Slashdot Mirror
US Intelligence Planned To Destroy WikiLeaks
An anonymous reader writes "This document is a classified (SECRET/NOFORN), 32-page US counterintelligence investigation into WikiLeaks (PDF). 'The possibility that current employees or moles within DoD or elsewhere in the US government are providing sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.org cannot be ruled out.' It concocts a plan to fatally marginalize the organization. Since WikiLeaks uses 'trust as a center of gravity by protecting the anonymity and identity of the insiders, leakers or whistleblowers,' the report recommends 'The identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could potentially damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions from using the Wikileaks.org Web site.' [As two years have passed since the date of the report, with no WikiLeaks' source exposed, it appears that this plan was ineffective.] As an odd justification for the plan, the report claims that 'Several foreign countries including China, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe have denounced or blocked access to the Wikileaks.org website.' The report provides further justification by enumerating embarrassing stories broken by WikiLeaks — US equipment expenditure in Iraq, probable US violations of the Chemical Warfare Convention Treaty in Iraq, the battle over the Iraqi town of Fallujah and human rights violations at Guantanamo Bay."
*burp* *fart* *queef*
Ooops, excuse me.
The urinal is the proper place to take Wikileaks!
I'll be here all week. Thanks!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Wouldn't an easier plan to destroy the credibility of wikileaks be to overflow it with bogus leaks and fake whistleblowers, flooding them with misinformation?
Sounds like a great idea. If China, North Korea and Russia have already showed a good example I think the US should definitely follow their example.
I wonder why the government is worried about them...
Sometimes secrets are useful. Given all the money I pay in taxes I would hope my government is at least making plans to keep some of those secrets secret.
"China, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe have denounced or blocked access to the Wikileaks.org"
To me, this means we should be helping them & not trying to destroy them.
There is a war going on for your mind.
When a government serves its own purposes it cannot serve its citizens.
The war that began in the 60s has finally come to an end, and it looks like all the players switched sides. These 200 odd years were certainly a nice time.
Surely, that would run counter to the US first amendment? What's happened to respect for the First that would let such a plan get beyond any US official's fantasies of power?
I am pretty sure, the answer is a resounding "Yes". Some things should be kept secret for some time... No one seriously argues against that, even if there are disagreements over whether a particular bit of information needs to be classified or not (and for how long).
Now, if anything needs to be hidden, then somebody has to be making the everyday decisions on what gets classified, and enforcing them. Governments are the most natural pick for that, if only because they are — by design — charged with national security.
Any "leakers" inside the government usurp that decision-making to themselves and to the Wikileaks. Instead of relying on the judgment of people charged with making it, we will depend on the judgment of the "leaker" and of the Wikileaks editors. Personally, I'd prefer the government officials...
Thus any leakers (and the Wikileaks personnel) are to be prosecuted with the prosecutors having only to prove their involvement in leaking. They could counter by proving, that the particular leak was justified (see also "whistleblower laws"), but the burden of proof is on them...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Sometimes its for good national security reasons which in the long run protect the public. Reasons which a lot of wannabe Robin Hoods won't know about and as a consequence can put agents or even the entire country at risk.
Sure , some people in agencies will abuse their power occasionally, thats human nature. But people shouldn't write off all security issues as just the Men In Black trying to pull one over the little people. Life isn't that simple and only the naive would think it is.
They also appear to be parked in fundraising mode, rather than spreading the word and fighting the good fight. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks
So maybe the plan worked?
Tghe Government deals in some serious secrets*
Wiki leaks is an outlet for anonymously leaking secrets.
The government looks into wikileaks and wants to figure out how they could stop a serious leak.
Well.. duh. IN fact, that's a good thing for them to have done.
*WHile I believe not everything it deems secret is necessary, I do believe SOME things do need to be kept secret for a period of time.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"As two years have passed since the date of the report, with no WikiLeaks' source exposed, it appears that this plan was ineffective" Or much more likely never implemented. There are hundreds of people paid to come up with ideas for fixing solutions in just about every govt org. By design these ideas are suppose to be a free thinking as possible while staying within the guidelines of the problem. In this case someone came up with an idea to deal with the leak problem by destroying the org that posted the leaks. This could have been a very potent fix, but also brought out the possibility of blow-back (public outcry, legal action, extra exposure of data, etc) as well as just pushing the problem off to another newer site that is even harder to deal with (Like shutting down Napster or Kazaa). It seems to me there is a good chance that they choose not to directly attack WikiLeaks and instead worked on keeping data from getting out to begin with (Can't get the data that's out back, so just keep them from getting more).
Sorry to criticise people who are clearly on our side. The Wikileaks folk are great, and the job they were doing was great, and it will be great again when they start back up...
...but it was not a good idea for them to take all the leaked documents offline without notice in order to show their value so that people will donate. It was last year, probably December, and everything's still offline :-(
For one example, they published the only (at the time) big ACTA leak. (There's since been a bigger one, hosted elsewhere) Everyone was pointing to them, and they took their copy offline. To my amazement, no one had a back up, so us anti-ACTA campaigners simply lost the only leaked draft.
At the implementation level, it was a bad idea to simply cause all pages to give error 404. A page of "We need donations, we'll be back up when we get them" would have been better.
Lesson: take backups of important docs, even ones published by groups of good people.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
Example? More like "everybody's doing it." Iran hacks US. US hacks Wikileaks. China hacks Google. /b/ gets mad/decides to join the fun and social engineers everyone else.
This information is marked SECRET and NOFORN (i.e. not for export or foreign eyes); simply accessing it without a security clearance may be committing a crime against national security.
Whether or not the US government will end up with a log of IP addresses that have downloaded it is a judgment for the reader.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Wow that evil George Bush is at it again. Wait, what?
The First Amendment does not apply to classified information, and for good reason. The government does not classify documents simply to hide information from the general populace; it truly is a matter of life or death in many circumstances.
Abusing one's security clearance can result in severe penalties.
I, for one, cannot read the document, as I no longer hold a clearance, and am legally obligated not to read or download it.
I'm sure Wikileaks was due to be the first casualty of censorship. There's not much governments fear more than their secrets ending up out in the open.
Far more likely that it was never implemented.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers...
I can understand that the government can harass, hound, and persecute those it does not like into oblivion. Comes with the turf. But if their objective is to destroy wikileaks, then this method, is, to put it bluntly, bass ackwards. How is it that the armchair wafflebutt who came up with this crock of sh*t never heard of the Streisand Effect?
Seriously, these are the people keeping the US safe? That their brilliant plan is to do precisely the kind of thing the Internet is really good at defeating?
Epic fail.
One would note that most of the time, the things that governments fight so hard to keep secret are things that aren't so much of national security interest but rather things that are embarrassing or things they're keeping secret not because of the enemy but because their own citizens might be upset if they knew. Wikileaks has shown many useful things, from drafts of ACTA, to the spying on citizens in violation of any numbers of laws, hypocritical actions by governments all over the world, and clear violations of treaties. In fact, very little of what Wikileaks posts is "top secret national security information" from almost any country - they're often things that governments want to suppress because they don't want to face reprisal from their own citizens for undertaking them, or are trying to hide actions they undertake that they know are otherwise illegal - not because they're afraid some other country is going to use that information against them.
Consider this - decades ago the US Supreme Court affirmed the State Secrets Doctrine, allowing the government to argue that trying a court case would reveal national secrets (and that the case must therefore be dropped without a hearing), because the government argued that revealing information about what was I think a plane crash would hurt national security. Decades later, when the files were unclassified, it turns out that there were no real secrets involved, certainly none that would have been revealed in a trial - the government was simply trying to hide the fact that there was government negligence involved. They wanted to avoid embarrassing themselves, not protecting secrets. Remember that next time the US Government invokes the doctrine (which they do with ever-increasing frequency).
And not only that, in free and democratic societies, individuals deciding on their own to leak classified information is a subversion of that very democratic process. In the US, we have collectively decided, as a society, that some information should be kept secret, even from The People, and we have empowered and entrusted the government with the power to do so.
When an individual, on his or her own, decides that some secret information should be leaked, they subvert that process. It is nowhere near akin to leaking sensitive information from totalitarian or repressive regimes, or even from corporate entities.
Some might assert that information is overclassified, or classified such as to hide wrongdoing or illegal or questionably behavior. Fine, but:
1. You don't get to make that determination yourself, and
2. If you do, generally this kind of decision is a moral one which must be tempered with consequences. I.e., if, in a free and democratic society, you really believe that a piece of classified information should be released, you should be willing to pay your society's consequences for it. People leak to WikiLeaks because they believe (mostly accurately) that there will be no consequences. This creates an unhealthy environment for any kind of protected or sensitive information in a democratic society.
Your own personal view on whether something should or shouldn't be classified is irrelevant. There are well-known and established processes that govern classification.
Just about the only thing WikiLeaks believes should be protected from leaking is negative information about WikiLeaks itself.
... because we all know what counts for journalism in that part of the world: Iran hacks US Spy Sites http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/03/15/147201/Iran-Hacks-US-Spy-Sites.
So I read the pdf which appeared to me as a risk assessment of Wikileaks.org. It basically concluded that Wikileaks is or can be used as a threat to US military. But it said almost nothing about "destroying" Wikileaks.
Remember, you don't have to destroy a threat right now. Use it or lose it.
And /. editors should learn from the US military on how to choose a good title for news items. Duh.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
While there are reasons to keep some things secret, I also think it's naive to think that power doesn't corrupt. Secrecy is a form of power, it's a way to hide what's going on, and it's easy to keep dirty laundry hidden under the guise of national security. Also, even good intentions can go awry.
Also, so far, none of the leaks at WikiLeaks has compromised people or national security.
I can hope, right?
No sig for you!!
And the problem with the above policy is that the government will regularly abuse its power to keep secrets.
Instead, it will spy on its own citizens, crush freedoms, trample the constitution, and generally run amok big-brother-style, all in the name of "protecting the country", when what it really is protecting is itself and its powers -- power for the purpose of power.
As far as I am concerned, this government lost its rights to keep secrets. They cannot be trusted to keep secrets. They cannot be trusted, period. When the government has lost its respect for its people, how can the people be expected to respect the government?
CAPTCHA == Founders
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
This leak feels like the ones Apple's secret police use. Since it's particularly inflammatory, I wonder if they only gave specific people access to it to track down who was doing the leaking...
Computer Science is all about trying to find the right wrench to bang in the right screw. -T.Cumbo?
All the stuff wikileaks has leaked has been in the category of avoiding embarrassment rather than anything that was truly a sensitive matter of national security.
For example, a detailed report on the exact weaknesses of various pieces of military equipment, identities of our spies, details of planned troop movements are all things I would consider important to national security.
Covering up the fact that we're torturing people because it would make a lot of people upset to learn that is not a matter of national security.
Wikileaks has performed an invaluable service for the years its been in operation.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I don't know who proclaimed this half-assed hallucination, but I can confirm that it isn't blocked here.
It is the universe that makes fun of us all.
All good points. The trouble is, in a way, that once the secrecy becomes widespread and is not just for highly exceptional cases it is going to be really tempting to overclassify stuff for spurious reasons. It doesn't even need to be with the motivation of "pulling one over on the little people", it can just be extreme risk-averseness e.g. "why release this stuff that's probably OK when not releasing it means we don't have to make that call". And if people start finding legitimate-sounding justifications to cover up mistakes that should be public, it's a dangerous situation.
To a certain extent I'm of the opinion that the secrecy is a somewhat self-perpetuating thing - once you get involved in activities that have to be secret you find that you need to keep up the secret activity, hiding information, etc lest your skeletons jump out of their cupboards. That's why it's good to limit it as much as possible, even though in international politics it is a necessity.
In theory what you say is important. It is important for the state to keep some secrets. But in practice the secrets we are protecting are merely whatever illegal actions they don't want the world to know about atm. While some secrets need to be protected(obv. one, nuke secrets), most(99.999%+) of the time they just want to cover up their latest mess. Protect the public my ass, thats a load of shit and you know it. If the price of keeping our govt accountable is the risk of a few deaths here or there, it is well worth it. People die for much stupider reasons all the time in massive numbers, I would think that dying in the name of freedom would be something approaching a noble death. We are so afraid of what could happen in this world, that we often ignore what we are doing to ourselves in the name of false security. Then we end up in a worse situation than if we had just ignored or taken minimal action against people trying to hurt us.
Everything has "changed" under Obama!
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Sometimes its for good national security reasons which in the long run protect the public. Reasons which a lot of wannabe Robin Hoods won't know about and as a consequence can put agents or even the entire country at risk.
You mean like revealing the identity of active agents on national television? Oh, ups, that was a high-ranking government official, my bad.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
"Choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil." ~ Jerry Garcia.
The problem is that while secrecy is necessary for some information such as a list of agents in a foreign nation for other things it is simply abused such as ACTA. What is needed is a watchers scenario, a board of citizens who are tasked with examining the "secrets" and determining which to make public and which are truly secret. Every citizen should have the right to apply to such a board and all should be truly considered. As a side, the true root of the issue is that perhaps beginning with the next generation of citizens they should be taught to question propaganda and learn citizenship skills such as dissent and holding government accountable. Perhaps this generation of politicians could even be persuaded to implement this in schools as hopefully by the time it made any real difference they would be dying off (naturally).
Shh.
Given that our government has basically been up to no good for the last 10 years (and arguably last 40), I would be completely willing to sacrifice our "victory" in Iraq in exchange for citizen oversight.
I can't think of a single military action undertaken during the Bush tenure that benefits me as an American citizen, whereas nearly all of the "secrets" that have been coming out have been directly harming me (conspiracy to fabricate Iraq WMD evidence, ACTA, Guantanamo).
In short, I don't believe these people have my best interest in mind; most of this "secrecy" is just them trying to prevent me from finding out the ways they've been fucking innocent people over. I'm not one of these people who thinks the moon landings were faked or anything, but I think it's blind trust in the government that's naive, NOT skepticism.
Wouldn't it be nice if they would toot their horn about all the really important secrets they held back in the 50's and 60's. Stuff that's so old, everyone who would be compromised is dead or old enough not to give a fuck.
That way we would have some sense of how badly the "national secrecy" is being abused. Because right now we have no idea how many secrets are bosses with blow and hookers and how many are keeping militants at bay.
Sometimes its for good national security reasons which in the long run protect the public. Reasons which a lot of wannabe Robin Hoods won't know about and as a consequence can put agents or even the entire country at risk.
Sure , some people in agencies will abuse their power occasionally, thats human nature. But people shouldn't write off all security issues as just the Men In Black trying to pull one over the little people. Life isn't that simple and only the naive would think it is.
You're right, but are arguing the wrong point. You're entire argument works just as well if the article mentioned US subpoenas to wikileaks trying to determine who leaked classified documents. Your argument also works if the article mentioned the US trying to shut down newspapers because they published classified documents. My point is that shutting down the MECHANISM is the wrong approach, you should focus on the PEOPLE doing the crime.
<soapbox>
This happens all the time and I wish people would realize it's the wrong approach. Instead of providing alternatives to abortion, anti-abortion activists kill abortion doctors instead. Instead of facilitating the use of existing gun laws, anti-gun activists want even more gun laws. And here... instead of the US government trying to prosecute folks who divulge national secrets, they seek instead to essentially block freedom of the press.
</soapbox>
Would you prefer another major terrorist attack that kills thousands of people?
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Yes, it is human nature to abuse absolute and arbitrary power (because it does not have a basis in a reality that a human can relate to). Critics of organizations like the NSA are not critics of security, they are critics of individual schmutzes making decisions on the behalf of a nation of people. It is not the place of government to protect the public from an imaginary threat. This article talks about the US planning to take down wikileaks, not for any concrete reason but only because the practice does not suit them!
Once something has been fully documented and around long enough to be successfully leaked, chances are it's not going to hurt national security (but will certainly hurt people in positions of power). Additionally, wikileaks exposes fraud and criminality above all -- it does not list security checkpoints and schedules of all airports or some such actual security-related issue.
As per your jab at simplicity - the principles of this situation are plain and clear, the interpretations can get as muddy as you would like.
PS: Governments DO keep secrets for the hell of it (just not all the time)-- because they can
Welcome to the new police state
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain
Two words / worlds i would never put in conjunction with eachother.
The document is dated in early 2008, when George Bush was still president. Yes, he and his fascist intelligence cronies were at it again.
I read through some of the PDF file. Nothing new there, just the usual "if someone tells of the uber-sekret stuff we're doing, the bad guys might get us" type of information.
However, one thing caught my attention on the 4th page: "The Wikileaks.org Web site could be used to post fabricated information,
misinformation, disinformation, or propaganda and could be used in perception
management and influence operations to convey a positive or negative message to
specific target audiences that view or retrieve information from the Web site."
Um, you mean like, Fox News? http://www.foxnews.com/
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
There is no derivative classification marking.
I've said from the very beginning, Wikileaks needs to be highly decentralized. Each time people cried out for donations and help, I continued to say that instead of dumping good money into a flawed model, we should be working toward decentralization. I was attacked and maligned, I believe my mother was even brought into the matter a few times... but still, here we are. If it is not the U.S. it's going to be some other gov't. For a bunch of intelligent geeks, we manage to miss some pretty obvious stuff.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
Talk about an over the top, sensationalist title.
This is clearly an assessment of Wikileaks, because a requirement was given to provide one to the Army.
This is NOT a paper discussing how to destroy Wikileaks, it is an Intelligence Assessment!
Speaking from experience, I can say that documents aren't given a classification simply to "hide" information from everyone.
There are strict rules to be followed if you want to classify a bit of information.
Once you classify something, it has to be maintained and tracked. There is a cost associated with it.
Can you think of an example of a secret that we couldn't be TOLD we were being kept from? One which would be a good thing. Military operations for example could be kept secret but we'd be know that it is being kept secret and can accept that. Which prisoners are on transfer busses sure... but again we are aware that it is being kept secret.
The article listed some things that the US gove would have preffered to kept secret and not have been leaked to wikileaks:
"US equipment expenditure in Iraq, probable US violations of the Chemical Warfare Convention Treaty in Iraq, the battle over the Iraqi town of Fallujah and human rights violations at Guantanamo Bay."
The first one we could have easily been told they were keeping secret and either accepted it or have them tell us. The rest are offensive that they should be hidden from the public at all.
The problem is that the abuses seem to be outnumbering the legitimate cases. It's not some people, it's entire agencies abusing secrecy as a matter of unwritten policy.
That is. of course, against the law. Too bad the law enforcement agencies are amongst the worst offenders.
They are demanding a budget significantly larger than Wikipedia's was just a few years ago... for a site that gets 1/1000th of the traffic. They could never hope to fight the legal battles directly with any amount of money, the only solution for materials with serious legal force behind them will be freenet.
Meanwhile, Cryptome trucks on as they have since damn near the beginning of the internet. They'll send you a DVD set of their content for _free_ if you ask.
Sometimes its for good national security reasons which in the long run protect the public.
Your argument makes sense so long as you fear others more than you fear the government.
After eight years where the Bush administration called virtually everything "national security", encouraged phone companies to spy on us without judicial oversight, and thought that the whole of the PATRIOT act was a good idea, we got the slightly-more-open Obama administration that somehow thinks that extreme secrecy is necessary when negotiating a copyright treaty.
Those things scare me significantly more than worrying about the stuff that Wikileaks has come up with.
Also, consider that Wikileaks only gets info that leakers give to them -- if some bit of data likely would cause the country great damage, I'd hope the person in possession of it would have the good sense not to leak it. Sure, some people in power will abuse their leaking-power occasionally, but most leakers don't reveal secrets for the hell of it.
Sure , some people in agencies will abuse their power occasionally, thats human nature.
That's dangerously naive. Given the opportunity and an incentive to do so -- avoiding imprisonment, keeping one's job, making some money -- most people will abuse their power most of the time. The default behavior for human beings is short-term self-service. Ethics and long-term thinking are learned behaviors that require an extensive social and legal reinforcement framework to maintain.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Maybe the gowt shouldn't put itself into positions where they need this much secrecy..
If they start wars then need for all the extra secrecy is their own damn problem, not anybody else's. Let's keep it up with the leaks, they can cry after their stupid "national security" excuse all they want.
Governments DO keep secrets for the hell of it. Time and time again information is withheld, for years or decades. Then when every asshat involved with the project retires, it's declassified. What do we find? Absolutely nothing that would have jeopardized national security.
You'd have to be naive to trust the government to decide what to withhold. Remember, any power that can be abused will be abused. Chances are it will be abused more often than not. Who's a bigger threat? Our own government, with the largest military budget in the world, that operates in unaccountable secrecy, which has repeatedly and reliably abused every power afforded it? Or a third world country half way across the globe?
Sunshine is the best disinfectant. Corruption at home is a bigger danger than "evildoers" abroad. And you know what? Taking care of the former can help take care of the latter.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
If an entity like wikileaks can find something out, then so can any actual hostile entities (other countries, whatever).
If it's something that really should be secret, then something's been done horribly wrong if it gets to wikileaks or to anyone else. Anything else shouldn't be secret in the first place.
Only on slashdot would a statement so legally invalid as this be considered "informative."
Thankfully, US Intelligence does not appear to be that intelligent.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Without secrets, the Normandy invasion would have failed, and the Allies could very well have lost World War II. The breaking of the Nazi Enigma Machine also directly contributed to our victory.
That many slashdotters have no idea of the realities of the world doesn't change things. China isn't going to open source their wartime strategies.
People who post classified information to WikiLeaks (like the aforementioned document itself) should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Leaking of classified information can and does lead to severe negative consequences for our nation, up to and including the loss of human life. It's not a game, and it's not as simple as
Wikileaks could potentially pose a threat to US intelligence, for many reasons including "Tipping our hand" to the enemy. So, the Government develops a strategy to mitigate the threat. News at 11?
Don't read this!
The story isn't that they planned to do this, and it is unreasonable to conclude that the plan was ineffective. The story is that they developed a plan to do this. I'd be shocked if China didn't have a plan (or a dozen plans) for the conquering of Taiwan. I'd be horrified if they actually planned to invade Taiwan. Military people need to practice between real action, and drawing up contingency plans is a way to do that. It's healthy, and prevents much stupidity from seeing the light of day. For example, from thinking about this, they may be led to realize that net censorship is ineffective and counterproductive unless it is undertaken on a brazen scale. That would be good, and IMHO more likely than that it will lead to real attacks on Wikileaks.
There are mirrors in Sweden and Switzerland.
Sure, some people in agencies will abuse their power occasionally, thats human nature.
Something tells me your attitude would be a lot less casual if it was you or your loved ones who were wrongfully detained, indefinitely, without warrant and without trial, in the name of "security."
The real naivete is assuming that only the bad guys are the victims of misuse of power.
I'm shocked, just SHOCKED. US Counterintelligence was actually planning to .... engage in counterintelligence!
That sure warrants a couple hundred replies to the submission from the usual Slashdot knee-jerks ....
Why was this even news?
Turn a candidate trying to fire up his supporters at a campaign event into... ..."THE SCREAM of an crazy man"
Wake me up when "Terrorists" kill as many people as car accidents.
Do we torture people to prevent car accidents? (The current Toyota thing hardly counts as torture.)
Good crap argument. Of course there are things the public should not know about the affairs of the government. The launch codes, the password to the IRS servers, the exact thickness of the bulletprooof glas of the window the president will be sitting behind at 9:00AM. Even when an attack by its forces is supposed to happen.
But global trade negotations, secret wars, treatment of prisoners, these are thing the public should know.
There is nothing insighful about your post, just because a government needs to keep some things hidden doesn't excuse them hiding some things.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"A government should be in fear of its citizens, not the citizens in fear of their government." Forgot who said it, but this is a beautiful real-world proof of it. If I lived in a country where government does such things, I would seriously consider the question of revolution.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
by John Brunner Read it. It really opens up a new perspective on information and secrecy to most. Also it's classic literature especially for anyone who considers himself a digital native (for lack of a better word). But then again a handicap of most digital natives is the inability to read anything longer than a wikipedia article.
Leaks are, by their nature, anonymous. Whether you believe them or not should not depend on how you got the information but whether it makes sense in context and is corroborated by known facts.
Looks like it worked. They got them to post the PDF to wikileaks and now the site gets slashdotted.
Kriston
Signed, Bush Jr.
Co-signed, every republican and a lot of democrats who have failed to arrest the president who authorized it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Muddy waters are a better way to control information than to remove the water altogether. You can't prevent leaks, so the best bet is to deliberately leak false info so that the average seeker can be controlled or disgusted into forgetting all about it.
The tactic is simple; Leak false but exciting/tantalizing info, (the Fake Moon Landing, for instance), let it brew and then categorically demonstrate how and why it is broken in public forum. This makes everybody feel stupid and turns popular opinion against not just the concept of a Fake Moon Landing, but against the entire idea of anti-establishment thinking, aka, "conspiracies". The Fake Moon Landing thing was promoted over television and denounced over television, clearly aiming the attack on Joe Average. A very effective campaign, by all indicators.
Here's another neat example. . .
The National Enquirer has been for many years, particularly during periods of high public interest in the UFO phenomenon, the only paper with national distribution which was willing to run reports from serious UFO researchers. It would, for a percentage of the time, run excellent and editorially exacting stories on UFOs, while the rest of the time press nonsense stories. While groups like APRO were wary of accepting support from the National Enquirer, the opportunity and sometimes significant research money offered by the Enquirer was hard to turn down, and there was always the argument that "Any publicity is good publicity." However, Richard Dolan observes. . .
"What makes this more interesting is that the Enquirer publisher, Gene Pope, had been a CIA agent during the early 1950's. What he did there remains classified, except that he was involved in the Agency's Psychological Warfare Unit. Hansen's research suggested that the CIA helped to fund the Enquirer when Pope took it over, most likely to provide sensationalistic coverage to certain stories as needed - a kind of 'inoculation,' just as a doctor gives a touch of disease to the patient to stimulate a reaction from the immune system. Even soberly researched UFO stories would be discredited within the confines of a tabloid dedicated to horoscopes and celebrity gossip."
-FL
The military managed to take down wikileaks! Or did we just slashdot the site?
The TOP SECRET/FORNPORN is the good stuff.
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
The government relies on confidential informants. This list of individuals is supposed to be secret. What do you think would happen to these people if their names and profiles were released to the public?
Identities have to be kept secret.
If slavery was legal, would you support it? How about herding Jews into ghettos? Or shooting union supporters on the streets of Philadelphia?
When the government makes something illegal, that by no means makes their argument moral or valid.
Sounds like you would have been a great citizen for any number of murderous dictators. Just pass a law, and Dave will support you!
And appropriately, the report about this is hosted on Wikileaks.
In two years they haven't been able to uncover a single whistleblower? Nice demonstration of the abject incompetence of government.
Liberty in your lifetime
The names of spies must be kept secret for many of the same reasons.
In criminal investigations the identities of informants must be kept secret.
It's not an option to release that information. Because if the government did not protect that information, the government would have no informants, spies, or intelligence capability.
If individuals have no privacy you have no "national" security. What you have is "institutional" security. All the people are so vulnerable that they could be killed and not even know they are being killed, while the government, institutions, corporations and big businesses continue to run and new people take over.
This is saying that America isn't the families, the lives, or even the Constitution, it's saying America is the institution and the corporations.
This is in my opinion a flawed view because sometimes the institution is completely broken, and when you value the institutions so much that people die for institutions, you could end up with institutions without any values or goals associated with them.
Like a prison industrial complex that exists to profit. Or a military industrial complex which exists to profit. And maintaining the war on drugs and launching wars to protect these complexes.
At what point is it no longer worth it? Or is that after we are all dead or in prison?
I'm sure there are bad guys in government but how do we determine who is "bad"?
China censors and imprisons to prevent destabilisation and change from the current state of affairs. USA does exactly the same but in slightly more subtle, and in some ways more menacing, ways.
All this is in the nature of the nation state.
Let's find a better way.
There are some valid reasons for the government to keep secrets -- see posts above. I think we can agree that if the government is to keep secrets, they have to be: 1) for the protection of individual citizens (e.g. tax returns); or 2) strictly time limited Of course, interpreting and applying #2 is difficult, but the point is that we all agree that no secrets can be kept forever.
Covering up the fact that we're torturing people because it would make a lot of people upset to learn that is not a matter of national security.
Well, it is a matter of national security, just in the worst way. You see, if people found out what we were doing, they would hate us and possibly join organizations fighting us. Which is clearly bad for our national security.
Sadly I've heard people seriously use that argument as to why the revelations of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib were bad and the people responsible for the leaks should be punished.
The enemies of Democracy are
An even simpler explanation is that this story itself was planted by US counterintelligence as part of a plan to discredit Wikileaks.org by using it to publish details of US counterintelligence plans that do not exist.
There are way too many false dichotomies appearing in this discussion.
No-one is saying that the government don't try to keep things secret for political convenience. The point is that there are also legitimate reasons to keep things secret, and Wikileaks have demonstrated poor judgement on what to publish in the past so there is no reason to trust them to act responsibly in the future. Frankly, I'm surprised it has taken this long for plans to bring them down to appear, and even more surprised that no-one has yet dealt with them in the same way they would deal with anyone else who didn't respect official secrets.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
So, just considering intelligence / national security information for the moment... I like that Wikileaks is putting more "intelligence"-style information into the hands of the citizenry, so long as they're sensible about it and don't publish really critical operational stuff for no morally justifiable reason. However, regardless of questions of restraint, lets just consider the risk of Wikileaks: It lets people leak national security data anonymously and makes it public.
Lets consider the problems to national security here: stuff is leaked anonymously so you can't stop them. And it gets published. Compare this to the traditional model which is either: a) stuff is leaked anonymously to a newspaper - and gets published, very embarassing at the least. This happens already. b) stuff is leaked to a foriegn intelligence agency. In this case it gives a specific power an "edge" and happens secretly so you don't know it's gone on at all. At least with Wikileaks the data is public and so you know which of your data has been published there! Moreover, since Wikileaks is just a website with anonymous contributors there's less of a risk that your leaker will be doing it purely for personal gain as they might be when dealing direct with a foreign power.
I'm not saying that leaking any old stuff or abolishing secrecy would be appropriate. But I'm not convinced that Wikileaks makes the security situation worse. And there's a strong argument that it makes life better for people in general.
The "leaked" document is OPSEC propoganda http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_security , a primary tool of psychological operations. It was made available so that it could be seen to fail, making Wikileaks and its supporters think they were getting away with something. They're not. They're being used. Psyops teams always seek to obtain a reliable source with which to feed misinformation. They do not make such sources stop. They give them reason to think they're safe so that they'll continue to publicize the "leaks" that the psyops teams want them to. A source like this is worth far more as a means to feed credible false intel than it is as a trophy marker in some administrator's resume'.
Besides, if they wanted Wikileaks to close shop, they wouldn't make it disappear. Instead they'd snatch people like Julian Assange and give them reasons why they should just drop out of sight. The reasons are typically measured in 'caliber'. Once such individuals are 'convinced', the other members start finding reasons why they should cease operations before becoming 'convinced'.
Yeah, I know it sounds more like a movie script than a government/military action. It actually sounds more like something from Dr. Paul "E.E. 'Doc' Smith" Linebarger's book "Psychological Operations". Read it before you try to say otherwise. And realize that this book is still the primary text book on the subject for the thousands of military and civilian (military psyops specialists are not allowed to operate within the United States) workers in the field.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I'll not cite sources, if you can't find 'em, you're not interested.
ivan
Like to brew? Want to talk about it? Brattlebrew: groups.yahoo.com/group/brattlebrew
This must be a conspiracy theory! :P
Oh wait, its conspiracy practice
__
L.
I know. The question to ask them then is if a murderer should have the right to punish any witness who talks.
Maybe the solution to our national security problems is to stop doing stupid useless stuff that makes people angry. The levels of incompetence, stupidity and willful ignorance involved at the highest levels shouldn't amaze me, but it does all the same.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Am I the only one who, whenever they hear these statements, feels the need for proof? It's not just this particular one, but as someone said earlier in the thread:
These too require proof. Certainly the first one, I've seen plenty of counterexamples with my own eyes. I'm not convinced that any one of these statements actually holds well in real life.
I would also like to mention that proximity is not really a huge factor, these days, in determining threats. It takes less than a day to get just about anywhere by plane, and the internet has made it possible to instantaneously do damage (in a limited scope) from anywhere in the world. The government, on the other hand, is large, unwieldy, naturally self-destructive, and under constant watch by people who hate them. They're not going to pull something drastic any time soon. I suppose neither is any foreign countries at the moment, but I certainly wouldn't rank the government much higher in terms of being a threat.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Actually, in the U.S., though entrenched interests in the name of the two party system (the Tweedledees and the Tweedledums, a.k.a. Demicans and Republicrats) do indeed control the political scene, it is only because of the sheep-like mentality of the stupid bulk of voters. Nothing limits their choice to the two main party candidates except their own mentality (not wanting to vote for someone who "can't win", a self-fulfilling attitude if there ever was one). There are usually other parties represented on the ballot for national office contests, and even if not, anyone can write in any individual's name, and if they are legally qualified, the winner will indeed be awarded the office.
Why are they listing Israel with North Korea, Russia, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe? There is no internet censorship in Israel, and there are very few people in the government who know what the internet is, let alone denouncing it.
I want my liberty not harassment; nor serfdom to the noble class (US congress/EU parliament).
The elected officials that make up those bodies are not the "noble class" (House of Lords being, in part at least, an arguable exception). The "nobility", or what passes for it, are those who pay to have the members of those bodies elected. Special interests, e.g. large corporations, own those officials and compel them to do their bidding. "The government" is not the problem. The problem is that we have let someone other than "the people" control that government.
As two years have passed since the date of the report, with no WikiLeaks' source exposed, it appears that this plan was ineffective.
No, it means that they never put any such plan into action. A report discussing wikileaks, its possible threats to some gov't departments, and possible ways to discredit it if needed, does not equate to an active ongoing effort to do so.
"conspiracy theory", etc.
Children, I see no reason to disbelieve that the US "Intelligence community" would look into doing this to wikileaks. Look up COINTELPRO. Look up the CIA using the Mafia to try to get an exploding cigar to Castro. These are all documented *FACTS*. Why on earth would I *not* think they'd try to trash wikileaks?
mark
The pentagon papers would only cause embarrassment to the US, but there are a lot of classified documents which can cause demonstrable harm to US government property, US government personnel, US intelligence assets and American citizens. Those documents would easily fall under the purview of what the SCOTUS would allow for a prior restraint.
The other half of that statement would apply to classified data in many cases.