Um, I Think It's Time for a Thread on WikiLeaks

guys mordy reads a lot, if you didn't know

the "value" of the info is not for those with the secrecy to make it secret to determine -- that's the whole point of a "free press" (long before it was a constitutional principle). no earthly power can correctly determine the real value of every text/idea, so best to let it all hang out.

however the "value of the data" qn is pertinent here, cos it is possible to think of specific pieces of gov't info, relating to war, that we can say in retrospect we're glad weren't widely known -- the d-day plans or some such.

but making that distinction throws the afghanistan data out of the ring, imo, it doesn't rise to that level of life or death importance. the ISI hearts the talibs? US troops have killed a lot of civilians? the war is going really fucking badly? this is the essence of the cynical seen-it-all response of a lot of war reporters across the political spectrum. jesus, what did you think was happening over there??

The only reason for the principle is to have the valuable information!

but who's to decide if information is valuable? the point is it's there - you're free to use the information any way you please, or to decide if it's valuable

Ok one more. Not totally true; Press doesn't have a right to privately owned information (patents or copyrights) except in places where exemptions (like fair use) have been made. I'm not a press lawyer but I suspect there are other limitations on that freedom too.

(responding to smiths assertion that only harm is configured ok sleep for real now)

the point here is that going "what's the big deal about this?" is just useless cynicism

Gotta agree with k3v, free access to information is a good thing, and what with 21st century warfare and the democratizing powers of the internet, it's an irreversible direction we're all headed in. Ironic that the net wouldn't exist without the military...

As for using intellect rather than emotions, being nuanced and adult about things over childish and knee-jerk, that's great. Maybe instead of using that debate to frame blogosphere & public opinion on the release of this information, we can apply it to what the information actually says. For instance the civilian deaths detailed in these logs tell of a war that is trying to be nuanced and adult and failing miserably.

To tell you the truth, the most alarming thing to me was that the NYTimes went to the White House before printing anything.

cynicism isn't useless if it's accurate!

the thing is, even at this late date i don't think the public is cynical about this. i am, i read this shit everyday.

Ok, really one last thing: Here's a very specific piece of information I think was destructive in this particular bunch of leaks. Everyone knew that Pakistan was covertly funding rebels in Afghanistan. The US clearly knew, but still wanted to work with them. Maybe they felt working with them would mediate this particular problem, or that maybe the problem was worth ignoring. But now the memos are out there and not only does the US know, and Pakistan knows they know, but it's all in writing and public. I don't know that this is a net good thing. I feel ambiguous about further poisoning the relationship between these two countries. Maybe all information wants to be free, but maybe it's not great all around when certain pieces of information become free.

But Mordy, you're now extending the harm question & the private enterprise question further: you're saying "if possible future interests of a government might be impacted, then that's harmful." you do see how this is arguing for the right of the state to censor the press, and how any administration (like say the Bush admin, who made this kind of argument all the time) can then argue "well, this isn't an immediate-need thing, but here, let me construe our desire for state secrecy in such a way that I get to abridge your freedom of speech"? right? I mean that is perilous, perilous stuff.

i think the logic in mordy's last post is openly ridiculous

the cynicism - secrecy angle works like this, imo: none of these things should have been secret in the first place. a few details aside these are things that have become known over the past several years -- the cables are all from between 03 and 09 iirc. the press or you or i, or fuxake, our representatives, should be able to call up the pentagon and say "just how shitty is it over there, and what shitty things are we doing?" and the flack would say "real shitty sir" and hand him the folder.

apparently there are a few callsigns or something of some special forces guys that were revealed. that might be the only thing that rises to that level of harm. but everything else? empty works projects? civilians killed by taliban, or by us? supposed missile strikes on helicopters? drug corruption? no, these things are just BAD, but not like the plans to a nuclear reactor or something.

the will to make secret is ultimately the will to alter the public's perception of what's going on.

clearly the onus is not on the press to decide whether or not relations between two governments are going to be hurt at all by the release of information

pakistani civic culture is so cinematically fucked up i don't think we should make any guesses as to what it will really "mean" over there.

the press or you or i, or fuxake, our representatives,

I thought this said "or fukaxe" and I thought it was like some nonce-name posited person, you know - "or anybody, let's call him 'Fukaxe'" and for a moment there I was like giddily happy

I don't agree that free information is about correcting power imbalances or right to know or whatever Foucault thinks - free information is only the default because it makes govt work more effectively, in that it means govt can be properly held to account. This might be what you're talking about re power imbalances, but that's dressing it up as high principle needlessly imo.

Free information can be trumped, therefore, if release makes govt work less effectively. It's easy to think of big things where secrecy is better, like troop movements. That's where the info itself needs to be not known. But it's just as important that processes be protected too, even if the info in these bits isn't major in itself, if such processes are a net good. You can't argue that the govt should enter negotiations with an open hand.

More importantly, some of these leaks are reports of meetings that only a very few people were at - i.e. the source's identity is very close to being revealed. Who in Afghanistan now is going to talk to the US if they think this is going to happen to them? The effect of such leaks might well be that information dries up totally and the govt becomes unable to function at all, or at least does so far less effectively.

pakistani civic culture is so cinematically fucked up i don't think we should make any guesses as to what it will really "mean" over there.

― goole, Tuesday, July 27, 2010 2:13 AM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

there are about six different centers of power that the us military and the state dept have to deal with anyway so its not super easy to say 'pakistan will react in such and such a way'

wash post is being hilariously bitchy about not being on the short list for the leaks:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_l67ejsXnvk1qa9bmvo1_1280.png?AWSAccessKeyId=0RYTHV9YYQ4W5Q3HQMG2&Expires=1280299255&Signature=oBDSLQ7p3fC3vrCblT4675Sbw94%3D

oh those old things? well we wouldnt have wanted them anyway

I don't know that this is a net good thing. I feel ambiguous about further poisoning the relationship between these two countries. Maybe all information wants to be free, but maybe it's not great all around when certain pieces of information become free.

― Mordy, Monday, July 26, 2010 11:04 PM (47 minutes ago) Bookmark

sympathetic to yr position here, but look at it this way: the U.S. fed (a powerful and secretive entity) is the sole possessor of some hypothetical information set. the info will be made avail to the world only on the U.S. government's terms. it is thus what we could call "fully controlled" information. moreover, as no one outside the government has access to it, neither you nor i nor anyone else can say what parts of it should or shouldn't be made available. there's nothing wrong with this hypothetical scenario - so long as we're both comfortable with the fact that the information in question is fully controlled by the entity in question. if we have doubts, however, then this arrangement may become unsatisfactory.

if the information is somehow leaked, then it becomes less fully controlled. it is at this point that other entities become able to say what should or shouldn't have been made available. note that this becomes possible only when at least partial control of the information has wrested from the powerful and secretive entity that ostensibly owns it. i.e., we are only able to make the informed judgment that the info maybe shouldn't have been leaked in the 1st place because it WAS leaked. naturally, the acceptability of such leaks will depend largely on the information in question and your faith in the institutional entities that controlled the info in the 1st place.

which is the always the problem in these cases. we can't know what ought to be known until more is known than someone else is comfortable with. and that's the sense in which all leaks are good leaks - even those that seem to harm us (however you conceive that "us").

and to think yesterday i was worried that this wasn't getting enough attention from ilx!

There's also a huge grey area in the middle xp, though, where information becomes known with which someone isn't comfortable, but no complaint is made because there's also a harm in drawing attention to it by protesting. Stuff gets leaked every day but, because the material is low-level or there's still some benefit in keeping a poker face, the govt either just gets on with it or else deliberately makes no comment. Condemnations of leaks are actually pretty rare. You get into realms of game theory thinking this way, but I'd guess it's probably safe to assume that a condemnation usually means that significant harm has been caused.

For all we know, a lot of the value in these documents might come down to context. A document which reveals that the taliban have weapon X might seem underwhelming because we already know it has weapon X - but the context might reveal a lot of secondary information, like:

- reveals that it had weapon X in 2009
- reveals that weapon X wasn't known about in 2008
- doesn't say anything about weapon Y

They might be significant to someone with more knowledge. Say you're in the taliban purchasing directorate. You negotiate with dealer A to acquire weapon X in 2008. You continue to acquire weapon X from dealers A and B through 2009. On one visit in 2009 dealer A introduces you to dealer C, who sells you weapon Y. If you know these facts, you now know you can trust A and C, but not B. That might be pretty important information, and wikileaks doesn't even know that it's giving it away.

When stuff is secret it's most likely to protect who the source is, not the actual content.

oh really? So that's why the US coalition suppresses reports of its soldiers killing Afghans? I suppose you are right, if the soldiers doing the killing could be defined as the source.

Aiui a lot of the reports that have been leaked also concern taleban killing civilians - don't understand why they would be kept secret if the purpose was suppression to make the US look good. I don't really understand this aspect of the leaks tbh - there are plenty of reports of civilian casualties, where do they normally come from? I'd assumed it was from regular journalism, but if it's from army briefings I don't understand why they'd report some but not others.

Really, though, I'm just trying to explain why stuff is kept secret when most of it is banal anyway. There are layers of meaning to these things, of which we're only aware of the surface. It's just the nature of that game, and I don't think that non-participants claiming an unrestricted or at least extremely broad right to know in great detail is at all appropriate.

can we just go ahead and fully privatize the military then?

tbh you're not doing a great job of explaining besides vague government talking points

So funny that there are so many stories saying "This won't change anything". As if everyone read all 90,000 logs yesterday while looking into the future via a crystal ball.

kind of thing wikileaks would have found out the juicy stuff and upfronted it? i guess there could be big surprises. and journalists and politicians should read it, because it will be instructive, and propose alternative strategies, etc. not sure what *could* change at this point, other than individual prosecutions. immediate withdrawal isn't going to happen.

I don't think that non-participants claiming an unrestricted or at least extremely broad right to know in great detail is at all appropriate.

I pay taxes that help fund these wars, so I would say I'm a participant, as are all US taxpayers.

i think there is a case for more openness... but not that case. shd every bit of govt expenditure be made public? kind of a libertarian's dream -- and the UK government is trying to do this precisely in order to undermine the public sector.

the principle American organ for reporting on a chache of tens of thousands of leaked, formerly secret documents makes the principle line of inquiry the potential effect that the reporting of said documents by such paper will have on the public, as speculated upon by government officials, and how this will in turn affect the actions of these same, speculative officials. In other words, the newspaper asked the government how it would be affected by the way it imagined the public might react to information that the newspaper itself is about to report. (Take a note, Nolan.)

I guess it would be simpler to report the information contained in the document, observe the resultant public reaction and the subsequent government response, and then report on what you've observed, but it wouldn't be nearly so much fun

http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/2010/07/thats-their-plan-travel-into-past-to.html

I pay taxes that help fund these wars, so I would say I'm a participant, as are all US taxpayers

I get that, and ultimately it's your collective choice how much transparency you want - but more transparency will likely mean the military you pay for doing its job less well.

'Doing its job less' would be just fine.

^^^^
Especially since "Its job" shouldn't be nearly so . . . proactive?

all you're saying is, we shouldn't gave invaded afghanistan nine years ago -- which is fine, but i don't think there's anything in the leak which will have swayed people either way. i guess it will bolster the argument that nine years ago we should not have invaded, but i don't think there's a gamechanger in there.

if 'doing it's job' is recklessly killing thousands of civilians with impunity, I'd like them to do that less well

that's not all they're doing in afghanistan.

there were some friendly fire incidents too.

I think it's clear that the idea that they might be held publicly (or criminally) accountable if they do make grave, reckless mistakes would serve as a sort of disincentive to do questionable shit - this is essentially the entire purpose of political transparency

the 'questionable shit' is mostly the war. i dunno, the three papers have not yet pulled out an incident that a) is surprising* or b) demonstrates that they're killing civilians 'with impunity', ie like it's for shiggles.

*maybe more in the US? idk, last week there was a matter-of-fact news item about the propensity of afghan troops to fire indiscriminately on civilians. possibly the embedded journalist was being censored and the british forces are equally reckless, but you get the idea.

I don't agree that free information is about correcting power imbalances or right to know or whatever Foucault thinks - free information is only the default because it makes govt work more effectively, in that it means govt can be properly held to account. This might be what you're talking about re power imbalances, but that's dressing it up as high principle needlessly imo.

This is precisely what I meant, tho obv Foucault is probably skeptical of the idea that the State simply represents their voters but also represents this formation of power. Btw, I'd like to also point out that Foucault isn't just criticizing power imbalances as some sort of high principle. There are a lot of good reasons to have a powerful State. One of the major issues in the Congo right now is that the State can't get a monopoly on coercive force and so it can't protect its citizens from each other. This is a classical reason to have governance (and is even mentioned in Pirkei Avot in 200BC; "without governance a man will swallow his neighbor alive"), and it's why I'm skeptical of free information as a value without any moderation or mediation. I don't believe that the government should have to give up every secret but the ones that will lead to immediate, quantifiable, and direct harm to their citizens. Surely our government could probably use to give up more information (and have a more robust FOIA), but I don't think that any individual acting with impunity should have the power to decide what information should be secret and what shouldn't. For all of our complaints about how the free press kowtows to Executive Power, they are an important step between full disclosure on every issue and figuring out what needs to remain a secret. Again, I believe our press should probably be more robust, and more willing to bend the lines (tho with the WaPost report on US intel organizations last week it's hard to say they aren't doing their job at all), but that doesn't mean it's a YAY AWESOME THING that random dude beholden to no one legally, ethically, etc can release whatever he wants. It's a thing, and it might be good sometimes (definitely good to give whistle-blowers a forum to safely release important information) and bad sometimes.

^ enjoys this guys posts even when i disagree

citizens of a country own the govts information imo.

shd every bit of govt expenditure be made public?

yep

welfare payments? prescription medication? cost of operations?

eh it depends on what exactly you mean by "made public". i can imagine a very innocent sunshine proposal coming from a GOP-controlled house to publish the name, salary, race and home address of every single federal employee. but that's a rather florid example i guess.

mordy i just fundamentally disagree here

One of the major issues in the Congo right now is that the State can't get a monopoly on coercive force and so it can't protect its citizens from each other. This is a classical reason to have governance (and is even mentioned in Pirkei Avot in 200BC; "without governance a man will swallow his neighbor alive"), and it's why I'm skeptical of free information as a value without any moderation or mediation.

mainly cos i don't think you can separate the objects of "the state" and "the people". the state is not a mechanism, or a force, or an idea, or an arrow on a flowchart, it is a subset of the people, acting. i'm enough of a libertarian to disagree with the dictum you've quoted -- "governance" is just as often the means by which a man swallows his neighbor.

i'm a little fuzzy on how we got from free inquiry to the monopoly on force, tho

Because information is a kind of power.

ah right, now i remember what i was thinking...

look i don't think we ought to react to a huge and embarrassing link like this by saying, oh no, what about the monopoly of force!! this way lies the congo!! i just don't think so.

but that doesn't mean it's a YAY AWESOME THING that random dude beholden to no one legally, ethically, etc can release whatever he wants.

isn't it?

knowing that the veil of secrecy allows you to do shitty things out of public view means... those with the power to make things secret will do shitty things! because they can! the principle of free information IS the principle of restraint of power, it IS the counterweight to the monopoly of force. a few more julian assanges around and the calculus for the political costs of military action start to change.

You can be in favor of free speech as a way of alleviating the worst excesses of political corruption and not be in favor of deinstitutionalized release of classified information. I was in favor of the NYT leaking the Bush administration wiretapping program (and even think they were too conservative about waiting to leak it) because the NYT is responsible to a number of different forces -- their readership, the country they live in, etc. I don't think Assanges is accountable to anyone and tho it seems at the moment that he's a good enough guy (at least making an attempt to keep the most dangerous information out of the public sphere), that doesn't mean I trust him to always make the right decision. Let's say he releases a bunch of destructive material that hurts people literally (many of which would be moderates who are trying to work with the United States) and institutionally (releases information that weakens the US when they come to the bargaining table) -- if you are against the US State having power (which is a real position, but needs to be articulated as such), then this is not a problem. But if you want a powerful State, just one where the corruption is mediated by a free press, then you need to be wary about someone like Assanges.

institutionally (releases information that weakens the US when they come to the bargaining table)

go fuck yourself

welfare payments? prescription medication? cost of operations?

― rip MAD MEN on AMC S4 26/07 never forget (history mayne), Tuesday, 27 July 2010 17:34 (31 minutes ago)

to individuals? nah. as a set of accounts in total? yeah.