Basically the same as the Manning leaks then.
About the biggest reveal was how childish diplomats are, complaining that certain countries government officials stink of BO and such.
I disagree, and if I had hypothetical magical powers I would have made everything kept secret by every government public.
My personal information included?
Sure, if by that you mean something in a government database. You and nearly every other human on the planet.
The murder of civilians and first responders in Iraq doesn’t ring any bells?
Garbage like this is precisely why I said “unless it makes the government a better slave to the people.” There are legitimate reasons for the government to keep a secret: because it is the custodian of private information about entities which do have a right to privacy; because although the nature of police operations should be fully open, the specifics of when and where can be justifiably kept a secret until that operation is over; because if you need to prove your identity to the government, telling everyone your password defeats the purpose. If you think that the postal service should tell anyone who asks who is sending you mail, what your password is and which corrupt politicians they are investigating, you are wrong.
The postal service has no business keeping OCR’d digital images of what mail you have received in the first place, and the best way to remedy that is for it to be made public.
Either that will spur people to action, or they will reveal they don’t care.
No secrets period.
Even if they aren’t keeping records of what mail you have received, they know what mail you’re receiving right now. It is the analog hole: it is fundamentally and inevitably impossible to stop someone from keeping a record of every piece of mail you ever receive unless you recognise that some information should not be made public.
Have you ever negotiated anything in your life? If the other party knows your entire strategy, including your bottom line and walk-away point, you will lose.
Direct deposit for federal employee paychecks is going to get very interesting.
In the case of the Manning leaks, there was quite a lot of information, lt was redacted by wikileaks on its own, the US seemed to use the actual names of its sources and agents as well as minutes of confiendtial meetings and broadcast them on regular cable… which was surpising on its own, as the Saudis (like pretty much everyone else) tend to presume that their cables might get compromised and don’t send them except by courier or special one time pads.
[QUOTE=grude]
I disagree, and if I had hypothetical magical powers I would have made everything kept secret by every government public.
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Including the following
i) How to make H Bombs?
ii) Vulnerabilities of various public places to terrorist attacks?
iii) Name of every confidential informant that police have?
I don’t have much to contribute to the debate here, but I’ve been sporadically reading up on the Saudi leaks throughout the day, and found some interesting bits:
Some documents shed light on the behind-the-scenes machinations behind “by far the largest military export contract Canada has brokered.” Considering Saudi Arabia’s poor human rights track record, not to mention its current war in Yemen, the deal is somewhat controversial.
In the “no shit Sherlock” department, some documents show the Saudis fuming about “flirtatious American messages” passed along to the Iranians “through an unidentified Turkish mediator.”
Meanwhile, the Washington Post argues that one needn’t necessarily go looking for “shocking revelations” here:
With regard to Snoden and the US, while I think there should be a path for people who uncover government malfeasance to make the general public aware of it, I am very uncomfortable with any individual functionary unilaterally deciding for himself what should and should not be secret.
What I would like to see is something like a classification IRB of people who have been cleared for security clearance, made up largely of civilian members of the public but also including some members of the clandestine organizations. Anyone within the organization could submit any document or set of documents to be reviewed by this board for release without fear or retaliation. Unless a super-majority of the IRB agree that it should be kept secret, then the document is released.
This way documents that are embarassing to the government can be revealed, if a significant subset of people agree that the harm of revealing them is less than the harm of concealing them, but it isn’t just one random person deciding unilaterally for the entire government.