To set bounds on how much protection of secrets is needed, do a thought experiment: Assume a super-leaker who accesses a repository of ALL significant secrets of law enforcement, military, intelligence, and political aspect of the fedgov. This would cause a loss of human assets of intelligence services, obviously. But what else? What else would be different the next day?
Now compare that with what horrors would be revealed: Who profited illegally from a secret matter? What lies have the American people been operating under? Who got away with what? Who died for lack of competent action? Secrecy is so often used to avoid embarrassment at the cost of an informed public, the vast majority of what would be revealed deserves to be revealed.
How beneficial would it be to learn these things, in full? The problem with things like "electronic declassification" is that they will err on the side of redaction.
> Assume a super-leaker who accesses a repository of ALL significant secrets of law enforcement, military, intelligence, and political aspect of the fedgov.
Significant to who? A very good argument can be made that there is absolutely no good reason for our government to keep ANYTHING secret. Any behavior the government thinks that they need to keep secret, they should not be engaged in. The harm done to our country and our "democracy" by the secret (and often illegal and unconstitutional) actions of unaccountable government officials is far, far worse then any claimed benefit.
Considering that the codes to launch nuclear missiles were set to all 0's for decades, your disagreement is a perfect example of why nothing should be secret.
If you seriously want to defend this viewpoint, which flies in the face of all conventional wisdom, then respond to superuser2's list. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11919660
So if a whistleblower tells the government about illegal activities of a business or of an organized crime group, the government should release the identity of the whistleblower and the details of exactly what information they provided?
If people tell the CDC details of their sexual contacts so that CDC can track and deal with an outbreak of an STD, the CDC should release the names of the people involved and those sexual details?
Or do you think law for cement and public health are not areas that government should be involved in?
The most important secrets are the most mundane to the public: the location and capability of military assets, such as nuclear missiles. Maybe technologies under R&D, such as aircraft, intelligence gathering techniques, or cryptography techniques are at the next level down.
The loss of these secrets would seriously weaken the U.S. in diplomacy since adversaries would know the exact limits and shortfalls in U.S. military power.
Most secrets, as you rightly assume, aren't in this class. Most of them are analysis literally gleaned from the open internet and combined in a report to a policy maker.
I don't think the classification system is a good repository for secret corruption. Tenured federal employees have little reason to hide the impropriety of an elected official; on the contrary, they can get a cash bonus for reporting the malfeasance! In the rare cases when corruption was masked by military secrets, e.g. the Iran Contra affair, the profits were small (in the tens of thousands) compared to the scale of the wrongdoing (the undermining of the rule of law, Congress, and the people).
The best way to detect corruption would be to have better aggregation of officials' assets and analysts dedicated to the task. Elected officials and security clearance holders currently fill out an annual financial disclosure, but corruption can easily be obscured from the process.
Well, it's on his wiki[1], but most information about this part of the Iran-Contra is questionable, and Ross is very cagey about what he says in his interviews. The last person[2] to really take a deep look into this part of the story killed himself, by shooting himself in the head -- twice.
>According to the October 2013 Esquire article, “Between 1982 and 1989, federal prosecutors estimated, Ross bought and resold several metric tons of cocaine. In 1980 dollars, his gross earnings were said to be in excess of $900 million – with a profit of nearly $300 million. Converted roughly to present-day dollars: 2.5 billion gross, and $850 million in profit, respectively. As his distribution empire grew to include forty-two cities, the price he paid per kilo of powder cocaine dropped from as much as $60,000 to as low as $10,000. ”
> Tenured federal employees have little reason to hide the impropriety of an elected official; on the contrary, they can get a cash bonus for reporting the malfeasance!
They have a very big reason: Appearing disloyal - the cardinal sin - and never working in Washington or anywhere near it again. I hope that cash bonus is a big one.
I could say the same of you, but it would be equally worthless to the discussion. Perhaps you can offer something besides attacks on the commenter, which are useless and damaging to discourse.
Fine, I'll put it in the more diplomatic: "Please substantiate your conjecture with data. It contradicts my personal experience, that of my personal network, and the things I've read in newspapers and magazines."
By the way, I usually enjoy your posts, just not that one. In a second reading of my comment, it contains way more snark than I had intended when I wrote it. I deserved to be called out.
Thanks for your kinds words. I'm a little surprised to be recognized! I know that's normal in a community but I just wasn't thinking about it.
All I can say is ...
... I know some people who work for government. In the last few hours, in fact, I was telling one about our conversation and they were surprised that there was any debate - they thought it would clearly be a career-ending move, and the only reward they knew of was around $3,000 (and if there are other rewards, what does it say that they don't know?). They said the only thing they can imagine you are referring to is that whistle blowers on government contract corruption in certain circumstances get a percentage of the contract or savings, which could be a lot and potentially worth losing a career and all the other institutional penalties that will come down on them too.
... It matches my lifelong experience and observations of every institution and industry, and what I believe is common knowledge of everyone in one. The worst thing you can do is be disloyal; you will be blackballed, your reputation may be smeared, and you may be investigated for every paperclip anyone is willing to allege that you wasted or used for personal reasons, etc. As one example, priests worldwide in the Catholic Church obviously knew raping children would be overlooked, but not one (afaik; certainly very few) dared to report it. Many at Penn State knew about Sandusky raping children; none dared to report it to police and several openly said they feared for their careers and reputations if they did. The first people to report it, a mother and her victimized son, faced such community retaliation (in Penn State's college town) that the local police prepared a witness protection program for them - for a raped child! - and those weren't even employees. University trustees who took action on the issue were voted out of office by angry alumni. Stomach-turning, but that unfortunately is human nature very often.
- Human intelligence assets would be executed, as you mention. Witness protection program participants, too.
- Signals intelligence targets would stop using (or feed false information to) compromised systems.
- Consequently, the government would lose what little understanding it has of what's going on in the world, threats, likely outcomes of foreign policy, etc.
- It would also be incapable of any sort of undercover/sting operation, because every target of an investigation knows they are the target of an investigation.
- Diplomats can no longer talk about 3rd parties behind their back. No more conspiracies between allies to keep another nation (i.e. North Korea) in check. No more back channels.
- Diplomats must negotiate with foreign leaders in full view of their populations and political opponents. No more reasoning with leaders, brokering secret face-saving solutions. (Giving foreign nations an opportunity to back down without appearing weak is a staple of diplomacy).
- The budget required to replicate our military technology (including nuclear arsenal) shrinks dramatically, amplifying threats currently below the threshold of "serious."
- The nature of our defenses and locations of troops, installations, ships, etc. becomes public, lowering the bar to a successful attack.
- Some of the government's secrets are your secrets too. The full name/DOB/SSN mapping used to authenticate yourself to financial services. Home and family addresses for federal employees like prison guards, judges, and prosecutors.
- We've blown confidentiality, but some systems are not read-only. Properties like integrity, authorization, etc. often depend on the confidentiality of passwords and private keys. When the admin passwords enter public record, we have to assume all government databases and infrastructure (taxation, payroll, Exchange servers, PBXes for federal offices, etc) are promptly trashed by bored teenagers (or even better, overwritten with subtly wrong data/configuration for the lulz). How long before the email password of the Secretary of Defense is used to announce a foreign policy change? How long do you think the signing keys for a valid nuclear launch order will sit on Wikileaks before someone uses them?
- Do we count the federal reserve? Authentication factors needed to make arbitrary bank transfers are out in the open too.
I disagree with most of your points but let's take an example of how TV/propaganda differs from reality: On TV, brave agents would be "incapable of any sort of undercover/sting operation." In reality, a super-leak would end abusive and dangerous confidential informant ops that depend on blackmailing CIs into enticing others into pseudo-crimes. CIs also commit thousands of crimes that they get away with while being CIs. The FBI wastes a good deal of time on these ops, which might have something to do with why, after his co-workers had concrete concerns about the Orlando shooter, the FBI found nothing wrong. Secrecy hides a lot of ineffective, expensive, and abusive practices.
In every area you cite, it is likely that secrecy hides more appalling counterproductive corrupt practices than it protects secrets that make us safer.
It's funny, I got the Chicago mayor's office phone records after a year of fighting for them. When my follow-up request asked for all calls to a particular hourly hotel in 2014, based on the results of my initial win, they claimed that I had all records for that phone number already. The department that gave me the initial records also had their access revoked a week or after the judge wrapped everything up. So, possible deletion of public records and additional layers of obfuscation..
If actually implemented, I could foresee this automation drastically helping journalism. Right now, FOIA requests require the requester to pay for the cost of research and redaction. Potentially one of these costs is going to drop. Also, automated redaction would improve the time it takes to fulfill FOIA requests.
Redaction isn't actually a difficult task, just tedious. The redactor (?) has a copy of the classification guide for that topic, and redacts anything from the document that hasn't exceeded its declassification time limit according to the guide.
I've submitted maybe 75 FOIA requests without a journalist exemption of any kind in the past two years and haven't had to pay a cent. Submit some damn FOIA requests!
Daniel Patrick Moynhan[1] chaired the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy[2] and wrote a book called Secrecy: The American Experience[3]. His main thesis (IIRC, I read it awhile ago) was that information is an important asset in government. People in government naturally seek to obtain it, hoard it, and only trade it at a price. He argued that much of government secrecy serves that dynamic rather than national interests.
He also asserts that ideas suffer from being developed in secret, often in insular echo chambers, where they are not exposed to the light of day of public debate and of outside ideas and points of view - a sort of cathedral vs. bazaar perspective. (Again, IIRC.)
----
[1] Notable sociologist, PhD in International Relations, UN Ambassador, Senator ... few were better qualified as a combination of scholar and practitioner.
25 comments
[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 58.7 ms ] threadNow compare that with what horrors would be revealed: Who profited illegally from a secret matter? What lies have the American people been operating under? Who got away with what? Who died for lack of competent action? Secrecy is so often used to avoid embarrassment at the cost of an informed public, the vast majority of what would be revealed deserves to be revealed.
How beneficial would it be to learn these things, in full? The problem with things like "electronic declassification" is that they will err on the side of redaction.
Significant to who? A very good argument can be made that there is absolutely no good reason for our government to keep ANYTHING secret. Any behavior the government thinks that they need to keep secret, they should not be engaged in. The harm done to our country and our "democracy" by the secret (and often illegal and unconstitutional) actions of unaccountable government officials is far, far worse then any claimed benefit.
I disagree. As examples, the codes to launch nuclear missiles and also your personal tax returns probably should be kept secret.
http://www.globalzero.org/files/bb_keeping_presidents_in_the...
Government secrecy is toxic, the very antithesis of how a free society should be run. It serves to hide corruption, negligence, and malfeasance.
If people tell the CDC details of their sexual contacts so that CDC can track and deal with an outbreak of an STD, the CDC should release the names of the people involved and those sexual details?
Or do you think law for cement and public health are not areas that government should be involved in?
The loss of these secrets would seriously weaken the U.S. in diplomacy since adversaries would know the exact limits and shortfalls in U.S. military power.
Most secrets, as you rightly assume, aren't in this class. Most of them are analysis literally gleaned from the open internet and combined in a report to a policy maker.
I don't think the classification system is a good repository for secret corruption. Tenured federal employees have little reason to hide the impropriety of an elected official; on the contrary, they can get a cash bonus for reporting the malfeasance! In the rare cases when corruption was masked by military secrets, e.g. the Iran Contra affair, the profits were small (in the tens of thousands) compared to the scale of the wrongdoing (the undermining of the rule of law, Congress, and the people).
The best way to detect corruption would be to have better aggregation of officials' assets and analysts dedicated to the task. Elected officials and security clearance holders currently fill out an annual financial disclosure, but corruption can easily be obscured from the process.
Where did you get that figure? Ricky Ross made billions personally on that racket
He was dealing drugs before the Iran-Contra affair.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Freeway%22_Rick_Ross
Thanks for mentioning him, though. I didn't know much about this particularly interesting part of history.
>According to the October 2013 Esquire article, “Between 1982 and 1989, federal prosecutors estimated, Ross bought and resold several metric tons of cocaine. In 1980 dollars, his gross earnings were said to be in excess of $900 million – with a profit of nearly $300 million. Converted roughly to present-day dollars: 2.5 billion gross, and $850 million in profit, respectively. As his distribution empire grew to include forty-two cities, the price he paid per kilo of powder cocaine dropped from as much as $60,000 to as low as $10,000. ”
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/"Freeway"_Rick_Ross
[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Webb
They have a very big reason: Appearing disloyal - the cardinal sin - and never working in Washington or anywhere near it again. I hope that cash bonus is a big one.
By the way, I usually enjoy your posts, just not that one. In a second reading of my comment, it contains way more snark than I had intended when I wrote it. I deserved to be called out.
All I can say is ...
... I know some people who work for government. In the last few hours, in fact, I was telling one about our conversation and they were surprised that there was any debate - they thought it would clearly be a career-ending move, and the only reward they knew of was around $3,000 (and if there are other rewards, what does it say that they don't know?). They said the only thing they can imagine you are referring to is that whistle blowers on government contract corruption in certain circumstances get a percentage of the contract or savings, which could be a lot and potentially worth losing a career and all the other institutional penalties that will come down on them too.
... It matches my lifelong experience and observations of every institution and industry, and what I believe is common knowledge of everyone in one. The worst thing you can do is be disloyal; you will be blackballed, your reputation may be smeared, and you may be investigated for every paperclip anyone is willing to allege that you wasted or used for personal reasons, etc. As one example, priests worldwide in the Catholic Church obviously knew raping children would be overlooked, but not one (afaik; certainly very few) dared to report it. Many at Penn State knew about Sandusky raping children; none dared to report it to police and several openly said they feared for their careers and reputations if they did. The first people to report it, a mother and her victimized son, faced such community retaliation (in Penn State's college town) that the local police prepared a witness protection program for them - for a raped child! - and those weren't even employees. University trustees who took action on the issue were voted out of office by angry alumni. Stomach-turning, but that unfortunately is human nature very often.
- Human intelligence assets would be executed, as you mention. Witness protection program participants, too.
- Signals intelligence targets would stop using (or feed false information to) compromised systems.
- Consequently, the government would lose what little understanding it has of what's going on in the world, threats, likely outcomes of foreign policy, etc.
- It would also be incapable of any sort of undercover/sting operation, because every target of an investigation knows they are the target of an investigation.
- Diplomats can no longer talk about 3rd parties behind their back. No more conspiracies between allies to keep another nation (i.e. North Korea) in check. No more back channels.
- Diplomats must negotiate with foreign leaders in full view of their populations and political opponents. No more reasoning with leaders, brokering secret face-saving solutions. (Giving foreign nations an opportunity to back down without appearing weak is a staple of diplomacy).
- The budget required to replicate our military technology (including nuclear arsenal) shrinks dramatically, amplifying threats currently below the threshold of "serious."
- The nature of our defenses and locations of troops, installations, ships, etc. becomes public, lowering the bar to a successful attack.
- Some of the government's secrets are your secrets too. The full name/DOB/SSN mapping used to authenticate yourself to financial services. Home and family addresses for federal employees like prison guards, judges, and prosecutors.
- We've blown confidentiality, but some systems are not read-only. Properties like integrity, authorization, etc. often depend on the confidentiality of passwords and private keys. When the admin passwords enter public record, we have to assume all government databases and infrastructure (taxation, payroll, Exchange servers, PBXes for federal offices, etc) are promptly trashed by bored teenagers (or even better, overwritten with subtly wrong data/configuration for the lulz). How long before the email password of the Secretary of Defense is used to announce a foreign policy change? How long do you think the signing keys for a valid nuclear launch order will sit on Wikileaks before someone uses them?
- Do we count the federal reserve? Authentication factors needed to make arbitrary bank transfers are out in the open too.
In every area you cite, it is likely that secrecy hides more appalling counterproductive corrupt practices than it protects secrets that make us safer.
Embarrassment is a weird thing in politics.
Redaction isn't actually a difficult task, just tedious. The redactor (?) has a copy of the classification guide for that topic, and redacts anything from the document that hasn't exceeded its declassification time limit according to the guide.
He also asserts that ideas suffer from being developed in secret, often in insular echo chambers, where they are not exposed to the light of day of public debate and of outside ideas and points of view - a sort of cathedral vs. bazaar perspective. (Again, IIRC.)
----
[1] Notable sociologist, PhD in International Relations, UN Ambassador, Senator ... few were better qualified as a combination of scholar and practitioner.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moynihan_Commission_on_Governm...
[3] https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/daniel-patrick-mo... and https://www.nytimes.com/books/98/10/04/reviews/981004.04tane...