Wikileaks, Ethics and Transparency

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I think it's just that we've been verging away from the topics where we typically disagree vehemently. I mean, how long has it been since someone went on a religion/anti-religion diatribe for/against abortions for lesbians or something?

The reason I say he probably would be if he gave it to an Al Qaeda operative, though, is because of the type of intel. Telling our enemy how many nukes the US has is one thing. Telling them who among them is spying for us is another. The first is valuable intel, but not something likely to result in immediate action to our detriment. The second is.

Apparently there was an issue about his UK bail address being read in open court.

 

How handy that these two headlines essentially amount to an argument: No ‘substantive’ damage from Wikileaks, Biden admits; Wikileaks did not commit a crime, House Judiciary chairman says.

 

This sounds bogus to me. As far as I've heard there is nothing in the documents released that is remotely interesting, let alone putting "people at risk." This sounds like nothing more than internatinal payback to me.

All that's been released proves one thing: The US government considers the most mudane events and communications to be "classified" and secert. What nonsense is this, that our government is on this big secercy agenda. It makes me wonder about the state of the mentaliy of the people who are running things. Why the need to keep everything secret? The Cold War is over, or so we were led to believe by the self-congratulatory Reaganites.

 

Part of that is how the government does its classifications. For anything that is consider classified, secret, or FOUO (For Official Use Only), you have to label the entire document as such, even if there's only a small part of it that receives that classification. All subsequent documents and correspondence produced from that document also get the same classification, even if the subsequent writing was not dealing with the 1% of the document that got the original a classification rating to begin with. So yes, it is entirely possible for very mundane material to have a classification rating.

It wasn't always like this - at first you could just label specific sections or pages with an FOUO (or whatever) rating, and the not classified stuff could be spread easily. A lot of these new rules came about after 9/11.

 

If I am a head of department in the US government with the power to classify, and I choose to classify my pizza receipts, any employee leaking them is violating secrecy laws, and committing a felony. Of course it works the same with torture receipts.

What I want to say is that secrecy is a weapon.

I remember very well how during the Bush years federal judges, who were asked to hear detention and torture cases were routinely told by federal prosecutors with straight faces that they lacked the proper security clearance to see evidence (worse, these judges caved in). Same iirc for a special investigator who had to investigate such cases. He just couldn't see the files because he lacked clearance, and the process to grant him clearance just took so long. Fortuitous coincidence.

Secrecy has been in the past, and continues to be in the present, used to evade and obstruct oversight, to cover up and to evade accountability.

Great comment on that subject: A call to dedicate a beat to the subject of secrecy

 

Oh, the US secrecy state goes back further than that. This dates back to the Cold War. Then Government realized they could gain power by classifying things. And you know how that goes.

 

Unfortunately, that appears to be the case.