WikiLeaks about to hit the fan

I don't know if this helps understand U.S. government. There are two federal acts, the Privacy Act and the Freedom of Information Act. Government employees respond to requests for information made under FOIA as long as it does not violate the Privacy Act.

I'm not sure I would classify Dean as a Whistle Blower (unless criminals who turn on their confederates under police coercion are considered Whistle Blowers) . . .

I'm not sure I would classify Dean as a Whistle Blower (unless criminals who turn on their confederates under police coercion are considered Whistle Blowers),

In particular, he creeps me out for the days on end that he sat in front of that Senate committee and calmly, quietly spilled the beans on that truly bizarre bunker mentality on Pennsylvania Avenue in those days.

The U.S. government’s response to both (the theft and release of classified documents) has been distressingly feckless.

First and most obviously, how is it possible that those responsible for security at the Departments of Defense and State did not foresee — and take measures that would have prevented — the possibility of a 22-year-old Army private not just accessing but also downloading such classified information?

Second, after the first WikiLeaks document dump back in July, why did a computer worm or virus not find its way into WikiLeaks servers and destroy them?

Instead, we’re hearing Pentagon spokesmen say it’s not that the U.S. lacks the means to put WikiLeaks out of business, but that such a response would have been excessive in this instance.

But the alternative explanation is that America’s cyber-warriors have not yet mastered their trade.

Cyberspace is not the battlefield of the future — it’s the battlefield of the present.

Chinese military analyst Wang Huacheng has described America’s reliance on information technology and the Internet as the country’s “soft ribs and strategic weakness.”

The threat posed by WikiLeaks doesn't center on the fact that the information was obtained (although preventing that, prevents all else) but that it was disseminated and made widely available to everyone. If, as some argue, it is impossible to stop a determined hacker, then the next best defense is to limit the audience available to him.

Assange may know all of a government's secrets, but if he can share and expose them to a wide public audience, he's been neutralized. Before his adoring throng convince themselves that this affair heralds the emergence of a brave new world of transparency and unfettered information, they should pause and consider that the powerful people who believe that secrets (for good or bad) must be kept are not going to simply throw up their hands and concede him his victory.

The Enemy must also be rapaciously malevolent enough that its defeat is worth any "collateral damage" be that the lives of informants and intelligence agents, or a loss of the freedom to communicate and be informed.

There is a great deal of naivety displayed in a strategy that presumes the calculus that an increased cost of information security will result in less security.

Equally unrealistic is the smug confidence in inevitability of transparency. We are smack dab in the center of the Information Age and still there are numerous states where clouds of secrecy far darker than anything seen in the West prevail.

Equally unrealistic is the smug confidence in inevitability of transparency. We are smack dab in the center of the Information Age and still there are numerous states where clouds of secrecy far darker than anything seen in the West prevail.

This is still a win-win in the fight against the secrecy state. As you force your opponent to go to ever greater lengths to defend his secrecy, you begin to majorly reduce the effectiveness of their operation - and greatly increase the cost of that operation at the same time. That's hacker 101.

You seem to me Finn to be talking about our addiction to computers. What caused that. The human race had done without computers for a couple of million years. If it is said that the extension of our ego's control over the surrounding space, the proper definition of sadism, the basic principle of NFL, is the cause then there are two difficulties.

One is that not every human being has such a need and thus it is learned which leads to who was it learned off. Is it a form of junk? Which, as Mr Burroughs said, leads to more junk.

The other is that we were warned. The Marquis de Sade for one. The first.

Our systems would now break down without computers. Like all goodies there's a dark side. They warn heroin takers don't they. Oil users.

It's us. I'm not in denial. I'm not looking for scapegoats. It's history. Given the addiction it was inevitable. It might even be a good thing it has happened at this low level. Better now than later.

Doing away with pretty young filing clerks was obviously ridiculous.