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Lord Blair Calls for Laws To Stop 'Principled' Leaking of State Secrets
An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from the Guardian: "Tougher laws are needed to prevent members of the public from revealing official secrets, former Metropolitan police commissioner Lord Blair has said. ... The peer insisted there was material the state had to keep secret, and powers had to be in place to protect it. The intervention comes after police seized what they said were thousands of classified documents from David Miranda – the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has been reporting leaks from the former US intelligence officer Edward Snowden. ... He warned there was a 'new threat which is not of somebody personally intending to aid terrorism, but of conduct which is likely to or capable of facilitating terrorism.' He cited the examples of information leaks related to Manning and WikiLeaks."
No thanks, I'm more afraid of the Government than Terrorists.
To hide their dirty work, to keep secret the things that would outrage the public if they knew. This has got nothing to do with enabling or even potentially enabling terrorism. Only protecting the established status quo which some perceive to be at risk of the serfs are properly informed.
"Maybe the real state secret is that spies aren't very good at their jobs and don't know very much about the world."
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
So they're hoping to redefine this in a way to ensure that future Mannings / Snowdens face harsher consequences for exposing criminal behavior. They couldn't get Manning seated in the electric chair, so let's make the definition of leaking == aiding the enemy even when there is no intent.
So the new political calculus: Intentionally kill innocent civilians, get a promotion, expose those illegal killings, get hunted down like a rabid dog. Yep, it all adds up!
Flying your jet into a building: Terrorism
Blowing up yourself in a marketplace: Terrorism
Leaking information about government crimes: Terrorism
Google "where to buy a pressure cooker": Terrorism
Picking your nose: Terrorism
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Is there anything that cannot be justified by appeals over terrorism?
This is just getting ridiculous. I am not used to politicans from the UK making no sense, even Thatcher was usually coherent.
But this... is just plain absurd.
Basically corrupt conservative 'er' exploiters governments, are looking to implement laws to hide corruption at all levels of government. Of course never to forget sheer incompetence. So basically it's all about creating a raft of laws to bury corruption and incompetence in government under national security.
You know what's really funny about this, this is exactly what corporations try to do with NDA's. Of course who is doing the corrupting of governments, why it's the multi-national corporations, where else do you think the incompetent corrupt fuckers in government got the idea from. Expose the corruption in government and you'll expose the corporations behind it. Hmm, not so funny after all.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
As opposed to the laws created to intentionally hide criminals and corruption?
How is the Official Secrets Act not adequate to cover this?
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
A state secret is something that needs to be secret in order to protect the lives of the citizens of that state (yeah, I know that's not how the law/precedent words it, but that's the fundamental idea of it). These are not state secrets. These are coverups of illegal activity that are labeled as "state secrets" in order to perpetuate the cover-up and not get power-abusers in trouble.
conduct which is likely to or capable of facilitating terrorism
like, say, building roads?
Good people do not have a need for rules. They have integrity -- they know what they stand for, and they know their right from their wrong. If a law gets in the way of that, it's a bad law.
I wonder why he needs so many rules...
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
If the government wants to pass ineffectual laws that have no hope at stopping what they are aimed at, then how about passing a law that punishes those that are supposed to be protecting our "secret" data? Why could a low level analyst working for a contractor in Hawaii have so much unfettered access to classified data that he could download thousands of documents and walk the data out of the facility with no one being aware.
There are plenty of ways that this could have been prevented with better access controls and auditing -- even the server admins shouldn't be able to bypass the audit system, and the audit system should have raised alarms when it saw so many docs being downloaded.
It adds cost and complexity to the system (like it means that an agent can't follow up leads on his own, but has to submit a request for access to records, while documenting why the data is needed), but it not only helps keep the secret data away from whistle blowers and curious agents that want to look up their ex-gf's, but also against foreign spies that have infiltrated the agency.
There should be a very small set of fine grained categories under which government data can be kept secret. Secrecy for government programs, and the content of said programs needs to be white listed, and the list of categories needs to be public.
If we are going to have a secret court, I want to at least know there is such a court, or know that some system with the authority to create it exists so I can object if appropriate. Every secret should classified under one (or more) of the categories in the white list, and each category should have some eventual schedule for disclosure and process for oversight.
There needs to be a public system for adding and removing categories (via laws from congress I guess).
This is a democracy: if the people don't know what the government is doing, how can it possibly work in the people's favor?
In the USA, you have to surmise that somebody is an elitist douche who fancies himself to be God. In the UK, they do us the courtesy of labeling themselves, "Lord".
Generally, leaks by the public happen not because such individuals wish to do harm, but because they feel it is in the public's interest to know such information. Therefore, in order to stop such leaks from occurring, it is the government's responsibility to conduct themselves in a manner so as to permit accountability and oversight by those who presumably elected them.
In short, if you don't want leaks of "sensitive" information, then don't do business in a way that creates such secrets to begin with. We aren't talking about corporate espionage, or nuclear missile launch codes. We are talking about actions at the behest of some government entity that purports to serve the public, but that same public has not even the slightest degree of oversight with respect to determining whether such actions are in fact legitimate.
To talk about needing more laws and more restrictions to hide government secrets in the name of "security" is the height of sophistry and hubris. It is Machiavellian and Orwellian reasoning, and it is the very thing that achieves what the actual terrorists intend. No sovereign nation will be brought to its knees by the direct loss of life and safety through sporadic murders, bombings, and violent mayhem. Nations fall for two reasons: conquest by another nation's military, or because the governments that rule over its citizens become so egregiously corrupt that a revolution occurs from within. The essential aim of terrorism is to achieve such a collapse through the latter means, because terrorists are aware that they lack the resources to do the former. It makes no difference whether the draconian behavior of a government is well-intentioned. The loss of basic democratic freedoms, in any form, is a win for terrorists.
wikileaks is right the best secrets are no secrets
The U.S. government is EXTREMELY corrupt.
2) Brave men and women who fight in wars and give their lives for their country.
1 and 2 are the same people, viewed at different angles for different purposes. I find it sad that people who are expected to give their lives for their country if need be are not deemed worthy of knowing more about the inner workings of their country. Instead they are spied upon and, under a magnifying glass, treated as insignificant. We should all have the right to understand the inner workings of our country and take part in shaping its security and its future.
Knowing anywhere that the NSA is looking is a security risk.
Now that we know facebook can lower your credit score, some of us may change our behavior.
The same theory applies to the credit score of a terrorist.
Google, Facebook, and Twitter may have been considered secure through obscurity, TMI for the NSA to sift and sort through.
Some valuable information could have been obtained through social media, but we really do not know.
Wait let met get this straigt. You want to take half of my salary (yes all the taxes you pay together). An not tell me what you do with it.
In a democratic society you work for me! You better tell me what you do with my money !
The only reason to keep something secret is because you are doing something illegal either from international law or local law.
Why do you want to monitor everything I do ? I'm not a child I'm supposed to be free !!!
With democracy come responsibility, to hide things from me is wrong. Yes we understand that we want to hide some information from criminals but I'm not a criminal !
Why do you change incent until proven guilty into guilty purely by being part of society. Keeping things things secret is the easy way out. Like when you are a child and you hide things from your parents because you are guilty.
If you want to hide stuff do not come and moan at me when you get caugh out. Take responsibility and CHANGE YOUR BEHAVIOUR
It's sad that the British and the Americans spent 40 years and billions if not trillions defeating the Soviet Union and now that it is gone they are rushing to become what they once fought against. The FBI, CIA, NSA and the DEA should just get it over with, stop pretending and merge & rename themselves the Stasi. The really sad part is the average American, if they even notice at all, will start chanting "USA! USA!" I think it was Ambrose "Bitter" Bierce once said that the Americans will get the government they deserve.
Another day closer to redwood heaven
As Matt Damon said, there should be a referendum to ask people if they want to trade civil liberties for security. I really think that a vast majority will choose the former.
Well Yes and No. No - I don't agree that the subject matter that has been actually leaked was right for governments to have done in the first place. eg: The deliberate killing of innocent civilians in Iraq. That is wrong.
Yes - I do agree that leaking information is harmful to government and beneficial to enemies,
but... what if the "enemies" didn't really exist? What if the people of the countries were just like you and me and didn't want to fight us? What if the most secret secret is that the "enemies" are fabrications of the governments, and without any secrets allowed at all they couldn't trick us into fighting each other?
Take Syria for example. The folks on the front line on each side just want peace, and Assad's forces are monitored and fed only state media and kept from communicating with the enemy... Why? If the enemy were evil, wouldn't they still be shouting evil things? Oh, it's to prevent traitors? But if they were traitors they wouldn't be fighting on the front line...
What sort of "wrong things" do you propose the government stop doing? Perhaps their real enemy is you?
BOO! now SHHH! we can't tell you why they're the enemy, that's a secret.
Not that that one's not good, but it really has little to do with the current discussion. You might be thinking of The Power of Nightmares , perhaps?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
That's him. Obsolete school actually.
Everybody else knows that security-by-obscurity does not work. It may slow some less skilled attackers down but the really dangerous attacker is not affected.
Any state that feels the need to hide important stuff from its own citizens obviously has something to hide, meaning that it gets far too easy to break laws in a systematic manner and keep it from the public. The terrorists cannot use the fact that a US gunship helicopter gunned down a group of unarmed civilians, including journalists, clearly aware that they were unarmed and not any kind of threat. The public on the other hand can use this to prosecute the people responsible, but if it wasn't for the Bradly Manning leaks, these genocidal murderers would have gone free.
If this guy actually thinks the by hiding the ways we protect ourselves, the people under suspicion and so on, we are one up on the terrorists - he's severely mistaken. Any terrorist worth fearing knows all this no matter how hard the government try to hide it. Like any other cold war style stand-off they have people on the inside, just like the government has informants inside the terrorist cells. All the general stuff is well known. Trust me, the relevant people in Al-Queda has known for a long time which weaknesses exist in airport scanners, in the Internet monitoring systems (PRISM?) and so on. Osama Bin Laden for instance used a very simple technique to send and receive emails. Do everything offline and have couriers transport the USB drives with it on foot, bikes, camels whatever that doesn't offer any way of tracking to random Internet cafe's. That kept him effectively hidden for years despite the massive reward on his head. So much for Echelon, PRISM and whatever else they threw at the task of correlating patterns and everything in other to locate him. All these systems failed completely. Bin Laden was in the end betrayed by a servant.
No, government secrecy has only one real purpose and that is to protect those in power from their enemies, which quite obviously include the people who pays their wages. It is a sick system and it needs to be broken down and replaced by transparency and open control. Sure, there are a few things that needs to be kept secret but not the massive amounts they hide today. Any wrong-doings for instance must be made public right away, possibly redacted slightly in order to protect assets not involved. A conservative guess would be that 98% of the stuff currently classified shouldn't be, and from the recent leaks it is obvious that among all this we'll find countless incidents where laws have been seriously broken mostly because they knew they could get away with it because of the secrecy.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
"I suggest that terrorist organisations, rather than individuals, already know how they were caught before and will update their procedures accordingly."
this is one of the things that's cracked me up/pissed me off the most about this whole NSA debacle!
Snowden is supposedly SIMULTANEOUSLY:
A. damaging national security
B. wrong
C. lying
D. BUT not telling anyone anything they didn't already know...
at least "D" is true (though in typical govt fashion the last of the four positions they tried floating).
if I'm Al Zawahiri I'm falling out of my chair laughing at the Snowden "leaks"/NSA's tap dance but I _DAMN_ sure took notes on all the material that's come out about how they found OBL (particularly that compound was an RF black hole)...
Unfortunately for both him and us, the information that helps citizen decide if their government is working in their interest or corrupt, or working at all and the information that outside forces need to evaluate possible holes in the governments security efforts can overlap quite a bit.
So yes, many leaks that are in the interest of the public will also serve the evil terrorist-pedophile-foreigner-evildoers (interesting idea: Take a publication from the height of the Cold War and replace "communist" with "terrorist" - my guess is you could publish a good part of them with that change today and nobody would notice they were written 30 years ago).
Anyways - there are two lessons here that politicians have not and never will understand, because few people who work outside the security industry do, even if you repeat it to them a hundred times:
One, security through obscurity isn't security. There are some secrets that really are secrets - almost always, they are very specific details, such as names, dates and locations. Anything that is not such a specific detail very likely falls under obscurity, and not security. If terrorists are aided by knowing that you monitor all Internet traffic, then frankly, they were idiots before and your security sucks badly if that knowledge makes such a difference.
Two, security or accountability, pick one. Only a totalitarian government can keep secrets, a democracy is accountable to its citizen. So either you turn the country into a tryranny, or you tell your citzen what the fuck you're doing with their taxpayer money.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org