Excellent analysis of Assange's Wikileaks motivations (from the horse's mouth) | Hacker News Reader

Excellent analysis of Assange's Wikileaks motivations (from the horse's mouth)

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179 pointsRickHull105 comments

It's a pretty good analysis, and Assange seems to have put a lot of thought into it. However, he's making an assumption that I think is unfounded, which is treating the concentration of political power as monolithic. If you assume that an organization is concerned about the power of the organization, then I think he's correct in his logic that authoritarianism leads to conspiracy and communication is important to having power. However, if you assume that most members of an organization are concerned with personal power rather than the power of the organization, then the importance of communication goes down sharply, as the only coordination is opportunistic. A bureaucracy, as opposed to a dictatorship, is quite content without having goals, coordination, or communication[1], and can expand its authority based entirely on the mission creep of lower-level individuals within it.

How valuable the disruption of communication is in fighting a "regime" depends on how you model that regime. And, of course, in practice you will find that reality is some bizarre chimera of any group of models. My intuition is that Congress (plus lobbyists) act more like a decentralized bureaucracy, executive administrations act more like dictatorships that fight against each other for territory, and that the closest things we find to Assange's "banal conspiracies" are small, ad-hoc, opportunistic alignment of objectives, much smaller, less powerful, and less stable than the government as a whole.

[1] In fact, lack of coordination could help a bureaucracy grow by fostering redundancy.

I really just disagree with all of that. Assange did not appear to me to be making any assumption about political power being monolithic. He is only talking about conspiracies as things in general having power, and notes that large parts of the US government act in conspirational ways..

Further, I don't think you can really have any model of current regime which absolutely could not function if it could not communicate secretly.

The sum of every secret conversation that the conspirator would not want the world to know about because it would breed opposition is the net capacity of the organization to act in unjust ways. If it cannot communicate internally in secret, it simply cannot act in unjust ways for any length of time.

That's a really interesting question. Can it be that the perceived "neo-con" or "Liberal" machines are really emergent behavior based solely (or predominantly) on independent, opportunistic agents?

I don't know the answer to that, but it's interesting to ponder.

That's one thing I think is worth rescuing from classical Marxism (ignoring the political prescriptions that the Marxists added on top). The "historical materialist" view that history is largely emergent behavior of structural elements like economic relations, not the result of either "great men" or conscious conspiracies, or some preordained macro-scale order, is still pretty relevant imo.

(It's actually out of favor in contemporary Marxist thought, oddly enough, which has gone more in the direction of analyzing the role of culture, hegemony, etc., following Gramsci. Perhaps some non-Marxists will have to revive the historical-materialist approach. Jared Diamond's work is sort of in that direction.)

tl;dr version (and it is quite long). I've copied out what I think are the key bits, the following is all quoted:

He begins by positing that conspiracy and authoritarianism go hand in hand, arguing that since authoritarianism produces resistance to itself -- to the extent that its authoritarianism becomes generally known -- it can only continue to exist and function by preventing its intentions (the authorship of its authority?) from being generally known. It inevitably becomes, he argues, a conspiracy ...

the most effective way to attack this kind of organization would be to make "leaks" a fundamental part of the conspiracy’s information environment. Which is why the point is not that particular leaks are specifically effective. Wikileaks does not leak something like the Collateral Murder video as a way of putting an end to that particular military tactic; that would be to target a specific leg of the hydra even as it grows two more. Instead, the idea is that increasing the porousness of the conspiracy’s information system will impede its functioning, that the conspiracy will turn against itself in self-defense, clamping down on its own information flows in ways that will then impede its own cognitive function. You destroy the conspiracy, in other words, by making it so paranoid of itself that it can no longer conspire ...

The leak, in other words, is only the catalyst for the desired counter-overreaction; Wikileaks wants to provoke the conspiracy into turning off its own brain in response to the threat. As it tries to plug its own holes and find the leakers, he reasons, its component elements will de-synchronize from and turn against each other, de-link from the central processing network, and come undone.

... he quotes Theodore Roosevelt’s words from his 1912 Progressive party presidential platform as the epigraph to the first essay; Roosevelt realized a hundred years ago that "Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people," and it was true, then too, that "To destroy this invisible government, to befoul this unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of statesmanship."

I don't want to get into a detailed analysis of the piece -- I only had time to skim it.

But am I to understand that I (and the rest of the American people) have paid tens of billions of dollars, had multiple elections, politically demonstrated and pleaded to Congressmen, to have a State Department that Assange doesn't feel should keep secrets, so he dumps the embassy cables?

If a single actor can take it on himself to do all of that, then why am I wasting my time choosing who to vote for, paying taxes, and debating with my fellow citizens what the correct policy on "X" might be? Seems like I should just take it on myself -- after careful analysis of course -- that Assange is a danger to my representative form of government and I should go shoot him (I mean this completely rhetorically, by the way. I in no way support violence against anybody)

The problem here is believing your own bullshit, as they say on the streets. Or put nicer, coming up with a line of reasoning that you (and perhaps others) deem to be the "correct" one, and then imposing it on the rest of us against our will.

Democracies don't work by doing the right or correct thing. They work by the consent of the governed. If Assange takes away my illusion of having some say in the governing of my state, then he's effectively attacking the social contract.

I just can't see how this plays out very well.

Yes. See also comment 32 by "Incomitatus":

2. Assange believes that what he calls ‘conspiracy’ is bad, that authority is bad. He regards these things as inherently ‘unjust’. He may not say it, or maybe the analyst who wrote this piece didn’t feel the need to draw it out, but his position logically requires him to regard the State as inherently unjust and evil. If he doesn’t, it can only be because he misapprehends the fundamental nature of the State. In short, Assange is an Anarchist, whether he realises it or not, and his agenda can be countered by every argument ever made for the value of the State as an institution.

To my mind, the most interesting, basic questions raised by the Wikileaks sensation are these:

To what extent may a good and proper government of the People keep secrets from its People and to what extent may it not? Secondly, if the State deems knowledge inappropriate for dissemination to the People how then are citizens empowered to change the State?

I don't have an answer for either of these questions. To have no secrets it desirable, but I do not see how this would not lead to pure Anarchy (in the political sense); hardly desirable in which malevolent actors are a part of the political process. Swing around to the other extreme and we've dropped ourselves into a Totalitarian Democracy.

To have no secrets it desirable, but I do not see how this would not lead to pure Anarchy (in the political sense)

I wonder if government could even function without secrets. A wartime government certainly couldn't--World War II would have gone much differently if Germany knew Britain had broken Enigma, or if Japan knew how to build an atomic bomb.

But what about more routine things? A lot of times we trust the government to keep our personal secrets. Consider health care. Most governments provide health care to some people in some capacity, be it the local public hospital or through a single payer system like Canada or even the NHS. How do you run one of these systems without protecting the privacy of your patients--i.e. keeping secrets?

Perhaps we should consider diplomacy, given the recent leak. Sometimes diplomatic negotiations are very sensitive, and the smallest leak can catastrophically queer the deal. Consider the Cuban Missile Crisis--a well-placed leak there could have led to war.

Or perhaps we should consider the criminal justice system. No state secrets means no Witness Protection Program. Sealed juvenile criminal records are generally considered a good thing, as is (in some cases) jury sequestration and the identities of rape victims.

Finally, a government that can't keep secrets can't use cryptographic authentication or cryptographic channels for anything, from running an HTTPS service to transferring funds. Hell, they can't even secure their computer networks. We would all have the constitutional right to root access on every government computer.

I have no doubt that a government could not function without the ability to keep some data private, hence my assertion that Anarchy existed as the consequence of absolute transparency.

> But what about more routine things? A lot of times we trust the government to keep our personal secrets. Consider health care. Most governments provide health care to some people in some capacity, be it the local public hospital or through a single payer system like Canada or even the NHS. How do you run one of these systems without protecting the privacy of your patients--i.e. keeping secrets? > > Or perhaps we should consider the criminal justice system. No state secrets means no Witness Protection Program. Sealed juvenile criminal records are generally considered a good thing, as is (in some cases) jury sequestration and the identities of rape victims.

I think that the conflation of individual privacy and the privacy of a government as an entity is erroneous. I can elaborate further, if you disagree or do not see why I assert such a thing.

> * Perhaps we should consider diplomacy, given the recent leak. Sometimes diplomatic negotiations are very sensitive, and the smallest leak can catastrophically queer the deal. Consider the Cuban Missile Crisis--a well-placed leak there could have led to war.*

I hope to address this below. Please do let me know if you feel that I have not.

> Finally, a government that can't keep secrets can't use cryptographic authentication or cryptographic channels for anything, from running an HTTPS service to transferring funds. Hell, they can't even secure their computer networks.

There is a distinct difference between degrees of openness with regard to citizens and with regard to external peoples. If we posit a totally transparent government, secure networks and the like could exist if every citizen were granted, on request and without possibility of denial, the appropriate credentials.

> We would all have the constitutional right to root access on every government computer.

I don't believe that this deduction necessarily follows. If we posit a completely transparent governmental apparatus, a distinction may still be drawn between a citizen's right to agency and a right to knowledge. Concerns and further objections may be raised, of course. However, I do not believe that total transparency is a feasible model for a government--hence the Anarchy--and do not believe that elaboration on this hypothetical is profitable path.

I am not--and I had hoped to make this more plain earlier-- advocating a state with no ability to keep data private. I do not wish to live in a society so ordered. Rather, inspired by the rhetoric of my State officials in response to WikiLeaks' actions, I have begun to wonder at the ideal compromise point between total openness and total secrecy of data. The current and former US administrations have certainly abused the privileged of classifying documents as State Secrets. Though I am a US citizen of voting age, I have no way to determine why a document is given a Secret classification, nor can I make an informed vote on sitting candidates if part of their actions remain hidden.

Are they keeping secrets that have been leaked? The Pentagon has insisted so far that none of it really mattered that much. It's not like there has been action for war crimes or something.

Seems like the only action that will be taken is the leakers will be prosecuted for violating security classification laws but most of this stuff shouldn't have been classified in the first place. Or perhaps should have been classified differently.

There is a different kind of "secret" that appears to be what has been compromised so far. You ever write code and maybe you're fast and furious and you've got some vulgarities in the comments but you're just hacking it out, then once it's working you start to button it up and maybe clean some of that stuff out? Face to face I might call and idea "fucked" but I rarely call it that in an email, I try to be a little bit more reserved, that email might live for a long time where as the face to face conversation sort of ends and disappears. It seems like the current wikileaks shows some of the unfiltered information that hasn't been processed for mass consumption yet but I have yet to hear about real lack of transparency or corruption. That's not exactly a lack of transparency or secrecy though.

It's the same reason they don't put the slaughter house right there inside the grocery store... You could do that, and offer the freshest of the freshest meat, it's a great design if freshness of meat is your only and primary goal. It's a terrible design if you're goal is to get protein to the masses though. Technically in a very black and white sense, it's a lack of transparency but not seeing how the sausage is made isn't always a bad thing.

So let me get this right: what you're asserting is that it's necessary for government officials to protect us by concealing or spinning information so it's only presented to us in the best light, for our own good?

Imagine if, for a second, that the slaughterhouse WAS in the grocery store. As civilized humans, some of whom think of ourselves as compassionate and caring, we would have to come face to face with the billions of animals we slaughter every year and make personal decisions as to if we thought it was right or not. In the current state of affairs, the source is abstracted so far from the final product that it's nearly completely obscured.

If we were faced with the reality of our government on a daily basis, perhaps a much larger number of people would be compelled to get involved in the process.

I'm not saying it's necessary, I'm saying it happens. And I'm not saying it's presenting it in the best light or anything like that.

It's more a kin to proof reading. I'm asserting that the leaks are closer to unedited rough drafts than any evidence of misconduct or wrong-doing. At least, so far as I've read and heard, it's more embarrassing than it is anything else.

Often it is the word spoken in private that carries the true intent of its speaker.

But more likely not. More likely that word is exaggeration, lying, etrapolating beyond one's knowledge, or a product of a myriad of other human errors. But let both be heard: the unedited and the edited.

Slaughterhouse right to the store was the norm many many years ago. There is nothing bad about killing an animal, if it's for eating. Humans need meat to survive. For a lot of people vegetarian style works, but not for everyone.

> Humans need meat to survive. [citation needed]

http://med-articles.com/?article=pernicious%20anemia

"Lack of Vitamin B12 in the Diet People can develop pernicious anemia if they don't get enough vitamin B12 in the foods that they eat. This condition takes many years to develop because it takes time to use up the vitamin B12 already stored in the body.

Some people who are strict vegetarians can develop pernicious anemia, especially if they do not eat meat, poultry, fish, eggs, or dairy products--the best food sources of vitamin B12. |Breastfed| infants of strict vegetarian mothers can develop anemia in a short time because they don't have enough vitamin B12 stored in their bodies. They can be given vitamin B12 supplements to prevent this type of anemia.

Some people develop pernicious anemia because of a poor diet due to conditions such as alcoholism or aging."

There exist a plethora of B12 supplemented foodstuffs, even for vegans (the strict vegetarian of your citation). Like any diet, one must be aware of one's needs and eat accordingly. Not to mention, of course, that plain vegetarians can exist quite comfortably without B12 supplements, as noted by your citation.

Next?

Anecdotally, my strictly vegetarian (usually vegan, often raw) girlfriend started bleeding through the pores of her face, despite taking extremely comprehensive supplements which included large B12 doses. When she added fish to her diet, the stigmata stopped.

There is no next. I don't want to argue.

Fair enough. For the record, your dietary assertion was not correct.

I'm not advocating the vegan or vegetarian position, I'm simply advocating transparency to the point where people are confronted with reality enough that they are making a fully informed decision.

I am a meat eater.

I rather think quinoa is a more effecient method of delivering protein through a population, but that's neither here nor there.

I do not suggest any avarice or corruption on the part of my or any government. Please do not read my questions in that light. Consider them, instead, as a matter of political philosophy.

Now, while the Pentagon has certainly insisted that--and a definite case can be made that the data WikiLeaks delivers is novel often only in its source--the sources with leaked data do seem to view it as harmful a priori. I may simply be ignorant, but I know of publicly available source of the various data related to the day-to-day internal functioning of any world government. That which is released is done so after decades, the bones of a system to be picked over by historians; hardly within the window of opportunity for a populace make informed voting decisions.

Now, I do not disagree with your assessment of the data WikiLeaks provides. That is granted without objection. I question, merely, the assumption that providing unfiltered information is a bad thing. I might filter my communication, but I am not a public official accountable to the collected process of a voting public who are supposed to be able to make an informed vote based on my actions. For example--and here again I may simply be ignorant--but I have no idea how I might go about discovering how the Treasury Department makes its choices. What data does it have access to? What people make which choices that affect the lives of every US citizen?

Clearly, I don't need this data in everyday life. However, why do I not have the possibility of having it? I'm sure if I called the Treasury Department they would simply laugh at me. The communications of elected officials are now collected and archived, but I know first-hand that the communication of thousands of bureaucrat--every bit as essential to the functioning of the government as the elected official--are not. Technology makes this possible. Why is it not done?

Note. Please excuse any spelling mistakes or grammar errors. I have a nasty cold and thought it best to prioritize promptness over polish.

Great phrase, Totalitarian Democracy. I think that's exactly what Assange sees himself as fighting against. If the lobbyists are writing bills in congress (they are), then maybe all the rest of it is just enough window dressing to keep us in line while we're being taken advantage of. The old "illusion of choice" from the Matrix.

That's the line of thought, at least. I probably believe it significantly less than Assange and significantly more than Markham, above.

When I hear the term 'Totalitarian Democracy,' I think of the Terror durring the French revolution, where everyone spied on everyone (even members of the government) and anyone who strayed too far from the norm was executed as a traitor. Privacy, even for the government, is an essential component of freedom. Personally, I oppose wiretapping and a government spying on it's citizens. I am also quite critical of Assange and his politics.

I'd call that more like mob rule.. totalitarian implies institutions. But I guess it's all connotations once you're splitting those hairs.

"To what extent may a good and proper government of the People keep secrets from its People"

The government may keep secrets to the extent that doing so does not erode its net good and properness. There can definitely be such a thing as too much transparency, which Jeffrey Rosen makes a good argument against in his book The Unwanted Gaze. But with Obama personally going out of his way to block scientific research from taking place I don't think we're anywhere near that point yet.[1]

[1] C.f. the controversy around Obama nominating Michele Leonhart for DEA administrator even after she defied a judicial recommendation to let UMass Amherst grow marijuana for MAPS research.

> The government may keep secrets to the extent that doing so does not erode its net good and properness.

This seems tautological. Can you elaborate, please?

So in Rosen's book he argues that full transparency will never work because A) people have a short attention span so the majority will never work to understand the context that our actions take place in and B) good ideas often take several years to come up with, and full transparency would open us up to ostracism or punishment based on a work on progress or something that we are just exploring and don't even fully believe.

In general I think secrets are good when they protect us from others, as Rosen shows is necessary, and bad when they are used to exert power over others. (Which seems to be how secrets are used to hide corruption.) I have no problem with the government analyzing foreign policy in secret, but I have a big problem with them killing people without producing any evidence to justify it. It would take more effort to come up with a litmus test or working definition so that's the best I can do for right now.

Words have changed over the past couple hundred years. It probably wasn't tautological then, though I wouldn't care to try to translate it to modern terms as I am not familiar enough with Jefferson's thought to have more than a sketchy clue from reading other works of the time.

I understand the words and intent well enough, but taken out of context the statement would have been deemed slim pickings even 240 years ago. What acts must a government and people do, etc. are not even hinted at. I can guess at Alex's intent--assume he's read similar things to me, has a roughly similar education and so forth--but the ambiguity impedes a well founded conversation.

Wait, what? Assange believes 'authority is bad'? Where are you getting that? Surly not from what he actually says;

"The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive “secrecy tax”) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption. Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance."

For an anarchist, he seems pretty unclear on the concept.

"Democracies don't work by doing the right or correct thing. They work by the consent of the governed."

The question is "does our government listen to its people anymore, regardless of elections"?

The bank bailouts were opposed by the majority of the population crossing party lines. I wouldn't be surprised if the new TSA procedures are equally as hated. I can go on about other subjects such as FISA, ACTA, torture, Iraq & Afghanistan occupation.

Are we now living in a more subtle version of Singapore or China?

Why the generalizing?

The question you pose is not something that you can prove one way or another. It's up to each citizen to make that decision for themselves. As broken as it all is, a minority of people can't rise up and take away the consent of the governed by the majority, no matter how good their logic or noble their cause. It doesn't work like that. It's not a mathematical proof. Systems of people are not like system of network nodes. Yes, there are similarities, but there are very important differences too.

Europe already went down this road in the prelude to WWI. It didn't work out so well. I'm not opposed to going over all of this again, but these things have already been discussed and argued by people far wiser than us. If I understand what folks are saying, it's not like Assange has come up with some unique insight that somehow is going to make things better. This is just anarchism by another name.

I wasn't that general. I did cite at least two cases where the majority of the governed wanted something other than what our government has provided us. Besides I don't see this toppling our representative democracy. If anything it'll just help keep our representatives a bit more honest and a bit more cautious.

My point is that many people already see the social contract as broken.

I screwed that up, so let me restate: why are you making a general assessment of the state of the social contract and then taking action which effects me because of your analysis?

I happen to agree with you that things suck. But I disagree with leaks of State Dept and tactical military intelligence. Others think things are great but don't mind the leaks. Still others are apathetic and encourage the leaks. Out of a dozen people, you'll find a dozen different opinions.

We all -- each citizen -- have a unique relationship with our government. Who are you or anybody else to make a decision like that that effects billions of dollars spent and tens of thousands of lives? I didn't elect Assange. He doesn't represent me. And I have no recourse to remove him from his post if I feel he is acting maliciously or incompetently.

You see, it's not enough to make the argument that things suck so much that anything would be better. It doesn't work that way. That's just waving your arms around in anger and exasperation. I also believe we need to get rid of 99.99% of the secrecy we have. But there is still a role for government and secrecy. Some random person doesn't have the right to "fix" what he thinks is broken -- because if he can do that, then we all can. And at that point we might as well just go out in the streets with guns to get our way.

This is insanity. Well thought-out, for a good cause, well-intentioned, but fundamentally broken. This is like the dozenth time groups of people have been down this road. It doesn't end well -- even if the state is "fixed".

It's critically important to separate your opinion of the state of things from the reasons and rules that each individual can take to make a difference.

Take the Declaration of Independence. In it, Jefferson doesn't make the case that monarchical rule is broken and therefore we must act militarily -- far from it. He respects the previous state of things but then makes a detailed argument as to how the king broke the social contract with the colonies, thereby releasing governance of the states back to the "natural legislature" of the people. It's a very long list of things we did to try to make things work and how they didn't work out. If you want a revolution, that's the place to go to start understanding what arguments work and what arguments don't work. Move from there to "Letters from a Birmingham Jail". But don't go down the Marx route where you do this huge amount of clever reasoning and then wreak havoc on the rest of us because of what you've proven. That's not so good.

"Who are you or anybody else to make a decision like that that effects billions of dollars spent and tens of thousands of lives? I didn't elect Assange. He doesn't represent me. And I have no recourse to remove him from his post if I feel he is acting maliciously or incompetently."

This has already been happening for years with our 4th branch of government, our very own government agencies. They aren't elected. How do we know that they are complying with the branches that we elected?

"Some random person doesn't have the right to "fix" what he thinks is broken -- because if he can do that, then we all can. And at that point we might as well just go out in the streets with guns to get our way."

I don't understand why you are comparing Wikileaks to an armed insurgency. Wikileaks is only doing what the mainstream media either won't or can no longer perform because of their new owners. Wikileaks is not an armed and violent insurgency. It isn't usurping anyone's power if they are acting within the law or within what they were elected to do. It is only releasing information that should be known to the public.

Our government is already supposed to make freely available a lot of information that it is still withholding:

http://www.aclu.org/accountability/released.html

What is an alternative to Wikileaks? We've already tried voting, and I'm not keen on supporting revolution. I'm just advocating transparency to help preserve our current government, albeit just making it a little more honest and a little less crazy.

Just saw this the other day on The Onion's competitor: http://toofar.tv/blog/?p=7

I also believe we need to get rid of 99.99% of the secrecy we have. But there is still a role for government and secrecy.

Well, we're all basically on the same side, then, it's just a question of methods.

Some random person doesn't have the right to "fix" what he thinks is broken -- because if he can do that, then we all can.

If no random person does it, then it doesn't get done. I mean, what should he do, try to get booked on Anderson Cooper? This is an asymmetric situation - they've got 23:30 left in the day after his half hour on TV. In his reasoning, the best way to break the circle of graft is to scare everyone straight that they're going to get caught. That may or may not work, but it's at least vaguely plausible that it'll change things, unlike a politely worded letter or a talk show appearance.

And, btw, the Declaration of Independence was released when we were already fighting in Massachusetts and the south, and the context was, "Ok, now we're going to make it public, undeniable, and impossible for us to walk back. Total commitment." Not just a politely worded letter, quite the opposite in fact.

> Who are you or anybody else to make a decision like that that effects billions of dollars spent and tens of thousands of lives? I didn't elect Assange. He doesn't represent me.

shrug

The majority of the USA voted for Gore rather than Bush. Still, Bush was made President. His administration then led us into a war in Iraq that cost tens of thousands of lives and billions of dollars, under what now appears to be false pretenses, pushed by his administration.

However, if We The People, at the time of the run-up to that war, had more insight and transparency into what was being done, and been able to see more of the real evidence (or lack thereof) first-hand, we as a nation would have been more able to arrive at a wise decision as to whether or not it was the right thing to do to start that war. As it was, instead, the Bush administration got to work mostly in secret, and we had to trust what they claimed. Trust violated. Billions gone, thousands of lives lost.

> And I have no recourse to remove him from his post if I feel he is acting maliciously or incompetently.

Many citizens felt that way about Bush and Cheney. And yet they were not removed from post. And even now into the following administration, they have not been punished nor has a prosecution attempt even been made. This is how our supposed "democracy" and system of laws works today in actual reality. Not in theory land. In reality.

This is the world Wikileaks is operating in. For better or worse.

> why are you making a general assessment of the state of the social contract and then taking action which effects me because of your analysis?

This sounds a bit bitter, but if you have a way for me to remove myself out from the spectre of government, I'm all ears. I'll gladly leave you with it.

Unfortunately, it just doesn't work that way. There's no current system that I (and I'd suspect, Julian) would feel comfortable living under. I've taken a slightly different course of action than he, but I can certainly understand and respect it.

To bring this back on topic slightly, it sounds like you're saying something like, "I like my job at MegaCorp, why would you create this startup that disrupts me. I'll lose my job!" Such is the way of the world.

This is common thinking.

But there is a problem; outside a national vote you tend to get a massive skew on "voter opinion" because only a minority are involved.

This has been observed many times over the years; where the electorate were supposed to think one way but in actual fact voted differently. A recent example is how badly the liberals did in the recent UK elections.

Over a large enough population people are generally apathetic - so there is no guarantee that what seems obvious reflects the majority.

It's an unfortunate side effect of democracy :-)

I'm not very familiar with UK elections, but I am aware of some voting irregularities in the US in recent years. It doesn't help when our electronic voting machines are subject to less scrutiny and transparency than the electronic slots in Las Vegas.

From my limited and inexperienced viewpoint, I just feel that less transparency tends to encourage corruption and other unpleasant things. Hence my support for organizations such as wikileaks.

"Who watches the watchers?"

Oh, well that's another issue - voting irregularities due to errors or corruption are a big problem in some areas.

But I'm more talking about... here in the UK just before the general elections all of the main commentators and polls were predicting a lot of huge wins for our third party, the liberals. As it turned out, they had a terrible election - and are only "kingmakers" because the public was divided over the lead two parties.

The outcome of the election was radically different to what was predicted - because it was only a vocal minority that was making their voice heard before the election. The vast majority of people are either apathetic or prefer to raise their voice via the ballot.

Which is why it is always dangerous to quote "public opinion" :)

In both of those cases the government was very much listening to the electorate, and giving them exactly what they wanted even if they did not ask for it or even refused it by name.

People wanted the government to fix the banking crisis, and they did in the most expedient way, even if the proper medicine was so foul-tasting as to inspire popular revolt. People begged for more security theater to prevent another underwear bomber, and the government threw money at the only potential solution to that attack vector and got it implemented just in time for the next holiday season.

Democracies don't work by doing the right or correct thing. They work by the consent of the governed.

They mostly continue due to the apathy of the governed, I'd say. The 40-something percent of voters who vote for the loser in various elections are explicitly registering their dissent from being governed by the people they didn't vote for. I'd say that those people certainly are wasting their time 'choosing who to vote for, paying taxes, and debating with my fellow citizens what the correct policy on "X" might be', and from the steadily heightening vitriol in day-to-day politics, I think that's becoming clearer and clearer to everyday voters in the US.

This, too, seems to be due in part to the fragmentation of sources from which people get political news; the genteel framing of debating with fellow citizens is breaking down with access to more varied and less controlled information.

It's also an overly simple view of things. The 40% that vote for the loser aren't expressing dissent, only a much smaller percentage of them are expressing dissent. It's not a binary problem. That simplifies everything way too much.

The candidates are too similar for it to be dissent. You have to go to the fringe topics to really make them disagree in the first place, you have to bring up abortion or which stem cell lines the federal dollars go to, or gay marriage or crap like that to even get them to start to disagree. Politics is competitive, the best politicians will hire the best analysts to study the polls of the masses and come up with platforms that appeal to the broadest set of people possible so that they can win the election. Likewise, the elections will continue to be "close" because of that.

In a very LessWrong sort of way, you might find if you really think about it that the "apathy" of the governed is frequently quite rational. If you are a middle-of-the-road voter and really don't particularly care one way or the other which person gets elected or which proposals pass, why vote? If things are going fairly well, why vote? Arguably they're doing us a favor by not casting an essentially random vote.

In the past couple of elections there's been a lot more participation, broadly from the Left in 2008 and broadly from the Right in 2010. Because not caring has become a lot less rational.

Humans aren't rational by any stretch of the imagination but groups of humans are frequently far more rational than supposed, if you take the time to figure out their real incentives and not just the immediately obvious ones, or the ones being loudly claimed. (And yes, I agree there are truly apathetic individuals. But most people read "apathy" as simply a variant of "lazy" and I don't think that's necessarily as true as it pleases some people to believe.)

Democracies don't work by doing the right or correct thing. They work by the consent of the governed.

OK, it's a tired point, but maybe relevant here: the USA is not a democracy, it's a Constitutional Republic, a few bits of which are managed democratically.

Just as the myth about Columbus being smart enough to ignore the popular notion that the world is flat, the bold experiment that is America was not Democracy: that's been around for thousands of years, since the Greeks at least. Heck, pirate ships were governed democratically.

No, the bold new idea embodied in America was that of a limited constitutional republic. Our contract with the government is now thoroughly broken, because it no longer views itself as being one of limited, enumerated powers.

As you say elsewhere regarding Jefferson and the Declaration, we have an obligation to show that the contract has already been violated. But as far as I can see, this is obvious enough to be a mere formality.

> my illusion of having some say in the governing of my state

You think being lied to is a good thing?

Assange's trick forces governments to pick one of: being called to account, stifling themselves with secrecy, or not being evil. Where evil is roughly defined as: doing things you would rather the voting public didn't know. You seem to be ignoring that third choice, but Assange is not. That's his aim.

You can make up your own bullshit or choose from the variety of available flavors.

Big businesses act without consent of the governed as the norm, breaking the social contract. Assange is just new to the party so he gets a disproportionate amount of attention.

So pick your flavor.

You're responding to a summary of a summary of Assanage's essay with a rhetorical (did you mean hypothetical?) suggestion of killing him? I don't think this is the kind of writing I expect on Hacker News...

The point wasn't that he wanted to kill him, I think, but rather that if Assange's own views don't respect rule of law and governance, the resulting outcome of those kinds of beliefs is vigilante justice.

Essentially pointing out the "you can't have your cake and eat it too" point in all of this.

But vigilante justice is homicide, and what Julian is doing is equivalent, how? You could call him an anarchist nerd publishing whatever low-level diplomatic snippets fall through the cracks, but surely, the things that are truly classified won't fall through the cracks to the likes of him.

This is the internet: you can publish content anonymously without extraordinary effort. Assanage simply provides a microphone. If he'd been a little less paranoid, he'd have made an amazing journalist.

I think his point was that, through his actions of attacking the fundamental values of society, Assange has declared himself an outlaw - in the original Anglo-Saxon sense of the word

I'd argue that the American people don't actually have any say over the organizations that keep secrets... they've taken on a life of their own.

Evidence? That much of the information revealed about Iraq/Afghanistan was suppressed for propaganda reasons -- the government didn't want the American people to know that the taliban has certain weapons, that the simple good/evil story is complicated by ISI involvement, that the US knowingly handed detainees over to the Iraqi regime for very likely torture, etc.

Any voter who supported the pretense of the war would surely want to know the truth about how the war is going before deciding whether to continue supporting it! The propaganda agencies suppressed certain info in order to tell a particular story back home.

The truth can work in favor of the war or against it. There were some aspects that worked in favor of it, but in my opinion the reason Wikileaks is a good thing is b/c it helps deprive our leaders of the ability to deceive us.

>The problem here is believing your own bullshit, as they say on the streets. Or put nicer, coming up with a line of reasoning that you (and perhaps others) deem to be the "correct" one, and then imposing it on the rest of us against our will.

Well it goes both ways. The government is constantly imposing its will on me in ways I resent. Assange also feels this way and notices that the ability of the government to impose its will rests on conspiracy.

Your 'argument' is impenetrable because whether or not the organization is inherently just (and shouldn't be messed with) or unjust (and should be messed with) you are fully invested in your paradigm and seem unwilling to give it up regardless.

From the standpoint that the US govt is all democracy and stars and stripes, of course Assange is 'bad.' But that doesn't appear to be the reality of the situation.

"If Assange takes away my illusion of having some say in the governing of my state, then he's effectively attacking the social contract."

Who you gonna blame? The one who gave you the illusion or the one who took it away?

... wait, don't answer that...

ie. like Morpheus, Assange is at least offering us more of a choice. Between the blue pill, which is what some want you to believe, or the red pill, which is documented evidence of the real. So to the folks who hawk the blue pill, and who profit from having the masses continue to believe in the illusion they're promoting, Assange is a terrorist. To those who'd rather know the Truth -- to see the world as it actually is -- you'd rather take the red pill. And therefore to those people, he would be a hero. Terrorist or hero. Same man, same actions.

(Note: Sarah Palin, the dipshit-diva of the right-wing has lately literally been calling Assange a terrorist. And she's the not only one. So my hero-or-terrorist model above is not an exaggeration. It's already happening.)

If a single actor can disrupt the system that much by releasing some information casually available to some 3m US military personnel, the system is broken.

Money already speaks volumes in elections so I would rather have a human being actually show they can have an effect beyond that. Not to sound like a paranoid, but how can the government follow the consent of the governed when those in power do not live like those they govern?

> Democracies don't work by doing the right or correct thing. They work by the consent of the governed

Can people consent to things they don't know about? Isn't transparency a pre-requesite for the kind of democracy you describe?

It's a good strategy, as long as the US doesn't become as autocratic as the Nazis or Viet Cong (correct?). Then, plugging leaks becomes hanging their corpses as a warning.

Peaceful protests only work against peaceful regimes.

There have already been calls from prominent US politicians to declare WikiLeaks a terrorist organization. Predator drone strikes are how the US deals with terrorists.

Palin:

> [Julian] is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands. His past posting of classified documents revealed the identity of more than 100 Afghan sources to the Taliban. Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders?

Most terrorists aren't sitting on huge piles of sensitive material set to be released en masse in the event of sudden, unplanned death.

I wonder if he would have any objection to posting internal Wikileaks emails and documents. In the name of transparency I'd like to see the behind the scenes thought process for posting the cables.

Assange claims that Wikileaks would publish his own emails, if anyone submitted them. Presumably none of his correspondents have done so yet.

If you consider the logic of this essay, it makes perfect sense for him to post his own emails. It won't trip up his very small network which is probably operating under the assumption this stuff is coming out sooner or later anyhow.

Any political system with secrecy evolves into authoritarianism. Why shouldn't it? Secrecy ensures politicians/bureaucrats won't be accountable.

When did we start thinking that we can have democracy and freedom without accountability?

It isn't about conspiracy theories. It's just common sense that some people will abuse their power if they can't be held accountable.

Agreed, mostly. But without SOME secrecy, a government can't function.

Imagine if the US became 100% transparent. You could listen to the president's phone calls, watch military strategy in real time, etc. Unless the government's enemies (its proper ones - criminals, opposing armies, etc) were likewise transparent, which they wouldn't be, Uncle Sam would basically be doomed to be beaten by them. Like if only one poker player had to show his cards in a game - he'd lose.

Just saying there are limits to the good that transparency can do.

Assange is poking at the illusion of democracy and it makes people damn uncomfortable as far as I can see. I think most people know that they are ruled by rulers and that the idea of the state as benefactor is dead, but to admit it is another thing for most. They will fight very hard to retain the comfort of the illusion. And the state will act to retain it also, by any means necessary.

> These leaks are not specifically about the war(s) at all, and most seem to simply be a broad swath of the everyday normal secrets that a security state keeps from all but its most trusted hundreds of thousands of people who have the right clearance. Which is the point: Assange is completely right that our government has conspiratorial functions. What else would you call the fact that a small percentage of our governing class governs and acts in our name according to information which is freely shared amongst them but which cannot be shared amongst their constituency? And we all probably knew that this was more or less the case; anyone who was surprised that our embassies are doing dirty, secretive, and disingenuous political work as a matter of course is naïve. But Assange is not trying to produce a journalistic scandal which will then provoke red-faced government reforms or something, precisely because no one is all that scandalized by such things any more. Instead, he is trying to strangle the links that make the conspiracy possible, to expose the necessary porousness of the American state’s conspiratorial network in hopes that the security state will then try to shrink its computational network in response, thereby making itself dumber and slower and smaller.

A long quote, yes, but I could not think of a way to shorten it without severely hindering its meaning.

This is a perfectly articulated description of how I initially felt about cable release. Wikileaks (and necessarily, at this point, Assange) is not trying to reveal a huge scandal, to embarrass or to destroy connections. If one or more of those things happen then so be it. The goal is to reveal, to expose the standard type and content of information that is traded like currency amongst the few who govern the very many.

The leak is an attempt at provoking forced honesty; if Wikileaks exposes a vast amount of cables enough times, the veil and shroud of secrecy that governments use as a personal cloak will continue to shrink and shrivel until it is non-functional. And voila! Now governments can no longer act in complete isolation from its people and governments such as that of the United States, which promise to be of and for the people, are forced to live up to that promise, out in the open. If you force the government into that situation harshly and fully enough, eventually it has no choice but to act that way. And finally it can be held accountable for its actions, positive or negative.

In short, the goal with all of these leaks is first and foremost to poke and prod through the secrecy and conspiracy until there is a large enough hole for the public to be able to view what its own government is doing on its behalf. Whether or not you feel that this is morally or ethically correct is up to you; this is just my take on the rationale.

As a side note, can we go easy on the appeals to emotion in headlines on Hacker News?

Yes, this article is good; yes, some robots are incredible; as far as titles go though, it's a distasteful use of rhetoric.

For what it's worth, I completely agree with your sentiment, and I felt a pang of regret when I reviewed my submission later. If I could rewrite the title now, I would call it "In-depth, insightful" rather than "Excellent".

Even those are just opinionated adjectives designed to get noticed and voted.

They are designed to be descriptive and informative (hrmph!). I applaud the article I submitted. Let there be no doubt.

It's a great article. And your use of 'excellent' was warranted, because the article is, well, excellent.

Even folks who don't agree with it have to admit that it frames the issue (as Assange sees it) with genuine clarity. In all the hype surrounding Wikileaks, this was the first mention I'd seen of what Assange actually said about his intentions.

Since when is 'excellent' an emotion?

With respect to the potential for popular opposition to government policy, I think he drastically overestimates the impact of exposure and drastically underestimates a "conspiracy"'s need for secrecy. Perhaps if he paid more attention to domestic U.S. politics, he would see that the standard response to revelations like this is boredom and disinterest. Did Abu Ghraib morally discredit the Iraq war with U.S. voters? No, the ones who still supported the war found it easy to shrug off an isolated incident caused by bad apples. Did it shock any Iraq War supporters to discover that the guys who pushed the Iraq War in 2002 and 2003 had already been looking for ways to sell another war against Saddam Hussein for almost a decade before to 9/11, and that their motivations had nothing to do with terrorism? No, people who had listened to the arguments and made up their minds to support the war did not care about the motivations of the obscure policy wonks advising politicians in Washington.

Anyone expecting the public to be shocked and outraged by a revelation ought to temper their hopes by reminding themselves how much publicly available information they find extremely shocking, and how different the typical voter's response to that information is.

But as he points out, the objective of WikiLeaks is not to foster popular opposition, as Assange believes that occurs naturally. If public outcry was his intention, he probably wouldn't have bothered with banal diplomatic cables. He is of the opinion that consistent leaks heightens intra-government paranoia. As each conspirator becomes more fearful of information being leaked, s/he shares it less, thus depriving the conspiratorial machine of the information it needs to survive. I'm not sure I agree with him (this will require some thought), but I think your analysis might be off.

Why would people be paranoid about unsurprising information being revealed? The leaks are embarrassing because privacy is expected. He wants to make people paranoid by destroying their expectation of privacy, but if the expectation of privacy is destroyed, then there is no reason for people to become paranoid, because the expectation of privacy was the basis of the embarrassment in the first place.

If he thinks he is accomplishing something by this large-scale indiscriminate leaking of banalities, I fear he will not focus on acquiring and revealing information whose publication could have a real impact.

Yes, exactly. And if the expectation of secrecy is nonexistent, Assange claims, those in power will act with de facto integrity because the probability of being caught committing a crime (even a boring one) is so palpable. Hence the claim that the purpose of WikiLeaks is to make WikiLeaks obsolete.

Crime? This is international politics. If Steve Ballmer says to Steve Jobs, "It's time to cut off the head of the snake," and Steve Jobs goes and kills Larry Ellison, Steve Ballmer can be charged with a crime. If the Saudis say the same thing to the U.S. and the U.S. invades Iran, who is going to get charged with a crime? The word and the deed would be popular in the United States and in Saudi Arabia.

If he was revealing truly sensitive information, it might force people to be a little more honest. For example, it has been claimed that Saddam Hussein was concerned that his invasion of Kuwait might upset the United States, so he went through the British and got assurances -- or perhaps merely thought he got assurances -- that the United States and Britain might respond with harsh rhetoric but would ultimately look the other way. He thought he had de facto permission to invade Kuwait, in other words. Something like that would be worth revealing.

But hundreds of thousands of documents and nothing scandalous? C'mon. There is no way he could have published hundreds of thousands of cables and not a single scandal unless he is revealing information that by its nature never contains anything scandalous. Keep in mind that this information was already available to many people inside the United States government, and so there was already good reason for it not to include information that would threaten anybody's career. Even government bureaucracies have Boy Scouts, and of course they have internal rivalries galore.

He's not claiming anything about the probability of being caught committing a crime.

He claims that the probability of leaks will force government to lock down information sharing increasingly tightly, and this lock-down will make secret policies impossible (because other arms of the government will not know those policies exist).

He's not aiming to change the behaviour of the people, he's aiming to change the behaviour of the policy wonks. He's aiming to make them either more open, and therefore far less exclusive. Or he's aiming to have their communications be much more difficult to achieve.

Either way, the power of the state over the people is lessened. It doesn't matter that no-one cares about the contents, it only matters that the state cares that people don't see the contents.

This is a very different motivation than journalists have.

I think the state would rather keep their communications secret, but in the event that they cannot, they will continue business as usual rather than change what they talk about. Really, what is the effect of transparency? So what if Russia knows we don't consider them a democratic country, so what if Iran knows that the Arab states want to see Iran isolated and neutralized? These are open secrets. Like a sex tape of a man having sex with his wife, they're embarrassing not because they're news but because they're supposed to be kept private. Nobody is surprised that a man has sex with his wife, and nobody is surprised that the Arab states are adversaries of Iran.

If secrecy becomes impossible, as Assange desires, will Arab states stop calling for the U.S. to be aggressive with Iran? Will the United States start believing in Russian democracy? Will American policy wonks stop openly discussing with each other what reasons might persuade the public to support policies that they support for other, less popular reasons?

Well, if every human being on earth suddenly had X-ray vision, would people stop having sex for fear of their neighbors seeing? Of course not. Life goes on.

Either way, the power of the state over the people is lessened. It doesn't matter that no-one cares about the contents, it only matters that the state cares that people don't see the contents.

I'm not sure that even matters. If you look back at the great conspiracies of history, they haven't been "hidden" by the conspirators at all. Could Wikileaks have stopped Hitler, who actually published a book explaining his views and telegraphing his intentions? So did Lenin and Mao, and the future slaves of their totalitarian states did nothing but nod their assent. The signatories to the PNAC all but told us to expect a "new Pearl Harbor," but, heck, that's just tinfoil-hat territory, there.

I'm pessimistic about the benefits of Wikileaks' activities simply because history has shown, again and again, that nobody cares about conspiracies except the conspirators. The free flow of information might effect positive change eventually, but it'll have to wait until next Tuesday night, after American Idol.

I'm pessimistic about the benefits of Wikileaks' activities simply because history has shown, again and again, that nobody cares about conspiracies except the conspirators.

Then the true audience for leaks is the conspirators, they'll feed off their own paranoia. Apparently, the watchers watch themselves, but even they have doubts about the trustworthiness of the watchers.

I think you missed what his plan is.

He's not leaking this to cause outrage - he's leaking it to make the US government lock down its information sharing to the point where it cannot functionally pursue its policies.

I'm not sure it will work, but it's a original and intriguing plan.

A little late for me to comment, but why, exactly, would they lock down information sharing if not out of fear of a popular reaction? Nothing revealed so far has been any worse than embarrassing. One commenter compared the revealed diplomatic cables to things one would say to one's wife about one's mother-in-law, but which one would not say to one's mother-in-law directly. They aren't even any state secrets yet, just a bunch of "Oooh, did you see what he said about them?"

We found out Hosni Mubarak hates Hamas. Did Hamas not know that? Suppose they didn't... now what just changed? Are they going to get their feelings hurt? The only way this will change the relationship is if one side or the other is pressured by a popular reaction to that information being aired publicly.

Our ambassador to Libya passed on a rumor that Qaddafi is sleeping with his nurse, oooh, juicy. Or check out this, which of all the things I've read isn't just a "tee hee" and actually resembles a real scandal:

In what is widely being seen as a dangerous blurring of the line between traditional diplomacy and intelligence work, the State Department has asked its diplomats to obtain "credit card and frequent-flier numbers, work schedules and other personal information of foreign dignitaries," according to the New York Times' reporting on multiple cables dating back to 2008.

Gasp... blurring the line between diplomats and spies! Of course, for hundreds, possibly thousands of years, the most common cover for intelligence agents has been diplomacy, so this isn't exactly news. Embassies are nests of spies, yes, I have read a couple of John Le Carre novels.

The amount of non-news surrounding this "event" is just stunning. Just a whole lot of we-knew-that-already.

So by what mechanism will this pressure anyone to lock down information sharing?

As a citizen I like to remain ignorant to the dealings done on my behalf. I think it's sinful for Julian, or anyone else to seek information that isn't blessed by the State - and anyone seeking knowledge that is not sanctified by my Representatives is unacceptable. Now I'm going to stick my head in the sand because I hate learning about facts.

Replace "citizen" with "president" and you've stated actual U.S. policy (as represented in movies and novels, anyway.) The Iranian nuclear scientists who were assassinated on their way to work recently -- if we (the U.S.) killed them, Obama will never know about it. If, on the other hand, some other country did it without our help, the CIA might share that information with him.

The question I have (and I will start the linked pdf tonight) is if unjust systems are nonlinearly hit vs. just systems in the event of a leak. What happens if the new communication or propaganda tools start a copy cat organization to "leak" their own agenda.

It might work both ways: complete openness and complete falseness.

Not sure if this is what you meant, but real transparency requires verification. If leaks are commonplace then "plants" will be too. All sorts of meta-games to play as well.

it's a great question. my intuition is yes at the first level: control of information is a key technique for many powerful unjust systems. it's a good point though that the same kind of power could also make unjust systems better at "false flag" attacks. certainly food for thought.

That would take a lot of organization. Also, what if their operations were leaked invalidating their previous lies?

agreed it would take a lot of organization. this is the conspiracy we're talking about though, they're good at stuff like that!

> what if their operations were leaked invalidating their previous lies?

their goal with this strategy is to devalue leaked information, so this would potentially work to their advantage moving forward. "you can't trust any of this leaked data. don't you know there's a secret bipartisan private/public conspiracy spending $5B a year to corrupt the data?"

at some point it gets complex enough that everybody's head explodes

If anyone is interested here is the full PDF that is quoted throughout this article dubbed "State and Terrorist Conspiracies":

http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf

I'm interpreting this article to say Assange's goal is to decrease the effectiveness of the conspiracy (eg, US government function) by killing off information flows within the conspiracy.

If that is so, then I really fear a world with Assange as the head of Wikileaks.

One of the major reasons why the government failed to prevent the 9/11 plot was because nobody had all the information in one place so that they could connect the dots. The 9/11 Commission recommended that different parts of the government increase the amount of information they share with each other. (Indeed, the State Department posting certain cables onto SIPRNET that was the source of this leak was part of the response to that recommendation.)

If Assange's actions induce a return to the world of stovepiping, then the future might not be so rosy.

Then I guess my only question is why does he want a world like this? Will society be better off in this kind of world?

I have not followed all the previous Wikileaks, but I definitely disagree with this latest one.

I don't see what purpose is served by releasing internals memos about what some diplomat located in Germany thinks about certain German politicians.

There's nothing evil in having a negative opinion about German politicians and communicating it to your boss. The People certainly don't need to know such micro level details. OTOH it does harm your diplomatic relations.

This is kinda like somebody hacking your Gmail account and releasing all your work emails to your startup's investors, because, after all, they're your investors, they deserve to know what's going on?

Someone in another thread put it best: when did I vote for Julian Assange? Who is he accountable to? Where are his secrets?

I'd say it's a mistake to either reduce Wikileaks to Assange or reduce the leak-dynamic to Wikileaks. Technology has made leaking very easy. Someone is going to do it.

There are many justifications you could come up with, someone will use one of them.

Leaking, for example, seems inherently easier than file sharing and that hasn't stopped for a while now.

As Michael Caine said in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Knight_%28film%29

"Some people would enjoy seeing the world burn"

funny how for years all that [USA being an authoritarian conspiracy] was even promoted as the "correct" action in sci action movies.

how many times the hero agrees not to disclose some alien invasion or something as to not create mass panic and help the government act in the dark and so saves the day?

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