I do not know what helps or does not help the terrorists. And I’m certainly not saying that Barbara Starr helped the terrorists by publishing her report. I don’t think she did. Anymore than Glenn Greenwald did. And more importantly, I don’t think the vast majority of people you see opining on “what helps the terrorists" have any clue what does or doesn’t. But it is a problem for this country, and for the functioning of our democracy, when Glenn Greenwald’s leak reporting is treated so differently than the Barbara Starr leak reporting. When, as with Glenn Greenwald’s reporting, the leaks are not specifically designed to advance the Pentagon’s agenda, then we have shock and controversy, and calls for prosecution. But when they are [designed to advance the Pentagon’s agenda], as with the Barbara Starr reporting…radio silence.
There is a vast and growing web of secret government in this country. And simply cannot be the case, it is not acceptable, that the only things we know about it, are the things that the members of that secret government want us to know. Because at the end of the day, it is on us, it is on all of us, what our government does in our name.
Tag: secrets
A Few Differences
Juan Cole runs down the Top 10 differences between the treatment of Edward Snowden and recently outed (suspected) Stuxnet leaker General James “Hoss” Cartwright:
No one will obsess about the exercise habits of Gen. Cartwright’s wife.
Gen. Cartwright will not be characterized as “a 63-year-old hacker.”
Gen. Cartwright will not be described as “nerdy” or “flaky.”
David Gregory will not ask that David Sanger be prosecuted for espionage because he aided and abetted Cartwright’s leaking.
We won’t get stories every day about where in McLean, Virginia, Gen. Cartwright is living.
Gen. Cartwright won’t be accused of being a spy for Iran.
No lurid stories will be rehearsed on the Sunday afternoon shows about Cartwright’s allegedly overly familiar relationship with a young female aide in 2009, with heavy innuendo as to what the episode said about his reckless character.
No FBI informants will be placed inside the elite Alfalfa Club in DC that Cartwright was known to attend.
Cartwright’s loyalty to the United States won’t be impugned by anchors or congressmen.
Dirt won’t be dug up on David Sanger’s private life in an attempt to discredit his reporting on Cartwright’s Stuxnet.
It’s not what is done. It is who does it that matters in Washington. Even past closeness to power covers a multitude of sins.
Yep. Read the whole thing
I think that marketers like “cloud computing” because it is devoid of substantive meaning. The term’s meaning is not substance, it’s an attitude: ‘Let any Tom, Dick and Harry hold your data, let any Tom, Dick and Harry do your computing for you (and control it).’ Perhaps the term ‘careless computing’ would suit it better.
Richard Stallman holds forth on ChromeOS (and cloud computing in general). Methinks he is not impressed. He also raises some interesting points on government prying, and their improved ability to pry if your data is in the cloud; though it is my understanding that they’d still need a warrant even for remotely stored information. That’s really what that email judgment was all about. Perhaps his concern falls more into the “they won’t even bother” department…
Old News
Thanks to Wikileaks, though, I now know the extent to which top American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world, as the Iraq mission exploded.
Memo to all assignment editors still employed in the American media apparatus: If you posit that Wikileaks file dumps are inevitably “old news” and thus nothing worth covering, then why aren’t you asking yourself the question that clearly follows: why were those 400,000 documents of “old news” classified in the first place? Where’s an ongoing series about reflexive, pervasive classification and its poisonous impact on any ostensibly free society?
For the American Republic to operate, we ought to expect that a smallish filing cabinet will ultimately be full of the truly dangerous secrets that must be kept. Nuclear bomb designs, the plans for the invasion of Normandy beach next year, and other sensitive documents of that sort are all that should be in there. Instead, “our” government routinely classifies everything, almost certainly still including many aspects of the Normandy beach invasion of 1944. How is a citizen supposed to know anything about the operation of their government? How is a citizen supposed to understand the wages (or even benefits) of these secret decisions, carried out in secret, reported on in secret, and then bundled away inside of another secret which might, just might, show up in heavily redacted form 50 years later, only to be greeted as “old news” by a media all too eager to please its governmental “adversary.”
The answer, of course, is: they are not supposed to.
Step one in any national recovery, any reemergence of sensibility and civic attention is going to have to be: no more blanket secrecy. Period. It’s very easy to know what should be classified as secret in a democracy, and that’s almost nothing. Classification as a general tool (and an inevitable bulwark used to hide the rampant lawlessness of administrations from both parties) obfuscates the outcomes of our own often poisonous and self-defeating policies, the very ones many of us claim to hold dear (while knowing next to nothing about them), and it has got to stop.
Lemkin 