It feels like I'm watching someone try to act out the part of a character in a spy novel. Big encrypted files called Insurance, twittering about being followed by government agents, sensationalizing the things they post...
I think they have good reasons for what they're doing (or at least good intentions), and I do like the concept behind WikiLeaks.
I just think they're getting a bit caught up in the whole drama/mystique, and their credibility and ethical standing is suffering as a result, which could be dangerous for the "open leak repository" movement.
A couple of years ago Julian and his colleagues released information that swung the national election in Kenya. This must have gotten the attention of every government with something to hide (all of them). Since then, he claims to have released more confidential information than the rest of the worldwide media. Combined. The stakes are enormous. And the reality is that that puts a target on your back.
I think if there ever is a downfall to the Wikileak initiative, it will be due to the gloating and the drama they perpetuate.
Julian and his gang need to stop with the commentary and just release the documents. leave the opinions to be formed by the people. The twitter account is going to come back and bite them in the ass if they keep pushing commentary out.
I fully support the need for an organisation like this and having seen multiple interviews of Julian, I have to say he's the right character to lead this mission.
Yes, because the average American surely has the time to read 100s of classified documents. The goal of the release is to attain reform, and if drama stokes discussion and catalyzes reform, so be it. What's the problem with drama exactly? The more notorious Assange gets, the harder it will be for the powers that be to get rid of him.
Do you honestly think that drama leads to the downfall of media? Do you remember CNN, Fox, NYTimes in early 2003, when they all claimed that Iraq had WMD? Why do they still have credibility? They do because media has become part of the enterntainment industry, which makes it obvious why WL is necessary.
It seems self-defeating to argue there's a shortage of people who are capable of dramatizing leaked information on the one hand, while on the other hand arguing that the entire news industry is solely interested in entertainment.
>It feels like I'm watching someone try to act out the part of a character in a spy novel.
In that case we should be able to figure out his key and decrypt the file. The key in the spy novels is always something you feel like you should have seen coming, something predictable.
It feels like I'm watching someone try to act out the part
of a character in a spy novel.
It feels more like I'm watching someone forced to act out that part. Those novels me be dramatized, but many are still based on the way things actually happen. Ian Flemming couldn't have kept that out if he wanted to, because he simply knew.
Is anyone else getting just a little bit sick of WikiLeaks? The basic concept of providing transparency is good, but I think they are taking things way too far.
I hadn't even thought of the issue of the Taliban being able to read the records themselves to find out who the informants are.
Just because something is a secret doesn't mean it has to be exposed, and I think that is the fundamental problem with Wikileaks. Some things do more harm out in the open than they would locked away.
What Julian appears to me to be trying to do is to reduce the ability of large bureaucratic militarized organizations to dominate innocent individuals.
Secrets exist for many purposes, but their primary impact on history is to permit groups of people to organize in order to persecute other less organized groups of people. Ultimately, it was the combination of industrialization and secrets that made it possible for nation states to directly the cause the death of 160 million people in the 20th century. In these situations, the ability of individuals to influence the course of events is essentially nil. That's why you and I have not stopped the millions of murders in Darfur, the same as our parents did not stop them in Rwanda 17 years ago, and so on.
In this context, it really is not reasonable to argue that we would all be much safer if nobody was revealing the secrets of those who have too many secrets.
Sixty to seventy years ago, the following information was kept secret by Western governments:
-How to build an atom bomb
-How to build effective radar systems to detect incoming bombers
-The fact that German and Japanese encryption codes had been compromised
-The US Navy's awareness of Japan's intention to attack Midway Island
-The fact that Patton was actually removed from command, and that his travels around Italy and north Africa were a ruse to misdirect German defenses away from Normandy
Need I go on? If some idealist decided to leak these secrets, a lot more innocent individuals would be dominated by certain nation states. State secrets are no different from any other power of the state--they can be used for good or for ill, and it's careful to ensure they're used for good, but it's foolish and suicidal to try and keep them from being used at all.
Both Ellsberg and Assange have claimed that they do believe that there are legitimate secrets (e.g., cyphers, nuclear technology, and the like). Your argument is based on the assumption that WL sees all secrets as being born equal, which is utter nonsense. Do you honestly believe that:
- the Afghan war diaries contain secrets of the same magnitude as, say, U.S. radar tech 70 years ago?
- Pakistan does not know that the U.S. knows that elements of the Pakistani intelligence are collaborating with the Taliban? (of course they are, they know the Taliban will most likely win, and they want to ensure tranquility after the U.S. gets tired, declares "victory", and leaves)
- the enemy does not know it's using heat-seeking missiles against U.S. choppers?
- the enemy does not know the attacks on U.S. forces? They were the ones who carried the attacks out!
Think about it. The release of the documents contains very little the enemy does not know about. Therefore, your entire argument is invalidated. Apples and oranges. The secrets you alluded to do compromise national security. The secrets exposed last weekend by WL only compromise the politicians who lied to the world about how the war was going in order to avoid losing popular support.
The burden of proof lies on the accuser's shoulders. How do you know it's not disinformation? From now on, the Pentagon will blame WikiLeaks for every civilian death. WikiLeaks had no incentive to put innocents at risk, but the Pentagon has all the incentives to discredit WikiLeaks.
While it may be true that WikiLeaks had no incentive to put innocents at risk, it's also beside the point. It's entirely reasonable to believe that laziness/stupidity/lack of resources caused them to leak informants names even if that wasn't their intention.
I accept the concept that Wikileaks puts informants at additional risk. I also accept that the government is lying through their teeth about the activities on the ground in Afghanistan.
Is it more important for a the taxpaying population to be informed of what the military is doing in their name? Or is it more important to hide all information that may have any connection to the activities of informants?
I would suggest, that as an informant you make a direct choice to act, which effectively stakes your claim to a large majority of the repercussions. No such choice is offered to the public, and even if it were, a large heterogeneous group of people cannot be saddled with the same responsibility that an individual chooses for them self.
Additionally, any government that hides non national security type information from their population, puts itself at risk by allowing it's informants to be possibly exposed by leaks. If it wanted to provide protection from possibly damaging leaks, thus ensuring the anonymity of it's informants, it would provide a robust channel of accurate information to the public. Such information would greatly reduce the perceived need for leaks, hold the government and military more accountable, better serve the public good, and provide additional protection for informants.
effectively stakes your claim to a large majority of the repercussions
So what are you saying, that if Wikileaks got access to the data of the Witness Protection Programme in the US it should publicize that too? Because all government coverups are bad?
Further - the one with the info is truly responsible for keeping it a secret. Maybe the Pentagon should look internally if they want to see the real leaker. However - it has to be said that the more secrets weigh on the conscience, the more risk they are of compromise. The worse the moral perception of the act, the more risk of a leak.
Today the following information is kept secret by many governments:
- Accidental civilian deaths in raids.
- Details of people "detained" for questioning.
- Botched up intelligence operations and lack of analysis capabilities.
- How much money is being spent on "intelligence" and why.
Need I go on?
It is true that they can be used for good or for ill, but the problem comes in when you take away accountability from the equation. The question really should be; how can we balance the two?
I don't want to agree or disagree with anything. All I want to agree with is that innocent people have the right to exist without getting shot in the middle of the night.
You know what's the biggest problem over here? It's okay if someone from country ABC kills people living in XYZ. That's collateral damage, but as soon as a few ABC civilians get killed it's war.
It's like somehow everyone in this world have agreed to play a game where they all assume that they're the heroes and the fate of the planet rests on their shoulders. Somehow they've agreed that it's okay to kill other people because they just don't agree with them. Somehow they've agreed that this is just the way things are and this is how they must be.
Why?
I think that it's safe to say that no one can analyze state secrets or anything in this world. It's just a long chain of causality that is propagated forward by implicit agreement.
It's facile to assume a moral equivalence between one side accidentally killing civilians in situations where it's extremely difficult to isolate the enemy, and the other side hijacking jetliners and flying them into office buildings.
I am talking about all sides. Not just the USA or the terrorists, but the Iranians, the Pakistanis, the Israelis, the Somalians, the Indians, the Chinese, the Russians...
The world is more complex than these shallow sides. I wish I could tell you what I see in one comment, but I can't. All I can ask you to do is to read history from a neutral perspective and follow the chain of causality down the ages.
I've read enough to know that I don't understand the world, and I never will. I can merely try to help other human beings unconditionally no matter what. This might sound crazy, but provided that a terrorist is willing to take a path of peace and understanding I am willing to give him/her a peaceful home both mentally and physically.
Agreed. But please do note that the Taliban didn't fly any aircraft into buildings. The ones who did were Saudis. The Taliban want to kick the invader out, just like the Vietcong 40 years ago. If you think the war in Afghanistan is motivated by the desire to kill Al Qaeda, you need to read a thing or two on geopolitics.
Al-Qaeda are about as Saudi as the IRA is British. The people who make that argument, and forget the close ties between Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the first place, are the ones who need to read a thing or two on geopolitics.
All I want to agree with is that innocent people have the
right to exist without getting shot in the middle of the
night.
Which is a naive view, because without American intervention in Afghanistan, their citizens ran the risk of being shot in the middle of the night anyway, because they rubbed some Taliban the wrong way.
Things might be better post-invasion - they damn well should be - but surely the point is that the US, British and other armies must be held to a higher standard than the Taliban?
No-one expects them to be perfect, but they do expect avoiding the killing of innocent civilians to be a priority. If there is evidence to suggest it is not, it should be given due attention.
A prefectly free and unhindered press helps to prevent atrocities by making armies accountable for their actions. Wikileaks might be a very crude tool, but it's definitely enhancing press freedom
No, you don't need to continue your litany without context. I here a lot of bleating about national security, good of the state, and all, but that is used far too often as a blanket justification to cover up anything. Restriction, or manipulation, of information is what gave rise to the powers that your examples had to counter. For example, if all information relevant to the public, was public, then the Afghan/Iraq wars would never have happened.
Foolish and suicidal to prevent state secrets? I would say it should be a mandatory past time and actively encouraged. How can you have a democracy that includes censorship? If knowledge is power, and it certainly is, as a government's legitimacy can be hinged upon the concealment of a truth, or the propagation of a lie, then the systems in place should err on the side of transparency.
Perhaps then a compromise should be made, all governmental information should be made completely available in raw form by the end of a governments term, irrespective of content. Secrets like those you listed, are a grey area, perhaps these special cases can be protected further if they are indeed legitimate cases. However, let there be an open real time record kept of who requested the information to be restricted and for what reasons, but eventually and with in a reasonable time frame, 5-10 years or soon enough to break a career if that is warranted. Abuses of the system can therefore be tracked.
I would go a little further and remove any laws surrounding information (that includes copyright and patent laws), and make it a completely moral issue when it comes to a secrecy. A more open society is a more equal society, and where there are fewer power imbalances you will get fewer abuses of power.
(For sake of clarity, I am not including private information; medical records, etc, unless there is good justification. I can imagine the revelations of schizophrenia for a would be government official, demographically related illnesses (eg all war veterans of X suffer higher rates of cancer), would be desirable.)
"How can you have a democracy that includes censorship?"
If it wasn't for censorship, democracy wouldn't have survived the 20th century. There are concrete, non-hypothetical secrets democratic states did keep during the 20th century which safeguarded their continued existence and the reestablishment of democracy throughout much of the world.
Everything you say can and has been applied to every power of the state--the power to make war, the power to collect taxes, the power to enforce law, you name it. Each of these powers has been abused. Each of these powers--including the power to keep secrets--needs to be restricted and kept in check, but not abolished. That way lies anarchy, a fundamentally untested system when applied conscientiously to a modern society and a violent nightmare when applied haphazardly anywhere we've observed it in settled societies.[1]
"A more open society is a more equal society, and where there are fewer power imbalances you will get fewer abuses of power. For sake of clarity, I am not including private information; medical records, etc, unless there is good justification."
Privacy and secrecy are two names for the same thing.
[1] Whether hunter-gatherer societies were fundamentally anarchic is an interesting but, in this context, irrelevant anthropological question.
Well, groups like Wikileaks aren't wanting to apply anarchist ideals haphazardly; but rather in a reasoned way to help achieve a more bottom-up democratic world, which of course requires a better-informed populace. Among other things.
For example, Wikileaks did try to work with the White House to remove names of innocents. (I cited it elsewhere on this thread; you can read how they went about it.)
Each of the state powers you mention can be used for helpful things, but usually aren't. Take for example law enforcement. Any society will need some measure of protection from sociopaths taking over. However, the US goes wild with it, using it to achieve by far the world's hugest incarceration rate!
And war requires the highest bar of justification. Needless to say, the US government doesn't come close to meeting it, illusions aside.
A state should not have the power to veto any information under the pretence of national security. There is no accountability. What I am really advocating is the abolishment of secret secrets, or any secrets that govern public policy, government decisions/workings/connections/longevity, and that all secrets should be made available to the records of history after they go beyond their limited window of opportunity. Hopefully, in time to counter abuses of power while they are still relevant.
> Privacy and secrecy are two names for the same thing.
By private, in the previous context I am referring to the individual.
> Violent nightmare
Examples would be appreciated. I don't understand what this idea of all information being immediately and universally available and the necessary decent into a dystopian nightmare, is based on.
"In these situations, the ability of individuals to influence the course of events is essentially nil. That's why you and I have not stopped the millions of murders in Darfur, the same as our parents did not stop them in Rwanda 17 years ago, and so on."
No, the ability of individuals to influence the course of events is exactly why our governments did nothing to stop the murders in Darfur or Rwanda. Humanitarian intervention in a matter of no interest to one's people is the act of a benevolent despot, not a democracy--at least when there's lives on the line. (The closest the US has gotten to "humanitarian intervention" as of late was the nonsense in the Balkans where Clinton was careful to forbid any measures which would have actually endangered American lives, even at the expense of civilian lives on the other side.) Normal people fundamentally don't care about the other. Instead of a few people being upset about millions of African deaths by genocide, everyone would be absolutely livid about thousands of (for example) American deaths by combat in a godforsaken part of the world that doesn't effect us. Normal people don't have the stomach to see their people die for some stranger around the world with whom they have nothing in common.
Afghanistan was revenge against people who killed Americans. Iraq was misplaced revenge for the same motive--and when it became clear to most Americans that they held no emotional or practical interest in Iraq, they turned against the war completely, with all the idealistic arguments about how the war deposed a brutal, murderous despot falling on deaf ears. How do you really think ordinary people would have reacted to Bush invading Sudan, or for that matter Clinton invading Rwanda after all the mess in Somalia?
And without these damn governments helping us, how exactly are you and I going to stop millions of machete-wielding Hutus, eh?
Wikileaks is about trying to implement the right to know, the right to inform and source protection via technology. This is laws[1] that in Sweden[2] is part of the "constitution" via the freedom of press act and the fundamental law on freedom of expression (free speech). If more countries had similar laws, Wikileaks would be unnecessary. If you don't agree with or understand why these laws exist, then of course your view on the necessity of Wikileaks might differ.
Wikileaks, just like laws on rights and freedoms, will sometimes facilitate the distribution of, for governments, "problematic" material. Does this mean we should remove these laws and/or outlaw Wikileaks? Not in my opinion. Of course there will always be some limitations.
Nothing stops government and organizations from protecting their information in the first place. Wikileaks doesn't pick what information they get access to. If someone in your organization is leaking your most inner secrets, you probably have more serious problem than than the existence of Wikileaks. Also the public nature of Wikileaks distribution model means that intelligence agencies are free to do all the operation security analysis they want when something is published.
"Now we contacted the White House as a group before we released this material and asked them to help assist in going through it to make sure that no innocent names came out, and the White House did not accept that request."
If there had been major revelations in the leaked data I would be more sympathetic to their cause. 5 days later it's out of the mainstream news cycle because it's not really news worthy. The leak itself is news worthy but the content mostly is not. It looks like all they managed to do was out some informants and damage the possibility of reconciliation. (not that the odds were great to start with)
I think the content demands analysis and cross-examination that incumbent news organisations are not used doing. Most current media formats (TV news and debates) are ill suited for such as well, so it's not going to happen.
Furthermore, incumbent news organisations loathe WL, and have incentives to ignore them.
Not sure how you are defining "incumbent news organizations", but the New York Times and Der Spiegel essentially broke this story in collaboration with wikileaks and have been analyzing the documents for some time.
Their conclusion seems to be that these documents don't contain anything explosive, but provide a really detailed picture into military thinking and the state of the war effort.
But who decides what "has to" be exposed, and what doesn't? The problem is that there is no third party at all trustworthy enough to bear the responsibility of "filtering" through all the world's dirty laundry to just find the "morally reprehensible" parts. So, there must be some (transparent) strategy set in advance: they either release nothing (most news agencies), everything (Wikileaks), or use some other pre-defined filter that can be proven to function (i.e. they cover everything, but then push their stories to a proxy server, with a transparent and inspectable program designed to only publish the stories that match some algorithm.)
The filter is already build into WL (and similar organizations): They can only publish information they get from informants. The informants are the filter.
How do you determine if the transparent and inspectable filtering program is operating correctly if you only have access to the output and none of the inputs? You'd need all of the inputs, and at that point, you just have access to all the information anyway, and wouldn't need the program to do the filtering.
Reliable computing isn't just for NASA; it also works when an individual codebase may have been designed to "malfunction." Instead of a single machine, you contract several independent, mutually untrustworthy parties to implement (open, inspectable) machines, with an architecture that takes votes from all machines into account. You could then spit out a log of (hash of input, vote) pairs from each machine to see that the voting architecture is also operating correctly.
You'd need at least one trustworthy party because you can not trust the mutually untrustworthy parties to not give similarly faked logs.
If the goal is secrecy, increasing the number of parties that have access to the inputs undermines that, especially if they are untrustworthy, even if they have "contracts".
While the solution you've outlined may be mathematically sound, I don't think it is very pragmatic.
frankly I'm a little surprised at the number of people that just plain don't hold government accountable.
Collateral damage video? No outrage over killing the civilians, Full outrage that they dared to add labels to a video.
This thing? No outrage over the fact that innocent people are getting killed...full outrage that WL dares to release information.
Seems like a lot of people are just plain authoritative and have full faith that anything they aren't being told is for their own good...when in reality it's just people covering their ass.
Without full transparency, they leave it up to sites like wikileaks to make decisions about things that might have military value, since they don't know 100% whether the thing they are reading is being censored because it's actually important or because the gov't just doesn't want bad PR.
The whole "these guys are assholes for releasing information about our bad deeds" just sounds like bs to me. Don't want bad PR? Don't commit atrocities.
Democracy can't function if the populace isn't fully aware of all the details.
Outrage over civilians being killed? Been there, done that. We knew ridiculous numbers of civilians were being killed, like, 10 or 20 news cycles ago. No one cares anymore.
Well, banality of evil cannot be an excuse, it was not accepted at the Nuremberg trials for example. If you don't care anymore, you are a monster, and monster are destroyed.
Just because something is a secret doesn't mean it has to
be exposed
Why does everyone suppose WikiLeaks is being naive about this? I'm sure there are plenty of files that they won't leak, because they think it will endanger more people than it will save.
In this case, the safety of a few Afghan informants could be considered collateral damage: you can't expect WikiLeaks to keep their hands completely clean, when they are trying to out pools of blood on the hands of others. There isn't an optimal solution; they will have to make case-by-case judgments. If you don't like that and want them to censor the documents: by all means, start volunteering for them to read all the stuff. In the mean time, putting this out in the open may save countless Afghan civilians in the years to come.
In this case, the safety of a few Afghan informants could be considered collateral damage: you can't expect WikiLeaks to keep their hands completely clean, when they are trying to out pools of blood on the hands of others.
I wonder if wikileaks will start posting some videos (hopefully edited and annotated out of context) of the deaths of the people they just caused.
By my understanding there are around 12401769434657526912139264 possibilities, therefore to calculate the time taken in days to brute force a password would be the application of the following formula:
t = n / m / 86400 / P
n: search space (no of possible passwords)
m: amount of random passwords that can be tested a second
86400: 60*60*24 (converts units to days)
P: parallelism (number of crackers)
Let
n = 12401769434657526912139264
m = 100
P = 1,000,000
It would only take 143 days to be successful. Is this correct? Second question, how do we carve up the search space and distribute this to the internet?
Edit: n is generated by limiting the key to be a composition of alphanumeric and related characters. Could be wrong.
According to Schneier[1] n should be closer to ~2600000000000000000000000000000000000000. For each single available core, m would be smaller, say 20 wouldn't it? On the other side, consider 8 or more cores a box for the NSA by 500,000 boxes (wildly conservative guess??) for about P = 4,000,000??
NSA probably has much more compute power than this, though: "With supercomputers measured by the acre and estimated $70 million annual electricity bills for its headquarters, the agency has begun browning out, which is the reason for locating its new data centers in Utah and Texas."[2]
Yeah n would be bigger, but if you limit the key to a composition of characters (alphabet, letters, funky characters %^&*, etc), would that drastically reduce the search space?
Another question, and I'm way over my head here (also time for bed), but considering this snippet below, is it possible the NSA or another group would have an undiscovered attack against it?
"NSA was embroiled in some minor controversy concerning its involvement in the creation of the Data Encryption Standard (DES), a standard and public block cipher algorithm used by the U.S. government and banking community. During the development of DES by IBM in the 1970s, NSA recommended changes to some details of the design. There was suspicion that these changes had weakened the algorithm sufficiently to enable the agency to eavesdrop if required, including speculation that a critical component—the so-called S-boxes—had been altered to insert a "backdoor" and that the reduction in key length might have made it feasible for NSA to discover DES keys using massive computing power. It has since been observed that the S-boxes in DES are particularly resilient against differential cryptanalysis, a technique which was not publicly discovered until the late 1980s, but which was known to the IBM DES team. The United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reviewed NSA's involvement, and concluded that while the agency had provided some assistance, it had not tampered with the design.[11][12] In late 2009 NSA declassified information stating that NSA worked closely with IBM to strengthen the algorithm against all except brute force attacks and to strengthen substitution tables, called S-boxes. Conversely, NSA tried to convince IBM to reduce the length of the key from 64 to 48 bits. Ultimately they compromised on a 56-bit key.[13]"
I don't think it matters whether the NSA can decrypt it. The 'insurance' is a contingency for releasing information to the general public and mainstream media; there is almost surely nothing of value in it as a weapon against Wikileaks. Any organization or group which will decrypt it but not release it doesn't count.
Random bloggers or citizens, on the other hand, might release it if they decrypted it - but this seems secure against them.
No doubt, I'm sure there's something quite damaging to war effort or administration in that archive. My interest in the NSA angle was only due to the technical side.
I think they have good reasons for what they're doing (or at least good intentions), and I do like the concept behind WikiLeaks.
I just think they're getting a bit caught up in the whole drama/mystique, and their credibility and ethical standing is suffering as a result, which could be dangerous for the "open leak repository" movement.