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Daniel Ellsberg on WikiLeaks (Economist Interview)

3 points by dfield 16y ago

tptacek 16y ago
I've got karma to burn, so I'll just point out that Daniel Ellsburg is not, in fact, an authority on the impact or ethics of this Wikileaks dump. Counterintuitive as it may sound, Daniel Ellsburg is not actually qualified to judge whether Wikileaks did the same thing for AfPak that Ellsburg himself did for Vietnam. The Pentagon Papers showed the war in Southeast Asia to have been an outright lie, and one to which the administration had resigned itself to losing but was feeding troops into in an attempt to extricate itself "gracefully". It exposed overtly illegal activities on a strategic scale, such as the widespread bombing of Cambodia and Laos, which the government had previously disavowed. The Pentagon Papers impacted the standing of the administration on a policy level. Anybody on Hacker News can compose an argument that suggests that somewhere in the Wikileaks dump is information that would expose: * strategic decisions to expand the AfPak conflict (say, continuous coordinated airstrikes into Baluchistan) * strategic acceptance of defeat in AfPak and a decision to make a face-saving retreat at the expense of American lives * the notion that we occupied Afghanistan for reasons other than the elimination of the Taliban (for instance, to grab resources, or to counter a resurgent Iran) But so far, no such information has been turned up. Instead, we have the meme that "the Wikileaks dump is like the Pentagon Papers in their raw original form". But we don't know that. For that to be true, they would need to paint a clear picture of a shocking distinction between reality and the ongoing narrative of the conflict; we'd have to be secretly at war with Pakistan or Iran, or already resigned to letting the Taliban reclaim the country, or something at that scale. Furthermore, the Pentagon Papers and the Wikileaks dump aren't ethically equivalent. Ellsburg leaked 4,100 pages of digested intelligence and policy information. Wikileaks dumped 70,000 documents taken directly from field reports. Wikileaks claims to have "minimized harm" (presumably by scrubbing names from reports or withholding documents they believed would have exposed people to harm). Ellsburg didn't have to take responsibility for avoiding that kind of harm; the NVA probably could not have organized death squads to react to his disclosure. Has this happened already in Afghanistan? Nobody has provided evidence that it has, but it seems pretty clear that it's a real risk. Death squads don't care about due process. All they need is a town, a time, and a rough description. All this, as usual, is not meant to say that the US Government is on the "right side" of this issue. For one (obvious) thing, none of this information should have been available, to anybody; negligence in DoD information assurance makes them just as culpable for deaths of outed informants. But I'm still left wondering: if you don't draw the line at a decent (tens of % points) chance at outing (and thus killing) an informant in Afghanistan while you're sitting behind a laptop in a safe western country, where do you draw the line? Is there any line at all?
- dfield 16y ago
  Thanks for your comment. Insightful commentary like this is why I read HackerNews.

3 points by dfield 16y ago

I've got karma to burn, so I'll just point out that Daniel Ellsburg is not, in fact, an authority on the impact or ethics of this Wikileaks dump. Counterintuitive as it may sound, Daniel Ellsburg is not actually qualified to judge whether Wikileaks did the same thing for AfPak that Ellsburg himself did for Vietnam. The Pentagon Papers showed the war in Southeast Asia to have been an outright lie, and one to which the administration had resigned itself to losing but was feeding troops into in an attempt to extricate itself "gracefully". It exposed overtly illegal activities on a strategic scale, such as the widespread bombing of Cambodia and Laos, which the government had previously disavowed. The Pentagon Papers impacted the standing of the administration on a policy level. Anybody on Hacker News can compose an argument that suggests that somewhere in the Wikileaks dump is information that would expose: * strategic decisions to expand the AfPak conflict (say, continuous coordinated airstrikes into Baluchistan) * strategic acceptance of defeat in AfPak and a decision to make a face-saving retreat at the expense of American lives * the notion that we occupied Afghanistan for reasons other than the elimination of the Taliban (for instance, to grab resources, or to counter a resurgent Iran) But so far, no such information has been turned up. Instead, we have the meme that "the Wikileaks dump is like the Pentagon Papers in their raw original form". But we don't know that. For that to be true, they would need to paint a clear picture of a shocking distinction between reality and the ongoing narrative of the conflict; we'd have to be secretly at war with Pakistan or Iran, or already resigned to letting the Taliban reclaim the country, or something at that scale. Furthermore, the Pentagon Papers and the Wikileaks dump aren't ethically equivalent. Ellsburg leaked 4,100 pages of digested intelligence and policy information. Wikileaks dumped 70,000 documents taken directly from field reports. Wikileaks claims to have "minimized harm" (presumably by scrubbing names from reports or withholding documents they believed would have exposed people to harm). Ellsburg didn't have to take responsibility for avoiding that kind of harm; the NVA probably could not have organized death squads to react to his disclosure. Has this happened already in Afghanistan? Nobody has provided evidence that it has, but it seems pretty clear that it's a real risk. Death squads don't care about due process. All they need is a town, a time, and a rough description. All this, as usual, is not meant to say that the US Government is on the "right side" of this issue. For one (obvious) thing, none of this information should have been available, to anybody; negligence in DoD information assurance makes them just as culpable for deaths of outed informants. But I'm still left wondering: if you don't draw the line at a decent (tens of % points) chance at outing (and thus killing) an informant in Afghanistan while you're sitting behind a laptop in a safe western country, where do you draw the line? Is there any line at all?

dfield 16y ago
Thanks for your comment. Insightful commentary like this is why I read HackerNews.