

How WikiLeaks threatens transparency - mhil
http://www.transcapitalist.com/transcapitalist/2010/7/26/how-wikileaks-threatens-transparency.html

======
blueberry
It sounds nonsense to me to blame Wikileaks for making transparency opponents
make more opposed to transparency. When you point out a problem, sometimes the
people who don't want this problem to be solved will take even more radical
measures to make sure it is kept secret. Giving up because of this is like
giving up fighting terrorism because your actions can anger terrorists and
they might kill more people. Also it's not clear from the current leaks
whether they would have been prevented if there was less transparency between
governmental bodies.

~~~
barrkel
Actually, there's a fairly hefty argument that fighting terrorism motivates
and recruits terrorists, bolstering the "us vs them" narrative of terrorist
leaders, radicalizes communities, and generally plays into their hands.

Terrorism doesn't work nearly as well if terrorist acts are treated as crimes
rather than war offensives. Terrorism works by provoking a reaction out of
proportion to the initial attack, which acts as a force multiplier for
radicals, who are almost always tiny minorities in whatever country or society
ends up being attacked in revenge.

As I understand it, Al Qaida was initially motivated by its opposition to the
ruling Saudi family of Arabia, who have a close alliance with the US. By
attacking the US with Saudi Arabian terrorists, they hoped to create doubt
over that linkage, provoke an extreme reaction, radicalize the Muslim world,
and thereby come closer to power.

------
jacquesm
Governments have to learn that obscurity is not the same as security just as
much as the IT world had to come to terms with it.

You can't 'hide' stuff and assume that it won't come back to bite you any
longer. So stuff that you could get away with and sweep under the rug in the
past now has the nasty habit of surfacing.

Wikileaks does not threaten transparency at all, it - or its successor - will
enable a society that will either simply act more responsible and will deal
with living in this new nice glass house or there will be a series of
scandals. The genie is as likely to go back in to the bottle as the file
sharing one.

The public is getting a rare taste of what their government is up to and so
far secret really does seem to equate with 'can't stand the light of day'.

If secret was only 'will hurt our society if known' then wikileaks wouldn't
have a leg to stand on.

------
fleitz
Those that threaten transparency will threaten it whether wikileaks exists or
not. The point of wikileaks is to expose these people and have them removed so
they can be replaced by people who are for transparency at which point
wikileaks will become irrelevant.

The just powers of government derive from the consent of the governed,
wikileaks provides information on what the government is doing so the people
may judge whether it is just.

~~~
GrandMasterBirt
There will always be leaks if someone feels that the government is doing
something immoral and they have access to the information, even if caught.

I find it insane that it is criminal to share some of this information. Secret
information that the government has should be very very little, especially in
war efforts. Sure the CURRENT strategy being applied in the battlefield should
be secret since that will save our soldiers' lives, but after the battle that
should all be revealed.

Hiding information makes the american public hated for certain actions, and
the american public does not know what the actions were to begin with, so in
the end the american public loses.

~~~
Ardit20
There was no leak about the blatant lies that Bush ant Blair were telling
about Iraq.

~~~
GrandMasterBirt
Damn. Then we haven't leaked enough.

------
DennisP
Secret information sharing between government departments is not
"transparency."

If the government didn't classify stuff like this in the first place, it could
easily share it between departments without worrying about whether it would
get leaked or not. That would be transparent.

The information release didn't endanger people. It just endangered policy. If
the government would stop doing things that are unpopular and embarrassing, it
could stop classifying so much.

Maybe then we'd once again have a government "of the people, by the people,
for the people."

------
jackfoxy
Pfc. Manning's massive leak of low-level classified documents (assuming he is
the responsible party, as alleged) was an act of inspired immaturity. He does
not have the education or experience to make any sense of the trove of
documents, let alone the time to actually read more than a fraction of them,
but must have acted either on the assumption "classified equates to bad" or
simply an impulse to get away with something.

No adversary is likely to learn anything they didn't already know (and
apparently the press has not either), although it potentially gives large
well-funded adversaries like Russia and China a great source for drawing case-
study training materials.

The damage is to our own intelligence and diplomatic internal affairs, both in
scrambling to do damage control and changing procedures.

The material is of great interest to arm chair intelligence analysts; plenty
of blogging material.

~~~
grandalf
I think the leak is of greatest interest to those who have yet to realize that
waging a war (even a small war in a third world country that most Americans
happily ignore) takes a tremendous amount of ongoing promotion and propaganda.

Obama has been caught in the act of going to great lengths to manage public
perception of the war... in this case by hiding information from the public
that might result in public pressure to stop the war.

------
mhil
The argument is not that WikiLeaks should stop what they are doing because of
this collateral damage, but that we should recognize what the most likely
immediate impact will be to this revelation: less information sharing. A leak
of some sort would not have been prevented with less transparency between
governmental bodies, but now State can say that if their classified data was
kept internal this particular info would not have been released. If staff from
one department leak information from another department it only reinforces
distrust between agencies and slows down the progress towards openness within
government.

------
jeremymims
"Our success in Afghanistan depends on open information sharing."

We've had 100,000 troops chasing 500 key people for nearly a decade. I'd say
we already lost the most expensive game of hide-and-seek ever...

------
schmichael
This article threatens our intelligence.

~~~
mustpax
While I laughed at your joke and agree with your sentiment, I had to vote you
down because witty one-liners introduce more snark than insight and drive the
quality of discussion on HN down.

~~~
schmichael
Agreed. Sorry for the noise.

