So you WOULD have been okay with leaking the existence of the enigma code in WWII? You’d be alright with Patton’s Calais force being exposed as a lie?
I understand that Wikileaks is trying to prevent people from being thrown in jail for violating secrecy laws by maintaining certain amounts of secrecy itself. However, one could also say that the governments are trying to prevent soldiers or spies from being killed, or stop relations with different countries from going down the tubes, by keeping some information secret.
I guess the value of disclosure of secrets all depends on whose ox is being gored.
To be clear, I recognize that it is rare that the front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post don’t have some story that exposes a government secret in some way. I also have pretty good faith that those two media outlets are run by reasonable people who understand that it may not be in the best interest of the public to expose everything that is secret – one can easily find situations in which the media outlets have respected requests by the government to not go into detail on one point or another of a story because it could have serious consequences.
Wikileaks, on the other hand, seems to have the attitude (if not policy) that government is the enemy, and seem to take delight in exposing secrets that don’t really seem to be important to the public debate, but could have serious consequences nonetheless.
Like I said, Sam Stone…
I’ve only read a few articles about this, but I don’t see “The Allies are landing in Normandy on June 6” in there. I don’t see “the Enigma code has been cracked.” I see “the Taliban have heat seeking missiles.” I see “the CIA paid for the Afghan spy agency.” I see “someone told one source that Bin Laden’s financier went to North Korea to buy weapons technology,” which I feel obliged to quote because I can’t imagine anyone believing it. And I see (and this is a real quote) “The people of Afghanistan keep loosing [sic] their trust in the government because of the high amount of corrupted government officials […] The general view of the Afghans is that the current government is worst [sic] than the Taliban.”
Yes, I agree. But the fundamental question is, why is the information a secret? Is there a legitimate national security interest, or is the government willing to cite national security whenever it’s convenient to avoid scrutiny? How does a society determine if it supports a war and a government if it does not know what is happening in the war or what the government is doing?
You’re correct, but you left out an additional motivation: they don’t want to piss off their sources and lose out on a scoop tomorrow. That’s human nature but since access is everything, it also acts as a motivation not to dig too hard into a story that angers your sources. If you do, they’ll give the next story to one of your competitors instead of you and sooner or later someone above you is going to be unhappy. WikiLeaks doesn’t have that conflict because it doesn’t rely on officials for access and soundbytes. They don’t have to play nice. So I think there is room for that approach as well. (I also think you’re assuming they are reasonable people because you’re used to their names. But I admit it’s a little easier to trust someone’s reasonability when you have his address.)
It goes without saying the people behind WikiLeaks are opposed to the war. They made that clear already. But the above seems reductionist, and even if the public places some trust in its government, I think the public should have the right to determine what it needs to know.
All governments are potential enemies unless you are allowed to keep their excesses in check. Wikileaks serves that purpose fine. Do things by the book and by the ethics we in the west claim to follow, and there will be nothing for dissenters to expose.
How does one keep secrets from one’s enemies while revealing the same secrets to one’s populace?
I don’t find this line of argument persuasive. During the war the Allies were facing adversaries who were trying to dig out their secrets with vastly more resources than a hypothetical Wikileaks . If security was so poor that vital secrets were leaking to a small NGO, it’s a fair bet that they were available much earlier to Axis intelligence services.
The same goes for today. If there is a serious danger of really important secrets being leaked to Wikileaks, the US might as well get out of the superpower game because it implies that their security is so bad that any second-rate power could infiltrate their military and intelligence services at will ; of course this isn’t true.
The fact is that governments keep a lot of material secret for bad reasons; because secrecy is a source of power and because disclosure can lead to informed criticism. If an organization like Wikileaks pushes the balance a little towards disclosure, that is not a necessarily a bad thing.
Nitpick: the Enigma codes were broken by the British, not by Americans, the movie U-571 notwithstanding.
Anyway, leakage is a two-way street. If the US government (or the Pentagon, specifically) want to keep things quiet, all they have to do is start propagating disinformation via Wikileaks.
Hell, for all we know, that might exactly what happened in this case.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Obviously, those with the shadiest secrets will oppose it the strongest, but that is part of the challenge.
He didn’t say governments have to reveal everything they do. He said if they behave ethically, there won’t be any embarrassing secrets for dissenters to spill. (I’d say that’s an oversimplification because there will always be people with axes to grind, but still, the scope of the issues would be different.) There is no particular ethical issue in troop movements or what day a force is going to land on a beach. “The CIA is running covert detention sites” or “People are being locked up on dubious charges and tortured” or “here’s what happens when an unarmed drone hits the wrong people” are ethical issues.
Unarmed?
Someone died of fright? Had their soul/spirit stolen by a photographic process?
Unmanned. The targets were unarmed. :smack:
Maybe a recon drone that lost it’s ability to be remotely controlled. It happens.
I was poking fun at Marley23… 
I knew what he meant to spell.
So, when you imply this isn’t an important secret, what is the public’s knowledge of the larger context of how allied helicopters protect themselves from ground-based threats that might allow them to come to a similar conclusion?
Because from my point of view, this is potentially one of the more serious issues that could lead to loss of American lives. Reports on the effectiveness of enemy missiles, and our countermeasures, could directly lead to the bad guys changing the way they use the missiles.
My point is, for the public, “OMG the TAliban uzes missiles” is nothing more than a curiosity. However, if the reports are out there about why/how this missile hit its target, but the others missed, then it seems to me that this could be very valuable information to the enemy, while it shines little to no light on the larger (and important) debate on whether we should be in Afghanistan.
The weakness of Wikileaks is not just that this potentially harmful information is just thrust out into the Interwebs, but also that it is done so without context.
Having been in Washington for a fair amount of time, this is a cartoonish and inaccurate portrayal of how “real” journalists do their jobs.
I wouldn’t disagree that there is too much government secrecy in general, and the government shouldn’t be telling one story if it has classified information that contracts the story (see “Iraq, WMD”). However, I don’t believe the public has the context to judge whether some particular bit of information ought to remain secret, as I discussed above with the helicopters. As I said before, I think the responsible course by a journalist is to at least entertain an argument from the government that some bit of information is not as harmless as it may appear on first flush. That doesn’t mean the journalist has to agree, and it doesn’t mean that I (or you or anyone else) has to agree with the journalist’s judgment.
But the news stories seem to indicate that the White House asked Wikileaks to react some information, and based on what I have read today, it appears that Wikileaks did not respond to the requests. That’s irresponsible.
Why would the military want to keep from their own public the fact of Teleban having surface-to-air missiles - for our own good, perhaps?
Should we not refer to the Taliban as the Teletubbies, so they don’t know we are talking about them?
Because the public doesn’t have a ‘need to know’, obviously. Do any of you people in this thread who think that this leak is a good idea actually understand how our government works, or what ‘representative government’ actually means? Seriously, I would like to know, because it doesn’t SEEM so.
As I said earlier, if the military is keeping this information from our REPRESENTATIVES, then that’s a problem. If they are keeping it from us (especially some of you in this thread who seem clueless about the military and how it works), I see that as a feature, not a bug.
-XT
I disagree. If it is released to the clueless there is not much they can do with the information. And intelligence agencies could even use Wikileaks to give out bogus information, if they think Al Quaeda and his pals are looking in. For all we know, they might be behind this leak, and are just looking for a good reason to put restrictions on the web.
I think what people are saying here is that the test shouldn’t be “need to know”, it should be “need to *not *know”; as in, what need is there for this information to be kept from the public. They claim that full disclosure should be the default, not the exception.
My guess would be that it needs to be kept from the public in order to keep sensitive information from getting back to the enemy. As it is, our system allows for a surprisingly large amount of intelligence to get back to the enemy on all manner of things. Why provide even more information? What purpose does any of this information now being in public hands actually serve that counters the risks of it getting into enemy hands and them being able to piece a more coherent picture of our tactics, strategy, patterns, etc?? I’ve yet to see anything, to be honest.
Our civilian government CONTROLS the military. THEY are made aware of the information, and presumably, are able to make judgments about it in our names as our elected officials.
-XT