Killing the messenger

The New York Times reports recently about broad-based web attacks on the world corporatocracy. The attacks, reportedly the work of the group Anonymous, have been directed at major players in the commerce world: Visa, Mastercard, Amazon and Paypal, to name a few.

The activities of Anonymous - to date best known for its battle with Scientology - come in response to decisions take by the organizations named above to strangle Wikileaks by denying it web access and blocking donations.  The head of Wikileaks meanwhile has been the focus of international efforts to muzzle and is now in custody in London.

Unless you've been locked in a biosphere for the last six months, then you are aware that Wikileaks has been obtaining and making available to the public some fairly sensitive (and often embarrassing) materials it has gathered from sources in government and the military. All of what Wikileaks has published was hidden behind the "Top Secret" wall.

And this is pretty much the point of Wikileaks activity: they believe that governance should be done in the sunlight. Odd concept that, but there you are. 

For all of Obama's blathering about transparency, our government has little to no respect for that archaic ideal that the people own the government, not the other way around.  These paranoic and spastic efforts at absolute secrecy began in modern times with Dwight Eisenhower, a man whose previous success had arisen from the ability to keep military actions secret.

Each subsequent administration built on the structure that Eisenhower put in place. On the left there is a solid conviction that secrecy really took off under the Bush administration, but it is our man Clinton who kicked off the recent spasms of classification with Executive Order 12958 which allowed 20 government offices to classify material on a whim.

Anecdote: In the article linked above, Scott Ferrell talks about newspaper clippings - you know, those things that we have all read? Classified. Yep, that's right, our government was so mad to classify things that they stamped content from the public domain as "Top Secret" so that only those with the right security clearance - and the whole rest of the United States, in any library - could access them.

Anyway... it is true that the Bush administration oversaw a tremendous expansion of secrecy after Sept 11, 2001. Today security administration and operations occupies millions of square feet of office space in DC, employs more than a million people with security clearance and consists in about 3500 various organizations (public and private) that check, map, analyze, infiltrate, data mine, surveil, disinform, and covertly control about every aspect of life on this planet. There is no let up in sight.

The simple fact is that there is so much going on, that no one actually has control of it all. There is tremendous redundancy (more than 50 organizations track the movement of money in terrorist organizations), continuous turf war and an unbelievable amount of waste. More important, because of the shear mass of the effort, more and more of these organizations are becoming more and more insulated from the government that "controls" them; the citizens of the US have become simply data points, about which anything can be found out, and on which any number of hells can be brought down with but a a click of a mouse.

So, Wikileaks is a danger to the security of the US? Truth is that Wikileaks has not even scratched the surface of the military/security complex. Indeed, I am certain that there are some security professionals out there who are happy about what Wikileaks has done. Because the result will be a lot of sturm and drang, a few bits of legislation and then the American people will fall happily back to sleep, thinking the matter is settled.

I wish Wikileaks well. I hope that they find and expose more. In fact, I hope that they create a crisis of such magnitude that it requires ground level changes in the way we do business.

But I have no illusions. When I worked in social services the bottom line of ethical judgment and risk management came down to this: "Don't say or do anything  you would not be comfortable talking about on a witness stand." I expect that that is what will happen in the US government: "Don't say or do anything you wouldn't be comfortable reading about on Wikileaks." I am confident that the eventual development will be that the security community will get around the problem of secret documents by finding a way to conduct business without creating any documentation. 

This has been done before. FDR made off the record promises at Pottsdam in which he gave away much of Eastern Europe to Stalin. He told no one, wrote nothing down, and then he died. Truman, who knew nothing of the agreement, saw Stalins actualization of the Pottsdam agreement - something Stalin assumed everybody on the US side knew about - as an attempt to take over the world. Stalin in turn saw Truman as attempting to renege on the agreements at Pottsdam. 

The entirety of the Cold War, the arms race, the development of nuclear deterrence, and the imperialistic meddling in Africa, Central America and the mountains of Afghanistan can be traced back to that one little secret.

So when Hillary says that some things must be secret to conduct business in the world, I just shake my head and smile. Me sitting here waiting for the next Cold War.