Comment by dkarl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dkarl | Hacker News Reader

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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com