Invisible Leaks
by zunguzungu
In this clip from his forum at UC Berkeley, Julian Assange admitted that sources of his had been caught in the past, but argued that “the chances of your source being run over a car are vastly higher” than that of a source of a leaked document being caught:
…there’s a perceptual illusion because every time a source is caught, their name, even their face is in the paper. But every time the NY Times uses a source to inform a story, it’s either, it’s like the source never existed in the first place, because it’s basically an anarchist act, right, leaking is basically an anarchist act, and to be a mainstream publication, you can’t be lionizing source of anarchist acts all the time. So you don’t see the source mentioned at all in the story or you see documents seen by the NY Times or officials speaking anonymously.
But that’s such a small reference that people don’t see the source. So there’s a perceptual bias that sources are getting busted all over bbut there’s not the perceptual understanding that sources are succeeding all over and that the actual chance of being busted is extremely low, even in this incredibly oppressive environment…
Which seems more or less right to me. Wikileaks is getting all the press, but here’s an EPA memo leaked without their help:
“An internal EPA memo released Wednesday confirms that the very agency charged with protecting the environment is ignoring the warnings of its own scientists about clothianidin, a pesticide from which Bayer racked up €183 million (about $262 million) in sales in 2009.”
Or this one, in which it was revealed that the British coalition government secretly believes Britain’s new higher ed scheme will be unsustainable, saddling graduates with a loan burden they’ll never be able to pay off:
Internal government figures, seen by The Independent on Sunday, reveal that a small minority of students paying fees of up to £9,000 a year are expected ever to pay them off in full. Ministers believe most graduates will spend their whole working lives making monthly payments to cover their loans and interest – without ever being able to settle their debts.
A briefing note from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) has revealed that: 25 per cent of graduates will repay “at least 100 per cent of the original value of their loans in PV [present value] terms”; the “best-case scenario” foresees a maximum of only half of graduates settling their debts; up to 60 per cent will never pay in full.
Now, this is damning stuff; the idea for the new system in Britain (as for semi-privatization schemes here in the states) is that a university education is so valuable that students should be willing to pay for it, now that the government is not. But that argument only works if the rise in income that graduates get from their educations compensates for the added debt they take on. If that’s not the case — and this document indicates that it is not, and that the government knows it is not — then one of two things are going to happen: students take on lifetime debt peonage or the population that gets a university education becomes vastly smaller. Either way, much greater class stratification and inequality is the result, something the government gets to ignore only if they pretend students will benefit, financially, more from their university education than they actually will. This document shows that they know that argument is bogus, and yet that they’re going forward anyway.
More than that, it demonstrates exactly what Assange was talking about: the entire story is nothing but a leaked document, and yet who leaked it? You barely even notice that there even was a leaker. And you don’t notice that The Independent’s role here has not been to propagate and disseminate the leaked document, but in fact, to obscure it. They read it and decided which parts were worth emphasizing, and then they excluded those which were not (the author of the report, for example, or other budgetary details). Such details might be much more damning. Yet standard journalistic procedure here is to excise such details, making an editorial choice (and taking the interpretive license) to tell you what the document says. Which is where Wikileaks’ “scientific journalism” comes in, the idea that all leaked documents should be fully released, so that conclusions can be independently checkable (not just checked by The Independent). Which is, of course, Assange’s real sin, and the reason he could be tried for espionage for publishing classified material, while the NY Times and Guardian never will be: he deigned to let us read the news ourselves.
zunguzungu 
The logical fallacy being promoted here is the idea that you can excise judgment about what to publish altogether. How does Wikileaks decide what to publish (versus what not to publish)? How is the decision “publish everything” not a judgment call? There is no neutral, you are just describing different points on the same spectrum.
That’s true, but you’re presenting as a quantitative difference what I would describe as both qualitative and quite grave: the Independent said that this is important for the public but not for the public to actually see (just be told about), whereas Assange’s method allows conclusions to be checkable by the people whose interest it supposedly concerns. The difference being, in other words, less one of principle than of effect: in the former case, we are wholly dependent on the newspaper to tell us what the leaked document says; in the latter case, we can read it for ourselves. That seems important to me, even though I wouldn’t deny there to be a certain slippery slope / lack of clarity in distinction going on. The difference is important and substantive, in other words, without being clear (like so much in real life).
If we set aside the fact that WikiLeaks (or anyone) exercises judgment in determining what to publish and that this bias cannot be excised (and is massive, considering that the volume of non-public information is, for all intents and purposes, infinite), then the premise seems to be that more disclosure engenders better behavior or better outcomes; that full, unfettered transparency benefits the public.
I think this idea merits further exploration in your blog postings. What are the unintended costs of transparency? The “in favor” debate seems to accept that transparency is always good. Picking this apart is relatively easy: sources are likely to be harrassed (perhaps physically harmed); sources are likely to become more reticent to share information; certain “secrets” are unequivocally better off kept as such (e.g., how to make weapons); etc.
Assange & others would say that my enumeration of the costs pales in comparison to the benefits of transparency. They will do this by cherry-picking some of the most egregious examples of institutional behavior so that the benefits are self-evident. Fair enough. But when Wikileaks potentially incurs the costs of transparency in service of publishing the mostly ordinary inner workings of our diplomatic corps., is it worth it?
If you pursued this line of reasoning, you could make a defensible case for, essentially, an editor (i.e., someone that assesses the cost/benefit of transparency). An editor that makes judgment calls. That leads us back to the “Independent”. Unless transparency is always desirable—which seems unlikely—some amount of judgment is essential.
What’s the solution? My two cents, an institution that is setup with oversight, traditions, and a “culture” that strives to strike the right balance. That institution? An independent media. Of course they will make mistakes, but I personally would trust then people like Assange that seem in possession of a worldview in which nuance doesn’t matter (“US government = bad”; “transparency = good”) and, therefore, some notion of editorial judgment is not essential.
what cudlips like Dan dont understand is that foxnews can never be anything but an information cocoon for disinformation, fact blocking, and backfire effect.
“a worldview in which nuance doesn’t matter (“US government = bad”; “transparency = good”) and, therefore, some notion of editorial judgment is not essential.”
again, that is not Assanges worldview.
just and honest diplomacy is not harmful …..is unjust and secretive diplomancy, the kind that is dangerous for the proles to know about, that is affected by Assanges system-killer.
Dan, I’d also like to point out that you’re approaching this issue of transparency vs. conspiracy, to phrase it pithily, without any sort of historical context. From 2000 onwards a massive deceit was perpetuated on the American public with disastrous consequences. In the recent past a major financial crisis seriously impacted the economies of countries around the world – again because of, in Assange’s terms, a conspiracy.
I don’t see how one could evaluate Wikileaks without keeping this in mind. Frankly, I think Wikileaks is an _entirely_ political organization, and that is as it should be, as, in the broadest sense, everything must dabble in politics. These days, news organizations which forget this (and by politics I don’t mean a partisan organization like Fox per se, but rather one aware of its inherent social role) become a victim of the maxim “if you don’t stand for something you’ll fall for anything.”
Lastly, if you want to pursue an empirical process of evaluating ‘transparency’ then I think you should take care to provide some verifiable data to bolster your logic.
It’s not quite everything. Wikileaks claims they have an editorial criteria.
The information must have been withheld from the public … currently withheld from the public, or undergoing active censorship ….an attack in the legal sense and be of significant public ethical, historical or diplomatic interest. That’s the criteria. One more thing, it can’t be self authored, unless it’s an official document.
[…]Regardless of what nation they are from, they[sources] can have confidence that we will stick religiously to this editorial criteria. And if there’s any doubt as to if something is in or out… it’s in.
Taken from a video by J.Assange
Thanks for posting their editorial policy. Separate from assessing whether practice is consistent with policy, someone should count the number of complete subjective criteria in that statement (“significant”, “ethical”, “historical”) and tell me what the difference is between a traditional newspaper editor and Wikileaks.
That leads me right back to the “man”. I’d rather have whomever is making this decisions for the WSJ, the NY Times, and the Post, to keep at it, rather than Assange who, my two cents, (yes, we have to wait until the courts render their verdict) seems a little off.
Granted, wikileaks is not without criticism, and we should all be skeptical of Assange as editor-in-chief, but I think what’s important is not necessarily Wikileaks as an organization, but as an idea.
The idea of Wikileaks is quickly becoming widespread, with many similar organizations popping up: OpenLeaks being the most prominent.
Now I have a problem with “OpenLeaks” as they won’t publish the source documents themselves. At the same time I like their approach. OpenLeaks will have the same source protection mechanisms in place as WikiLeaks, but the leaker will choose who receives the documents. Let’s see how this works.
Major media organizations have accounts with OpenLeaks. You want to leak something. You send your data to OpenLeaks and instruct them on which major media outlets gets the data. OpenLeaks has no control over what gets published, they aren’t responsible for checking these documents for authenticity. The leaker decides that.
I like this model a lot, my only criticism is that OpenLeaks won’t publish the documents themselves, which means we’re at the mercy of the traditional media again.
Assange’s own off-the-cuff description of these as “editorial criteria” notwithstanding, these are hardly qualitative criteria as used by traditional newspaper editors. They’re more like descriptions of the body of material Wikileaks chooses to work with. It’s reasonable to make commonsense subjective judgments about what’s significant. Can’t we all stipulate that genocide is more worthy of attention than local zoning ordinances and the like?
I’m a different Dan, lest anyone mistake me for a change of heart. On that note, I think that the distinction between publishing leaked documents and reporting on them amounts to more than a difference between more transparency and less. We lose theoretical leverage by treating the curation of primary documents as the equivalent of a quote-heavy article instead of trying to pin down the differences of medium and genre that separate Assange’s journalism from the NYT. We’re looking at a change in what Northrop Frye calls “the radical of presentation,” the set of social and formal conventions through which a text addresses its audience.
Provisionally, Wikileaks is to the NYT as drama is to epic. The fact that the individual documents appear to speak for themselves seems important, not because it guarantees unlimited objectivity (there being no such thing) but because such direct access makes it nearly impossible to read these purloined letters without imagining their social itinerary, their privileged circulation among those who think the rest of us ought not to know. I’d wager that the simple availability of these leaked documents exerts a potent social push on those who guess at their contents without actually bothering to read a word. Someone call McLuhan. Our whole fallacy is wronger by the minute!
“We lose theoretical leverage by treating the curation of primary documents as the equivalent of a quote-heavy article instead of trying to pin down the differences of medium and genre that separate Assange’s journalism from the NYT.”
Awesome! +1
Having posted all that, I forgot to add that ZZ’s final paragraph already seems to imply the extent to which we’re talking about the aesthetic form of political transactions. Good stuff.
“Which is, of course, Assange’s real sin, and the reason he could be tried for espionage for publishing classified material, while the NY Times and Guardian never will be: he deigned to let us read the news ourselves.”
Aye, theres the rub.
And the next stage of the kabuki drama. Will Assange be prosecuted by the US for espionage?
Or protected by the judiciary?
we already saw the judiciary suborned to the Bush Torture Presidency.
the real drama is the system that the Founders built vs the system killer that Julian Assange built.
Fucking freedom of speech….how does it work?
just how robust is the Founders vision?
Makoto, I don’t understand where there’s an inherent conflict between Wikileaks and the Constitution, if that’s what you’re saying.
Assanges system killer will work (if it works) by transforming the target closed information into a police state by inducing paranoia reflex.
At this point the hyperpower cannot seem to turn off the drip of diplo cables, and is obviously preparing to violate Assanges rights (while ignoring the NYT and der Spiegel equivalent transgressions.
I see the judiciary as the only way to prevent America turning into a police state on its way to non-linear system collapse….committing seppuku via paranoia reflex.
The Bush Torture administration successfully suborned the judicial branch to allow torture.
Assanges systemkiller is a test of the judicial branch…..which failed the torture test.
Did the Founders design a robust system? or will america become a police state.
there are a lot of signs that Assanges system killer is WAI…i know people with clearances that have been threatened with debrief if they are caught visiting WL sites. The Library of congress closed links last week. Defense contractors are fraggin their OODA loops too.
the Keystone Kops of Amerikkka are right now trying to gin up some espionage charge to go after Assange with.
Will the judicial go along? in the name of “national security”?
they sanctioned torture.
thing is, it wont do any good. WL is built to run without Assange. He said himself he is the lightening rod to draw fire while WL hums along.
approx 20 per hour since i started keeping track.
cant stop the signal.
“Other Dan”.
These are great comments, except for the one that seems to imply that I am a fan of Fox News (and in which I believe I was derisively referred to as a “cudlip”, which I assume to be shorthand for “someone with whom I disagree”, although I could be mistaken).
Inspired by the comment about historical context, I think another potential blog topic is whether or not after all is said an done, the release of documents will acheive much of anything. Judging from the posted comments, I think we are all likely to agree that the premise for the war in Iraq (WMD) was false, that its administration was characterized by all sorts of nasty stuff (see: Abu Ghraib photos), that our own government pushed the boundaries of torture and with what consequence? None of these essentially “known” facts seem to have done much to change the behavior of our government (in Assange’s vocabulary, to make our governement more “just”) and it’s former head seemingly spends his time worried about Kanye West. Food for thought—and this is not necessarily fully formed, so please refrain from pie-throwing—if we know most of this already, if instances of high-level accountability are relatively few & far between, will additional transparency lead to more moral governance? Is the Internet (transparency) a bulwark against, say, dictatorship? Or should we be discussing the fecklessness of our institutions and the apathy of our citizenry rather than WikiLeaks. I would maintain that the information we need has been there all along, we’re just not able or willing to act on it.
Also, since the topic is transparency, if you are reading a hint of obstreperousness in my comments, it’s probably b/c I have succumbed to the emotional interpretation of Assange-as-egotistical prick, rather than to a conservative worldview.
i call n/e one a cudlip that bloviates about Assanges intent without reading Aarons excellent analysis.
dont take it personal.
WL is simply the death of conservatism.
did you know that?
conservatism is the idea we have to use old crap that worked in the past because human nature is immutable….the idea that some things are better for the cudlips not know.
Assange believes cudlips can learn, can be educated….that is what his mission statement of information transparency and hacktivism as a paradigm are all about.
me, im not so sure.
cudlips will be cudlips.
you see Dan….there is a prototype of a closed information systems killer RUNNING RIGHT NAOW.
and the powerless hyperpower cannot turn it off.
it certainly seems to be working as intended.
and if it works….it is the ELE (extinction level event) of the modern security state.
I tend to think that maximizing the freedom of information will influence our political system for the better, but I also suspect that Matoko_chan errs by regarding the state primarily as an information system. Of course, it is an information system, but also a structure of power with ties to social and financial hierarchies. If you’ll all pardon some crude Marxist lingo, let’s not get stuck on the superstructure.
Meanwhile, if we want to be strict, something like wikileaks will plausibly force closed information systems to shrink themselves down and dumb themselves down in the way that Assange predicts, but it is melodramatic to say that his MO kills these systems. Speculatively, that won’t happen until someone solves the P versus NP problem and makes all those fancy encryption algorithms worthless. That one may be the Fields Medal that makes pre-apocalyptic civilization obsolete…well, unless the next ice age gets here first.
the SECURITY state is a closed information system.
To massively simplify. Success is built on having a nice open functioning OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) loop. When A paranoid system adds layer after layer of security, bluffs, FUD, etc. at increasing strength as the core of the system is approached, Information flow across the entire system is compromised, and the OODA loops of the component parts start getting more and more out of whack,they respond to information more and more slowly, make decisions slower, or worse always make the SAME decision etc. This is how non linear information systems collapse.
If you can complete your OODA loop faster than your opponent you will win.
The slow drip of the diplo cables is intended to induce paranoia reflex …freezing or fraggin the OODA loops.
So far it is working.
obviously you know nothing about next gen encryption– quantum encryption.
Thing is– hackers write the ice, hackers can break the ice.
Assange and company are cyber-insurgents on their home turf.
the powerless hyperpower is forced to hire cyber-mercs, skiddies and spammers to DDOS wikileaks.
this will end just as badly as all our other Epic Fails at fighting insurgents– islamic insurgents, vietcong insurgents.
America the Stupid.
Yes, yes, fine, QKD slipped my mind. My main point, though, is not to contest what you’re saying about information flow, but to point out that what you’re calling the Security State does not encompass our political system. No one is acting particularly surprised by the content of the leaked cables, which suggests (among other things) that the secrecy being undermined is primarily an expression of political power and only secondarily its cause.
this is why i called you a cudlip.
fucking blockquotes….how do they work?
the core idea behind conservatism is that human nature is immutable, and therefore the people are are stupid, and some secrets should kept from them for their own good.
WL is a full frontal assault on political conservatism.
actually you called me (other dan) a cudlip. dan c. was largely an innocent bystander.
as for your revolution and interesting views of conservatism, good luck. for me, the key is in dan c’s comment “no one is particularly surprised” about the cables. perhaps much ado about nothing. if you’re anticipating dramatic change of some sort, worth asking what’s different? technologies for disseminating information have been around forever (printing press for centuries, internet for decades), investigative journalists, ditto (woodward & bernstein, going on 40 years ago), anarchists (check, not new). so what are you left with? scale? degree? what else? finally, the revoluion (sorry of oversimplifying) requires a citizenry that cares beyond our relatively short news cycle. the portion that does seem to care seems particularly afflicted these days with a hyper-partisanship that infects even this message board. assange can show everyone the same source documents, but he can’t control the “truths” that people assign to them.
so yes, good luck, with the revolution. let me know how it goes.
“assange can show everyone the same source documents, but he can’t control the “truths” that people assign to them.”
CANT YOU FUCKING READ?
THAT IS NOT THE PURPOSE OF THE SLOW RELEASE OF THE CABLES.
it DOESNT MATTER what is in the cables– they are only CONFIDENTIAL, there is nothing earthshattering in there….but the constant drip induces system paranoia.
Like Assange predicted, america is becoming a police state on its way to non-linear system collapse.
im not talking about the revolt of the cudlips….altho that is coming.
Assange has deployed a beta-test closed information systems killer. the slow release of the diplo cables is designed to trigger paranoia reflex so that the system kills itself by freezing or cutting its OODA loops….non-linear system collapse.
It is running right naow, and the powerless hyperpower cant seem to find a way to turn if off.
And it is working as intended, meaning that America is becoming a police state on its way to non-linear system collapse.
Smash the oligarchs is just the first stage.
the revolt of the cudlips comes later.
🙂
Do you understand what just happened?
A branch of the American armed services just forbid OUR troops from reading an American newspaper.
WTF is wrong with you people?
is that even legal????
and Dan….it matters not a whit that you think it couldnt happen or that it shouldnt happen.
It IS happening.
Z,
I’m not sure I entirely agree with this:
“Which is where Wikileaks’ “scientific journalism” comes in, the idea that all leaked documents should be fully released, so that conclusions can be independently checkable (not just checked by The Independent). Which is, of course, Assange’s real sin, and the reason he could be tried for espionage for publishing classified material, while the NY Times and Guardian never will be: he deigned to let us read the news ourselves.”
You may be right that what distinguishes Wikileaks from other publishers *in the eyes of the law* is that it actually publishes the original documents that are leaked. But even so, I can’t imagine that that is really Assange’s “real sin” in the eyes of the U.S. government and its allies. As you noted in a previous post, Assange himself makes the point that just releasing leaked documents doesn’t necessarily make a difference. Surely what has got the U.S. government worried, then, is not that Assange publishes raw data but that he is so good at getting it out there. He is actually setting the news agenda. And that’s a problem for them because Assange is not someone they can control.
One of the puzzling aspects of this affair is why many establishment journalists and watchdog groups are ambivalent or even against what Wikileaks is doing. I think the reason is that they have a tacit understanding with the U.S. government that they won’t actively try to undermine U.S. interests (as defined by the elites, of course). In other words, these groups will expose corruption as long as the damage is localized to individuals, and does not impede the ability of the government to carry out its policies – especially with respect to “national security”. Assange and Wikileaks aren’t interested in playing this game. On the contrary, as you and others have pointed out, they want to target the operational effectiveness of the government insofar as it relies on a conspiratorial structure to be effective. Doing that, however, isn’t just a matter of making information available. Wikileaks also have to be advocates – hence with the publication of the raw data they also editorialize (e.g. “collateral murder”). For this reason I would also disagree with something you said earlier, namely that Wikileaks is not about Assange. Actually, I think to some extent it is, since he is the front man of this operation. And without a spokesperson it would be a lot harder for Wikileaks to get so much publicity for its stories and force other news organisations to take notice.
no you are wrong.
WL is designed to run fine without Assange.
actually i think his arrest was kabuki planned to activate his fifth column– the mirror site and the chanese (Anonymous, 4chan, cryptome, the hacker community)…and to MAXIMIZE EXPOSURE (another WL prime directive).
that is about 20 per hour added since i started keeping track.
WL cannot be turned off.
If you read my post carefully, you’ll see that I distinguish between the process of publishing information and the process of making people take notice of that information. I’m suggesting Assange (as Wikileak’s spokesperson) is essential to the latter; at least until they get another spokesperson. And the latter – making the public take notice of the information being leaked – is what the U.S. government is most concerned about.
“I’m suggesting Assange (as Wikileak’s spokesperson) is essential to the latter”
and i disagree.
as far as the diplo cables go, there is no shocking content.
CONFIDENTIAL classification doesnt allow for it.
Assange-as-essential-spokesperson is a faery tale the powerless hyperpower is telling itself.
the empirical data is that WL cannot be stopped.
not by the oldskool (“conservative”) method of chopping off the snakes head, not by emulating insurgent tactics (a la french algiers campaign) not by anything the powerless hyperpower can do.
And the harder the hyperpower tries to shut down the data stream, the more Assanges system killer appears to be working as intended.
America is becoming a police state on its way to non-linear information system collapse.
that is incontrovertable.
America troops are being forbidden to read an American newspaper– the NYT.
shockant.
This is extremely frustrating for me….i guess it the whole first culture vs third culture dynamic. I understand the vast majority of readers and commenters here dont have the system theoretic or information theoretic background to assimilate what Assange is attempting to do.
But it doesnt matter if you think he cant (technically) or shouldnt (morally) accomplish his STATED goals.
Assange has been very forward about his philosophy and what he is trying to accomplish.
It is nothing less than a new world order.
Highly radical, highly ambitious.
The reason i think Assanges strategy has a 90% chance of working is that Assange just did in cyberspace what OBL did to us in meatspace.
Granted, OBL’s tactical strike was not as well formed as Assanges hackitivist manifesto.
It was really just junk-punching Big White American Christian Bwana in the economic junk.
But it worked splendidly, pretty much bringing down the American economic house of cards and turning America into Soviet Russia in the worlds eyes.
Now Julian Assange just junk-punched America in the security junk.
And if America runs true to form, we will sting ourselves to death like the scorpion in the faery tale.
[…] This document shows that they know that argument is bogus, and yet that they’re going forward anyway. . . . More than that, it demonstrates exactly what Assange was talking about: the entire story is nothing but a leaked document, and yet who leaked it? You barely even notice that there even was a leaker. And you don’t notice that The Independent’s role here has not been to propagate and disseminate the leaked document, but in fact, to obscure it. They read it and decided which parts were worth emphasizing, and then they excluded those which were not (the author of the report, for example, or other budgetary details). Such details might be much more damning. Yet standard journalistic procedure here is to excise such details, making an editorial choice (and taking the interpretive license) to tell you what the document says. Which is where Wikileaks’ “scientific journalism” comes in, the idea that all leaked documents should be fully released, so that conclusions can be independently checkable (not just checked by The Independent). Which is, of course, Assange’s real sin, and the reason he could be tried for espionage for publishing classified material, while the NY Times and Guardian never will be: he deigned to let us read the news ourselves. —Zunguzungu […]
[…] Accusations of data dumping and lack of analysis of the data dumped miss the point completely. In Invisible Leaks Aaron Bady aka zunguzungu, a California-based blogger who has attracted a lot of attention […]
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