Smallest surprise in the world

3 Comments »

• Peter says:

  29 November 2010 at 6:46 pm

  Er, so?

  (NZ) PM warned of embarrassment in leaked cables

  New Zealand’s prime minister has been warned that one or two diplomatic cables out of the US embassy in Wellington might cause some embarrassment.
  The cables are part of a worldwide release on Monday of 250,000 American confidential diplomatic cables by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks.
  John Key says he has been given a broad idea of what is in the cables relating to New Zealand and one or two might contain embarrassing comments.
  But he would not give details on Monday, saying he was waiting to see whether website actually posted the cables or not.

  All that has appeared so far are references to topics which diplomatic cables from Wellington address, including cables related to North Korea and Iran in February this year.
  Labour Party leader Phil Goff says the language in the cables will be much more brutal than the language contained in the State Department’s public statements.

  US spies likely to know Clark’s credit card details

  It appears likely that American intelligence officials know credit card details of former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark, documents released by WikiLeaks indicate.
  The latest diplomatic cables reveal US diplomats were asked to collect detailed personal information on senior United Nations officials.
  The cables date from July last year, not long after Miss Clark took up her job as head of the UN Development Programme.
  American diplomats were asked to provide the US intelligence community with personal details about senior UN officials, including their credit card account numbers, frequent flyer numbers and email details.

  http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/62901/pm-warned-of-embarrassment-in-leaked-cables

  Desperately grasping for any relevance whatsoever …

• Peter says:

  29 November 2010 at 6:52 pm

  Meanwhile, The Guardian‘s Simon Jenkins has it right:

  An electronic secret is a contradiction in terms.

  This line is worth remembering, I think.

  —

  US embassy cables: The job of the media is not to protect the powerful from embarrassment

  It is for governments – not journalists – to guard public secrets, and there is no national jeopardy in WikiLeaks’ revelations

  Is it justified? Should a newspaper disclose virtually all a nation’s secret diplomatic communication, illegally downloaded by one of its citizens? The reporting in the Guardian of the first of a selection of 250,000 US state department cables marks a recasting of modern diplomacy. Clearly, there is no longer such a thing as a safe electronic archive, whatever computing’s snake-oil salesmen claim. No organisation can treat digitised communication as confidential. An electronic secret is a contradiction in terms.

  Anything said or done in the name of a democracy is, prima facie, of public interest. When that democracy purports to be “world policeman” – an assumption that runs ghostlike through these cables – that interest is global. Nonetheless, the Guardian had to consider two things in abetting disclosure, irrespective of what is anyway published by WikiLeaks. It could not be party to putting the lives of individuals or sources at risk, nor reveal material that might compromise ongoing military operations or the location of special forces. ….

  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/28/us-embassy-cables-wikileaks

• Peter says:

  30 November 2010 at 5:56 pm

  WikiLeaks: the revolution has begun – and it will be digitised

  The web is changing the way in which people relate to power, and politics will have no choice but to adapt too

  Heather Brooke guardian.co.uk, Monday 29 November 2010 22.45 GMT

  Diplomacy has always involved dinners with ruling elites, backroom deals and clandestine meetings. Now, in the digital age, the reports of all those parties and patrician chats can be collected in one enormous database. And once collected in digital form, it becomes very easy for them to be shared.

  Indeed, that is why the Siprnet database – from which these US embassy cables are drawn – was created in the first place. The 9/11 commission had made the remarkable discovery that it wasn’t sharing information that had put the nation’s security at risk; it was not sharing information that was the problem. The lack of co-operation between government agencies, and the hoarding of information by bureaucrats, led to numerous “lost opportunities” to stop the 9/11 attacks.

  As a result, the commission ordered a restructuring of government and intelligence services to better mimic the web itself. Collaboration and information-sharing was the new ethos. But while millions of government officials and contractors had access to Siprnet, the public did not.

  But data has a habit of spreading. It slips past military security and it can also leak from WikiLeaks, which is how I came to obtain the data. It even slipped past the embargoes of the Guardian and other media organisations involved in this story when a rogue copy of Der Spiegel accidentally went on sale in Basle, Switzerland, on Sunday. Someone bought it, realised what they had, and began scanning the pages, translating them from German to English and posting updates on Twitter.

  It would seem digital data respects no authority, be it the Pentagon, WikiLeaks or a newspaper editor.

  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/29/the-revolution-will-be-digitised

  That’s my experience too. Secrets have a way of leaking out. Digital-ness only amplifies that — and can make the leak more accurate — and more authentifiable (sp?)