "War is a failure of the imagination." In an ideal world Wikileaks wouldn't be necessary, but in the world we have it helps ameliorate the damage caused by our cognitive biases. Also, someone should really make Chris Hedges' book War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning into a movie.
- philwelch 16y ago
  Sixty to seventy years ago, the following information was kept secret by Western governments: -How to build an atom bomb -How to build effective radar systems to detect incoming bombers -The fact that German and Japanese encryption codes had been compromised -The US Navy's awareness of Japan's intention to attack Midway Island -The fact that Patton was actually removed from command, and that his travels around Italy and north Africa were a ruse to misdirect German defenses away from Normandy Need I go on? If some idealist decided to leak these secrets, a lot more innocent individuals would be dominated by certain nation states. State secrets are no different from any other power of the state--they can be used for good or for ill, and it's careful to ensure they're used for good, but it's foolish and suicidal to try and keep them from being used at all.
  - todayiamme 16y ago
    Today the following information is kept secret by many governments: - Accidental civilian deaths in raids. - Details of people "detained" for questioning. - Botched up intelligence operations and lack of analysis capabilities. - How much money is being spent on "intelligence" and why. Need I go on? It is true that they can be used for good or for ill, but the problem comes in when you take away accountability from the equation. The question really should be; how can we balance the two?
    - philwelch 16y ago
      You don't disagree with me; you agree with me and disagree with the idealist, quasi-anarchist view that state secrets shouldn't exist at all. Note that all (but perhaps one) of the secrets I listed is now well documented public knowledge. I think this example should be followed.
      - todayiamme 16y ago
        I don't want to agree or disagree with anything. All I want to agree with is that innocent people have the right to exist without getting shot in the middle of the night. You know what's the biggest problem over here? It's okay if someone from country ABC kills people living in XYZ. That's collateral damage, but as soon as a few ABC civilians get killed it's war. It's like somehow everyone in this world have agreed to play a game where they all assume that they're the heroes and the fate of the planet rests on their shoulders. Somehow they've agreed that it's okay to kill other people because they just don't agree with them. Somehow they've agreed that this is just the way things are and this is how they must be. Why? I think that it's safe to say that no one can analyze state secrets or anything in this world. It's just a long chain of causality that is propagated forward by implicit agreement.
- philwelch 16y ago
  Another side issue: "In these situations, the ability of individuals to influence the course of events is essentially nil. That's why you and I have not stopped the millions of murders in Darfur, the same as our parents did not stop them in Rwanda 17 years ago, and so on." No, the ability of individuals to influence the course of events is exactly why our governments did nothing to stop the murders in Darfur or Rwanda. Humanitarian intervention in a matter of no interest to one's people is the act of a benevolent despot, not a democracy--at least when there's lives on the line. (The closest the US has gotten to "humanitarian intervention" as of late was the nonsense in the Balkans where Clinton was careful to forbid any measures which would have actually endangered American lives, even at the expense of civilian lives on the other side.) Normal people fundamentally don't care about the other. Instead of a few people being upset about millions of African deaths by genocide, everyone would be absolutely livid about thousands of (for example) American deaths by combat in a godforsaken part of the world that doesn't effect us. Normal people don't have the stomach to see their people die for some stranger around the world with whom they have nothing in common. Afghanistan was revenge against people who killed Americans. Iraq was misplaced revenge for the same motive--and when it became clear to most Americans that they held no emotional or practical interest in Iraq, they turned against the war completely, with all the idealistic arguments about how the war deposed a brutal, murderous despot falling on deaf ears. How do you really think ordinary people would have reacted to Bush invading Sudan, or for that matter Clinton invading Rwanda after all the mess in Somalia? And without these damn governments helping us, how exactly are you and I going to stop millions of machete-wielding Hutus, eh?
jsz0 16y ago
If there had been major revelations in the leaked data I would be more sympathetic to their cause. 5 days later it's out of the mainstream news cycle because it's not really news worthy. The leak itself is news worthy but the content mostly is not. It looks like all they managed to do was out some informants and damage the possibility of reconciliation. (not that the odds were great to start with)
- ovi256 16y ago
  I think the content demands analysis and cross-examination that incumbent news organisations are not used doing. Most current media formats (TV news and debates) are ill suited for such as well, so it's not going to happen. Furthermore, incumbent news organisations loathe WL, and have incentives to ignore them.
  - jberryman 16y ago
    Not sure how you are defining "incumbent news organizations", but the New York Times and Der Spiegel essentially broke this story in collaboration with wikileaks and have been analyzing the documents for some time. Their conclusion seems to be that these documents don't contain anything explosive, but provide a really detailed picture into military thinking and the state of the war effort.
derefr 16y ago
But who decides what "has to" be exposed, and what doesn't? The problem is that there is no third party at all trustworthy enough to bear the responsibility of "filtering" through all the world's dirty laundry to just find the "morally reprehensible" parts. So, there must be some (transparent) strategy set in advance: they either release nothing (most news agencies), everything (Wikileaks), or use some other pre-defined filter that can be proven to function (i.e. they cover everything, but then push their stories to a proxy server, with a transparent and inspectable program designed to only publish the stories that match some algorithm.)
- thwarted 16y ago
  How do you determine if the transparent and inspectable filtering program is operating correctly if you only have access to the output and none of the inputs? You'd need all of the inputs, and at that point, you just have access to all the information anyway, and wouldn't need the program to do the filtering.
  - derefr 16y ago
    Reliable computing isn't just for NASA; it also works when an individual codebase may have been designed to "malfunction." Instead of a single machine, you contract several independent, mutually untrustworthy parties to implement (open, inspectable) machines, with an architecture that takes votes from all machines into account. You could then spit out a log of (hash of input, vote) pairs from each machine to see that the voting architecture is also operating correctly.
    - thwarted 16y ago
      You'd need at least one trustworthy party because you can not trust the mutually untrustworthy parties to not give similarly faked logs. If the goal is secrecy, increasing the number of parties that have access to the inputs undermines that, especially if they are untrustworthy, even if they have "contracts". While the solution you've outlined may be mathematically sound, I don't think it is very pragmatic.
- 16y ago
Confusion 16y ago
Just because something is a secret doesn't mean it has to be exposed Why does everyone suppose WikiLeaks is being naive about this? I'm sure there are plenty of files that they won't leak, because they think it will endanger more people than it will save. In this case, the safety of a few Afghan informants could be considered collateral damage: you can't expect WikiLeaks to keep their hands completely clean, when they are trying to out pools of blood on the hands of others. There isn't an optimal solution; they will have to make case-by-case judgments. If you don't like that and want them to censor the documents: by all means, start volunteering for them to read all the stuff. In the mean time, putting this out in the open may save countless Afghan civilians in the years to come.
- elblanco 16y ago
  In this case, the safety of a few Afghan informants could be considered collateral damage: you can't expect WikiLeaks to keep their hands completely clean, when they are trying to out pools of blood on the hands of others. I wonder if wikileaks will start posting some videos (hopefully edited and annotated out of context) of the deaths of the people they just caused.
_politicalist 16y ago
From Assange: "Now we contacted the White House as a group before we released this material and asked them to help assist in going through it to make sure that no innocent names came out, and the White House did not accept that request." http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2010/s2968342.htm http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2010/s2968342.htm
vaksel 16y ago
frankly I'm a little surprised at the number of people that just plain don't hold government accountable. Collateral damage video? No outrage over killing the civilians, Full outrage that they dared to add labels to a video. This thing? No outrage over the fact that innocent people are getting killed...full outrage that WL dares to release information. Seems like a lot of people are just plain authoritative and have full faith that anything they aren't being told is for their own good...when in reality it's just people covering their ass. Without full transparency, they leave it up to sites like wikileaks to make decisions about things that might have military value, since they don't know 100% whether the thing they are reading is being censored because it's actually important or because the gov't just doesn't want bad PR. The whole "these guys are assholes for releasing information about our bad deeds" just sounds like bs to me. Don't want bad PR? Don't commit atrocities. Democracy can't function if the populace isn't fully aware of all the details.
- sp332 16y ago
  Outrage over civilians being killed? Been there, done that. We knew ridiculous numbers of civilians were being killed, like, 10 or 20 news cycles ago. No one cares anymore.
  - ovi256 16y ago
    Well, banality of evil cannot be an excuse, it was not accepted at the Nuremberg trials for example. If you don't care anymore, you are a monster, and monster are destroyed.
    - sp332 16y ago
      You're talking about people participating in the killing. I just mean people who are hearing about it from the other side of the world.
hbd 16y ago
Wikileaks is about trying to implement the right to know, the right to inform and source protection via technology. This is laws[1] that in Sweden[2] is part of the "constitution" via the freedom of press act and the fundamental law on freedom of expression (free speech). If more countries had similar laws, Wikileaks would be unnecessary. If you don't agree with or understand why these laws exist, then of course your view on the necessity of Wikileaks might differ. Wikileaks, just like laws on rights and freedoms, will sometimes facilitate the distribution of, for governments, "problematic" material. Does this mean we should remove these laws and/or outlaw Wikileaks? Not in my opinion. Of course there will always be some limitations. Nothing stops government and organizations from protecting their information in the first place. Wikileaks doesn't pick what information they get access to. If someone in your organization is leaking your most inner secrets, you probably have more serious problem than than the existence of Wikileaks. Also the public nature of Wikileaks distribution model means that intelligence agencies are free to do all the operation security analysis they want when something is published. [1] http://www.meddelarfrihet.nu/freedom.php?lang=en http://www.meddelarfrihet.nu/freedom.php?lang=en [2] This is why Wikileaks is hosted in Sweden.

riffer 16y ago

What Julian appears to me to be trying to do is to reduce the ability of large bureaucratic militarized organizations to dominate innocent individuals. Secrets exist for many purposes, but their primary impact on history is to permit groups of people to organize in order to persecute other less organized groups of people. Ultimately, it was the combination of industrialization and secrets that made it possible for nation states to directly the cause the death of 160 million people in the 20th century. In these situations, the ability of individuals to influence the course of events is essentially nil. That's why you and I have not stopped the millions of murders in Darfur, the same as our parents did not stop them in Rwanda 17 years ago, and so on. In this context, it really is not reasonable to argue that we would all be much safer if nobody was revealing the secrets of those who have too many secrets.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
Alex3917 16y ago
"War is a failure of the imagination." In an ideal world Wikileaks wouldn't be necessary, but in the world we have it helps ameliorate the damage caused by our cognitive biases. Also, someone should really make Chris Hedges' book War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning into a movie.
philwelch 16y ago
Sixty to seventy years ago, the following information was kept secret by Western governments: -How to build an atom bomb -How to build effective radar systems to detect incoming bombers -The fact that German and Japanese encryption codes had been compromised -The US Navy's awareness of Japan's intention to attack Midway Island -The fact that Patton was actually removed from command, and that his travels around Italy and north Africa were a ruse to misdirect German defenses away from Normandy Need I go on? If some idealist decided to leak these secrets, a lot more innocent individuals would be dominated by certain nation states. State secrets are no different from any other power of the state--they can be used for good or for ill, and it's careful to ensure they're used for good, but it's foolish and suicidal to try and keep them from being used at all.
- todayiamme 16y ago
  Today the following information is kept secret by many governments: - Accidental civilian deaths in raids. - Details of people "detained" for questioning. - Botched up intelligence operations and lack of analysis capabilities. - How much money is being spent on "intelligence" and why. Need I go on? It is true that they can be used for good or for ill, but the problem comes in when you take away accountability from the equation. The question really should be; how can we balance the two?
  - philwelch 16y ago
    You don't disagree with me; you agree with me and disagree with the idealist, quasi-anarchist view that state secrets shouldn't exist at all. Note that all (but perhaps one) of the secrets I listed is now well documented public knowledge. I think this example should be followed.
    - todayiamme 16y ago
      I don't want to agree or disagree with anything. All I want to agree with is that innocent people have the right to exist without getting shot in the middle of the night. You know what's the biggest problem over here? It's okay if someone from country ABC kills people living in XYZ. That's collateral damage, but as soon as a few ABC civilians get killed it's war. It's like somehow everyone in this world have agreed to play a game where they all assume that they're the heroes and the fate of the planet rests on their shoulders. Somehow they've agreed that it's okay to kill other people because they just don't agree with them. Somehow they've agreed that this is just the way things are and this is how they must be. Why? I think that it's safe to say that no one can analyze state secrets or anything in this world. It's just a long chain of causality that is propagated forward by implicit agreement.
philwelch 16y ago
Another side issue: "In these situations, the ability of individuals to influence the course of events is essentially nil. That's why you and I have not stopped the millions of murders in Darfur, the same as our parents did not stop them in Rwanda 17 years ago, and so on." No, the ability of individuals to influence the course of events is exactly why our governments did nothing to stop the murders in Darfur or Rwanda. Humanitarian intervention in a matter of no interest to one's people is the act of a benevolent despot, not a democracy--at least when there's lives on the line. (The closest the US has gotten to "humanitarian intervention" as of late was the nonsense in the Balkans where Clinton was careful to forbid any measures which would have actually endangered American lives, even at the expense of civilian lives on the other side.) Normal people fundamentally don't care about the other. Instead of a few people being upset about millions of African deaths by genocide, everyone would be absolutely livid about thousands of (for example) American deaths by combat in a godforsaken part of the world that doesn't effect us. Normal people don't have the stomach to see their people die for some stranger around the world with whom they have nothing in common. Afghanistan was revenge against people who killed Americans. Iraq was misplaced revenge for the same motive--and when it became clear to most Americans that they held no emotional or practical interest in Iraq, they turned against the war completely, with all the idealistic arguments about how the war deposed a brutal, murderous despot falling on deaf ears. How do you really think ordinary people would have reacted to Bush invading Sudan, or for that matter Clinton invading Rwanda after all the mess in Somalia? And without these damn governments helping us, how exactly are you and I going to stop millions of machete-wielding Hutus, eh?

jsz0 16y ago

If there had been major revelations in the leaked data I would be more sympathetic to their cause. 5 days later it's out of the mainstream news cycle because it's not really news worthy. The leak itself is news worthy but the content mostly is not. It looks like all they managed to do was out some informants and damage the possibility of reconciliation. (not that the odds were great to start with)

ovi256 16y ago
I think the content demands analysis and cross-examination that incumbent news organisations are not used doing. Most current media formats (TV news and debates) are ill suited for such as well, so it's not going to happen. Furthermore, incumbent news organisations loathe WL, and have incentives to ignore them.
- jberryman 16y ago
  Not sure how you are defining "incumbent news organizations", but the New York Times and Der Spiegel essentially broke this story in collaboration with wikileaks and have been analyzing the documents for some time. Their conclusion seems to be that these documents don't contain anything explosive, but provide a really detailed picture into military thinking and the state of the war effort.

derefr 16y ago

But who decides what "has to" be exposed, and what doesn't? The problem is that there is no third party at all trustworthy enough to bear the responsibility of "filtering" through all the world's dirty laundry to just find the "morally reprehensible" parts. So, there must be some (transparent) strategy set in advance: they either release nothing (most news agencies), everything (Wikileaks), or use some other pre-defined filter that can be proven to function (i.e. they cover everything, but then push their stories to a proxy server, with a transparent and inspectable program designed to only publish the stories that match some algorithm.)

thwarted 16y ago
How do you determine if the transparent and inspectable filtering program is operating correctly if you only have access to the output and none of the inputs? You'd need all of the inputs, and at that point, you just have access to all the information anyway, and wouldn't need the program to do the filtering.
- derefr 16y ago
  Reliable computing isn't just for NASA; it also works when an individual codebase may have been designed to "malfunction." Instead of a single machine, you contract several independent, mutually untrustworthy parties to implement (open, inspectable) machines, with an architecture that takes votes from all machines into account. You could then spit out a log of (hash of input, vote) pairs from each machine to see that the voting architecture is also operating correctly.
  - thwarted 16y ago
    You'd need at least one trustworthy party because you can not trust the mutually untrustworthy parties to not give similarly faked logs. If the goal is secrecy, increasing the number of parties that have access to the inputs undermines that, especially if they are untrustworthy, even if they have "contracts". While the solution you've outlined may be mathematically sound, I don't think it is very pragmatic.
16y ago

Confusion 16y ago

Just because something is a secret doesn't mean it has to be exposed Why does everyone suppose WikiLeaks is being naive about this? I'm sure there are plenty of files that they won't leak, because they think it will endanger more people than it will save. In this case, the safety of a few Afghan informants could be considered collateral damage: you can't expect WikiLeaks to keep their hands completely clean, when they are trying to out pools of blood on the hands of others. There isn't an optimal solution; they will have to make case-by-case judgments. If you don't like that and want them to censor the documents: by all means, start volunteering for them to read all the stuff. In the mean time, putting this out in the open may save countless Afghan civilians in the years to come.

elblanco 16y ago
In this case, the safety of a few Afghan informants could be considered collateral damage: you can't expect WikiLeaks to keep their hands completely clean, when they are trying to out pools of blood on the hands of others. I wonder if wikileaks will start posting some videos (hopefully edited and annotated out of context) of the deaths of the people they just caused.

_politicalist 16y ago

From Assange: "Now we contacted the White House as a group before we released this material and asked them to help assist in going through it to make sure that no innocent names came out, and the White House did not accept that request." http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2010/s2968342.htm http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2010/s2968342.htm

vaksel 16y ago

frankly I'm a little surprised at the number of people that just plain don't hold government accountable. Collateral damage video? No outrage over killing the civilians, Full outrage that they dared to add labels to a video. This thing? No outrage over the fact that innocent people are getting killed...full outrage that WL dares to release information. Seems like a lot of people are just plain authoritative and have full faith that anything they aren't being told is for their own good...when in reality it's just people covering their ass. Without full transparency, they leave it up to sites like wikileaks to make decisions about things that might have military value, since they don't know 100% whether the thing they are reading is being censored because it's actually important or because the gov't just doesn't want bad PR. The whole "these guys are assholes for releasing information about our bad deeds" just sounds like bs to me. Don't want bad PR? Don't commit atrocities. Democracy can't function if the populace isn't fully aware of all the details.

sp332 16y ago
Outrage over civilians being killed? Been there, done that. We knew ridiculous numbers of civilians were being killed, like, 10 or 20 news cycles ago. No one cares anymore.
- ovi256 16y ago
  Well, banality of evil cannot be an excuse, it was not accepted at the Nuremberg trials for example. If you don't care anymore, you are a monster, and monster are destroyed.
  - sp332 16y ago
    You're talking about people participating in the killing. I just mean people who are hearing about it from the other side of the world.

hbd 16y ago

Wikileaks is about trying to implement the right to know, the right to inform and source protection via technology. This is laws[1] that in Sweden[2] is part of the "constitution" via the freedom of press act and the fundamental law on freedom of expression (free speech). If more countries had similar laws, Wikileaks would be unnecessary. If you don't agree with or understand why these laws exist, then of course your view on the necessity of Wikileaks might differ. Wikileaks, just like laws on rights and freedoms, will sometimes facilitate the distribution of, for governments, "problematic" material. Does this mean we should remove these laws and/or outlaw Wikileaks? Not in my opinion. Of course there will always be some limitations. Nothing stops government and organizations from protecting their information in the first place. Wikileaks doesn't pick what information they get access to. If someone in your organization is leaking your most inner secrets, you probably have more serious problem than than the existence of Wikileaks. Also the public nature of Wikileaks distribution model means that intelligence agencies are free to do all the operation security analysis they want when something is published. [1] http://www.meddelarfrihet.nu/freedom.php?lang=en http://www.meddelarfrihet.nu/freedom.php?lang=en [2] This is why Wikileaks is hosted in Sweden.