5 ms·

If that was his intent: Why not selectively publish only the parts about surveillance of US citizens? Why publish details of how the US was dealing with adver

• yourapostasy 6y ago
  Selective publishing runs into the problem of easy deniability and drawn out recognition if any due to its narrow scope. The weight of the body of the revealed secrets forced the hand of the US intelligence agencies to admit their veracity. Considering how whistle blowers in the US are routinely persecuted, the malfeasance in so many cases successfully survives whistle-blowing, and the leadership who directed authority over the malfeasance avoid responsibility for it, that "shotgun" strategy is likely a predictable emergent response. Until the US organizational culture and culture in general is orders of magnitude less hostile to whistle blowers, this asymmetric response will likely continue. The reflexivity of this situation likely means US organizations that don't tolerate whistle blowing become more compartmentalized to force whistle blowing into a more deniable narrow scope, which of course means the same organizations increase their inefficiency. An altogether horrible development all around.
  • kyboren 6y ago
    > [...] organizations that don't tolerate whistle blowing become more compartmentalized to force whistle blowing into a more deniable narrow scope, which of course means the same organizations increase their inefficiency. This is the insight and strategy Assange laid out in his 2006 essays "State and Terrorist Conspiracies" and "Conspiracy as Governance"[0] and put into practice with WikiLeaks. > Authoritarian regimes create forces which oppose them by pushing against a people’s will to truth, love and self-realization. Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce further resistance. Hence such schemes are concealed by successful authoritarian powers until resistance is futile or outweighed by the efficiencies of naked power. This collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population, is enough to define their behavior as conspiratorial. > We can see conspiracies as a type of device that has inputs (information about the environment), a computational network (the conspirators and their links to each other) and outputs (actions intending to change or maintain the environment) > In a conspiracy, individuals conspire, while when isolated they do not. We can show most of this difference by adding up all the important communication (weights) between all the conspirators. Call this total conspiratorial power. > Instead of cutting links between conspirators so as to separate a weighted conspiracy we can achieve a similar effect by throttling the conspiracy — constricting (reducing the weight of) those high weight links which bridge regions of equal total conspiratorial power. > Literacy and the communications revolution have empowered conspirators with new means to conspire, increasing the speed of accuracy of the their interactions and thereby the maximum size a conspiracy may achieve before it breaks down. > Later we will see how new technology and insights into the psychological motivations of conspirators can give us practical methods for preventing or reducing important communication between authoritarian conspirators, foment strong resistance to authoritarian planning and create powerful incentives for more humane forms of governance. [0]: https://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf https://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf