I’ll admit that my instinctual reaction to learning that WikiLeaks had access to a ton of supposedly classified information from the State Department, and that they intended to make that material available on the internet, was revulsion. As curious as I am to learn the secret dealings of our government, I don’t want our government to be totally helpless to keep its secrets. I listened to arguments from the other side with respect, but I came to the conclusion that the reaction to the leaks basically came down to whether someone saw the U.S. government as thoroughly rotten or just discouragingly bad. To be clear, I was more upset that WikiLeaks had been able to obtain the information than disturbed that they made it available. But the leaks have had far reaching and unpredictable consequences. In one important example, they played a role in the abdication of the “president” of Tunisia. We know now that that abdication started a snowball rolling in the Middle East. Hopefully, this will all shake-out in a positive way, but nothing is guaranteed.
In any case, no one threatened me to get me to say that I wasn’t enthusiastic about the way WikiLeaks has handling the information. But it looks like there was a concerted effort to target Glenn Greenwald to get him to stop lending rhetorical support to them.
You should read what happened, but that’s not what I want to talk about here. Instead, I want to concur with Digby.
I would wonder if the “professional pressure” they planned to exert on supporters was brought to bear on some of the most powerful journalists in the country who seemed to be offended by the very idea that governments and wealthy institutions should have their lies exposed to the public, but sadly, I doubt it. Those people clearly behaved instinctively, siding with the powerful with whom they identify. The governing elites have nothing to fear from the mainstream press.
The fact that they focused on Greenwald pretty clearly proves that, don’t you think?
There’s a fine line between wanting a secure communications network for our State Department and being “offended by the very idea that governments and wealthy institutions should have their lies exposed to the public.” That’s a fault line which divides me from Glenn and digby on a variety of issues (rotten vs. disappointing). But I agree with them completely when it comes to the fact that it was a blogger for Salon who they considered it most important to disrupt, and not the tech guys for any major newspapers or television news outlets. It was just assumed that any truly established media outfit would oppose what WikiLeaks was doing. The fact that they targeted Greenwald proves that our corporate media is self-neutered. There should be at least some establishment journalists who think our government had it coming.
Also, too, this is so creepy.
You know what’s the saddest thing? The research they did about Greenwald. The clowns BoA hired basically called him a careerist hack. Evidently they didn’t do any research about him whatsoever. Where do they find these clownshow firms?
Digital wealth must be devalued in comparison to even paper money or we are going to see a crash of incredible proportions.
It just isn’t as likely you will get your money back from a bank when it is stored digitally. You put your money in a bank these days, it may ‘just go away’ due to the actions of an outsider or even the bank itself.
It is worth less because money’s value is based on it’s reliability as liquid tender in the market. Sure it has been reliable thusfar, but we can all see how the unpredictable, catastrophic risks are greater problems for digital currency than a gold bar.
Requests for ‘new money’ in remote places shows how this works even in the paper money world.
While paper may burn, there aren’t legions of people who designed the security systems of the world who will try to torch your wallet whenever they get their ire up. This certainly is the case in the digital world.
A particularly insidious attack could actually ‘print’ money and insert it into accounts in such volumes as to devalue a currency.
Hate to say it, but in a world where wealth is represented as bits on some server somewhere, detached from the real world in a way that fiat currencies never have been, we expose ourselves to a ‘fire sale’ attack that literally vaporizes wealth on a scale never before even remotely possible. Be it one bank or all banks at once, Capitalism has exposed itself to at worst destruction, but at best constant extortion.
Way to go Banksters!
My takeaway wasn’t that they thought Greenwald was a careerist hack, but that they thought of all journalists as careerist hacks. If they’re talking about legacy media, it’s hard to argue the point. But extending that analysis to Greenwald and other folks who’ve risen through the blogger movement shows how completely they misunderstand the force they’re dealing with.
Meanwhile, I didn’t find the Anonymous response creepy; I thought it was hilarious. A bunch of highly paid security “experts” (recommended to BoA by the Department of Justice…hmmm…) had their lunch eaten by volunteer hackers. Ouch. The fact that these so-called experts can’t even keep their own correspondence secure is pretty telling.
But then, as much of history reminds us, you don’t need to be very bright, or competent, to successfully pull off dirty tricks – just amoral. And counting on sympathetic media for your dirty tricks would usually be a pretty safe bet, if “media” meant the same universe it did in 1990.
Most people respond to threats to their main income. I don’t think that is any great insight. But, they didn’t say “we need to figure out what Mr. X at the Times thinks and persuade him that these leaks are bad.” They safely assumed that those types of reporters were already on their side.
It’s a complicated issue, actually, and there has been a lot of inaccurate characterizations about what WikiLeaks was doing. I don’t think it is as simple as supporting or opposing the leaks. I thought the dump was overly large and the vetting was insufficient. But I don’t have a problem with hypocrisy being exposed in classic whisteblower fashion. These seemed much to wide and malicious and careless for my tastes. Others are so pissed off about overclassification and hypocrisy that they’re just glad the government got a bloody nose and now how a hundred and one messes to try to clean up.
As long as reporters correctly understand the basic facts and don’t misrepresent them, I don’t think it means that they’re sell-outs if they don’t like to see our government get exposed like this. I don’t think it’s a simple as supporting elites against the exposure of their lies. It’s about having a government that can function and communicate with itself, too.
“Our government”? So you’re a billionaire now?
But it’s OUR government. Why should any but a very tiny few have to be held in secret at all?
If it were up to me, Senators and Congressmen could never have a secret discussion. They’d be on 24-hour realit TV. Then we’d truly have a window into everything, and a government of, by and for the people.
I understand someone wrote a novel about a world with no secrets. I heard it made love impossible. That’s a sad but probably true observation..!
No. “Sell-out” means money is the prime motivator, and Digby’s whole point is that these guys didn’t need to threaten mainstream reporters’ incomes to get favorable coverage. But it does mean that those reporters are not objective. As soon as anyone starts thinking of a particular set of politicians (as opposed to our institutions) as “our government,” meaning one whose success they are vested in, then in any case where the authority of that government is challenged, especially from beyond our borders, the journalists are far more likely to take the government’s side.
Any citizen, of course, should want their government to govern well. But where it gets problematic is passing judgment on which policies qualify as “governing well.” I actually prefer media like Fox or DKos or individual reporters or commentators where I already know the biases; it helps me contextualize what they’re saying. But when reporters who bleat endlessly about their prized objectivity mindlessly parrot politicos’ warnings about WikiLeaks’ threat to All We Hold Dear (and how the State Dept leaks proved what an effective job US diplomats do, when it proved nothing of the kind), well, the hypocrisy kind of bugs me.
I’ve been saying for years that the real bias of legacy media in this country is less liberal or conservative than deference to power, regardless of its professed ideology. WikiLeaks coverage was a pretty good example of that. And it’s even more insidious than digby’s observation. It’s not just that legacy reporters and editors didn’t need to be threatened; it’s that at the national level almost any reporters or editors who might need to be threatened in such a case would never have been hired in the first place.
Wowouch! Annonymous does sound pretty damn scifi-ish scary, not sure I’d wanna be in their sights.
And just as we all know, Glenn is not a person to ever want to be on the other side of an argument with without a super computer to back you up as you struggle for facts; these folks shouldn’t think he or Annonymous can be dismissed simply by giving them a label and assuming it’s game over.
Stakes are big but I swear I can hear someone whispering ‘here kitty kitty’
Which would you rather have, a government that never has to worry about any secrets ever being leaked, or a government that has to worry about everything being leaked?
True, that is a choice of extremes, but I would take the second choice. Without wikileaks we would have very close to the first choice.
Leaking is a good thing.
And Anon. Picking on a supposed security firm and exposing them as incompetent? It does not get any better.
.
Booman,
Consider, for a second, a government that has little need for secrets, and what that would mean. It has amazing and mostly positive possibilities.
Sure. Troop movements in a time of war. There are things I’d keep secret, too. But there are precious few things that fall into that category.
Yep.
Btw – JFK said, after the fact, he wished the plans for the Bay of Pigs had been made more public – then they couldn’t have gone ahead. He said this even while decrying that some leaks spoiled the surprise attack.
I’d use the same standard that presidents used up until Dubya (who labeled everything a state secret). Deliberations and informational memos leading up to a decision can be kept confidential. (That, incidentally, covers a lot of the State Dept. leaks). But the decisions themselves should almost always be public, except for the obvious wartime and secret op exceptions.
That seems about right to me. Without some protection for the advice, leaders who can’t know all things about all issues are going to get advice from (by definition) ambitious aides with one eye on the possible public response and their future careers. I’m more concerned with the decisions, and holding decision-makers accountable, than the process leading to it.
Exactly right. I don’t need to know what the ambassador thinks about the First Lady of Algeria’s weight problem. There is a lot of gossip and otherwise embarrassing crap that just causes problems in the leaks. And, I’m sorry, but people at the New York Times can’t predict was piece of idle, and seemingly meaningless chatter is going to cause a diplomatic row and lead who knows where. A lot of the stuff should not have seen the light of day.
Well, gossip about the weight of the First Lady of Algeria should not even be in State Dept memos. And if it is then I would want to know about how State employees are wasting their time.
So, you don’t want to know, I do. How should that be resolved? If the government is allowed to keep secret what a certain amount of the people do not want knowledge of, even though a large number does want to know, they will keep everything secret.
It’s not just the details of a particular memo that is important. It’s sometimes the wastefulness. Or the incompetence.
I am reminded of a conversation I had with some co workers right after 9/11. We were discussing what tactics the government would use to ‘break the case’ and some said ‘I don’t want to know how they do it’. I said ‘Well, I want to know everything they do, because that is how you would find out if the terrorists succeeded or failed in their goals! Torture = win. The government listened to the ones who ‘did not want to know’.
How did that work out for us?
Secrets are almost always counter to freedom. Democracies are based on an educated population. It’s all we have. America is in trouble because many ‘don’t want to know’.
.
So, you want to be able to read confidential correspondence between our embassies and our appointed officials in DC? Do want Michelle Obama’s email password while you’re at it?
You sound all high-minded, but you’re not thinking things through.
Wikileaks didn’t choose what to publish. Blame the NYT or anyone else you want for wasting our time and their space publishing trivia.
Some more trivia that good citizens don’t want to know about, couyrtesy of Greg Mitchell at HuffPo:
-Saudi donors remain the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al Qaeda.
-Saudis (and some other Middle Eastern states) pressed U.S. to take stronger action against Iran.
-Yemeni president lied to his own people, claiming his military carried out air strikes on militants actually done by U.S. All part of giving U.S. full rein in country against terrorists.
-Shocking levels of U.S. spying at the United Nations (beyond what was commonly assumed) and intense use of diplomats abroad in intelligence-gathering roles.
-U.S. tried to get Spain to curb its probes of Gitmo torture and rendition. Saudi king suggested to Obama that we plant micro-chips on Gitmo detainees.
-Cables showed the UK promised in 2009 to protect U.S interests in the official Chilcot inquiry on the start of the Iraq war.
-American and British diplomats fear Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program — with poor security — could lead to fissile material falling into the hands of terrorists or a devastating nuclear exchange with India.
-Washington was misled by our own diplomats on Russia-Georgia showdown.
-The UK sidestepped a ban on housing cluster bombs. Officials concealed from Parliament how the U.S. is allowed to bring weapons on to British soil in defiance of treaty.
-NYT headline: “An Afghan Quandary: Fighting Corruption With Corrupt Officials.” Excerpt:
“From hundreds of diplomatic cables, Afghanistan emerges as a looking-glass land where bribery, extortion and embezzlement are the norm and the honest man is a distinct outlier. Describing the likely lineup of Afghanistan’s new cabinet last January, the American Embassy noted that the agriculture minister, Asif Rahimi, ‘appears to be the only minister that was confirmed about whom no allegations of bribery exist.'”
-Afghan vice president left country with $52 million “in cash.”
-Potential environmental disaster kept secret by the US when a large consignment of highly enriched uranium in Libya came close to cracking open and leaking radioactive material into the atmosphere. ”
-U.S. used threats, spying, and more to try to get its way at last year’s crucial climate conference in Copenhagen.
-Iraqi government officials see Saudi Arabia, not Iran, as the biggest threat to the integrity and cohesion of their fledgling democratic state.
-Details on Vatican hiding big sex abuse cases in Ireland. Vatican cables so “inflammatory” they could spark violence against Catholics in UK.
-Oil giant Shell claims to have “inserted staff” and fully infiltrated Nigeria’s government.
– North Koreans implored the U.S. to get Eric Clapton to play a concert that might loosen up their glorious leader.
-Guardian goes nuclear: “The leaked U.S. cables reveal the constant, largely unseen, work by American diplomatic missions around the world to try to keep the atomic genie in its bottle and forestall the nightmare of a terrorist nuclear attack.”
-Cable shows Israel cooperating with Abbas vs. Hamas during Gaza attacks.
-U.K. training death squads in Bangladesh, widely denounced by human rights groups.
-Cable finds U.S. criticizing the Vatican for not supporting population control methods. The U.S. ambassador there lamented, “the Vatican will continue to oppose aggressive population control measures to fight hunger or global warming.”
-U.S. pressured the European Union to accept GM — genetic modification, that is.
– Hundreds of cables detail U.S. use of diplomats as “sales” agents, more than previously thought, centering on jet rivalry of Boeing vs. Airbus. Hints of corruption and bribes.
-Russia is a “mafia state.”
-Israel wanted to bring Gaza to the”brink of collapse.”
-Extremely important historical document finally released in full: Ambassador April Glaspie’s cable from Iraq in 1990 on meeting with Saddam Hussein before Kuwait invasion.
-Cables on Tunisia appear to help spark revolt in that country. The country’s ruling elite described as “The Family,” with Mafia-like skimming throughout the economy. The country’s First Lady may have made massive profits off a private school.
-U.S. knew all about massive corruption in Tunisia back in 2006 but went on supporting the government anyway, making it the pillar of its North Africa policy.
-The U.S. secret services used Turkey as a base to transport terrorism suspects as part of its extraordinary rendition program.
And much more just in the past week, including torture and corruption and Egypt.
Also – consider this: reporters who are the most famous and “respected” get to be so because they are the most servile to the national security state. I have a great quote about that, but it’s in my book, at home.
You do remember that the same argument was used for the Super Secret Cheney Energy Meetings that lead us to a war in Iraq?
I think it’s healthy to air the sheets every once in a while.
Air them all the time.
.
Hm. I’m not sure what you found “creepy” about the Anonymous post. A computer security firm did some chest thumping in the press about how they’ve found out crap about big bad hacker group, and the big bad hacker group promptly pwned them. It’s not really creepy, more like “that’s how the Internet works” – you don’t shoot at the king unless you’re sure you’re going to be able to kill him. And in this case it appears that the security firm wasn’t even using a loaded gun when they took their shot.
The lesson of the story is – if you’re going to be tracking down successful hacker groups, don’t call them out publicly. Which is something that anyone working in actual computer security knows these days (or should know these days) – you keep it on the down-low, mass your data, and when the time is right you bring the hammer down. You absolutely don’t call attention to yourself.
There’s a not very fine line between the government being able to conduct its legitimate operations with an expectation of confidentiality, and a government that carries out secret murders, kidnappings, torture, and military violence all over the world and doesn’t want the people who pay for it, and are morally culpable for it — us — to know.