Whatever you feel about Assange as a personality, it's pretty clear that this is the way things will be from now on - even if Wikileaks were somehow to be taken out of the picture. And it's much to our benefit, I think. The old school has for too long used secrecy as a cloak for mediocrity.
The connection the article draws with Zuckerberg's views on privacy (basically, "get used to not having it") is interesting. Though the article doesn't mention it, it also seems to be a similar mentality to Eric Schmidt's comment that "if you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place".
Not sure what I think about that trend overall, but if the future is going to be one of "involuntary transparency", it does seem like it should apply to corporations and governments too, not just individuals.
If involuntary transparency applies to individuals, it will inevitably become applies to corporations and governments whether they want it to or not.
If the individuals that make up companies and governments can no longer hide their secrets, it becomes a defacto reality that those agencies will no longer be able to hide their secrets in individuals. There's a whole sci-fi AI theme here, but I'm sure an object made of data will have worse security than a human that can voluntarily withdraw all its data into its head.
Humans have unlimited privacy, so long as they keep it inside their head. My peers today that blurt every cogitation out on Facebook and Twitter have no ability to comprehend the use of privacy until they feel they desperately need it. How is a government or corporation going to maintain its privacy when it employs people who can barely keep a thought to themselves?
There's two parts to transparency - a feasible way to get information, and the resources/motivation to do so.
This could all very easily play out in a way that individuals have no expectation of privacy in the face of corporate/government scans of all available data, but the reverse doesn't hold, unless people like wikileaks step up to the plate.
In context, Schmidt's comment is more like "If you have something to hide you shouldn't be doing it on Google servers because we're legally obliged to hand over your data to the government." An important difference, I think.
Naturally. If all communication and all transactions are electronic, they will be stored and indexed. First, this happens in corporations and other organizations. Since this knowledge is power, the state can't let this go on for very long, and it will demand access to this data. This process is in full swing in Europe with things like the Data Retention Directive and various Echelon clones.
The people can't let the state have all this power, since it's an absurd power advantage which people are rightly afraid leads to an Orwellian society. They will protest with things like the Pirate Party.
There is another way of undermining this information advantage, however, which is to disclose information instead of trying to hide it from certain entities. If you tell everyone what you do, you can't be blackmailed, for instance. In my view, things like Facebook and Twitter are symptoms of this. When my mom goes on about why people broadcast what they had for breakfast, I usually tell her that they are subverting the power.
Zuckerberg, Schmidt and Assange have understood this and are acting and speaking accordingly.
The only other way forward, in my view, is ubiquitous end-to-end encryption between individuals. I'm not so sure that would be a good thing, and I don't see how it could work if the current trend of communication and transactions being concentrated in fewer and fewer hubs will continue, since that means someone has access to at least timestamp and communicating parties.
If we can reverse that and decentralize, encryption between "power symmetric" parties might work. But then, it might not be necessary.
Zuckerberg and Schmidt are talking about the privacy of individuals. This is about the privacy of governments and large businesses. The power dynamics are vastly different.
I generally think so too. It's also more likely to impose responsibility in such cloaked goings-on, as the actions may be revealed later. If what they were doing was justified at the time, it's not much of a problem; if it wasn't, they have it coming.
Secrecy has uses, but perpetual secrecy seems useful only to hide what you should be punished for.
> It's also more likely to impose responsibility in such cloaked goings-on, as the actions may be revealed later.
Call me a cynic, but I think that what will happen in the short term is that people (US diplomats in this case) will continue to behave in the exact same way, only now they won't trust the diplomatic 'cable' system to communicate and will temporarily revert to more old school practices (person to person or encrypted voice communications).
I'm not sure that's even likely. I think business and the cable system continue as always. The leak only occurred, from what we know, due to the actions of Manning. That's one person, out of the estimated 3 Million who have access to Secret classified cables. The punishment pursued against him, and the screening FSOs go through, make future leaks, I think not so certain.
I agree. At least in the US, I have long viewed traditional media as nothing more than public relations divisions of the various political parties. Face it - when you're not doing your job, someone's gonna step in and do it for you.
Notice too that while this traditional media decries the leaked cables, they can't help but spend time telling us exactly what's in them.
Mediocrity seems to carry a large center of gravity.It's so much easier to obscure evil ethics, than it is to change the core of what you stand for.
The noise will just have to be increased when it comes to hiding the facts. I can see many of these large institutions with skeletons in the closet might lobby for tighter censorship now. What was once isolated events now has a core. Keeping the illusion that they are aberrations stopped them from becoming more than that.
I agree in principle but note that even if it to "our" (society's, the individual's) long term benefit it may nevertheless very much result in quite dramatic short-term pains.
Anybody who has worked at a fortune 500 tech company knows how much security (physical, IP, etc.) tends to be a joke. To the degree that such security works its often due to the lack of serious threats and the ubiquity of individual discretion. As more institutions with serious resources and an anti-secrecy agenda come into existence and grow in stature and capability this comfy situation will likely devolve. In the near term that might lead to a lot of very unhealthy reactionary responses. More NDAs, more security, police state tactics being deployed throughout the tech industry (as an example). We can look to the responses of the RIAA/MPAA to modern communication technology as a yard stick for the way the typical corporate mind might react to the onslaught of "openness" that wikileaks and its ilk will cause.
Similarly, how will government respond? We see the sort of ridiculousness that we already have to put up with (TSA pat-downs, porno-scanners, liquid limitations, other security theater), what new travails will the public have to put up with?
My way of thinking is that this actually provides a great opportunity for more enlightened individuals & organizations. If you embraced FOSS 10 years ago, you're at a clear advantage as a dev now. So it will be the same with this new kind of security/privacy openness: embrace it now & you'll have a massive advantage in the future.
"Like informational IEDs, these damaging revelations can be detonated at will."
"What do large companies think of the threat? If they’re terrified, they’re not saying. None would talk to us. Nor would the U.S. Chamber of Commerce."
Pure junk journalism. Strange, I'm used to see very good pieces on Forbes. Perhaps its blogs are a bit more permissive.
There's probably some really good information from BP or various banking institutions that could really shed some much needed light on recent disasters.
Wikileaks is simply doing the job that journalists have lately forgotten or refused to do.
We already have more than enough information to know that BP is guilty of gross negligence (in regards to the Deepwater Horizons disaster) up to and including negligent homicide.
Whether or not that's the case, this is something that's being investigated by government agencies who have the power to order the handing over of whatever documents they need, so leaks aren't really a big issue here. (no pun intended)
But no one pays attention to information that isn't released with careful fanfare. Assange handles the media quite well, and most organizations would be better off releasing this stuff voluntarily so no one pays attention.
Involuntary transparency can have its good aspects, but those might be offset by "unilateral disarmament" - if WikiLeaks doesn't do the same to the confidential information of, say, Chinese and/or Indian companies, then U.S. and European companies could well be at a competitive disadvantage.
Unless there's an advantage in being seen as open. ("If your European company would have done something bad, we would have heard of it. We haven't (or have heard only a mild relevation.) So you must be pretty good guys!")
I applaud WikiLeaks and Assange for disseminating the classified information to the public. That disseminated information keeps politicians honest to their constituents, which in turn, makes for better, transparent governments.
I've always been concerned that if I played it honest with my business if I would end up being fodder for the sharks that twist, bend and break the rules.
eh, I've been 'in business' most of my life now, and, I guess that isn't all that long (I think I was 12 when I started my first venture, selling pumpkins, and I'm 30 now.) I haven't seen great success, or really great failure. The thing is, every time I tried to be less than honest to gain an advantage? I got slapped down. Sometimes hard. (though most of my forays were probing and weak, and so were the consequences.)
My suspicion is that lying and dishonesty is a skill like any other, and one that is not trivial to learn. You can't just lie and expect to be rewarded, you need to know when and how to lie. People spend their lives studying that sort of thing, as well as how to detect liars. Personally, I think the average businessperson is better off being as honest and transparent as he or she is able while focusing on some other competitive advantage. Competing with the professional liars in this arena is difficult.
Hrmm...I am not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, having light shone on various dark parts of processes can be good for innovation and checks and balances - but on the other hand, it kinda feels like Assange is getting too big for his britches.
I feel like it might be getting to his head and he feels he is more important than he should be.
I also feel like he might be giving an outlet to squeaky wheels - i.e. disgruntled employees that have a bridge to burn because they are upset about management decision.
I am no big fan of corporate secrecy and perhaps shedding a light on certain practices can get 'big business' to stop lobbying lawmakers for some ridiculous things, but I am nervous that it might have many unintended consequences.
i.e. we turn Assange into a mercenary that releases stuff for his own self-aggrandizement than for the greater good.
Raise your hand if you have damning documents on your corporation. |o.
It's pretty obvious that we as the masses, get shat on by people above us. It's a fact and unless you bend the financial tax rules in your favor, you're getting smacked around too.
I think the title is misleading, he's not looking to spill 'my' companies corporate secrets, he's looking to spill big business' secrets (and by secrets I do believe the intention is to reveal unethical behaviour).
I don't work for an oil company or an investment bank, two of which are targets of his next round. Change the title!
I don't work for an oil company or an investment bank, two of which are targets of his next round. Change the title!
I do, but honestly, we aren't doing anything particularly evil. The subprime meltdown was not caused by one person's evil dealings, it was caused by many parties each doing something not-particularly-evil individually. It's like littering -- if you do it, it doesn't matter, but if everyone does it, then there's a major problem. Liar loans and CDOs were like littering, not really a problem when one person or bank "does" them. But when the whole industry does little things like this and people bet a lot of money under the assumption that this isn't happening (because the credit rating agencies mislead them), then things unravel. But it's just a colossal fuckup, not some super secret backroom deal designed to fuck over retirement funds. (The big issue was that the credit rating agencies were lazy, and told institutional investors that CDOs were a good credit risk. They obviously were not, and people lost a lot of money either buying the CDOs, or selling insurance on the CDOs.)
The bailout was similarly non-evil. The banks said, "we're fucked unless you give us a lot of money, and if we are fucked, so is everyone else", and the government said, "you're right, take the taxpayers' money". The banks did, they continued to operate, and eventually paid it back.
I do, but honestly, we aren't doing anything particularly evil.
You may not be. In fact, it's probable that the vast majority of people working for the banking industry are honest, law-abiding citizens.
But just because most people are honest, doesn't mean all of them are. I find it somewhat hard to believe Madoff was the only one lining his pockets at other people's expense.
If you read the whole transcript then you will find that he does indeed want "your" company secrets. He believes in markets but insists they cannot function without good information to highlight bad competitors. This allows the good endeavours to continue, rather than going bankrupt due to the undercutting from companies that get an advantage from unethical or illegal behaviour.
Since ICE is seizing domains who infringe copyright, wouldn't it make sense for all companies to copyright all internal documents and communication immediately, and then claim copyright infringement if wikileaks publishes them?
Even if wikileaks.org can't be seized [I'm not advocating that] wouldn't it give corporations more legal power via the DMCA to be able to claim copyright infringement?
1) All those documents are protected by copyright the moment they're produced.
2) The DMCA is a US law, and wikileaks.org's IP is in France. As with Assange, they'll move the operation wherever in the world they need to find favorable laws.
If the force of US law was enough to stop wikileaks it would have been gone long ago. Publishing national secrets is a much more intimidating crime than civil copyright infringement, no?
That's not all there is to it, Assange has a 1.4G timebomb out there, the passkey to which will likely be revealed when he decides or disappears long enough.
Maybe, I'm not so sure. The citizens of Oceania in 1984 were very much the victim of "involuntary transparency", and it didn't seem to be a good thing.
The problem with "involuntary transparency" as practiced by wikileaks is that there are inherent limitations of scope and thus inherent discrimination in application.
George Orwell was a left-communist who fought with the POUM, a Libertarian Marxist group, in the 1936 Spanish Civil War.
When Stalinism came to power, he was extraordinarily critical of it's centralization of power and of what he saw as a tyrannical subversion of democratic socialist principles.
If ever there was a man in history who left a clear blueprint on where he would side in a struggle between multinational corporations and governments, and an idealistic whistleblower organization, it's Eric Blair.
It's important to point out that the citizens of 1984 had their actions monitored at all times, yet the government operated in total secrecy. What we're discussing here is a situation in reverse.
And on that note, if you have not read it, no matter your politics, I cannot recommend "Homage To Catalonia" enough. Orwell was truly one of the most gifted writers of the 20th century.
My point is that in the time between now and when all governments and powerful organizations on Earth are open and honest (likely to be a fair stretch of time) organizations like wikileaks cannot help but discriminate in the organizations they shine a light onto. There are innumerable reasons why this is so, starting with the mere matter of random chance and limited capabilities, moving to the matter of the nature of the organization and the opportunity for such leaks to occur, to the interest of the "viewership", the consequences of getting caught, etc, etc, etc.
This discriminatory coverage has the potential to create a false portrait of reality. And that has consequences. Imagine two magazine covers, one photoshopped and immaculate the other completely "honest". To most uncritical observers the "honest" cover will appear vulgar and ugly in comparison. Only a few people will take the time to appreciate that the perfect cover is an utter lie. How do such dynamics play out in society, business, and geopolitical relations? In a wikileaks future a brutal dictatorship that can maintain utter control over its media image might be able to appear better than an honest and open, though flawed, country of liberty and consensual governance. Indeed, this is already a problem to some degree today. Idiots who don't know better imagine that life in dictatorial regimes might be exactly how the regime and its sycophants portray it (all the more believable without any dissenting voices), whereas every gritty aspect of life in western democracies and every flaw down to the least consequential is revealed in gory high-definition detail.
To me wikileaks specifically seems very much biased by the "point spread" problem, of judging America and the west by a much higher standard than the rest of the world. There's nothing wrong with holding America to a higher standard, but there's everything wrong with losing sight of the fact that the standards are different and then falling into the notion, as so many have, that, say, America is as bad as the Iranian regime, or that American troops are no better than the Taliban. The consequences of such discriminatory judgments and of such imbalanced worldviews are dire indeed.
The more I read supporters of wikileaks in this event the more evident it is that it all depends on who you think "deserves it" As long as its somebody you don't like who's ox is getting gored, life is good.
If this is truly the "age of involuntary transparency", then this problem will solve itself. Sooner or later we'll get around to dumping in public something you find precious. At that point, you'll be up in arms about cyber criminals.
Perspective and context are wondrous things. Many times instead of trying to find the general rule we're just happy that one group we like is leveling the score with another group we don't like. Once that is accomplished, we all can be quite nimble with the details of which principles we're upholding and the rationalization for our positions.
We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield. —George Orwell (1946)
I think most of us who support the wikileaks stuff are indeed following a general rule -- large organizations that spend billions/trillions of dollars and kill people on our behalf deserve scrutiny. Individual human beings deserve privacy. Protect the little guys from the big guys, let freedom ring, we hold these truths self-evident and all of that. This is basic stuff -- it all hinges on individual privacy and the individual right to know what is being done with our money and our flag.
High-profile wikileaks leaks which don't fit your pattern include:
"On 25 November 2009, WikiLeaks released 570,000 intercepts of pager messages sent on the day of the September 11 attacks."
Clearly a gross invasion of privacy for many individuals involved.
"In September 2008, during the 2008 United States presidential election campaigns, the contents of a Yahoo account belonging to Sarah Palin (the running mate of Republican presidential nominee John McCain) were posted on WikiLeaks"
An astoundingly clear violation of an individual's privacy. One gives up a certain level of privacy when entering public life, but that was ridiculous.
"After briefly appearing on a blog, the membership list of the far-right British National Party was posted to WikiLeaks on 18 November 2008."
If anyone's the "little guy", it's the British National Party, a hard-working group of political idealists fighting for what they believe in against tremendous odds. Of course they also happen to be a bunch of openly racist jerks, but they're also an oppressed minority.
Well, then, I'll have to assume you're a libertarian.
How on earth do you square that with opposing what wikileaks does? Liber-authoritarian? Is it just because they published Sarah Palin's email? (BTW, it's illegal to conduct public business over private email, that's why the leak was noteworthy).
You know, I hated to add the last part to my comment, but it just didn't look right being a one-liner.
It wasn't meant to be a snarky point, but a serious one: it's a very nice turn of a phrase. It's neat how we invent new phrases to couch certain concepts either pro or con.
I love language and the study of how we communicate. Watching little phrases like this appear and then either grow or die (to me) is extremely fascinating.
EDIT: A terrific example of this is the oldie "mistakes were made" Note how the sentence actually has no subject -- "mistakes" seem to have made themselves. Cool stuff.
