List of facilities 'vital to US security' leaked
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
If a leak fits with people's opinion on wars or something similar, it's supposedly alright to leak; if it doesn't fit with one's opinion, it's bad and irresponsible? I think this goes to show that most people just view leaks on certain topics as means to an end on that specific policy subject.
It's not like that. Only leaking "politically correct" material is not going to happen. Either you stick up for the unmitigated leaks or you don't.
If you think a middleman (newspaper, whatever) has to assess whether or not a leak is potentially damaging or "not worth" leaking, then I think you haven't come to terms with what leaking is also about: exposing the truth and not relying on whatever authority to establish what is alright for the general populace to see and what is not.
P.S.: If this is so important for the US government, why is it only SECRET/NOFORN? Also, according to Michael Chertoff, this list was/is used by US government agencies to prepare themselves for disruption.
This particular piece of information doesn't bother me so much. As somebody else mentioned, it seems to my layman mind that, to a first order, those with sufficient resources and determination to do damage to these targets also have the resources and determination to think hard for a little while about what things might be important to a nation, and figure out where those things are made. This might save them some time, but I'm skeptical that this leak will create an army of only-mildly-interested attackers who otherwise wouldn't have bothered to find any of these places.
That said, I disagree that "either you stick up for [the] unmitigated leaks or you don't." Sure it's an opinion, but I think it's OK to think that the world is best off with some information out in the open, and some information private. I agree that governments should default to the former rather than the latter, but everything in moderation.
If you stand for this leak, do you also have to stand for the leak of all Visa card numbers and account holder information? Do you have to stand for leaking Google's search history logs, or Tor entry node access logs, or a hospital's medical records? That's not so clear-cut to me.
Also, your last sentence leaves out the reality that you will never get rid of the middleman. Today, with Wikileaks, the middlemen who "establish what is alright for the general populace to see and what is not" are:
1) The set of all disgruntled employees and personnel, and other whistleblowers. Often their motives are pure, but sometimes not.
2) The cabal that runs Wikileaks. They may well have a better sense of what should be public than the average person, but we're still talking about a small set of humans, and we all have our motivations, agendas, needs, and wants to some extent.
You can certainly argue that this is a better situation than 15 layers of government bureaucrats, or a few layers of journalists, but again, I don't think it's unilaterally better in all circumstances.
P.S.: There is a heaping helping of intellectual inconsistency flying around concerning Wikileaks; I just think that there is room for reasonable concern in there too.
That said, Wikileaks chooses what it releases and when. These choices matter in terms of the effects it has.
This kind of release makes me wonder whether Wikileaks is anti-corruption, or is it anti-American? If it's the former, that's good for us all and I think it deserves support, but if it's the latter I absolutely don't.
I don't think it's intellectually inconsistent to believe in Wikileaks's right to free speech, while simultaneously hoping that they use it in the most positive way possible.
edit: Honestly this release is the most depressing thing I've seen in ages. I really want wikileaks to be a positive thing but it's looking like just more of the politics of punishment that it puports to be liberating us from.
If his agenda is to test only that hypothesis without regard to the consequenses then I'm saddened. The path taken to get there makes a difference to the outcome, and he's responsible for that too.
Canada James Bay Power Project, Hydro Quebec, Part of the St. Lawrence Power Project, between Barnhart Island, New York, and Cornwall, Ontario Seven Mile Dam, Canada Chalk River Nuclear Facility - big industrial targets that would require a lot of effort to really do damage to. Also, there were a lot of obvious targets that are already well known "Border Crossing", "Atlantic Cable Landing".
Pretty much every one of the Canadian items (and many, many, many more) are discussed fairly openly in Canadian Newspapers in terms of how attractive they might be to terrorists, so nothing particularly interesting there. If anything, I was disappointed, significantly, at how _little_ is considered a Critical Foreign dependency.
The Alberta Tar Sands aren't considered a Critical Foreign Dependency?
I think that a small team of economists could have figured out what plants are vital to national security. It's not like this data is secret- it's just the embassy's thoughts that are secret. (So... thank god Jihadists don't know economics! Let's hope Julian doesn't leak any textbooks.)
The only information this list provides is what the list says it provides: facilities that are vital to U.S. security. I can't think of a beneficial use of this data, but I can think of plenty of harmful uses. The list isn't hard to figure out, so I don't think its release is a huge loss, but there is no gain, so I can only wish that it were never leaked.
Whenever I'm in a train station I hear about how important I am, as a civilian, to security and that I should report suspicious bags. Couldn't the government take that attitude to the next level?
The train station analogy is flawed. Train stations are targets because they're train stations. Security through obscurity isn't possible.
If this leak is somehow beneficial, how would you feel about a leak of the identities of all covert agents? The public would know who they're paying to do certain kinds of work, but I'm sure we can agree that it would have a negative effect overall. I think this situation is similar, although the information is easier to deduce.
I do agree that can be helpful. I just wonder how many things that weren't targets yesterday are now targets today. I live near a nuclear powerplant, but I wouldn't necessarily consider it a target because it is just one of hundreds, why target this one? I'm sure there is security on it, but I don't worry about it much.
But what if it was on the list and it said that it was critical for the distribution of power in the whole northeast region because there is a flaw in the power distribution system. Now this relatively obscure nuclear plant is high on the list of targets and its security has to be increased a lot.
The same goes for chemical plants, oil refineries, etc. Can you tell me which one of the hundreds of DuPont factories manufactures chemicals for weapon systems and which ones manufactur nylon for disposable table clothes? Probably not before this leak, but I bet you can guess it now.
I don't see why that is helpful to anybody. I would have been suspicious of people snooping around any chemical factory, but now all of a sudden the terrorists can hit the most valuable one.
To me, that is pretty lame.
What if Wikileaks leaked the text of all the bills from congress to the press from the past year? If senators and the press actually read them fully, it would be the first time any of them had actually read the full contents!
I wouldn't be surprised if those are raising eyebrows, with people thinking "it would never even have occurred to us that there may be a problem with the insulin supply!".
We teach children that honesty is a good thing right? Why does our government need so many secrets to really keep us safe? Without those things are we really unsafe, or is the simple perception of safety gone (but no one is actually harmed).
Anyone with an axe to grind against the US can find something of value with a map indicating every testicle kick site on earth, I'd think.
It's one thing to take a guess at what might be valuable. It's quite another to, right from the horse's mouth, have a definite listing of everything that is valuable.
Let's use a familiar comparison: MVC is hardly a secret design pattern. Still, it's a lot cheaper for me to get crackin' with Rails today than it would have been for me to roll my own MVC code ten years ago. That's a lot of legwork out of the way.
In the same way, Wikileaks has democratized intelligence gathering, at least with regard to these targets. This multiplier could be significant, in that it lowers barriers to entry for coordinating attacks.
I don't have a dog in this hunt – I don't side with Wikileaks but I'm also realistic enough to grasp that this is a post-secrecy world we're entering. Foreign policy, national security and government are going to have to learn, very quickly, how to exist here.
Ever bought a car or a house? If so, did you tell the seller upfront exactly how much you wanted it, and exactly how much you could pay? How about selling a house--do you put it up at the absolute minimum price you'll accept and tell that to buyers, providing access to your financial records to prove that you can't go lower? When applying for a job, do you tell the employer up front the lowest pay you will accept?
In most negotiations, if you can't keep your position secret you will get screwed.
The same goes for governments.
As far as children go, teaching that honesty is good does not mean teaching that secrets are bad. Responsible parents teach their children that there are some things that are only meant for family members and friends, for instance, and should not be shared with strangers.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/22/iraq-detainee-ab...
http://harpers.org/archive/2010/11/hbc-90007831
http://harpers.org/archive/2010/12/hbc-90007836
http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2010/12/01/john-perry/yes-it-was-a...
Are positive things. The only reason those are getting less coverage than the leak in the OP is to delegitimize the leaks that have occurred and sweep the violations of day to day governance under the rug.
Wikileaks clearly makes it's most dangerous, least-helpful, almost indefensible leak, and your argument is that the media are covering it as a favor to the U.S. government?
Think this through a little. The world media all works for the U.S. governmment? No. The reason they're covering this is because it's the most dangerous, least potentially good thing Wikileaks has done.
Inventing some media conspiracy that it's all a smear? C'mon, man, think a little more. Regardless of what team you're on, this one is clearly, indefensibly bad. What rationale on Earth could you have for releasing a list of places the U.S. government would feel destabalize the world if they're destroyed? Terrorists - real terrorists that really do exist - are going over those lists right now as we speak.
Edit: I get downvoted for saying that an international press conspiracy is an absurd idea? Really?
Yeah, good and bad things get leaked. That's what happens when governments use their secrecy to cover up some pretty dirty stuff that's happened. I feel accountability is more important than safety from some shadow threat that will always exist.
Also, those terrorists that are (supposedly) going to use this intelligence to do bad things, they probably wouldn't exist if states weren't busy terrorizing civilians.
Sure, those with power are corrupt and do things that most of us wouldn't approve of.
But when things go too far, someone with a brain often leaks it. And those leaks have a purpose - to stop whatever that is happening from happening.
Wikileaks is really dangerous to those kind of important, targeted leaks. These leaks in my opinion are more damaging to the government than helpful to the people keeping the government in check. I think most people who are shocked, SHOCKED! by the stuff in this leak just haven't been paying close attention, I have yet to see anything that wasn't already speculated about in the media aside for little tiny details (like this list).
So this leak isn't all that valuble to the population, but it scares the crap out of the government. And so we're going to get a bunch of laws designed to prevent this from happening again and make it far more dangerous and difficult for people to leak in the future.
I always viewed Wikileaks as the escape hatch. If you are working on something you think is objectionable and need to leak and it is impossible to get word out, send your leak to Wikileaks and they'll keep you safe and get it to the media.
Now Wikileaks to me is just taking a shotgun approach and really missing the point that leaks, when done well, are extremely powerful for stopping bad things from happening. These leaks will not stop anything from happening because they don't highlight one topic. The focus of the leak is Wikileaks, not on the bad things happening.
The focus of Watergate was Nixon, not the Washington Post.
Some possible ways it could be useful are
- Stop the reliance on 'security by obscurity'
- Motivate cooperation on how to secure these facilities or decentralize their function where possible.
- Inform public discussion on these issues which may possibly lead to new ideas / solutions
I'm not saying that it will necessarily be a net benefit but it certainly is possible.
I hope the people responsible are brought to full justice when an innocent person dies because they work at a facility that has just become a target for terror.
During WWII it was treason to reveal the activities and movements of troops, operations and shipments of factories and transport critical to the war effort. (And everything was critical to the war effort.)
Any possible sympathy for the good that Wikileaks is doing, has been undone.
How can you commit "treason" to a country you are not a citizen of? (Assange is not a US citizen. ).
Stuff like "becomes a terrorist act in itself" is hyperbolic and has no real meaning. I doubt thinking people would consider Assange a "terrorist", like say, Osama Bin Laden. At worst Assange is anti-US or anti-war. Last I heard that wasn't a crime.
An action against the US occupation of Afghanistan (which is about as far as these WikiLeaks disclosures can be stretched to mean without breaking down completely - and even this interpretation is very debatable) is not necessarily "terrorism". Hyperbole is dangerous to clarity of thinking (on both sides of this issue).
These especially struck me as dangerous;
http://cablesearch.org/cable/view.php?id=09DOHA214&hl=%3...
Specifically;
2. (C) There are three main industrial facilities of interest that if destroyed, or if their production is disrupted, could have an immediate effect on U.S. national economic security. In order of priority, these are Ras Laffan Industrial City (RLIC), Mesaieed Industrial City (MIC) and port complex, and Dukhan Industrial City. All three industrial centers are under the control and supervision of Qatar Petroleum (QP), a semi-autonomous government organization whose Chairman, Abdullah bin Hamad Al-Attiyah, is also the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Energy and Industry. Natural gas production is primarily centered around the coast and offshore areas in the northeast of Qatar, in and round Ras Laffan; while, oil production is concentrated on the western coast near Dukhan as well as offshore platforms.
In both the #startups and #wikileaks channels on freenode people variously assured me that they had already considered it or I was just being a troll. I suppose it really is naive to expect unmitigated good to come of this episode, but I really wish they would not hand ammunition to the opposition in this fashion.
I wish there was a way to privately contact them to ask them to reconsider a particular release without drawing attention to it in a public fashion.
P.S. I will happily edit this message to omit the sensitive information directly in the event that anyone can tell me how to bring the necessary attention to it in a more private way.
You can't see how listing the facilities that the United States thinks are vital to national security in Qatar could possibly be a bad idea?
It's like once people pick their teams, they can't reconsider. They have to find rationalizations "oh, this isn't so bad" or "well now we know what the government is working on" - guess what? There's random unhappy people in Qatar who don't have the resources or skill to do their own recon and intelligence work. Wikileaks just delivered America's own intel/recon to them. This makes the world less safe. This is a bad thing.
I don't care what team you're on. This one is a bad thing. Shame on everyone who downvotes etherael for pointing out a really valid point. Stop the blind allegiance to the cause and think this one through critically. This is a bad thing.
The reality is that most terrorists seem to be fairly incompetent with meager resources. This kind of intelligence is actually really dangerous because it means someone can do a lot of damage without expertise or a lot of money.
The leak to worry about is the priority. What is the difference between a super critical oil refininery and the average refinery? I bet the average terrorist niether knows or has the means to find this out, but now there is a hit list in their hand given to them by the leakers. Going back to my example, we knew we were under powerlines, but is this just some random line to a town or is it THE line to New York City. I didn't know and I didn't care, but this might help answer questions like that for people we don't need or want to be telling.
If that doesn't damage our national security, I really don't know what does.
A power line gets destroyed by terrorists, cutting power to NYC for 3 days as crews work to restore service.
Some member of the public or some journalist might ask "gee, why didn't they have someone guarding that power line if it was alone responsible for carrying power to a major city?"
The answer from officials would of course be: "Whoever did this attack was a fearsome mastermind and analyzed our grid to figure out which lines would do the most damage. Of course now we have the line guarded 24/7."
But the attack still happened. It was in all of the officials' best interest not to do anything prophylactic because they get more mileage out of making a show of dealing with things people are already scared of.
So I'd argue that thanks to the leak, we are all safer from the sort of misbehavior caused by the perverse incentives officials have toward these sorts of things.
How difficult would it be to plan an attack that would have significant consequences for a major city's infrastructure? The New Yorker ran a piece a few years ago on New York's water supply and how it's extremely vulnerable. Surely anyone who spent a few weeks studying the infrastructure of any city would be able to assess the vulnerabilities well enough to determine whether or not an attack made sense.
So given that there are already thousands of things which could reasonably have been determined to be good attack targets, the addition of a list of a few thousand more does not make terrorism any more likely, since there was nothing stopping anyone before.
What the leak does give us, however, is the ability to look at these pieces of infrastructure and evaluate whether anything has been done to secure them. If it hasn't then there is only one direction blame should flow.
I can think of lots of other things that are vital to US economic interests. I don't think they're particularly hard to find.
Of course, thinking that terrorists want to target these things is a mistake; terrorists are not an existential threat to any state, not unless they have the sympathy of the general public and are fighting an unpopular government. As such, military targets are some ways down the priority list. Terrorists want targets that generate a disproportionate reactionary effect on the population. A pipeline in the middle of nowhere may affect energy prices indirectly, but lacks the immediacy that makes the public demand an overreaction.
Al Qaeda and the likes are more interested in regime change in Saudi Arabia than anything else. Making the US out to be the Great Satan plays into that dialog, and therefore making the US overreact, vilify Muslims, and polarize the population is their goal.
The goal you stated for terrorists is not mutually exclusive with attacking economic and military targets. Bin Laden himself said that his goal is to bankrupt the US and attacking those installations would make a pretty good target for achieving that.
Also don't forget the biggest terrorist attack prior to 9/11 against the US was not the previous (mostly failed) WTC attack, it was the two embassies in Africa (somewhat militarized considering every embassy has a wall and a detachment of marines) and prior to that the USS Cole. And a ways back we had the marine barracks in Beirut. Terrorists are not afraid of military targets.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cole_bombing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_United_States_embassy_bomb...
I don't fully disagree with the remainder of your comment, but I would also say that it's not a trivial factor that the targets you listed also have something else in common: they're all U.S. targets that are local or relatively easy to get to locations. Another consideration is that those are all older attacks. More recent attacks around the globe to Western facilities have focused on non-military targets. Based upon the result of 9/11 (U.S. engaging full force), the non-military target has demonstrated to be more productive for them.
You just hit the nail on the head. This shouldn't surprise you. In wars of opinion, most people pick a side, and stick with it until the bitter end. Heck, there've even been front-page articles on HN about this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attitude_polarization
You are one of the rare people if you regularly allow yourself to switch.
I wonder what would have happened, had the US accepted to review the cables before the leak, as offered by WikiLeaks.
Also, on the whole;
The human rights are violated in some way anyway. Try running some country without it first and then complain. That's the imperfect nature of human relations.
The whole leaks action was immature, ego-driven, stupid and childish act.
stupidity in thinking that they will make the world better this way.
The "bad guys" fail to act on this information and instead a group of newly informed (politicians|non-profit watchdogs|citizens|concerned corporations|supranational organizations) affect some change that reduces our reliance on such a small number of facilities.
Without this leak, a lot of very influential "good guys" might not know this danger even existed.
My point is that the "bad guys successfully act on this information" scenario is only one of many, not all of them bad.
I don't think that kind of reasoning is the best way to question peoples ability to think rationally.
There might be "bad things" in these leaks, but that the natural gas industry is important to Qatar and the US exports to Qatar is just as far from a secret there is. Even someone totally ignorant on Qatar as a country could find this out on wikipedia.
Economy of Qatar [1]:
Export goods > Liquefied Natural Gas
Import goods > Machinery and Transport Equipment
Main import partners > United States 13.3%
Qatar also has much larger security problems then "random unhappy people". For example to quote the congressional research report on Qatar[5]: "On March 19, 2005, an Egyptian national carried out a car bomb attack at a theater popular with Western expatriates on the outskirts of the capital city of Doha. [...] The suicide bomber was an engineer employed at Qatar Petroleum"
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Qatar [2] http://english.mofa.gov.qa/details.cfm?id=56 [3] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/world-leaders-1/wor... [4] http://www.nytimes.com/cfr/international/slot2_021106.html?_... [5] http://opencrs.com/document/RL31718/2008-01-24/
I think at least one good thing from this leak is that maybe people realise that their country relies on things coming from far far away and how that might be an unstable and insecure base for any economy.
More to the point, it is a concrete priority list according to the US' own economic research, it's like paying a research team to discern your weak spots and then handing that information directly to your enemies.
Frankly, the extent to which this information is dangerous is obvious enough that I actually feel somewhat uncomfortable discussing it in this public forum. But since somebody else clearly has already gone public with similar information in a much more obvious way...
As I said, if this actually is a significant leak, then let it be an eye-opener and improve your land's self-support. You can only exploit other countries through globalism so much. Nothing beats having all you need at home.
A) War is bad.
B) The war in Iraq is particularly bad
C) So let's provide intel to the enemy in order to make the war even worse for the US, potentially killing many innocent foreign workers or friendly bureaucrats in the process?
You lost me at C.
The terrorists are not like that. They don't have the resources. But they do have the means to blow people up and kill in the dozens or hundreds at a time (and on 9/11, thousands at a time).
If you worked in one of those oil refineries in Qatar that yesterday wasn't a a terrorist target, but today is, would you be happy about Wikileaks? Most of these are far from obvious to laymen, which most of the terrorists are.
[1] The "about" page of wikileaks.ch describes WL as a project of Sunshine Press.
Leonard Weinglass weinlen@earthlink.net +1 212 807 8646
I also feel that the ideologies might not line up really well with this. "We are going to destroy the American infidels... by destroying a Danish insulin factory!" The symbolism gets kinda lost.
The government's and terrorist's idea of vulnerable is fundamentally different. In Russia they were securing gas pipes, nuclear stations, cabbage sorting plants and whatnot, but terrorist hit apartment buildings, theaters, hospitals and schools.
It just so happens that attacks involving large numbers of civilians are particularly effective for this, because the political pressure to protect the public is high. In the case of targets on this list, there is a similar pressure to protect them, but in general they won't be as expensive to guard because their nature makes it easier to restrict access.
If I were on the Chinese politburo, though, this leak would read like a literal shopping list.
People are less emotional about shut down plants than they are about dead children.
> If I were on the Chinese politburo, though, this leak would read like a literal shopping list.
You bring a point here. This list makes sense (and is obvious) if you have a strategic bomber command in your disposal. Otherwise a few of those isolated attacks will fail to shatter the economy. Remember how many bombs were unleashed on German industry in WW2 before it started showing any effect.
Attacking population on the other hand is accessible and effective, that's the whole idea behind the terror. So a proper, realistic list should be "dense urban areas of the United States". Of course it's not what the embassies were assigned to find out, so they really did an honest, if mostly useless, job.
Either way, the list could be just as easily compiled by Chinese self as it was by the U.S. missions, most of it is based on public knowledge and open sources.
It's not that I suggest leaking it made any practical sense, but IMO the dangers of it are greatly exaggerated.
That nobody has done this stuff underscores just how much of a non-threat terrorism is.
You mean like the train and bus bombings in Israel, Spain, England?
That have slowed down and largely stopped after the military campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and other parts of the Middle East?
There has been nothing in the US. Are you seriously telling me that of all the tens of thousands of angry, disaffected people in the US, those who have contemplated doing such attacks decided not to because they realized that the act would cause more destruction in Afghanistan?
Similarly, there have not even been any machine gun attacks at malls or airports -- imagine what even a few dozen shots fired at the crowds on black friday would have done to holiday retail numbers. Surely someone thought of this in the past 9 years.
So you are arguing that of the tens of thousands of people in the US who ostensibly want to commit such acts, a) none have thought of it, b) they are working on some far more diabolical plot, or c) they have been dissuaded by the US bombing of the middle east?
On the contrary, I think the truth is that life is good, people are friendly, etc., but most importantly, people care far more about their next meal than they do about abstract concepts, political struggles, etc.
They also got a few cruise missiles in response to the first two attacks, and they got a massive war in response to 9/11. That kind of speaks to how much more effective hitting big civilian targets is for the terrorists than the military and economic ones, but I don't think we can just shrug this off because they've changed course a bit.
(I don't personally believe that hitting Iraq was a good response to 9/11, but you can't argue that if 9/11 hadn't happened Bush would have had any public support to invade Iraq. Without 9/11 there is no Iraq war. With 9/11 and a different president, I doubt there is an Iraq war then either)
(Fictional?) example with body scanners: The company making those has a real interest in the terror threat never going away. The shareholders expect that. The politicians get elected with money from security companies. Thus: The terror threat will never go away. UNLESS a whistleblower shows the truth and the population gets upset.
Whistleblowers are important for democracy.
Little or no public good comes from this, any more than disseminating pictures of the keys to your front door or publishing your bank account details would somehow be justified "in the interests of openness".
Comments about this being OK because "security through obscurity" is a bad thing merely show the commenter to incompetent at thinking, preferring instead to spout cliched slogans, rather like the book waving Maoists of old.