God, we couldn't have asked for a better puppet to hand us an excuse to crack down on hacktivism and leaks at the same time. by Logical Premise
(statist)
Friday, December 17, 2010
I have not written for the Nolan Chart in some time. Most of that is due to the fact that writing here often evokes shades of Poe's Law.
That being said, it is often amusing to post here in the manner of poking the bear, just to see what sort of response one derives. And with the recent brouhaha of Wikileaks, I think it would be instructive (and , of course, amusing) to lay out what the average statist thinks of the entire thing.
Let's get something straight : I am delighted that Assange is such a politically naive fool. If he wasn't such a self-absorbed egotistical maniac, he would have run Wikileaks much differently and it would be much more difficult for future attempts like this to be crushed and discredited. But since it has been done this way, not only is it likely to make it easier to stop things like this in the future, but the hacktivist response is likely to be criminalized as well.
It's already becoming appearant that Assange had no idea how far and how quickly things would go against him. In a matter of days his website and finances were locked down and he was rounded up on rape charges. In protest, some hackers have begun attacking credit card companies and other companies who wouldn't do business with Wikileaks.
Yet public opinion in the US is not in Wikileaks favor. There are plenty of people who see what Wikileaks is doing as "bad". They feel that Wikileaks "hates America". Even those that defend what has happened have a hard time when the Taliban states openly that they are going through the Wikileaks material looking for informants they can kill.
The results?
First of all, the people who release data internally are screwed. (The fact that a freaking 35F Specialist would have access to this much data, and that NO one would notice him accessing military DB's he had no reason to look at , are also highly suspicious, but that's a different article.) I have zero doubts that, given Wikileaks criminally incompetent technical abilties (they used a free DNS server for Christ's sake , with no SSL certificate!) that the CIA or some other dirty tricks organization is happily tapped into them, and their whole focus is on locating anyone who supplies Wikileaks with information. If you can identify and punish leakers regularly, leaks will dry up. Proven fact.
Second, this is doing nothing but weakening the idea that freedom of the press should be applied to "freelance" organizations and web bodies like Wikileaks. Disingenious legal arguments are already starting regarding if Wikileaks qualifies as press. It doesn't help that in some countries to be considered a press device you have to register and Wikileaks didn't bother to do so. The end result is that I suspect laws will be passed -- soon -- to make this sort of thing illegal or considered to be espionage. Big name media outlets will continue to be able to do it because the government can get them to STOP (i.e., the wireless wiretapping thing a few years back).
Finally, if hacktivists protesting what is happening to Wikileaks continue they will end up criminalizing the entire enterprise. Already, people are talking about Wikileaks threats of releasing all their cables at once, and now you have vandals attacking MasterCard and Amazon with DDoS attacks. Before long, we will end up branding Wikileaks as a subversive hacking organization and completely criminialize them.
The end result will be that citizen journalism which involves any kind of inside government information will be discredited, tantamounted to treason, and made illegal. And given the public's vapid attention span, once Assange is arrested , he will probably have an accident. Remove him, and his organization falls apart (hell, it's already starting)
As to the ... value of such so-called activist journalism, I reserve my judgement in saying the results do not justify the means. The American people are vunerable to good-sounding rhetoric. (Exhibit 1 in proof of this, Barrack Obama.) Statists hate this sort of so-called transparency because it never -- I repeat, NEVER -- actually achieves anything in terms of improvements or positive change. Did Watergate affect anything? No. Looks like Nixon had won the election anyway, and the person we got in place of Nixon, while not corrupt, was worthless and lead to the election of Jimmy Carter. Good job!
More than that, though, from a statist point of view, information should emphatically not be free. You are not a political specialist. You do not have all of the background information , context, and experience to interpret what is being distributed. It is being piecemealed out with no way to know why things were undertaken or why decisions were made, so that the people who have worked all their lives to achieve a position or were elected to make decisions can be second-guessed after the fact by some clown who works at Pizza Hut.
Another point is what is being released. Some of it is pointlessly damaging, like a list of critical locations with a secret classification. The list was being drawn up by military experts to see what could be done to protect them further. Releasing this is not "transparency" by any means, assuming that transparency means the voting public has a right to know how and why it's money is being spent within reason. Instead it is , at it's most basic, the ability to send a message to the US from Wikileaks that "we can release things that will hurt you and get people killed so do what we say or else".
Finally, consider the source. A military analyst who hacked, broke into servers, disabled security, stole information -- classified or secret information at that -- and released it en masse without considering ramifications. People are comparing this to a release earlier that the Supreme Court weighed in on and said was valid -- during Watergate, etc -- but this is not even remotely the same. This is nut (read his interview, the guy comes off as some kind of lunatic) who is deciding that he needs to "let the people see what is going on" because he disagrees with it. Not one thing or five things but who knows how much information.
The result? The Taliban has lists of peoples names and licence plate numbers and even human rights organziations are saying "What the hell are you doing?" (Link)(Link)
From a statist point of view, the government has a right to protect it's citizens and when a citizen decides that he knows better than the entire government, that does not give him the right to endanger countless others because of his freaking opinion.
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Posted By: Walt
Date: December 17, 2010 12:11:17 PM
You wrote:
"The fact that a freaking 35F Specialist would have access to this much data, and that NO one would notice him accessing military DB's he had no reason to look at , are also highly suspicious, but that's a different article."
I'm glad you finally noticed. Maybe sometime you'll also notice that government does not generally act in our best interests. Rather, the people in government act in their own best interests, regardless of how far those interests wander from the best interests of the rest of us. Maybe someday you'll even notice that government harms us much more often than it helps us. Maybe, but I'm not holding my breath.
Re: Poe's Law...yes, controversy should be avoided at all times. After all, it's not orderly. :rolleyes:
Posted By: trd
Date: December 18, 2010 12:01:43 AM
Why does the Government need so much secrecy? The government suffers from over-classification of documents. If it needs to be secret, why even have a ducument? As a private individual, do you keep a written log with your personal secrets? Most likely the answer is no. So what if Average Joe reads a classified document? It doesn't matter. Governments need to be as small and transparent as possible. There is no need for so much secrecy in the name of "security". But if the government wanted to keep secrets, then the only sure way to keep those secrets is to NOT WRITE THEM.
With regards to journalism....freedom of speech applies not only to the press but to each individual citizen. Its irrelevant. I shouldn't need to have no news organization nor some kind of license to be a journalist. If I call myself a journalist, that should be good enough.
With regards to Assange's Freedoms, that should be up to Australia ot 5weden or wherever the hell he might be. Ironically, since he has pissed off probably half the countires in the world, the US might be one of the safest places for him.
BTW, although the technology is new, wikileaks itself is not. Search "Pentagon Papers". Nixon tried to press charges against the New York Times in the same way as with Wiki Leaks for publishing classified information. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the New York Times. The biggest difference is that such incident was National and within our borders whereas Assange's is international with multiple servers throughout the World and with better and faster technology.
