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Comment by dtf | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

Eh, only sort of.

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.

See: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/03/privacy_and_po...

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.

So what you're saying is: if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear?

I've heard that before...

For businesses / governments? Yes. They are not people. They have very few of the rights people have.

They actually have quite a few that people don't have.

Those two points don't contradict each other.

> 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.

Future leakers may be smart enough not to seek validation from individuals whom the government already has it in for.

Wow that sentence sucked. I hope you get my drift.

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.

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