Comment by etherael | Hacker News Reader

Comment by etherael | Hacker News Reader

I saw this this morning and it seemed like the first example of something that should severely not be leaked. I wanted to contact them privately and directly and bring their attention to it but there turns out being no discernable channel to do that.

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.

What exactly is the danger of this information? It is obvious that fuel/power facilities are vital to any nation's economy that is attached to those facilities.

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.

It's a list of the three highest priority industrial facilities in the country directly across the gulf from one of your primary warzones, it also gives the name of the controlling company, and the name of the bureaucrat directly in charge of the controlling company.

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...

The war is there because the USA attacked.

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.

Ok so let me see if I follow your line of reasoning here.

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.

Who's the enemy? The people? Any serious enemy already has this information.

Religious fundamentalists with paramilitary inclinations, I may not be a fan of the US, but I am even less a fan of this bloc.

I said serious enemy.

Which part about the enemy in question makes them not serious?

You are right. A serious enemy would have this information. You can be sure during the Cold War the USSR had a list just like this on us, and we had a list just like this on them. And we pointed the nukes at each place on that list. I would wager a couple countries still keep a list like this.

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.

Believe me, people working at those facilities already have very good level of security, both at home and work.

You make a point, but anyone doing 5 minutes of research would find this exact same spots. Besides, being "industrial cities" they are actually hard to hit. It's like saying NYC, Chicago and DC are critical..

Who is downvoting this? What's wrong with people?

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.

Should it make us feel safer to know that the US Government was relying upon security by obscurity for vital interests?

The problem with security researchers when they rail against "security by obscurity" is that they assume everyone is reasonably competent.... or that the main actors in any situation are nations with huge resources at their disposal. Neither of those are true in the general case.

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.

Well, that's an empirical point. I'd be willing to wager that none of the would-be targets get attacked in the next 6 months.

I wouldn't really call it security by obscurity, you can probably find most of this information already. When I was in high school I had a map of the natural gas pipelines and power transmission lines in my state (public records). Since the forest is cleared for both, they are great places to go skiing in the winter on the hilly parts or ride around on ATVs or horseback in the summer.

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.

Fair point, but imagine the following scenario:

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.

The cable states that they are vital to US economic interests in Qatar, not that they are vital to Qatar's national security.

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.

Who says they have to be terrorists? If there is a war with Iran, guess which country is next to their shores at missile striking distance? Besides, what do you know of terrorist goals?

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.

Certainly the World Trade Center was a 'soft' target, but I wouldn't describe the Pentagon as anything other than a military target.

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...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Beirut_barracks_bombing

I'd certainly describe the Pentagon as a symbolic target in exactly the same way as the WTC was a symbolic target.

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.

The Pentagon was not attacked to disrupt military capability. That would consistute a military target. It was attacked for the symbolic value.

It's like once people pick their teams, they can't reconsider.

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.

Weirdly enough, reading this almost makes me regret donating to WikiLeaks yesterday. It's not a total switch, but it's more and more a grey area for me. Maybe it should have been all along.

I wonder what would have happened, had the US accepted to review the cables before the leak, as offered by WikiLeaks.

As a post hoc, don't feel too bad about it, it looks like this was not taken as a serious responsibility by state department staff, for example they list an antivenom manufacturer in Australia amongst the CI/KR list, yet this manufacturer has not made that antivenom in over ten years.

Also, on the whole;

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1977293

What's wrong with people is their political correctness, which blinds them to the point that they can't accept the fact that every country has its intelligence doing some dirty work.

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.

I think you totally misjudge the motivation of the people behind WikiLeaks and its supporters.

Here's another motivation:

stupidity in thinking that they will make the world better this way.

Lots of people, lots of motivations. The motivation behind this leak was petty revenge, "we do it because we can", no good can come of it and it was literally senseless.

I didn't down vote, but I don't think the issue isn't as black and white as you're suggesting. Let me offer an alternative possibility:

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.

"This is a bad thing", "This one is a bad thing", "This is a bad thing".

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%

Not even the facilities[2] mentioned nor the people involved[3] are even close to secret. Just because something has a "SECRET" label and is posted from an embassy doesn't mean it's damaging or that information that could be damaging shouldn't be published[4]. To me it's the people who keep repeating that everything is bad regardless of the actual content, that make it close to impossible to have a critical debate on the leaks.

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/

As of two days ago, https://sunshinepress.org [1] was hosting a webclient pointing to two Wikileaks IRC channels, but it appears to be down at the moment. That said, I didn't check if the site was legit, but, from the activity, it looked real at first sight.

[1] The "about" page of wikileaks.ch describes WL as a project of Sunshine Press.

Extrapolating from the newly available Groups to contact for comment section on the wikileaks site. It looks like you can get in contact privately with someone who can get in contact with wikileaks reps via e-mail here;

Leonard Weinglass weinlen@earthlink.net +1 212 807 8646

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