5 ms·

I like the idea that random people sitting in chairs in conference rooms in Western Europe and the US should be able to decide what their citizens should and sh

I like the idea that random people sitting in chairs in conference rooms in Western Europe and the US should be able to decide what their citizens should and shouldn't know as long as they think it furthers their agenda. That is, after all, the logic that our governments keep using to get us into conflicts.

tptacek 16y ago
So your argument is that we all have a right to know which Afghanis and Pakistanis are informing on militant groups?
- lhnz 16y ago
  I think we are talking about leaks and not 'rights'. Nobody has to grant us any kind of permission. If it is leaked we will know. Such is reality unencumbered by legality.
  - tptacek 16y ago
    Is that a response to my question or a koan? We're talking about the ethics of the leak itself.
    - lhnz 16y ago
      I did not mean it to be difficult for you to decipher. I was simply saying that technology helps make ethics or 'rights' irrelevant in these situations. If somebody can leak with relative security and ease, they will. To quote another HNer: "Technology bestows rights in a way which is true and real far beyond the law. The law can be changed, but you cannot undiscover AES. The law gives you rights as a fiction, but technology gives you rights as a fact."
- jacquesm 16y ago
  So, your argument is that we all have a duty towards Afghani and Pakistani informers to keep their identities safe? That's just as absurd. What's leaked stays leaked, there is not much 'we all' can do about that and wikileaks as a conduit is not in a position to make the call, so they should default to 'release all' rather than to make judgement calls on what can and can not be released. Every secret will inconvenience someone if it were known, some may be more inconvenienced (as in a bullet to the head) than others, but when you turn informer that is a well known risk. Wikileaks is not responsible for people taking that risk, the only people that have a responsibility there are the informers themselves (don't give your identifying info to parties you can't trust), the US military / government (don't hire people you can't trust) and the leaker (for breaking his oath of secrecy). What's interesting is that there is a pretty strong effort to shift the blame for the fall-out of the leak on to wikileaks, whereas it should be clear to everybody that the other parties have a much larger part of the responsibility to carry and each and every one of them failed in a very serious way.
  - tptacek 16y ago
    I don't accept this notion that everything Wikileaks has leaked would have been leaked anyways without Wikileaks.
    - thaumaturgy 16y ago
      And this is what I think is most dangerous. The couple of times that the subject of Wikileaks has come up, here and elsewhere in person, what I hear is people saying that the endangerment of personnel (and/or operations) is enough to condemn the existence of Wikileaks. I acknowledge that Wikileaks has released information which endangers people, and I acknowledge that they're likely to do it again in the future. However, I think their existence as an international freelance watchdog group is far more valuable, especially given the tendency of various world governments to run operations that their citizens don't know about and might be far less likely to agree with if they did know about. Wikileaks has an obligation to reduce the risk to individuals when leaking sensitive information; however, even if they did nothing to protect the people implicated in leaks, I would still rather have Wikileaks than not.
      - tptacek 16y ago
        I'd probably support the idealized Wikileaks that took due care to minimize harm to the subjects of its leaks. But we don't have the ideal Wikileaks; we have the one run by Julian Assange.
    - jacquesm 16y ago
      Why not? Who are we to even know the significance of what was leaked? It could very well be a disinformation operation where names of a bunch of people that were on the hit list of the US army got leaked in a way that was too juicy for WL to pass up. Two birds with one stone.
      - pvg 16y ago
        Two black helicopters, one tinfoil hat, at that point, really.

tptacek 16y ago

So your argument is that we all have a right to know which Afghanis and Pakistanis are informing on militant groups?

lhnz 16y ago
I think we are talking about leaks and not 'rights'. Nobody has to grant us any kind of permission. If it is leaked we will know. Such is reality unencumbered by legality.
- tptacek 16y ago
  Is that a response to my question or a koan? We're talking about the ethics of the leak itself.
  - lhnz 16y ago
    I did not mean it to be difficult for you to decipher. I was simply saying that technology helps make ethics or 'rights' irrelevant in these situations. If somebody can leak with relative security and ease, they will. To quote another HNer: "Technology bestows rights in a way which is true and real far beyond the law. The law can be changed, but you cannot undiscover AES. The law gives you rights as a fiction, but technology gives you rights as a fact."
jacquesm 16y ago
So, your argument is that we all have a duty towards Afghani and Pakistani informers to keep their identities safe? That's just as absurd. What's leaked stays leaked, there is not much 'we all' can do about that and wikileaks as a conduit is not in a position to make the call, so they should default to 'release all' rather than to make judgement calls on what can and can not be released. Every secret will inconvenience someone if it were known, some may be more inconvenienced (as in a bullet to the head) than others, but when you turn informer that is a well known risk. Wikileaks is not responsible for people taking that risk, the only people that have a responsibility there are the informers themselves (don't give your identifying info to parties you can't trust), the US military / government (don't hire people you can't trust) and the leaker (for breaking his oath of secrecy). What's interesting is that there is a pretty strong effort to shift the blame for the fall-out of the leak on to wikileaks, whereas it should be clear to everybody that the other parties have a much larger part of the responsibility to carry and each and every one of them failed in a very serious way.
- tptacek 16y ago
  I don't accept this notion that everything Wikileaks has leaked would have been leaked anyways without Wikileaks.
  - thaumaturgy 16y ago
    And this is what I think is most dangerous. The couple of times that the subject of Wikileaks has come up, here and elsewhere in person, what I hear is people saying that the endangerment of personnel (and/or operations) is enough to condemn the existence of Wikileaks. I acknowledge that Wikileaks has released information which endangers people, and I acknowledge that they're likely to do it again in the future. However, I think their existence as an international freelance watchdog group is far more valuable, especially given the tendency of various world governments to run operations that their citizens don't know about and might be far less likely to agree with if they did know about. Wikileaks has an obligation to reduce the risk to individuals when leaking sensitive information; however, even if they did nothing to protect the people implicated in leaks, I would still rather have Wikileaks than not.
    - tptacek 16y ago
      I'd probably support the idealized Wikileaks that took due care to minimize harm to the subjects of its leaks. But we don't have the ideal Wikileaks; we have the one run by Julian Assange.
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    Why not? Who are we to even know the significance of what was leaked? It could very well be a disinformation operation where names of a bunch of people that were on the hit list of the US army got leaked in a way that was too juicy for WL to pass up. Two birds with one stone.
    - pvg 16y ago
      Two black helicopters, one tinfoil hat, at that point, really.