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    WikiLeaks Debate on Democracy Now

    By Donal on Fri, 12/03/2010 - 8:35pm | Politics

    With their highest viewership ever, Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez were far less placid than usual for this morning's debate between Steven Aftergood and Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald is well-known for his legal and political blogging at Salon, while Aftergood directs a government secrecy project at the Federation of American Scientists, and posts secret documents himself with the Secrecy News project, which I've never heard of before.



    Aftergood said he supports the exposing of corruption, but accused WikiLeaks of being clumsy and unfocused: "It has invaded personal privacy. It has published libelous material. It has violated intellectual property rights. And above all, it has launched a sweeping attack not simply on corruption, but on secrecy itself." Aftergood cited an example of WikiLeaks hurting innocent people by releasing unsubstantiated allegations from a child abuse and murder investigation. He noted that the helicopter video made a big splash, but hadn't accomplished much real change. "I think their theory of political action is extremely primitive. It’s basically throw a lot of stuff out there, and then good things will happen to good people and bad things will happen to bad people."



    For his part, Greenwald blamed people like Aftergood for some of the current problems swirling around WikiLeaks. While he admitted that WikiLeaks was imperfect, he felt their flaws were trivial. He sees them as a strong response to a severe problem, and Aftergood's efforts as comparatively ineffective. "How many wars has Mr. Aftergood stopped? How many rules of engagement has he caused to be changed? I mean, it’s not WikiLeaks’s fault or its responsibility that when they show grave injustices to the American people that the citizenry is either indifferent towards those injustices or apathetic towards them." He attributed several investigations and important reforms to WikiLeaks. He admitted that some Afghan leakers had been exposed and lost their government positions, but felt WikiLeaks had made improvements.

    At one point Aftergood noted, "It’s very hard, evidently, to say both good and bad things about WikiLeaks. People want you to say only one or the other." - which we have certainly seen here on dag. Going back and reading the rush transcript, Greenwald and Aftergood didn't disagree that much factually, it was simply that Aftergood considered WikiLeaks dangerous both to his efforts and in general while Greenwald found their revelations far more compelling than the sort of incremental reforms achieved by more cautious reformers like Aftergood and others.

    Amy Goodman ended the debate by announcing that Columbia University had warned students against accessing WikiLeaks, and that the US Department of State had done the same with workers at USAID. Both men found that absurd, but Aftergood considered it fallout from WikiLeaks itself while Greenwald thought it demonstrated why WikiLeaks is needed. So the debate probably didn't settle much, but seems a representative example of why WikiLeaks is so controversial.

    The interview that followed, Abandoning Net Neutrality, also deserves our attention, as does the Greenpeace lawsuit story after that.

    I'm a big fan of Democracy Now! and I continued my yearly routine of ordering their products as Xmas presents. I saw that for a mere $1000, I could sit in to watch one of their interviews, but I settled for books, coffee mugs and a new hoodie. I'm annoyed with Amazon, though, for caving in to Lieberman. I used to do a lot of business with them, but they aren't the only store in town.

    Topics: 
    Politics

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    I just watched and forwarded a link to a friend as I found out that I am not yet burned out on the subject. If scored like a debate I thought greewald won easily.

     Regarding the e-mails read at the end, I think the one sent by the university to its students was both ominous in its implications yet a smart and responsible thing to do to advise students as to what was in there best interests.


    by A Guy Called LULU on Fri, 12/03/2010 - 9:43pm

    Greenwald seemed more at ease, Aftergood seemed out of his element.


    by Donal on Fri, 12/03/2010 - 10:16pm

    Which brings up the side issue related to debates in our political system: that is, too often the validity of an argument or position is based on the person's ability to deliver that message in the medium provided.  One merely has to refer back to Kennedy vs Nixon to sum of this issue.  Unfortunately all too often we associate the messenger with the message.  One of the facets of why we have the government we have now.


    by Elusive Trope on Fri, 12/03/2010 - 10:48pm

    Did you watch the video? In this particular case I believe that Greenwald made a relaxed delivery of the best arguement.


    by A Guy Called LULU on Fri, 12/03/2010 - 11:09pm

    My point is that if the best argument, whether it done in a relaxed manner or a jittery manner should be irrelevant.


    by Elusive Trope on Fri, 12/03/2010 - 11:29pm

    I'm guessin' you want to edit that statement.


    by A Guy Called LULU on Fri, 12/03/2010 - 11:33pm

    Okay I have pondered this and the comments.  Maybe it is because this has been a long week at work, and maybe it is the vodka, but it seems pretty clear to me: you can argue he makes the best arguement, but what does the fact that he did it in a relaxed manner have to do with the validity of that arguement?


    by Elusive Trope on Sat, 12/04/2010 - 12:03am

    Well then....there!  You fixed it.  Hee. 

    Hell, I knew what you meant.


    by LisB on Sat, 12/04/2010 - 12:14am

     I only suggested an edit so we would be continuing from a common point. Like lisB, I knew, or at least believed , I knew what you meant.
     I didn't mean that a good delivery should carry the day.. Instead, I was suggesting that a judgment that one person won the debate should not be denigrated by implying that the difference, in this case,  between the winner and loser was the delivery by the winner.  I agree, making the best points should, and in this case did, carry the day.

     


    by A Guy Called LULU on Sat, 12/04/2010 - 12:44am

    I didn't see a clear winner. Greenwald admitted, but excused the failings that Aftergood cited. The only substantive difference I saw was that Aftergood thought WikiLeaks had made little positive contribution while Greenwald was able to cite a few examples where they had. They agree on the ends, but not the means.


    by Donal on Sat, 12/04/2010 - 8:20am

    In a sense this was not even a debate as nobody presented a thesis which one defended and the other attacked. It was more a broad conversation in which each party discussed and expressed opinions about Wikileaks and Assange ranging from right and wrong, effectiveness, legaliy, responsibility, and potential harm versus benefit.  and those opinions were sometimes the same and sometimes very different.
     From Wikipedia:

     "Though logical consistency, factual accuracy and some degree of emotional appeal to the audience are important elements of the art of persuasion, in debating, one side often prevails over the other side by presenting a superior "context" and/or framework of the issue, which is far more subtle and strategic."

     This is where I judge that Greenwald did a much better job than Steven Aftergood.


    by A Guy Called LULU on Sat, 12/04/2010 - 1:44pm

    An excellent blog.  Really outlines the various primary issues and sides that are play, and, thus, why so fascinating.  There are a lot of approaches to the content, but one part jumped out at me when you wrote:

    Greenwald and Aftergood didn't disagree that much factually, it was simply that Aftergood considered WikiLeaks dangerous both to his efforts and in general while Greenwald found their revelations far more compelling than the sort of incremental reforms achieved by more cautious reformers like Aftergood and others.

    For what it's worth, it reminded me of a time when Paul Watson of Sea Shepard fame came to my campus (some moons ago).  He spent a good amount of time during his lecture belittling the activists who tried to work within the system, writing their pathetic little letters to their congressional representatives while those who were really making a difference were spiking trees.  The bad blood this created between the environmental activists on campus who agreed with him and those who didn't lasted for quite some time.

    Along the same lines, shortly thereafter I found myself in the planning sessions to develop the plan action for the summer action to protect the ancient forests of Clayoquot Sound in British Columbia. A split occurred between those who wanted the action to be non-violent, including no action against machines, and those who saw acts against the machinery as keeping within the non-violence creed, since one could only could commit violence against living beings.  (Eventually the former group won the day and what turned out to be the largest act of civil disobendience in Canadian history occurred without any violence and actually led to a compromise between the government, activists and First Nations.) 

    The point being the battle between the incrementalists and the revolutionaries (for lack of a better term at the moment) has always been there, whether in the movement concerned the environment, gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, or whatever else one seeks some just resolution to a current injustice.  Today's flavor is government secrecy and the power structure behind the power structure of governments.  The reason for this is because in the end they are all the same struggle, differing only in the specific emergent feature they choose to focus on.


    by Elusive Trope on Fri, 12/03/2010 - 10:41pm

    That's a great observation, Trope. A lot of times the people advocating violence aren't putting their own lives on the line, though. I have this book about Lippman somewhere, and recall throwing it down when I read a letter of his advocating war, but not wanting to be there.


    by Donal on Fri, 12/03/2010 - 11:15pm

    Just a side thought, based on my experience on the logging roads where the heroes were those who were willing to sit there and let the authorities arrest them, one of the reason Assange's impact is being undermined is that he is unwilling to be taken in by the authorities.  There is a basic assumption that lies just under the surface for many of those who embrace non-violent civil disobedience (myself included i suppose) that if one truly believes in one's cause then one is willing to be arrested and incarcerated in the name of one's cause.  Some kind of mythical thinking that envisiones Assange needing to be willing to sit in prison like Mandela and that he chooses to run away and do interviews with the likes of Time magazine makes one thinks he has less than noble intentions in what he is doing.


    by Elusive Trope on Fri, 12/03/2010 - 11:41pm

    Trope, you say:

    "Some kind of mythical thinking that envisiones Assange needing to be willing to sit in prison like Mandela and that he chooses to run away and do interviews with the likes of Time magazine makes one thinks he has less than noble intentions in what he is doing."

     Give this some thought. Start with this common claim. "I would be willing to die for my country". Most who claim this are full of shit, whether they know it or not. The truth, IMO, is that many are willing to take great risks for their country with the realization that many lose life or limb with that gamble, and that is way more than enough to ask or expect. In the case of Assange, he is taking a great risk for what ever his reasons are. If they are good reasons and he is affective in advancing his cause, why shouldn't we wish that he avoid prison?
     By confronting the U.S.A. he is taking a great chance. Why do you require martyrdom to prove legitimacy?
     I do realize that if he is apprehended and brought to trial that he cannot disown his actions and maintain any credibility as a moral actor.


    by A Guy Called LULU on Sat, 12/04/2010 - 12:04am

    the reason i used the term "mythical thinking" is because I don't think this is solid line of thinking.  I was trying to say that we hold people like Assange up to lofty ideals that don't necessarily make rational sense.  It is like NCD's blog on Lebron James and the sports fans who hate him intensely because he chose to play for a different basketball team.  Those on the left idealize those like MLK and Mandala who go to prison, hold the fact they did up as a virtue, which in one fundamental sense it is, but as we tend to do, we drift into absolutes, subconsciously if nothing else.  I guess I was just trying to point out one of the many factors of why Assange has tapped into such intense reaction.


    by Elusive Trope on Sat, 12/04/2010 - 12:29am

    Not to mention his attorney in the UK said on DemocracyNow! that the reason he is a bit in the wind isn't that he is avoiding arrest so much as trying to avoid assassination.  Pretty big difference there....


    by we are stardust on Sat, 12/04/2010 - 8:31am

    This short article is interesting. To me it is filled with darkly humorous ironic hypocrisy. An intelligence "source" leaks NSA findings, presumably everything from the NSA is classified, to "The Daily Beast".

    http://warincontext.org/2010/12/03/moscows-bid-to-blow-up-wikileaks/


    The source implies that the U.S. would not do anything underhanded. No, not us, who would even think it, but those Russkies? They play by different rules and they are outraged. They might do something dirty.
     Is the leak a heads up to Assange so he will keep his head down? I doubt it. So, what might have been the reason for this information to be released? To get an early start at deflecting blame in case our good=guys get the chance to pop Assange? No, that sounds too conspiratorial. That couldn't be it.


    by A Guy Called LULU on Sat, 12/04/2010 - 10:39am

    Lulu, I wonder if you might be enticed to hit the font-size drop down menu and hit #3, (12 pt) before composing.  Man; that default font is hard to see...  Frown


    by we are stardust on Sat, 12/04/2010 - 10:46am

    Happy to oblige.


    by A Guy Called LULU on Sat, 12/04/2010 - 10:56am

    What Stardust said.


    by Atheist (not verified) on Sat, 12/04/2010 - 10:48am

    Very well stated. I would like to know more about the Clayoquot Sound act of civil disobenience, we would all have a lot to learn from it.

    The incrementalist/revolutionary divide describes much about human behavior. I have observed that in most couples, as a wild  example, there is one who wants to trim the bougainvillaea back to the very roots and the other one who wants to trim the branches back only a little. 


    by Oxy Mora on Sat, 12/04/2010 - 12:13am

    Here is the first part of 6 part youtube series on the fight for Clayoquot back in 1993.  Ah the memories.  Like when Midnight Oil dropped by for a free concert.  Our beds having been burning for some time now.  And there is some out setting more on fire.  What to do?  How do we stop the arsonists? Is a trim of the bougainvillaea enough?


    by Elusive Trope on Sat, 12/04/2010 - 12:21am

    I'm so glad you found the youtube series.  I was just looking for the wikilink you had given us before about it, and I seem to be having trouble with wiki.  Plus, they don't cover the Midnight Oil concert.  :)

     


    by LisB on Sat, 12/04/2010 - 12:29am

    In my opinion, this WikiLeaky thingy has becomes completely dingy.

    WikiLeaks just did a data dump without the courtesy of editing the material into a coherence form...kinda just threw the shit into the fan and let it fly. However, I think everyone is missing the real problem...the internal strife within our government.

    Internal strife being the inability to channel vital info to the agencies within that needed to review and act. The necessary vehicle for such a group would be costly simply because of the people necessary to review the info and determine who needs to see it and who doesn't. Rather, they just created a smorgasbord of raw data in the cloud and didn't post anyone to validate the guests.

    Once upon a time, before microsoft overran the world, there was an OS called UNIX...still in use but not in the public mix. What is interesting about UNIX is each user has a set of permissions. Those permissions can either give or deny access to material...read, write and execute.  For some strange reason...I suspect budget cuts and congressional portfolios heavy with microsoft stock...the military moved over to the microsoft OS. And the OS is at the heart of the problem.

    The leaker had complete access to info well above and beyond what his clearance allowed. There wasn't any mechanisms in place that validate their access to sensitive info...read permission.

    On top of that, they were able to download the data...copy, which I believe is either a write permission or an execute permission.

    And at no time after the individual gained access to the data cloud was their need-to-know validated further to verify their access to specific material. Kinda like being allowed access into the facility where the FED/government is printing money and walking out with a pocket full of $1000 bills.

    Simply put, just because one has access to the cloud where all the data is contained doesn't mean one has privilege to read and download whatever strikes your fancy...which is exactly what this whole WikiLeaky thingy dingy is really about.

    So to sum it all up...everyone is being mislead down another path to vilify WiliLeaks so they won't look at the really bigger problem that created the incident in the first place. Better to focus on an individual and business entity rather than look at the government's lack of focus and awareness that allowed the abuse to go unchecked.


    by Beetlejuice on Sat, 12/04/2010 - 7:37am

    To extend the Unix metaphor further (and you have the same capabilities in modern Windows OSs, and of course Mac OS X is Unix), there's a concept of group permissions, and users can belong to multiple groups. That rather simple idea seems like an obvious first step. Not in the diplomacy group? Then you can't read those cables. In fact, it's so blindingly obvious, I'm still taken aback by how much access this guy had.


    by Atheist (not verified) on Sat, 12/04/2010 - 9:44am

    That's were the breakdown was...they didn't take the time or make the effort to catalog the info then establish a need-to-know criteria for users to establish who is or is not authorized to view, copy and edit. One would think as sensitive as the info seems to appear by the way the government is reacting they would have gone the extra mile to safeguard access. So it's not the leaker who is the criminal, but the victim themselves for not taking care their info was secure and on a need-to-know basis with credible and trustworthy users. That's why all the noise being manufactured is dingy...it's all for the wrong reasons and serves no useful purpose...the government will not tackle upgrading their access methods cause WikiLeaks is the public's enemy now.


    by Beetlejuice on Sat, 12/04/2010 - 10:55am

    In my experience, you could set r-w-x perms in Windows NT Server, but the MS apps and CAD programs we used virtually required superuser status to work properly. So if everyone is a near-administrator, perms won't count for much. Maybe that has changed, but I look back and regard leaving Unix & Novell for NT as a major error. Now I use Linux myself.


    by Donal on Sat, 12/04/2010 - 9:52am

    It has changed, and for the better. The main problem, IMO, is that Windows Sys Admins are typically less security savvy than Unix Sys Admins - as a rule, but with several exceptions, of course. Similarly, Windows programmers are typically less security savvy than their Unix counterparts, which leads to the apps scenario you're talking about. There are reall problems with the Microsoft operating systems that I could pick on, but I think the ease if setting permissions is not one of them. As with Unix, there's a bit of a learning curve, but I don't find the learning curve any worse than it is for Unix, although it is worse than most Windows users are willing to put up with (there I go with my generalizations again).


    by Atheist (not verified) on Sat, 12/04/2010 - 10:04am

    I've seen both types in action. Unix Sys Admins are hard-core computer scientist types and know the language and hardware inside and out. Whereas, Windows Sys Admins are bootcamp specialist willing to fork out lots of $$$ for a simple certification that says they know what their doing. I had many discussions with certified guru's and noted they rely upon their training rather than read the documentation. For instance, Cisco switches and 3Comm NICs were incompatible so the switch and NIC needed to be hardwired with matching speed and duplex. However, the Microsoft Certified Engineer running the PC shop refused to listen or read the documentation because he learned in bootcamp they should always set the NIC to auto negotiate...never argue with a fool, especially once he's been certified.

    by Beetlejuice on Sat, 12/04/2010 - 11:08am

    never argue with a fool, especially once he's been certified.

    If I were DD… (especially for those of us who understand the context)


    by Atheist (not verified) on Sat, 12/04/2010 - 11:22am

    I ran into this at wired.com while I was looking for something else, and pardon me if this has been discussed on this thread already.  Paulson says a lot of missteps by Assange's folks could have been avoided easily, and he posits that maybe they're not as tech savvy as they think.  (I understand not one jot of it.)

    http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/wikileaks-domain/

     


    by we are stardust on Sat, 12/04/2010 - 12:23pm

    Windows has had user-level permissions implemented since Win95/NT. It's perfectly possible to administer a MS network reasonably securely much as you describe ... at least from an non-exploited operational point of view. (FWIW, Novell probably provided the best backbone solution for the DoD/State enterprise)

    Read/Write/Execute is a directory/file access level thing. Once someone is granted access to "read" a file, it allows copying the file into a user's local memory. A user without "write" privileges would be prevented from saving any changes made *back to the original* file. But once it's in local memory, there's nothing to keep the user from saving the information any damn place the local machine has the hardware to accommodate. This would be true on both Unix or MS. In his chats with Lamo, Manning focused on a slightly different aspect of what you are talking about; the lack of physical controls in place at the operational level and a lack of proactive security monitoring of the data network. He pretty much nails the biggest hole in that respect IMO.

    But you ultimately get to a crux of difficulty with data technologies. The whole power of the distributed database is that people across the organization have instant access to the entire pool of knowledge - typically sorted and queried in a fashion relevant to their tasks. None of this leaked stuff is in the "need to know" category. "Secret" is a pretty huge category and "Classified" is even larger. Some of it is tagged not to be shared with foreign nationals but it's ops level stuff. In order for the system to actually work, any one with the specified clearance level *has* to be able to access the data pool. It appears that what a lot of analysts do is perform specialized queries on these databases when requested by superiors. It's a solid idea technologically speaking ... but by it's nature it kind of requires a vast number of people accessing on a read-only nature and a huge number accessing on a read-write basis (the analyst doesn't do the data entry ... I *think* that is happening more or less directly from the field).

    We don't actually know if all the information released by Wikileaks is from the same source so it's pretty difficult to know if they had access to stuff that was well above what their clearance allowed. Assange has said on several occasions things came in from several different places. That said, Manning's clearance and role likely would have allowed him to access the stuff we've seen so far. Military commanders have to decide how to deal with random civilian leaders from all over the place and really need to know what's going on when both military and diplomatic officials are are operating in the same place - I can see how giving DoD analysts access to the State data pool for prepping reports would be a real benefit.

    I agree criticizing Wikileaks seems rather to be like shooting the messenger here. But I think the internal strife is far more systemic than just a data management/security problem (although we do seem to have one of those too). Ultimately there is a reason some people have taken to dumping internal data wholesale. Either we accept they are genuinely traitors and just want to destroy America or we have to ask ourselves why those who are leaking the information ended up deciding Wikileaks was the only place to turn.

     


    by kgb999 on Sat, 12/04/2010 - 3:59pm

    Nice to see some complexity in this.  Something beyond "Wikileaks: Prosecute or Venerate?" is what we need.


    by Michael Maiello on Sat, 12/04/2010 - 9:55am

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