

Umberto Eco: "the crypts of state secrets are not beyond the hacker’s grasp..." - fiaz
http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/article/414871-not-such-wicked-leaks

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tptacek
Each Wikileaks dump is a different kind of funhouse mirror, aborbing the gazes
of politicians, activists, philosophers, pundits, and what-have-you, repaying
them with illusory advancements of their agendas.

So now we get --- respectfully! The Name Of The Rose is one of my all-time
top-5 books! --- the take of a blowhard classically-trained Italian
semiotician (yeah, _there's_ someone who isn't going to see his life's work
reflected in the Wikileaks narrative) on world politics.

And from it, we get these gems of foreign policy:

* The State Department doesn't know anything you can't learn in the newspaper

* Embassies have turned into spy centers (heavens!)

* Wikileaks did irreparable damage to Clinton and Obama (irreparable! Unlike, say, losing the house and practical control of the Senate?)

* Technology has advanced to the point where governments can't keep secrets anymore

These points, all utterly banal, some dubious, would have been shrugged off in
any article not written by a famous person in the context of Wikileaks. But
now that we have Wikileaks, anything any famous person writes, be it bridge
trolls like Michael Scheurer and John Bolton or has-been literary stars like
Umberto Eco, glistens with supposed insight.

I'm not a WL supporter, but I'm worried that the effect it's having on public
discourse may be bothering me even more than the underlying principles.

 _PS: I'll concede the humor buried in the subtext of Eco making reference to
Dan Brown._

~~~
elblanco
> The State Department doesn't know anything you can't learn in the newspaper

This is the bit that has me the most mystified...none of the released cables
reveals anything particularly surprising (or at least not surprising to
anybody who pays even minimal attention to world news)...yet the media is
acting like these are _huge_ revelations and it leaves me confused -- is the
media reporting that wikileaks is leaking these completely obvious things? or
are they reporting about these fantastic new completely obvious things?

~~~
tptacek
To the media, each Wikileaks dump is just another lump of fuel for the
attention-gathering machine. Everyone knows this, including Assange, who
acknowledges it openly.

One wonders whether a real impactful whistleblowing leak might be
disadvantaged in this climate; it might, perish the thought!, be boring. Where
would we find the persecuted elfin protoganist? What about the sex? The
gossip? To whom would we sell the movie rights about a policy process story?

~~~
jacquesm
> One wonders whether a real impactful whistleblowing leak might be
> disadvantaged in this climate;

This one is pretty real.

For one we now have official confirmation that the Netherlands hosts a foreign
countries nuclear weapons inspite of numerous politicians being on the record
to the contrary and for that alone I thank Julian Assange.

I'm pretty sure that there are lots of other bits and pieces that are relevant
to various parties.

One thing this all shows is that you really can't trust governments with any
collection of data and that's another useful thing to know with direct
application to everyday life.

~~~
roel_v
To the best of my knowledge the Dutch government, like the Belgian, never
confirmed nor denied that US nuclear warheads were stored on Dutch resp.
Belgian soil. Everybody knew for at least 25 years that they were there, and
nobody was even coy about it - just that there was no 'official' confirmation.
So it's not a new fact at all.

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neilk
I like Umberto Eco, but a lot of this is what I call "profundity by paradox".
Technology goes backward as it advances! The real secret is that there is no
secret! Etc.

~~~
ggchappell
I'd have to agree.

Also, that phrase "profundity by paradox" is a nice one. And remarkably
little-used. Right now it gets just 3 Google hits (a 1993 book, a 2007 quote
from that same book, and a 2009 philosophy discussion); perhaps we should see
what we can do to increase that.

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makmanalp
>> "but (digital) CDs now only allow us quantum leaps from one chapter to
another"

They say to write what you know about ...

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jacquesm
Even though Umberto Eco probably does not realize that mr. Mannings activities
do not really qualify as hacking he's right on the money in that any large
trove of data will sooner or later become public.

There is a ratchet action at work here which causes information to be
disseminated even when you really don't want to. The mere existence of
information that more than just a very few people have access to almost
guarantees a leak and eventual publication, with some direct numerical link
between the number of people that have access and the chances of the
information being leaked.

Those tasked with guarding our privacy are worried about all this precisely
because they seem to be incapable of doing so, even when dealing with stuff
that would never have seen daylight 20 years ago.

With every advance in telecommunications technology, computing and storage the
amount of information explodes further and avenues through which it may leak
out multiply.

Cellphones with cameras are one nice example of this effect.

When you put together a 'list of sensitive installations' you need to realize
the impact of just creating such a list. Once created you have to assume that
eventually it will fall in to the hands of those that you don't want to have
it (and what a banal list it is, is that the best they could do?).

Spy novels have been preaching 'need to know' for a long time, and governments
the world over have always struggled with finding the right balance between
being able to do their jobs as well as not helping their perceived enemies or
other parties to the information they so painstakingly collected.

It looks to me as though the big lesson of this leak (besides a bunch of
important details in the cables themselves) is that this process is currently
failing.

~~~
poet
Jacques your rhetoric on Wikileaks is quite frankly awful. Here are some
specific pieces I take issue with:

 _The mere existence of information that more than just a very few people have
access to almost guarantees a leak and eventual publication_

Empirically not true. What percentage of classified information has been
leaked in the course of history? It's infinitesimally small.

 _With every advance in telecommunications technology, computing and storage
the amount of information explodes further and avenues through which it may
leak out multiply. Cellphones with cameras are one nice example of this
effect._

The government can control what technology they allow into secured facilities.
Cellphones with cameras are irrelevant when they aren't allowed into secure
locations.

 _what a banal list it is, is that the best they could do?._

Obviously not. Do you really think the list that was leaked is the only such
list? More detailed lists would obviously be classified at TS.

 _It looks to me as though the big lesson of this leak (besides a bunch of
important details in the cables themselves) is that this process is currently
failing._

The stuff that's been leaked is relatively low level Secret stuff. To claim
that recent events prove that the government's ability to protect classified
information is failing is ridiculous.

\--

Why the standard of debate so low for this particular issue?

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blue1
It seems that Eco's DVD player has no "pause" button.

Also, the interesting part regarding Berlusconi in the WL cables are not the
facts, but the american opinions about them, which apparently are quite
different from the official ones.

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takrupp
Makes sense. Another article spoke of how documenting the Bush and Obama
presidencies will be tough and probably not that thorough, as the juicy bits
are written on scraps of paper that are immediately disposed of.

There is a market for an offline, secure technology, like a modern day codex.

~~~
hugh3
The Bush and Obama White Houses are still producing documents at a far greater
rate than any prior White House, I'm willing to guess. If anything, it'll be a
difficult job because the Bush and Obama Presidential Libraries will be filled
with so many dull emails between White House staff members that you'll never
be able to find the interesting ones.

Anyway, the really juicy bits have always happened in face-to-face meetings.

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danielnicollet
Great article. I especially liked this thought provoking segment:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1976276>

