Slashdot Mirror
DoD Paper Proposes National Security Through a Culture of Restraint (and Stigma)
decora writes "An SAIC analyst has written a paper [PDF] calling for the 'stigmatization' of the 'unattractive' types who tend to discuss government secrets in public. The plan, described in the Naval Postgraduate School Homeland Security Affairs journal, is to promote self-censorship as a 'civic duty'. Who needs to censor themselves? Amateur enthusiasts who describe satellite orbits, scientists who describe threats to the food supply, graduate students mapping the internet, the Government Accountability Office, which publishes failure reports on the TSA, the US Geologic Survey, which publishes surface water information, newspapers (the New York Times), TV shows, journalism websites, anti-secrecy websites, and even security author Bruce Schneier, to name a few."
self-censorship as a 'civic duty'
I'm speechless.
Let's stigmatize SAIC analysts who have internalized the mind-set of the Soviet Union.
It will save lots of time in the long run.
The United States government is so corrupt that the only way they see it surviving is to use 1984 as a howto manual.
As an American (hopefully not for that much longer), this is shameful. Every so-called patriot should be fighting against censorship and spying, in every form, yet both the "small government" republicans and "progressive" democrats are for this kind of crap.
Welcome to the road to a third-world banana republic, America.
Great Intellect...
How about a culture where attempting to stigmatize people for your own gain is looked on as bad?
Or one where openness and freedom of speech is looked upon as helpful?
Does anyone with more than a room temperature IQ think the "bad guys" don't know the satellite orbits?
Snitching = bad. Right?
It's not hard to stigmatize snitching. It's already universally recognized as bad by everybody who doesn't work for government and who isn't a cop. And the cops only think it's good when the snitches are working for them. So basically governments don't like being snitched on, but so what? Governments are the ones funding the informants and snitching by offering prizes in cash to the biggest leaker/informant/snitch.
And governments don't have a problem trying to use morality to convince people it's right to leak when it's to them. Suddenly it's your civic duty to help the FBI solve it's crimes, or to turn on your friend to help law enforcement, but if it's the other way around and someone within the FBI reports crimes going on to the media, suddenly it's snitching again.
It's the blue code of silence. So we have to decide whether or not leaking = snitching.
If leaking != snitching, then why would leaking be wrong? Why should any of us care about government agendas if we don't work for them?
Why should Bruce or Bob or Alice care about the governments private agenda? We don't know about it, so we don't have any responsibility. Also we haven't taken an oath. And finally, it's a matter of does the government care about the agenda of individuals when they are out to make arrests or conduct whatever operations? I highly doubt they would.
So lets have the debate. How much leaking is too much? When does leaking become snitching? And what are the effects of a leak or snitch culture vs a culture of secrecy? It's not like these questions have been fully discussed. So lets ask them.
Kind of opposite of "anonymous coward" is the "authenticated coward", which is what this "culture of restraint" will encourage. You are someone only if you don't say anything. Anyone who says something (not officially condoned) is a persona non grata.
Yuck! Someone tag this Do Not Want, please.
I got the feeling this was more along the lines of not talking about ship movements and stuff... The summary is a little extreme.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Whether we are talking about the mafia with omerta, or a terrorist cell, or a full fledged government, they all rely on secrecy to maintain power.
And they all hate snitches, traitors, leakers, informers or whatever they choose to call the person who tells the secrets.
So it's nothing new. On the other hand opposing groups see the snitches, traitors, leakers, informers as heroes. Why? Because by revealing secrets and leaking, it protects lives on the opposing side, but keeping secrets protects lives on your governments side, and depending on which side you are on you will care about secrecy or not. It's completely subjective and determined more by what side you see yourself on.
This stigma of secret might work on people who swore an oath to keep secrets. These people probably do feel responsible. On the other hand ordinary civilians have no reason to give a shit or choose a side. They'll choose whichever side pays them at the time, which is all sides, or they might choose no side, or they might choose one side or another based on ideology, but they have no responsibiliy or reason to choose the US governments side.
Civic duty will not work. It's like expecting people to conduct business in a way which promotes the nation. That isn't going to happen. People aren't going to care and I highly doubt any of these people are going to give a damn what the government says unless they work for the government and their paycheck is determined by their ability to keep government secrets. (Such as if they have a clearance)
How about we get a culture where things don't have to be leaked? Almost everyone who leaks something is doing so to attract public attention to a problem those responsible refuse to solve. If you institute a culture of "if someone brings a serious problem to your attention, you fix it, regardless of what it does to your bottom line or to your dignity", then leaking never needs to happen.
PS: Yes, I saw some of the bizarrely paranoid things they suggest self-censorship for. That's just their culture of paranoia kicking in.
What choice do you have? The machinery of aristocracy and control is well beyond the need for your support. They're self-sustaining and the level of corruption in all aspects of government and politics so unbelievably extensive and deep and convoluted that there is no way to simply excise the foreign tissue by itself.
Naomi Wolf does a great job of describing the process that seems to be occurring right now (including this event) in her book "The End of America".
I mean, we live in a country where our president's (last president) family did extensive business with the family of the man that killed thousands of Americans. We live in a country where government officials who are employees of Goldman Sachs take a trillion dollars from the tax payers to bail out Goldman Sachs. We live in a country where our president appoints Ken Lay as energy advisor to deregulate his own industry on his own terms. We live in a country where we allow our government to pass bills that allow the president to point at a citizen and make them disappear. Off to gitmo for torture, if he wants. Without representation or a trial. We live in a country where judges are paid off in millions of dollars by the private prison industry to fuel their business by unfairly punishing minor juvenile violators with many months in juvenile detention (google it - in Pennsylvania).
It's probably not too late to force change, but by the time you could ever even remotely possibly convince enough of the population to give a flying fuck and get their heads out of their Bible and Twilight or their "durr durr abortion" and "durr durr immigration" and "durr durr religion" bullshit to actually do something about the real problems facing us, it'll definitely be too fucking late.
It makes no sense to me. You have by far the strongest military in the world. The USSR is gone. Ok, so there's China, but so far they have not made any seriously threatening moves. Who is left that is any threat?
I know 9/11 left some big scars on the collective psyche but seriously, it's been 10 years, you invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, killed Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Surely there's been enough restitution?
I worry that one day the rest of the world is going to have to unite against the US as you decide to pacify or nuke us all since we are deemed a threat to national security.
It is, however, very useful for a lot of very large and very computer intensive research problems, such as in artificial intelligence.
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
Well, I guess Matt Blaze won't fit into this brave, new world, Mr. and Mrs. AmeriKKKa.
This is a proposal for better security through psychological denial and cognitive dissonance.
As such, it fulfils the "Ignorance is Strength" part of the equation, which already has it's "War is Peace" and "Freedom is Slavery" components well under way. So begins the formalisation of thoughtcrime - through state promotion of doublethink.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Sounds like the good old "loose lips sink ships". Except for the fact that we are not in a world war, where it actually made sense.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
A single analyst at a private company writes a paper, and now everyone pretends that it is the official policy of the US Government, 'cause by golly, we haven't had our two minutes hate yet today, and we need something to be outraged over!
Keeping the secrets everyone knows is one of the common threads of totalitarian government (wannabees) from time immemorial.
(It ain't just the Chinese. The guys who wrote the US Constitution saw it coming, the Greeks saw it a bit too late some two thousand years ago, the Egyptians, well, I'd get into controversies about historicality if I said anything specific, but it wasn't new then, either.)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
We can avoid the possibility of terrorists trying to destroy a free and open society, by eliminating the free and open element - therefore removing attractiveness as a target.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Leaking is snitching. Or, I should say, snitching is leaking.
Snitching is only bad when we have something to hide.
Getting rid of everything we have to hide scares most people. Or, at least, scares most of the people who spend the most time talking.
The silent majority knows about the secrets and do what they can to mitigate without making much fuss of it. At least, until somebody decides to make an example of them by saying how wonderful whistleblower X or Y was.
But it's impossible to get rid of some things. Since everyone has secrets, from medical history, to sexual history, to that project you are working on that you don't want stolen before you can patent it, everybody has secrets. Of course governments have secrets too, the problem is governments don't expect or allow individuals to have secrets. Governments all around the world know everything about each one of us, and we know virtually nothing about them or what their true agenda is.
So we know and understand privacy has to exist to keep our own secrets safe that governments possess. These could be nude photographs from a body scanner, it could be surveillance records, photos, videos, or it could just be some obscure law we broke or are breaking. The simple fact is everyone has a record of doing immoral things, and governments have enough secrets about each person that any one of us could be made to look like a monster.
If you look back to COINTELPRO in the USA the FBI had secrets on virtually everybody in little FBI files locked away. Do we want "anonymous" or some leaker to leak these sorts of files to the media? Hell no of course not. So yes it does matter when it comes to whether it's leaking or snitching. When it's information being leaked about us, that hurts us, it's snitching, and when it's not hurting anybody in specific then its leaking.
Snitching can ruin lives, destroy marriage, get people killed. Leaking has minimal impact on peoples lives. Snitching would be releasing the names of all the informants in the USA. As this would put their lives at risk and probably get them all killed. Leaking would be releasing information about the COINTELPRO program itself and details on parts of it which violate human rights.
Some leaks are news worthy, and some leaks are just outright snitching, and the only way to determine which it is, is by subjective measure. Does it put civilian lives at risk? If it does then it's snitching because it hurts the people. On the other hand if it puts troops at risk, it might not be snitching unless you are a troop / fed putting troops at risk. And if it's neither of these and no ones life is going to be destroyed or at risk, then it's leaking.
Whistleblowing usually details a human rights violation. Either way the idea in this article is that civilians like Bruce Schneier should accept extra responsibility. I don't think Bruce or civilian owes the government a damn thing. I do believe as civilians that we should not snitch on other civilians, we should not for example leak the names of informants or release peoples FBI or other files to the media. We should not attack other civilians but thats my personal belief as a civilian and not all civilians follow that.
One governments snitch is another governments hero.
But as civilians, we are usually caught in the middle of these snitch wars or whatever you want to call them.
Now of course it's not snitching if it's detailing human rights abuses against civilians. That is not snitching.
It's snitching when the leak destroys civilian lives. An example would be if some rogue hacker decided to hack top secret FBI files and leak a bunch of files on a bunch of people to the media. That is snitching.
It doesn't matter whats in those files. It's snitching. It's also snitching if the names of informants are leaked, that too is snitching. If you know who is or isn't an informant, and you leak that, their lives are put directly at risk. Even if you don't particularly like informants, it's probably not wise to leak that kind of information.
Anonymous leaked Hal Turner's status as being an FBI informant. That is the perfect example of snitching on a snitch. It's still snitching if you do that. For people who don't believe it happened just Google Hal Turner and Anonymous.
Not even the whistleblower, I mean, snitch, I mean, leaker who leaks the secrets of the enemy.
No one likes a snitch.
Use the snitch, sure. Then make sure you either corrupt him to keep him under control, or get rid of him before he snitches on you.
Not that this is a new thing.
Of course, the only way to lose to this kind of government is to give up and fail to do your civic duty. So I disagree with you there, too.
First there are differences between leaker, snitch, whistleblower. The difference is subjective not objective, and it's determined by who is affected by the leak. If the leak benefits me, thats not a snitch, that's a hero. If the leak hurts me, thats a snitch and nobody likes a snitch. If the leak benefits my group, thats still not a snitch.
So basically in order for someone to be a snitch they have to be within your group, and they have to sell out the group. According to the US Military Bradley Manning is a snitch because he leaked in a way which made fellow soldiers look bad. But to civilians Bradley Manning is not going to be a snitch, but a leaker, or whistleblower. And to Bradley Mannings group that he is loyal to, if he has one, he is a hero.
So basically if your informant gives you the secrets of your enemy, thats a spy not a snitch. If your informant however turns around and gives your secrets to the enemy, thats a snitch. It has to do with the social network and social relation between the individuals involved. Two criminals who commit a crime together or who both benefit from a crime, if one reports on the other, the defector is a snitch. This is not the same thing as if they are sworn enemies fighting each other and they spy on each other. The difference being that spies can have loyalty to their group or their side and be acting out of absolute loyalty, while the snitch does not have loyalty to any side.
What the governments see us all as, is potential informants, snitches, terrorist, or something in between. Governments do not promote loyalty, and promote snitching to begin with, but when it finally starts to negatively affect them and their interests then they want to push civic duties onto us. It's real simple, the government wants useful idiots who they can manipulate into taking on responsibilities without being paid to do it. So now security researchers cannot release the details of their exploit to the media and take credit because they fear they could be labeled a snitch by the government?
Only that is not snitching because they weren't told government secrets. They don't work for the government. They don't have to be loyal to an entity they never swore an oath to. This is not a complicated case such as with Bradley Manning where we don't know what he knew or didn't know so we cannot know who is right between him and the government. This is civilians, people like you and me, and it is clear I'm on the side of civilians.
This means while I would not release information which would hurt civilians, I don't have some sort of civic duty to protect the feds who don't act like or consider themselves to be civilians. They are their own group, they act like their own group, and would certainly exploit me given the opportunity.
Use the snitch, sure. Then make sure you either corrupt him to keep him under control, or get rid of him before he snitches on you.
This is common sense. But which group is the group making the most use of snitches? The government. And which group complains the most about leakers/snitches? The government. So why would I have sympathy if they are complaining about a culture they helped to create? And why should I believe in the concept of civic duty? My civic duty if I choose to believe in such a concept is to civilians, not drug warriors, not cops, not soldiers, but civilians, because I'm a civilian.
This means when certain stuff gets leaked to the media that details about how governments are abusing civilians, I'm going to side with civil
It is nothing as differentiated as that.
"Snitch" is simply a pejorative term for someone who for whatever reason(s) breaks a social contract regarding secrecy, written or unwritten, that he/she had with other person(s), or that other person(s) thought that they had.
Regardless of the nature of the secret one is disclosing, and to whom it is disclosed to, one is always seen as a "snitch" by the party whose secret(s) are being revealed.
Others might label "the snitch" an informant, an insider, a whistle-blower, an inside source, a concerned citizen, a witness, a patriot, a man of honor and integrity...
Or a hacker, a thief, a spy, a traitor, a criminal, a terrorist, a lowlife who would sell out his/her own mother...
But he/she will always be a snitch to those whose secrets he/she is revealing to the third party.
The term is SO precise and determined you may just as well use "asshole" instead. Or "cunt".
It's simply a bad word for the people you don't like cause they tell on you.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Don't worry about that, they are taking you somewhere safe! No more questions citizen.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
I got the feeling this was more along the lines of not talking about ship movements and stuff... The summary is a little extreme.
Did you read the paper (it's not hard, the link is right up there in the summary)? They specifically mentioned the "leaks" referred to in the summary. At least the ones I checked (GAO TSA report, Satellite orbit info, food supply threats).
If those aren't the kind of leaks they are talking about, then why do they mention them specifically?
Nor would Billy Mitchell. The father of the modern air force, and the guy who blew the whistle on the vulnerability of Pearl Harbor to a Japanese attack in 1924 - 17 years before it happened.
He was court-martialed for it. (Actually, for publicly blaming incompetent Navy commanders for losing a dirigible and 14 crew at a slightly later date ... same deal really).
You forgot to mention that the Bushtards then promoted and implemented a war that has resulted in the killing of tens (hundreds?) of thousands of brown people, thousands of its own people (more than 9/11 did) and cost Amerika The Great billions upon billions (trillions?) of dollars. Cluster fucked doesn't even begin to describe it...
Nothing new under the sun when it comes to human beings wanting to tell other human beings how to live and think.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
He read it, but unlike you he understood. That's why he does not mention XXXXX and XXXXX.
Torture, genocide, slavery, human rights abuses, these are also moral issues.
As is the question of who should get what information.
God only knows the difference between a snitch and a whistleblower and a leaker in most cases.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
It isn't just the Liberals/Progressives, the conservatives/regressives are all about the authoritarianism and they're even more into the xenophobia and racism.
I'm curious why you point out code pink for "bigotry against Jews", the only recent event I can find on them re jews is a jewish member of code pink who got the shit beaten out of her (by some nice "patriots") for protesting the israeli PM's speach.
Believe it or not some jewish people see the dark road the state of israel has been going down and how it's treating the palestinians ,they remember the stories their grandparents told them and say "Never again!"