Taffer36 on 6/12/2010 at 07:13
Quote Posted by demagogue
One of my professors wrote a good (
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/chesterman2/English) editorial on this.
His main point was the biggest impact this is going to have in the long run is the feedback effects, perversely creating a lot more secrecy and paranoia in government agencies. You won't see note-taking at meetings, more will be done without documentation or documents will be eyes-only, and there will be regular purges of documents.
Edit: Not to mention the willingness of diplomats to talk to each other frankly. They'll hold things back or not open up dialogs, which can only be bad for healthy relations.
Could the same not be said about whistle-blowing of any kind, even good? Public facing investigations that result from more damning leaks might be more positive, but officials will still undoubtedly become more paranoid or secretive or whatnot, regardless.
I think people are underestimating some of the leaks, it's not all "LOL he called her fat," one details CIA encouragement for diplomats to gather credit card numbers and internet passwords of U.N. officials.
demagogue on 6/12/2010 at 16:38
Quote Posted by Taffer36
Could the same not be said about whistle-blowing of any kind, even good? Public facing investigations that result from more damning leaks might be more positive, but officials will still undoubtedly become more paranoid or secretive or whatnot, regardless.
It's a good question.
The difference is that whistle-blowing only discloses
wrongdoing to people with authority & power to punish those doing the wrong (and have the discretion whether to publicly disclose it or not), whereas these leaks are
blanket leaks about everything to everybody.
What this means in practical terms -- and this comes from the lawyer in me, how they'd think about it -- whenever you punish any behavior it changes the playing-field on which these people act, so the wrongdoers do whatever is cheapest to avoid getting punished and still do what they want.
So if you're a smart policy-maker, you set it up so your punishment-system makes it cheapest for the wrongdoers to stop doing wrong. In this case, whistle-blowing is still a pretty good system because the cheapest way to avoid getting punished is to stop doing the wrong (and then they can continue doing what they're legitimately doing without worrying about that too).
But with blanket leaks of everything to everyone, stopping wrong-doing doesn't stop you from getting punished, so the cheapest way now to avoid it is very drastic steps to lock everything up, which has the perverse result of also shielding wrongdoing even more and making healthy whistle-blowing much harder. Blanket punishment doesn't allow for flexibility in incentivising good behavior. That's the difference.
Sulphur on 6/12/2010 at 17:36
Pretty transparent evidence that if you piss the greater part of the world off, it's going to come back at you however it can.
Martin Karne on 6/12/2010 at 22:00
Oh, how can you people side with the big boys crushing a little fella' trying to do the right thing?
Some bit of truth in a sea of lies and deception almost leading to a world war with N.Korea, and now thanks to him we know that attacking N.Korea would actually make China a happy country, and people do not fear anymore a nuclear war and atomic clouds for a new dawn.
Ok there might be limited exchange of nukes with N.Korea if they even worked at all.
Pyrian on 6/12/2010 at 22:07
Quote Posted by demagogue
Edit: Not to mention the willingness of diplomats to talk to each other frankly. They'll hold things back or not open up dialogs, which can only be bad for healthy relations.
I don't care much if they talk to each other frankly while they're not being candid with
me. What's best for the leaders is not necessarily - or, these days, even frequently - in line with that's best for those they represent.
Quote Posted by Tocky
And I see the poetic justice of hero exposerman hiding from those who may want his life after his endangering others.
It didn't really endanger anybody.
Quote Posted by demagogue
The difference is that whistle-blowing only discloses
wrongdoing to people with authority & power to punish those doing the wrong (and have the discretion whether to publicly disclose it or not), whereas these leaks are
blanket leaks about everything to everybody.
So who do you propose you whistle-blow to when it's the authorities themselves who are the problem? Are not the people their masters? Do not the voters possess the authority (at least in theory)?
Quote Posted by demagogue
But with blanket leaks of everything to everyone, stopping wrong-doing doesn't stop you from getting punished, so the cheapest way now to avoid it is very drastic steps to lock everything up, which has the perverse result of also shielding wrongdoing even more and making healthy whistle-blowing much harder. Blanket punishment doesn't allow for flexibility in incentivising good behavior. That's the difference.
What really disturbs me about your post, here, demagogue, is your completely absolute equatement of
transparency with
punishment. I think you're wrong in that, but even if you were right, it would in my mind simply prove that wrong-doing existed.
As the authorities like to say when they're invading private privacy (lol), if you haven't done anything wrong than there's nothing wrong with having your stuff examined. Except, of course, that the logic involved works quite well on official public actions, but not on private ones.
Muzman on 7/12/2010 at 01:53
I don't think that's what he's saying. He's saying that the breadth and un focussed nature of these leaks, as opposed to the Iraq ones perhaps, just makes Assange and the leakers a target rather than giving them some defensible legal/ethical position (at least as we'd usually think of it. Some say Assange is an old school anarchist so he probably thinks this is pretty ethical). That makes principled leaking harder to find in it all and the authorities shutting them down isn't something the public is likely to care about as much.
I think.
Anyway, the dimension I think is missing from a lot of the discussion around this is the creeping of secrecy. At least I think that's what's going on in them doing this. In a security obsessed world the analysis and sheer manpower necessary to try and predict the value of any given piece of information starts to fail and it becomes easier to just gradually make everything secret. And therefore authoritarianism starts to appear.
It's true that this latest round is unfocussed and I do hope it doesn't become the norm for the reasons stated. Just grabbing everything that isn't nailed down all the time won't help when something specificly nasty needs to be swatted. But this is a spanner thrown into a larger works trend. That's my theory anyway. We can debate the merits of that, of course.
Tocky on 7/12/2010 at 03:20
Am I misremembering there being a period of a few days when the documents were displayed whole and without deletion of Afghani contacts and informants? Then when the stupidity of that was realized those names were taken out? Yet it was up long enough for Taliban to download and study. I'm sure I recall mention of that before this diplomatic muchado. At any rate Asslasange is not who I would trust to parse military secrets to the public in a time of war.
There has always been secrecy in wartime. Hell in anytime with any government ever. Does anyone really think otherwise? If you are going to leak information there needs to be a better damn reason than lets all get transparent and skip through the tulips.
Taffer36 on 7/12/2010 at 04:00
I think the real shame here is that there are important documents in there, but releasing them en masse is such a terrible way to do it. As I said before, the CIA giving diplomats a "wishlist" of information they want them to ascertain about UN officials such as INTERNET PASSWORDS and CREDIT CARD NUMBERS is fucking huuuuuuge in my book. But because information is being released at such an absurd rate, and loads of unnecessary memos are included, people are simply going to gloss over the few important ones.
Tocky on 7/12/2010 at 06:33
I know it sounds huuuuuge but I remember reading a book on MI6 twenty years ago and was astounded at the amount of spying between FRIENDLY nations. Credit cards are excellent tracking mechanisms and internet passwords would of course facillitate information gathering. It used to be bugging was the big thing and I'm sure it still is to a large extent. Of course if other nations have a few do gooder traitors then all they have to do is wait for wikileaks infotainment.
If it makes you sleep easier at night then rest assured your government (no matter which) has been very busy spying on the US for all of your life.
