I'm having a hard time reconciling people's viewpoints over here. Most people are intellectually inconsistent over Wikileaks.
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.
I must be one of those intellectually inconsistent folks, so take this for what it's worth.
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.
I don't think there's necessarily intellectual inconsistency going on. I personally would like to live in a world with far fewer secrets - particularly kept by those with power, and I certainly defend wikileaks right to free speech and abhor calls for Assange to be murdered.
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 you've been following the Wikileaks story, then you've seen the essays by Assange about what Wikileaks wants. It's very simple. A conspiracy needs communication to be effective; if you disable it's ability to communicate, it becomes less effective. Wikileaks exists to weaken trust in communications throughout the conspiracy thus rendering it less effective, and the release of documents like this serves exactly that purpose.
Not just any conspiracy: governmental conspiracy and corporational (as in "a large, perhaps transnational") conspiracy. He cannot leak Al Qaeda's communications these way (not that he would be against it, necessarily).
I have read that. What I think he misses is that there isn't really a conspiracy - there is no bright line between us and 'them' - we all collude in the current state of affairs through want of something better. I think he has the opportunity to lead people to demand less corruption if he plays this right, but he equally could cause the opposite effect if he simply damages countries.
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.
Secret is pretty high. In the movies you all these folders stamped TOP SECRET getting passed around the time, but that is actually really rare. It is a pyramid and the bulk of it is Distro D/For Official Use Only, then there is a bunch of Restricted, then a bit less Confidential, and then significantly less Secret, and then a tiny tiny bit of Top Secret. And there is nothing higher than that civilians can handle.
I read through the Canadian "Critical Foreign Dependencies" List, and what struck me, is how difficult it would be to really damage any of the elements on the list, unless you were a state power.
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'm finding a hard time seeing how this leak is a positive thing. At least leaks related to violations of human rights and international law have legs to stand on.
The real leaked material is that the US embassy have the opinion/analysis that X factories & mines are vital to the U.S.
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.)
I know HN isn't the place for jokes but- this just popped into my head due to your textbooks comment
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!
Some are obvious--oil production facilities are important, so your hypothetical team of economists would have no trouble there. But how about the insulin manufacturer in Denmark or the rabies vaccine manufacturer in France?
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!".
I agree that the data isn't particularly secret, but I also agree that there doesn't seem to be any possible public good served by leaking this information.
This leak Does serve the public good, if the public surrounding these vital targets learn that these locations are vital. Instead of being ignorant bystanders who think it's "just a factory"; they'll know that it is a Vital factory, and that suspicious activity around it should be reported.
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?
You're assuming that the benefit from the public knowing about the facilities is greater than the detriment. That isn't necessarily the case, and it's unlikely to be the case in my opinion.
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 think you have made the only solid argument backing the leak of this specific document that I've seen, so thank you for that.
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.
Are you talking about the money spent compiling the lists or the money spent on the things in the list? The former is trivial, and the latter isn't actually provided by the list. It isn't limited to U.S. assets.
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.
It's a fascinating list for that reason. What's listed, and why, and what isn't, and why. Lots to think through (though certainly not to share on a public forum). It's an extremely interesting way to look at the world.
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.
> 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?
It is to every established power's advantage to make leaking government information seem dangerous and wrong because states in general do bad things and would prefer to not be held accountable for their actions.
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.
This is the point you are missing. There is no thinking "state". State governments consist of people. People with morals and ethics (you hope).
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.
I don't think any of this information was terribly secret though. I think any other nation's government that wanted this and had any intelligence service would be able to figure them out too.
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).
The US isn't really under threat from governments so much as distributed guerrilla/terrorist organizations which might benefit materially from this intel.
Any government with change in its couch cushions can buy the services of such organizations, either directly, or through proxies. Any government with the cash to directly train and fund even a mediocre group of operatives can do plenty more.
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.
> We teach children that honesty is a good thing right? Why does our government need so many secrets to really keep us safe?
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.
It's worth pointing out that while this may not have been truly secret, the work of pulling together this intelligence would have been significant for anyone seeking to act against US interests.
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.
This is massively irresponsible and smacks of the Wikileaks team trying to 'get at' the US government for reasons unknown. This is really the sort of information that could put lives in danger. Whatever good Wikileaks attempts to do is immediately overshadowed by such a stupid and naive leak such as this.
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.
Agreed. This crosses the line and becomes a terrorist act in itself.
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.
During WWII it was treason for a country's citizens to reveal the activities and movements of its troops, operations and shipments of factories and transport critical to its war effort.
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).
So how do you define a "terrorist act"? Is it any action that is contrary to the interests of the United States or is it just releasing information that terrorists could conceivably find useful? In which case, Google is, by far, the biggest, baddest, terrorist on the planet.
Back in the day, a terrorist act involved doing shit that terrorized people.
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.
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...
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 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.
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..
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
"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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
This is weird to me. I just get the feeling that... a lot of these miscellaneous commercial facilities are replaceable- not only that, but the market forces acting after an attack would encourage new facilities to be built or new locations of the resource to be discovered (in the case of cobalt).
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.
But it is the kind of security planning information that most people (in the US) wouldn't want leaked, and would actually support secrecy for (as opposed to things that "endanger" us by embarrassing us, things that receive classification because they document our moral failings (like take, say, the helicopter video)).
Terrorist don't give a damn about ports and cable stations, they go after office workers and schoolchildren.
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.
Traditionally, yes. With al Qaeda (inasmuch as there is a single body with unified aims), not so much. One of bin Laden's videos spelt it out: their aim is to economically cripple the US and the West by forcing them to spend a vastly disproportionate amount of money on security measures through performing relatively cheap acts of violence.
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.
Well, it does not happen like that accidentally. The whole point of terrorist attack is terrorizing the population to achieve one's political objectives. To terrorize population you hit where it hurts the people.
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.
Possibly you misunderstand me. I don't mean that the Chinese (for instance) might want to bomb what's on the list (although that would certainly be one approach). I mean that they might literally wish to (and be capable of) buying what's on the list. We all know they've been cornering African mineral exploitation for the last decade or so, I'm sure they wouldn't object to another cobalt mine or two on their acquisition list, even if they had to pay an absurd premium.
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.
This is a very important point. It seems that for the past decade it's only become increasingly clearer that we've had these terrorists' motivations and desires all wrong or we're dealing with very stupid people. I consider it a mix of both; does anyone still believe they're out to destroy "our freedom"? And I also would bet that for many individuals on HN, were they not good people, they could trivially cause some major damage.
Superb point. It would be trivial to create attacks sufficient to grind public transit to a halt in a major city for weeks and result in a crackdown on civil liberties,... among other things.
That nobody has done this stuff underscores just how much of a non-threat terrorism is.
> It would be trivial to create attacks sufficient to grind public transit to a halt in a major city for weeks and result in a crackdown on civil liberties,... among other things.
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?
No, far simpler bombings. Ones that would require less than $50 in supplies.
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.
Well, they did kill a few dozen US sailors by blowing a hole in the side of a destroyer with 2" thick steel plating and a few hundred people by attacking two embassies guarded by US marines prior to 9/11. So I'm not sure they wouldn't considering hitting military or economic targets today.
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)
There are potential terrorism targets literally everywhere. This whole issue is way overblown. Even the 9/11 perpetrators didn't want to "kill teh infidel", more reduce US involvement in the middle east.
Unless this leak contains information which could point out that the US is protecting facilities owned by any particular corporation(s) in the name of national security, releasing it is not warranted.
Perhaps not all information should be released, however, in the end perhaps it's only whistleblowers that can uncover certain things and force decision makers take back certain laws.
(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.
This is ill judged and shows Wikileaks to be immature as the motivation could only have been some form of juvenile revenge, this has probably damaged their credibility beyond repair.
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.
You do have a very valid point, but your tone is rather harsh. I'm guessing the downvotes are more about how you're saying it rather than what you're saying.
A mindless defence of a mindless act deserves nothing but contempt. Harsh? not as harsh as the reaction to wikileaks will be. To quote Stan Lee "with great power comes great responsibility" ("Spiderman"). Wikileaks has power, they have not exercised responsibility, this will cost them (and indirectly, the rest of us) dearly.
I wish Wikileaks would stick to exposing corruption / human rights violations / warcrimes etc. This release seems only to increase the vulnerability of the USA (not to mention the civillians simply working at these targets) to unsophisticated attackers.
I'd be interested to see how Assange responds to this. It's going to determine my opinion about him, and put a lot of doubts to rest for better or worse. I'm sure other people feel the same.
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.