WikiLeaks about to hit the fan

Quote:

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.

Doing simple things like disabling USB ports and dvd/cd burners have a large overhead?

Keeping Monitoring software going to red flag odd behaviors like a clerk accessing and or dumping a few G of secure cables?

Encrypting any information that is going to be traveling outside of secure buildings have a large overhead?

There is something wrong when I have more security on my computers then the government seem to be using.

Good luck in getting information from my computers without my permission by getting pass my encrypted drives or getting malware into my computer pass my sandbox browser and other security programs.

I'm sure that for a typical user, you have good security, so I'm not trying to insult you when I say: a competent hacker wouldn't give two shits about your 'encrypted drives' or your over-the-counter security programs. I can think of more than one way to get around those measures right off the top of my head.

Because there might exist states in which a pernicious devotion to secrecy greater than that of our own nation exists, does not excuse or justify the arrogant and crypto-aristocratic secrecy of this state.

I don't know that I would call it addiction, but we have reached a point where our reliance on computers is so deep and widespread, that their disappearence over night would result in a global catastrophe.

The same thing can be said of other technological innovations.

For example:

Automobiles
Mastery of electricity
Pharmacology
Mastery of fire

But ask yourself: how much does it cost, in terms of time and technical expertise, to maintain your box at that level? How much would it cost the US to do this for every terminal with access to this data? Think about that and then think whether or not hackers and leaks like this make the cost of secrecy go WAY up.

I applaud his commitment

the defensive posture of you, Finn, BillRM, even FA,

'even the balance' attempt -

You forgot Ionus, Hinge. But I guess you must have been thinking of people who actually try to make an argument.

Ionus is on my ignore list

he's an arsehole with an overinflated sense of self worth and a loose grip on reality that he resents people shaking further loose.

You just don't understand propaganda, Art,

someone who tells the truth

I'm asking about poor handling because if one completely buys into wikileaks being infallible, then one cannot accept that information could ever be mishandled. I am asking what kinds of things you'd have to see to be convinced of the mishandling of information. Unless you believe there is no way for this information to be mishandled, you do have an answer. I'm asking for your opinion.

Is it okay to have material 30 years later? You're ignoring what I said. I'm saying that real transparency is changing the policies on the proper release of information. Wikileaks: not the problem, not the solution. It's the symptom.

Should states have the ability to speak in secret. Yes. Should they speak more often in the open. Absolutely. I'm fond of public meetings msolga, but too often politics makes for theater and interferes with crafting policy. Certainly, you'd not like to see a televised meeting between your head of State with a foreign official turned into nothing more than a photo-op campaign stop. Sometimes we want the cameras away so people can get to work. We need not subscribe to either extreme. There is area in the middle where a balance of private and public negotiations between states.

I'm still not sure how you feel the facilities release is in the public's interest. One is a plant that produces most of the world's insulin. That's public on a international level. Would Australia be better off if it publicly announced what foreign sites it found most critical? This information defies the defense of WL simply exposing dirty deeds. They aren't simply interested in devious info. They are interested in any info that has power.

To be continued .. (sorry! Accidental premature post.)

Think back to before there was a WikiLeaks. If I asked you how to obtain the degree of transparency you desire in our society, are you going to tell me that your answer would have been to wait for a group of hackers to come along and collect sensitive information and then release it as their leader sees fit? I doubt it.

It seems that the stigma grows that all that is secret is shameful, and that's bullshit.

... I'm saying that in your lessons-learned great open society, obviously there is no need for any state to ever keep their cables private. So why doesn't some state stand up an be the first to hold up this great torch of the open society and say: "We heard you world! Here's the key to the vault!"

I somehow suspect that the truth is rather that no state will do so. Better to play damage control and suggest that diplomacy is only dirty when the US is involved.

You post illustrates the public's relationship with the information. Having now the existence of WL, you've come to assume that leaks are the way things could be prevented.

I would have welcomed those leaks, if they had occurred.
They might have made a real difference.

WASHINGTON — In the past few weeks, more than 1,200 internal State Department cables have been made public by WikiLeaks and received worldwide attention, including regular front-page coverage in The New York Times and countless other news organizations, including MSNBC.

But the Obama administration’s attempt to stop people from reading them continues unabated, creating mounting confusion and head-shaking among bewildered federal employees.

In one example, the Department of Homeland Security sent out a strongly worded memo to all employees and contractors telling them that not only may they not “download or attempt to download” any of the classified WikiLeaks memos onto their computers, they also may not “discuss the content” of such “potentially classified” documents “with persons who would not otherwise be authorized access,” according to a copy of a Dec. 3 memo from the department’s Office of Chief Information Officer.

...

“This is driving secrecy policy over a cliff,” said Steven Aftergood, a national security specialist with the Federation of American Scientists and the author of the widely read Secrecy News blog who wrote about the issue on Friday. “It means that government employees are going to be the least informed people on the planet.”

As an example, Aftergood cites an e-mail he got from one DHS employee who had just received the department’s latest missive from Donna Roy, an official in the department’s information office. Strictly read, it appears to suggest that department employees and contractors could be guilty of a security violation if they access WikiLeaks cables from their personal computers, the employee noted.

...

A DHS official, who asked not to be identified by name, acknowledged the department’s memo may have been worded “imprecisely.” The purpose was to prohibit employees from downloading WikiLeaks cables on their government computers, not necessarily their personal computers at home. (A similar memo from the Defense Department’s Threat Reduction Agency banning its employees and contractors from downloading Wiki memos does apply explicitly to “employees’ or contractors’ personally owned computers,” however.)
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Finn dAbuzz wrote:

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 an inferential tu quoque fallacy--because someone is worse than a bad man does not excuse or mitigate the badness of that bad man. Because there might exist states in which a pernicious devotion to secrecy greater than that of our own nation exists, does not excuse or justify the arrogant and crypto-aristocratic secrecy of this state.

I would call that a dangerous addiction Finn.