WikiLeaks Wants To Spill Your Corporate Secrets
blogs.forbes.com
blogs.forbes.com
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 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.
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.
See: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/03/privacy_and_po...
Secrecy has uses, but perpetual secrecy seems useful only to hide what you should be punished for.
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).
Wow that sentence sucked. I hope you get my drift.
I've heard that before...
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.
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.
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?
"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.
Wikileaks is simply doing the job that journalists have lately forgotten or refused to do.
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.
Hardly the crime of the century.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
When the leak is out, will the bank's stock tank?
If the leak is leaked, will some short it?
My, what a nice turn of a phrase.
Assange dumps all your trade secrets on the net? It's not a crime, nope, you're just being "involuntarily transparent".
Orwell would have been proud.
Orwell would have been proud, indeed.
The problem with "involuntary transparency" as practiced by wikileaks is that there are inherent limitations of scope and thus inherent discrimination in application.
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.
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)
"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.
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).
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.
http://www.mistakesweremadebutnotbyme.com/
Time to go get it I guess.