How the US government inadvertently created Wikileaks

"Protesters, leakers, et al don't spontaneously erupt. They are created by bad governments."

There are two models that could be at work here: (1) "dissident agents" occur randomly (i.e. they do "spontaneously erupt") but have greater value and visibility when they occur amidst bad government or (2) bad governments cause good agents to become "dissident agents".

In all likelihood it's a combination of both: people have varying tendencies of becoming "dissidents". Some people will rebel without a cause, others will follow their leaders to hell. Most are in between, more likely to (a) become, and (b) be empowered upon becoming, dissidents the more "bad" a government becomes.

There are varying opinions of what constitutes "bad" government. It would not be surprising that there are correlations between certain worldviews and their populations' propensities to engage in dissident activity. Stylised: pro-war advocates might be expected to go dissident quicker than pro-peace advocates.

Point is it isn't obvious. The more likely outcome would have been for Julian to have shut up and kept going his way. What made this time different is worth looking into.

What is more detrimental is the uselessness of the phrase "classified" in the after math of leaks. When leaks show that a lot of classified documents are not really that important it will desensitize people to the word classified in the long run and when really important and classified info is leaked, it will be treated with carelessness.

Statistically, real threats are rare, but ambition and corruption are common. Overwhelmingly, the purpose of censorship is not the protection of national security, but the protection of individual careers. That's not ideology, but mathematics. Because there are very, very, few true national secrets, but a huge amounts of information that someone would like to bury for one reason or another. -- Seth Finkelstein, at http://grep.law.harvard.edu/article.pl?sid=03/12/16/0526234&...

Finkelstein writes "censorship", but you could put "classification" in and get exactly the same result.

If

1. document X becomes classified;

2. you are have a government security clearance;

and 3. your government security clearance isn't high enough to be allowed to look at X,

then you must not look at X, keep copies of X, etc. even if X is public knowledge. This came up more recently in the context of government employees getting in trouble for having publicly-leaked but still classified documents on their computers.

I imagine, if the research you were funded to create is classified out from under you, you have to delete all public copies of it, and have to pretend you don't officially "know" it any more.

I think what they meant was the reasons the work had been funded and how that played into the larger system(s) it was intended for.

And awkward photos.

Money, no one else will fund it.