9 ms·

List of facilities 'vital to US security' leaked

54 points by pacemkr 16y ago

civilian 16y ago
This is weird to me. I just get the feeling that... a lot of these miscellaneous commercial facilities are replaceable- not only that, but the market forces acting after an attack would encourage new facilities to be built or new locations of the resource to be discovered (in the case of cobalt). I also feel that the ideologies might not line up really well with this. "We are going to destroy the American infidels... by destroying a Danish insulin factory!" The symbolism gets kinda lost.
- cma 16y ago
  But it is the kind of security planning information that most people (in the US) wouldn't want leaked, and would actually support secrecy for (as opposed to things that "endanger" us by embarrassing us, things that receive classification because they document our moral failings (like take, say, the helicopter video)).
  - Herring 16y ago
    There are potential terrorism targets literally everywhere. This whole issue is way overblown. Even the 9/11 perpetrators didn't want to "kill teh infidel", more reduce US involvement in the middle east.
  - sks 16y ago
    Unless this leak contains information which could point out that the US is protecting facilities owned by any particular corporation(s) in the name of national security, releasing it is not warranted.
  - varjag 16y ago
    Terrorist don't give a damn about ports and cable stations, they go after office workers and schoolchildren. The government's and terrorist's idea of vulnerable is fundamentally different. In Russia they were securing gas pipes, nuclear stations, cabbage sorting plants and whatnot, but terrorist hit apartment buildings, theaters, hospitals and schools.
    - regularfry 16y ago
      Traditionally, yes. With al Qaeda (inasmuch as there is a single body with unified aims), not so much. One of bin Laden's videos spelt it out: their aim is to economically cripple the US and the West by forcing them to spend a vastly disproportionate amount of money on security measures through performing relatively cheap acts of violence. It just so happens that attacks involving large numbers of civilians are particularly effective for this, because the political pressure to protect the public is high. In the case of targets on this list, there is a similar pressure to protect them, but in general they won't be as expensive to guard because their nature makes it easier to restrict access. If I were on the Chinese politburo, though, this leak would read like a literal shopping list.
      - varjag 16y ago
        Well, it does not happen like that accidentally. The whole point of terrorist attack is terrorizing the population to achieve one's political objectives. To terrorize population you hit where it hurts the people. People are less emotional about shut down plants than they are about dead children. > If I were on the Chinese politburo, though, this leak would read like a literal shopping list. You bring a point here. This list makes sense (and is obvious) if you have a strategic bomber command in your disposal. Otherwise a few of those isolated attacks will fail to shatter the economy. Remember how many bombs were unleashed on German industry in WW2 before it started showing any effect. Attacking population on the other hand is accessible and effective, that's the whole idea behind the terror. So a proper, realistic list should be "dense urban areas of the United States". Of course it's not what the embassies were assigned to find out, so they really did an honest, if mostly useless, job.
        regularfry 16y ago
        Possibly you misunderstand me. I don't mean that the Chinese (for instance) might want to bomb what's on the list (although that would certainly be one approach). I mean that they might literally wish to (and be capable of) buying what's on the list. We all know they've been cornering African mineral exploitation for the last decade or so, I'm sure they wouldn't object to another cobalt mine or two on their acquisition list, even if they had to pay an absurd premium.
poet 16y ago
I'm finding a hard time seeing how this leak is a positive thing. At least leaks related to violations of human rights and international law have legs to stand on.
- civilian 16y ago
  The real leaked material is that the US embassy have the opinion/analysis that X factories & mines are vital to the U.S. I think that a small team of economists could have figured out what plants are vital to national security. It's not like this data is secret- it's just the embassy's thoughts that are secret. (So... thank god Jihadists don't know economics! Let's hope Julian doesn't leak any textbooks.)
  - natrius 16y ago
    I agree that the data isn't particularly secret, but I also agree that there doesn't seem to be any possible public good served by leaking this information.
    - gasull 16y ago
      We learn what our Government is spending our money on.
      - natrius 16y ago
        Are you talking about the money spent compiling the lists or the money spent on the things in the list? The former is trivial, and the latter isn't actually provided by the list. It isn't limited to U.S. assets. The only information this list provides is what the list says it provides: facilities that are vital to U.S. security. I can't think of a beneficial use of this data, but I can think of plenty of harmful uses. The list isn't hard to figure out, so I don't think its release is a huge loss, but there is no gain, so I can only wish that it were never leaked.
    - civilian 16y ago
      This leak Does serve the public good, if the public surrounding these vital targets learn that these locations are vital. Instead of being ignorant bystanders who think it's "just a factory"; they'll know that it is a Vital factory, and that suspicious activity around it should be reported. Whenever I'm in a train station I hear about how important I am, as a civilian, to security and that I should report suspicious bags. Couldn't the government take that attitude to the next level?
etherael 16y ago
I saw this this morning and it seemed like the first example of something that should severely not be leaked. I wanted to contact them privately and directly and bring their attention to it but there turns out being no discernable channel to do that. These especially struck me as dangerous; http://cablesearch.org/cable/view.php?id=09DOHA214&hl=%3Anewest http://cablesearch.org/cable/view.php?id=09DOHA214&hl=%3... Specifically; 2. (C) There are three main industrial facilities of interest that if destroyed, or if their production is disrupted, could have an immediate effect on U.S. national economic security. In order of priority, these are Ras Laffan Industrial City (RLIC), Mesaieed Industrial City (MIC) and port complex, and Dukhan Industrial City. All three industrial centers are under the control and supervision of Qatar Petroleum (QP), a semi-autonomous government organization whose Chairman, Abdullah bin Hamad Al-Attiyah, is also the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Energy and Industry. Natural gas production is primarily centered around the coast and offshore areas in the northeast of Qatar, in and round Ras Laffan; while, oil production is concentrated on the western coast near Dukhan as well as offshore platforms. In both the #startups and #wikileaks channels on freenode people variously assured me that they had already considered it or I was just being a troll. I suppose it really is naive to expect unmitigated good to come of this episode, but I really wish they would not hand ammunition to the opposition in this fashion. I wish there was a way to privately contact them to ask them to reconsider a particular release without drawing attention to it in a public fashion. P.S. I will happily edit this message to omit the sensitive information directly in the event that anyone can tell me how to bring the necessary attention to it in a more private way.
- lionhearted 16y ago
  Who is downvoting this? What's wrong with people? You can't see how listing the facilities that the United States thinks are vital to national security in Qatar could possibly be a bad idea? It's like once people pick their teams, they can't reconsider. They have to find rationalizations "oh, this isn't so bad" or "well now we know what the government is working on" - guess what? There's random unhappy people in Qatar who don't have the resources or skill to do their own recon and intelligence work. Wikileaks just delivered America's own intel/recon to them. This makes the world less safe. This is a bad thing. I don't care what team you're on. This one is a bad thing. Shame on everyone who downvotes etherael for pointing out a really valid point. Stop the blind allegiance to the cause and think this one through critically. This is a bad thing.
kostko 16y ago
This article actually makes a lot of sense to me: http://www.infowars.com/is-the-internet-911-under-way/ http://www.infowars.com/is-the-internet-911-under-way/
geedee77 16y ago
This is massively irresponsible and smacks of the Wikileaks team trying to 'get at' the US government for reasons unknown. This is really the sort of information that could put lives in danger. Whatever good Wikileaks attempts to do is immediately overshadowed by such a stupid and naive leak such as this. I hope the people responsible are brought to full justice when an innocent person dies because they work at a facility that has just become a target for terror.
- JoeAltmaier 16y ago
  Agreed. This crosses the line and becomes a terrorist act in itself. During WWII it was treason to reveal the activities and movements of troops, operations and shipments of factories and transport critical to the war effort. (And everything was critical to the war effort.) Any possible sympathy for the good that Wikileaks is doing, has been undone.
  - GiraffeNecktie 16y ago
    So how do you define a "terrorist act"? Is it any action that is contrary to the interests of the United States or is it just releasing information that terrorists could conceivably find useful? In which case, Google is, by far, the biggest, baddest, terrorist on the planet. Back in the day, a terrorist act involved doing shit that terrorized people.
    - JoeAltmaier 16y ago
      So its not terrifying to be put on a public list of people who, if killed, will damage critical American supply chains?
      - GiraffeNecktie 16y ago
        It's not a list of "people who, if killed".
  - plinkplonk 16y ago
    During WWII it was treason for a country's citizens to reveal the activities and movements of its troops, operations and shipments of factories and transport critical to its war effort. How can you commit "treason" to a country you are not a citizen of? (Assange is not a US citizen. ). Stuff like "becomes a terrorist act in itself" is hyperbolic and has no real meaning. I doubt thinking people would consider Assange a "terrorist", like say, Osama Bin Laden. At worst Assange is anti-US or anti-war. Last I heard that wasn't a crime. An action against the US occupation of Afghanistan (which is about as far as these WikiLeaks disclosures can be stretched to mean without breaking down completely - and even this interpretation is very debatable) is not necessarily "terrorism". Hyperbole is dangerous to clarity of thinking (on both sides of this issue).
dsplittgerber 16y ago
I'm having a hard time reconciling people's viewpoints over here. Most people are intellectually inconsistent over Wikileaks. If a leak fits with people's opinion on wars or something similar, it's supposedly alright to leak; if it doesn't fit with one's opinion, it's bad and irresponsible? I think this goes to show that most people just view leaks on certain topics as means to an end on that specific policy subject. It's not like that. Only leaking "politically correct" material is not going to happen. Either you stick up for the unmitigated leaks or you don't. If you think a middleman (newspaper, whatever) has to assess whether or not a leak is potentially damaging or "not worth" leaking, then I think you haven't come to terms with what leaking is also about: exposing the truth and not relying on whatever authority to establish what is alright for the general populace to see and what is not. P.S.: If this is so important for the US government, why is it only SECRET/NOFORN? Also, according to Michael Chertoff, this list was/is used by US government agencies to prepare themselves for disruption.
- sparky 16y ago
  I must be one of those intellectually inconsistent folks, so take this for what it's worth. This particular piece of information doesn't bother me so much. As somebody else mentioned, it seems to my layman mind that, to a first order, those with sufficient resources and determination to do damage to these targets also have the resources and determination to think hard for a little while about what things might be important to a nation, and figure out where those things are made. This might save them some time, but I'm skeptical that this leak will create an army of only-mildly-interested attackers who otherwise wouldn't have bothered to find any of these places. That said, I disagree that "either you stick up for [the] unmitigated leaks or you don't." Sure it's an opinion, but I think it's OK to think that the world is best off with some information out in the open, and some information private. I agree that governments should default to the former rather than the latter, but everything in moderation. If you stand for this leak, do you also have to stand for the leak of all Visa card numbers and account holder information? Do you have to stand for leaking Google's search history logs, or Tor entry node access logs, or a hospital's medical records? That's not so clear-cut to me. Also, your last sentence leaves out the reality that you will never get rid of the middleman. Today, with Wikileaks, the middlemen who "establish what is alright for the general populace to see and what is not" are: 1) The set of all disgruntled employees and personnel, and other whistleblowers. Often their motives are pure, but sometimes not. 2) The cabal that runs Wikileaks. They may well have a better sense of what should be public than the average person, but we're still talking about a small set of humans, and we all have our motivations, agendas, needs, and wants to some extent. You can certainly argue that this is a better situation than 15 layers of government bureaucrats, or a few layers of journalists, but again, I don't think it's unilaterally better in all circumstances. P.S.: There is a heaping helping of intellectual inconsistency flying around concerning Wikileaks; I just think that there is room for reasonable concern in there too.
ghshephard 16y ago
I read through the Canadian "Critical Foreign Dependencies" List, and what struck me, is how difficult it would be to really damage any of the elements on the list, unless you were a state power. Canada James Bay Power Project, Hydro Quebec, Part of the St. Lawrence Power Project, between Barnhart Island, New York, and Cornwall, Ontario Seven Mile Dam, Canada Chalk River Nuclear Facility - big industrial targets that would require a lot of effort to really do damage to. Also, there were a lot of obvious targets that are already well known "Border Crossing", "Atlantic Cable Landing". Pretty much every one of the Canadian items (and many, many, many more) are discussed fairly openly in Canadian Newspapers in terms of how attractive they might be to terrorists, so nothing particularly interesting there. If anything, I was disappointed, significantly, at how _little_ is considered a Critical Foreign dependency. The Alberta Tar Sands aren't considered a Critical Foreign Dependency?
epo 16y ago
This is ill judged and shows Wikileaks to be immature as the motivation could only have been some form of juvenile revenge, this has probably damaged their credibility beyond repair. Little or no public good comes from this, any more than disseminating pictures of the keys to your front door or publishing your bank account details would somehow be justified "in the interests of openness". Comments about this being OK because "security through obscurity" is a bad thing merely show the commenter to incompetent at thinking, preferring instead to spout cliched slogans, rather like the book waving Maoists of old.
- epo 16y ago
  Ooh! downvoting, there's a compelling counterargument.
  - jokermatt999 16y ago
    You do have a very valid point, but your tone is rather harsh. I'm guessing the downvotes are more about how you're saying it rather than what you're saying.
    - epo 16y ago
      A mindless defence of a mindless act deserves nothing but contempt. Harsh? not as harsh as the reaction to wikileaks will be. To quote Stan Lee "with great power comes great responsibility" ("Spiderman"). Wikileaks has power, they have not exercised responsibility, this will cost them (and indirectly, the rest of us) dearly.
scrrr 16y ago
Perhaps not all information should be released, however, in the end perhaps it's only whistleblowers that can uncover certain things and force decision makers take back certain laws. (Fictional?) example with body scanners: The company making those has a real interest in the terror threat never going away. The shareholders expect that. The politicians get elected with money from security companies. Thus: The terror threat will never go away. UNLESS a whistleblower shows the truth and the population gets upset. Whistleblowers are important for democracy.
kmfrk 16y ago
I'd be interested to see how Assange responds to this. It's going to determine my opinion about him, and put a lot of doubts to rest for better or worse. I'm sure other people feel the same.
dqh 16y ago
I wish Wikileaks would stick to exposing corruption / human rights violations / warcrimes etc. This release seems only to increase the vulnerability of the USA (not to mention the civillians simply working at these targets) to unsophisticated attackers.
DjDarkman 16y ago
And I should believe that the location of "the most critical gas facility in the world" has been a secret all along. :D

54 points by pacemkr 16y ago

This is weird to me. I just get the feeling that... a lot of these miscellaneous commercial facilities are replaceable- not only that, but the market forces acting after an attack would encourage new facilities to be built or new locations of the resource to be discovered (in the case of cobalt). I also feel that the ideologies might not line up really well with this. "We are going to destroy the American infidels... by destroying a Danish insulin factory!" The symbolism gets kinda lost.

cma 16y ago
But it is the kind of security planning information that most people (in the US) wouldn't want leaked, and would actually support secrecy for (as opposed to things that "endanger" us by embarrassing us, things that receive classification because they document our moral failings (like take, say, the helicopter video)).
- Herring 16y ago
  There are potential terrorism targets literally everywhere. This whole issue is way overblown. Even the 9/11 perpetrators didn't want to "kill teh infidel", more reduce US involvement in the middle east.
- sks 16y ago
  Unless this leak contains information which could point out that the US is protecting facilities owned by any particular corporation(s) in the name of national security, releasing it is not warranted.
- varjag 16y ago
  Terrorist don't give a damn about ports and cable stations, they go after office workers and schoolchildren. The government's and terrorist's idea of vulnerable is fundamentally different. In Russia they were securing gas pipes, nuclear stations, cabbage sorting plants and whatnot, but terrorist hit apartment buildings, theaters, hospitals and schools.
  - regularfry 16y ago
    Traditionally, yes. With al Qaeda (inasmuch as there is a single body with unified aims), not so much. One of bin Laden's videos spelt it out: their aim is to economically cripple the US and the West by forcing them to spend a vastly disproportionate amount of money on security measures through performing relatively cheap acts of violence. It just so happens that attacks involving large numbers of civilians are particularly effective for this, because the political pressure to protect the public is high. In the case of targets on this list, there is a similar pressure to protect them, but in general they won't be as expensive to guard because their nature makes it easier to restrict access. If I were on the Chinese politburo, though, this leak would read like a literal shopping list.
    - varjag 16y ago
      Well, it does not happen like that accidentally. The whole point of terrorist attack is terrorizing the population to achieve one's political objectives. To terrorize population you hit where it hurts the people. People are less emotional about shut down plants than they are about dead children. > If I were on the Chinese politburo, though, this leak would read like a literal shopping list. You bring a point here. This list makes sense (and is obvious) if you have a strategic bomber command in your disposal. Otherwise a few of those isolated attacks will fail to shatter the economy. Remember how many bombs were unleashed on German industry in WW2 before it started showing any effect. Attacking population on the other hand is accessible and effective, that's the whole idea behind the terror. So a proper, realistic list should be "dense urban areas of the United States". Of course it's not what the embassies were assigned to find out, so they really did an honest, if mostly useless, job.
      - regularfry 16y ago
        Possibly you misunderstand me. I don't mean that the Chinese (for instance) might want to bomb what's on the list (although that would certainly be one approach). I mean that they might literally wish to (and be capable of) buying what's on the list. We all know they've been cornering African mineral exploitation for the last decade or so, I'm sure they wouldn't object to another cobalt mine or two on their acquisition list, even if they had to pay an absurd premium.

poet 16y ago

I'm finding a hard time seeing how this leak is a positive thing. At least leaks related to violations of human rights and international law have legs to stand on.

civilian 16y ago
The real leaked material is that the US embassy have the opinion/analysis that X factories & mines are vital to the U.S. I think that a small team of economists could have figured out what plants are vital to national security. It's not like this data is secret- it's just the embassy's thoughts that are secret. (So... thank god Jihadists don't know economics! Let's hope Julian doesn't leak any textbooks.)
- natrius 16y ago
  I agree that the data isn't particularly secret, but I also agree that there doesn't seem to be any possible public good served by leaking this information.
  - gasull 16y ago
    We learn what our Government is spending our money on.
    - natrius 16y ago
      Are you talking about the money spent compiling the lists or the money spent on the things in the list? The former is trivial, and the latter isn't actually provided by the list. It isn't limited to U.S. assets. The only information this list provides is what the list says it provides: facilities that are vital to U.S. security. I can't think of a beneficial use of this data, but I can think of plenty of harmful uses. The list isn't hard to figure out, so I don't think its release is a huge loss, but there is no gain, so I can only wish that it were never leaked.
  - civilian 16y ago
    This leak Does serve the public good, if the public surrounding these vital targets learn that these locations are vital. Instead of being ignorant bystanders who think it's "just a factory"; they'll know that it is a Vital factory, and that suspicious activity around it should be reported. Whenever I'm in a train station I hear about how important I am, as a civilian, to security and that I should report suspicious bags. Couldn't the government take that attitude to the next level?

etherael 16y ago

I saw this this morning and it seemed like the first example of something that should severely not be leaked. I wanted to contact them privately and directly and bring their attention to it but there turns out being no discernable channel to do that. These especially struck me as dangerous; http://cablesearch.org/cable/view.php?id=09DOHA214&hl=%3Anewest http://cablesearch.org/cable/view.php?id=09DOHA214&hl=%3... Specifically; 2. (C) There are three main industrial facilities of interest that if destroyed, or if their production is disrupted, could have an immediate effect on U.S. national economic security. In order of priority, these are Ras Laffan Industrial City (RLIC), Mesaieed Industrial City (MIC) and port complex, and Dukhan Industrial City. All three industrial centers are under the control and supervision of Qatar Petroleum (QP), a semi-autonomous government organization whose Chairman, Abdullah bin Hamad Al-Attiyah, is also the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Energy and Industry. Natural gas production is primarily centered around the coast and offshore areas in the northeast of Qatar, in and round Ras Laffan; while, oil production is concentrated on the western coast near Dukhan as well as offshore platforms. In both the #startups and #wikileaks channels on freenode people variously assured me that they had already considered it or I was just being a troll. I suppose it really is naive to expect unmitigated good to come of this episode, but I really wish they would not hand ammunition to the opposition in this fashion. I wish there was a way to privately contact them to ask them to reconsider a particular release without drawing attention to it in a public fashion. P.S. I will happily edit this message to omit the sensitive information directly in the event that anyone can tell me how to bring the necessary attention to it in a more private way.

lionhearted 16y ago
Who is downvoting this? What's wrong with people? You can't see how listing the facilities that the United States thinks are vital to national security in Qatar could possibly be a bad idea? It's like once people pick their teams, they can't reconsider. They have to find rationalizations "oh, this isn't so bad" or "well now we know what the government is working on" - guess what? There's random unhappy people in Qatar who don't have the resources or skill to do their own recon and intelligence work. Wikileaks just delivered America's own intel/recon to them. This makes the world less safe. This is a bad thing. I don't care what team you're on. This one is a bad thing. Shame on everyone who downvotes etherael for pointing out a really valid point. Stop the blind allegiance to the cause and think this one through critically. This is a bad thing.

kostko 16y ago

This article actually makes a lot of sense to me: http://www.infowars.com/is-the-internet-911-under-way/ http://www.infowars.com/is-the-internet-911-under-way/

geedee77 16y ago

This is massively irresponsible and smacks of the Wikileaks team trying to 'get at' the US government for reasons unknown. This is really the sort of information that could put lives in danger. Whatever good Wikileaks attempts to do is immediately overshadowed by such a stupid and naive leak such as this. I hope the people responsible are brought to full justice when an innocent person dies because they work at a facility that has just become a target for terror.

JoeAltmaier 16y ago
Agreed. This crosses the line and becomes a terrorist act in itself. During WWII it was treason to reveal the activities and movements of troops, operations and shipments of factories and transport critical to the war effort. (And everything was critical to the war effort.) Any possible sympathy for the good that Wikileaks is doing, has been undone.
- GiraffeNecktie 16y ago
  So how do you define a "terrorist act"? Is it any action that is contrary to the interests of the United States or is it just releasing information that terrorists could conceivably find useful? In which case, Google is, by far, the biggest, baddest, terrorist on the planet. Back in the day, a terrorist act involved doing shit that terrorized people.
  - JoeAltmaier 16y ago
    So its not terrifying to be put on a public list of people who, if killed, will damage critical American supply chains?
    - GiraffeNecktie 16y ago
      It's not a list of "people who, if killed".
- plinkplonk 16y ago
  During WWII it was treason for a country's citizens to reveal the activities and movements of its troops, operations and shipments of factories and transport critical to its war effort. How can you commit "treason" to a country you are not a citizen of? (Assange is not a US citizen. ). Stuff like "becomes a terrorist act in itself" is hyperbolic and has no real meaning. I doubt thinking people would consider Assange a "terrorist", like say, Osama Bin Laden. At worst Assange is anti-US or anti-war. Last I heard that wasn't a crime. An action against the US occupation of Afghanistan (which is about as far as these WikiLeaks disclosures can be stretched to mean without breaking down completely - and even this interpretation is very debatable) is not necessarily "terrorism". Hyperbole is dangerous to clarity of thinking (on both sides of this issue).

dsplittgerber 16y ago

I'm having a hard time reconciling people's viewpoints over here. Most people are intellectually inconsistent over Wikileaks. If a leak fits with people's opinion on wars or something similar, it's supposedly alright to leak; if it doesn't fit with one's opinion, it's bad and irresponsible? I think this goes to show that most people just view leaks on certain topics as means to an end on that specific policy subject. It's not like that. Only leaking "politically correct" material is not going to happen. Either you stick up for the unmitigated leaks or you don't. If you think a middleman (newspaper, whatever) has to assess whether or not a leak is potentially damaging or "not worth" leaking, then I think you haven't come to terms with what leaking is also about: exposing the truth and not relying on whatever authority to establish what is alright for the general populace to see and what is not. P.S.: If this is so important for the US government, why is it only SECRET/NOFORN? Also, according to Michael Chertoff, this list was/is used by US government agencies to prepare themselves for disruption.

sparky 16y ago
I must be one of those intellectually inconsistent folks, so take this for what it's worth. This particular piece of information doesn't bother me so much. As somebody else mentioned, it seems to my layman mind that, to a first order, those with sufficient resources and determination to do damage to these targets also have the resources and determination to think hard for a little while about what things might be important to a nation, and figure out where those things are made. This might save them some time, but I'm skeptical that this leak will create an army of only-mildly-interested attackers who otherwise wouldn't have bothered to find any of these places. That said, I disagree that "either you stick up for [the] unmitigated leaks or you don't." Sure it's an opinion, but I think it's OK to think that the world is best off with some information out in the open, and some information private. I agree that governments should default to the former rather than the latter, but everything in moderation. If you stand for this leak, do you also have to stand for the leak of all Visa card numbers and account holder information? Do you have to stand for leaking Google's search history logs, or Tor entry node access logs, or a hospital's medical records? That's not so clear-cut to me. Also, your last sentence leaves out the reality that you will never get rid of the middleman. Today, with Wikileaks, the middlemen who "establish what is alright for the general populace to see and what is not" are: 1) The set of all disgruntled employees and personnel, and other whistleblowers. Often their motives are pure, but sometimes not. 2) The cabal that runs Wikileaks. They may well have a better sense of what should be public than the average person, but we're still talking about a small set of humans, and we all have our motivations, agendas, needs, and wants to some extent. You can certainly argue that this is a better situation than 15 layers of government bureaucrats, or a few layers of journalists, but again, I don't think it's unilaterally better in all circumstances. P.S.: There is a heaping helping of intellectual inconsistency flying around concerning Wikileaks; I just think that there is room for reasonable concern in there too.

ghshephard 16y ago

I read through the Canadian "Critical Foreign Dependencies" List, and what struck me, is how difficult it would be to really damage any of the elements on the list, unless you were a state power. Canada James Bay Power Project, Hydro Quebec, Part of the St. Lawrence Power Project, between Barnhart Island, New York, and Cornwall, Ontario Seven Mile Dam, Canada Chalk River Nuclear Facility - big industrial targets that would require a lot of effort to really do damage to. Also, there were a lot of obvious targets that are already well known "Border Crossing", "Atlantic Cable Landing". Pretty much every one of the Canadian items (and many, many, many more) are discussed fairly openly in Canadian Newspapers in terms of how attractive they might be to terrorists, so nothing particularly interesting there. If anything, I was disappointed, significantly, at how _little_ is considered a Critical Foreign dependency. The Alberta Tar Sands aren't considered a Critical Foreign Dependency?

epo 16y ago

This is ill judged and shows Wikileaks to be immature as the motivation could only have been some form of juvenile revenge, this has probably damaged their credibility beyond repair. Little or no public good comes from this, any more than disseminating pictures of the keys to your front door or publishing your bank account details would somehow be justified "in the interests of openness". Comments about this being OK because "security through obscurity" is a bad thing merely show the commenter to incompetent at thinking, preferring instead to spout cliched slogans, rather like the book waving Maoists of old.

epo 16y ago
Ooh! downvoting, there's a compelling counterargument.
- jokermatt999 16y ago
  You do have a very valid point, but your tone is rather harsh. I'm guessing the downvotes are more about how you're saying it rather than what you're saying.
  - epo 16y ago
    A mindless defence of a mindless act deserves nothing but contempt. Harsh? not as harsh as the reaction to wikileaks will be. To quote Stan Lee "with great power comes great responsibility" ("Spiderman"). Wikileaks has power, they have not exercised responsibility, this will cost them (and indirectly, the rest of us) dearly.

scrrr 16y ago

Perhaps not all information should be released, however, in the end perhaps it's only whistleblowers that can uncover certain things and force decision makers take back certain laws. (Fictional?) example with body scanners: The company making those has a real interest in the terror threat never going away. The shareholders expect that. The politicians get elected with money from security companies. Thus: The terror threat will never go away. UNLESS a whistleblower shows the truth and the population gets upset. Whistleblowers are important for democracy.

kmfrk 16y ago

I'd be interested to see how Assange responds to this. It's going to determine my opinion about him, and put a lot of doubts to rest for better or worse. I'm sure other people feel the same.

dqh 16y ago

I wish Wikileaks would stick to exposing corruption / human rights violations / warcrimes etc. This release seems only to increase the vulnerability of the USA (not to mention the civillians simply working at these targets) to unsophisticated attackers.

DjDarkman 16y ago

And I should believe that the location of "the most critical gas facility in the world" has been a secret all along. :D