Ask HN: Should Diplomats Be Allowed Private Communication? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Should Diplomats Be Allowed Private Communication?

3 pointsJ3L24047 comments

Diplomacy without secure interchange would be extremely difficult, if not impossible. Does WikiLeaks imply there should be no confidential communiques?

View on HN

Just checking - what do you mean by private? Do you mean "only visible to the three million people who could access the cables"? Or do you mean a higher level of privacy?

Private meaning only authorized access. Is there some form of privacy that includes unauthorized access?

"Private" does not generally mean "only authorized access" which is why I had to ask for clarification. The public isn't allowed into many library stacks, but just because I'm not authorized to access the stacks doesn't mean the information there is private.

But to answer your response ... let's see, there's "top secret", which is restricted to fewer people. Those wouldn't be on the same network as these cables and therefore would not have been accessible by the person who gave them to Wikileaks.

There's secrecy levels above "top secret." There are phone calls. There are in-person meetings. So if the Secretary of State and the US diplomat to Xyzzy wanted a more secure communication then it's possible in quite a number of ways.

I am deliberately going after your premise because it makes little sense. There is no such thing as a "secure interchange", only levels of insecurity. The computer could be bugged, the meeting room surveilled, a staff member compromised. Even SSH has had to work to fix the subtle attacks people have come up with data exchange, and that's only one part of the entire system.

If 3 million people can read a document then you should not expect the same level of confidentiality as, say, the paper listing the launch codes to the US nuclear missile system. (Hint: no longer 00000000.) Old quote: "three can keep a secret if two are dead."

Wikileaks adds nothing new to this discussion. The Pentagon Papers were marked top secret. Reporters have made a long living off of knowing who the right people are to get the information they need for a story. And politicians have long known how to curry favor with the right reporters to leak the information - true or false - they want.

So in answer to your question: 1) Diplomats should have a secure communication (Kennedy's negotiation to get the missiles out of Cuba in exchange for withdrawing US missiles from Italy and Turkey shows the importance of that), 2) privacy has nothing to do with it. 3) Wikileaks doesn't change anything about the principles.

It might change our view on how duplicitous diplomats and world leaders are, or change our ideas on the importance assigned to "secret" documents, but that would be an answer to another question.

I'm glad that you agree that diplomats should have secure communications, but, secure != private, seems semantic.

Then let's talk about the specific case of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The negotiation was secure and done in secrecy. That secret wasn't made public until many years later.

The communications was secure. The information is no longer a secret. Is it still private?

If secure == private then do you consider legal document declassification the same as a security hole? A breaking of privacy?

I think it's reasonable to expect some privacy in diplomatic communication. The rough drafts, as it were, need to be private so that fear of embarrassment does not automatically remove any options from consideration. Of course, once privacy is granted, it can and is used to cover up much more -- mistakes, corruption, duplicity, etc.

Yes, but so should citizens.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com