If this report is accurate, Assange may have created a cyberwar war equivalent of the unbreakable “one time pad” — all Assange needs to do is post the key and doomsday bomb goes boom. Perhaps the Pentagon ought to hire him to teach DoD how to wage the net centric warfare it loves to talk about.
Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, has circulated across the internet an encrypted “poison pill” cache of uncensored documents suspected to include files on BP and Guantanamo Bay.
One of the files identified this weekend by The Sunday Times — called the “insurance” file — has been downloaded from the WikiLeaks website by tens of thousands of supporters, from America to Australia.
People are more likely to lie, exaggerate and distort when they know they won’t be held accountable for what they said, and people like to say what their interlocutors want to hear, says Jordan Stancil.
Jordan Stancil is a lecturer in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs of the University of Ottawa.
Phi Beta Iota: This is the single best overview of how secrecy supports corruption. It is consistent with testimony to the Moynihan Commission on Secrecy and with Morton Halperin's findings in Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy in which one of the “rules of the game” was “Lie to the President if you can get away with it.” Today, the “rule of the game” is “Lie to the public if you can get away with it for at least one election cycle.” Newt Gingrich started the decline with his power and ambition, Dick Cheney peaked at 935 documented lies that Colin Powell allowed to stand unchallenged, and now Obama, with Bloomberg in the wings, are the anti-climax of secrecy as fraud Of, By, and For Wall Street. America has become a cheating culture, an unthinking culture, far removed from the essence of a Republic.
The more I think about the WikiLeaks episode, the less I know what to say about it. Unfortunately, too much commentary, right and left, has tried to inject certitude where ambivalence should be.
It is not clear whether the WikiLeaks disclosures will damage our national interest. During the few years I spent as a Foreign Service officer, in Jerusalem and Berlin, I produced and read a fair number of classified cables, and I understand the rather obvious point that diplomats might get more — and more sensitive — information when their contacts believe that what they say will remain secret. We have heard endless appeals to “common sense” about the need for secrecy on these grounds.
But common sense also tells us that people are more likely to lie, exaggerate and distort when they know they won’t be held accountable for what they said, and that people like to say what their interlocutors want to hear. The annals of diplomatic communication, indeed of all communication, are filled with evidence of this banal insight, which many people seem to have forgotten in their rush to defend government secrecy.
This is a permanent reference. Read the rest below the line, followed by links.
For years I have written about the Defense Power Games — front loading and political engineering — as they are practiced by the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex. My 1990 pamphlet on this subject was written to explain why the end of the Cold War would not result in a lasting peace dividend — a prediction that has come true to a degree that astonishes me.
As I explained in Section II of the pamphlet, “front loading is the practice of planting seed money for new programs while downplaying their future obligations. This game, which is a clever form of the old-fashioned “bait-and-switch,” makes it easier to sell high-cost programs to skeptics in the Pentagon and Congress. Political engineering is the strategy of spreading dollars, jobs, and profits to as many important congressional districts as possible. By making voters dependent on government money flows, the political engineers put the squeeze on Congress to support the front-loaded program once its true costs become apparent. Front loading and political engineering are about increasing the flow of money; the former starts the money flowing while the latter tries to lock the spigot open, and in American politics, control of the money spigot is power.”
My discussion focused on defense procurement programs, which are by far the most developed and ritualized form of the games , but the central ideas behind these power games — a bait and switch operation to set up an extortion operation — apply to all government taxing and spending programs. In fact front loading and political engineering are now ubiquitous practices that are openly celebrated by cynical political operatives — the fact that they are destroying the idea of using a system of checks and balances to hold the peoples representatives accountable in a democratic republic does not seem to matter. Their effects, for example, can be scene in the corruption federal accounting systems.
To those readers who think I am taking this idea too far, I recommend the attached article, which is a good statement of where the effects of the rug merchant politics shaped by front loading and political engineering power games take us.
Chuck Spinney
Published on Friday, December 3, 2010 by Think Progress
As debate rages in Washington over the Bush tax cuts, set to expire at the end of this year, the Bush administration officials who initiated the steep tax cuts are celebrating what they see as an apparent victory, since signs point to a temporary extension of all the cuts. The Daily Beast’s Howard Kurtz interviewed Dan Bartlett, Bush’s former communications director, and Andy Card, Bush’s former chief of staff, among others, and they were pleased at how the expiration debate has played out:
“We knew that, politically, once you get it into law, it becomes almost impossible to remove it,” says Dan Bartlett, Bush’s former communications director. “That’s not a bad legacy. The fact that we were able to lay the trap does feel pretty good, to tell you the truth.” […]
Extract from Conclusion in the Above: I have observed the World Game as a student-participant, and wish it well. I have also observed Bob Pickus's work, as a student-participant in Turn Toward Peace, and wish him well. There are still other alternatives, but whichever road leads us faster into a world without war, what I gain most from Pickus and Fuller is their sense of the Big Picture. No one else can match their indefatigable and comprehensive efforts to see the problem whole, and to steer the world's energy into a grand design of peace.
The International Council for Science (ICSU) is spearheading a consultative Visioning Process, in cooperation with the International Social Science Council (ISSC), to explore options and propose implementation steps for a holistic strategy on Earth system research. Five Grand Challenges were identified during step 1 of the process. If addressed in the next decade, these Grand Challenges will deliver knowledge to enable sustainable development, poverty eradication, and environmental protection in the face of global change.
The details of the Grand Challenges are contained in the document ‘Earth System Science for Global Sustainability: The Grand Challenges’, representing input from many individuals and institutions.
Science Article (2 Page PDF)
INTERNATIONAL COUNCIL FOR SCIENCE – PRESS RELEASE
Thursday 11 November 2010
Scientific Grand Challenges identified to address global sustainability
Paris, France—The international scientific community has identified five Grand Challenges that, if addressed in the next decade, will deliver knowledge to enable sustainable development, poverty eradication, and environmental protection in the face of global change. The Grand Challenges for Earth system science, published today, are the result of broad consultation as part of a visioning process spearheaded by the International Council for Science (ICSU) in cooperation with the International Social Science Council (ISSC).
The consultation highlighted the need for research that integrates our understanding of the functioning of the Earth system—and its critical thresholds—with global environmental change and socio-economic development.
The five Grand Challenges are:
Forecasting—Improve the usefulness of forecasts of future environmental conditions and their consequences for people.
Observing—Develop, enhance and integrate the observation systems needed to manage global and regional environmental change.
Confining—Determine how to anticipate, recognize, avoid and manage disruptive global environmental change.
Responding—Determine what institutional, economic and behavioural changes can enable effective steps toward global sustainability.
Innovating—Encourage innovation (coupled with sound mechanisms for evaluation) in developing technological, policy and social responses to achieve global sustainability.
Impacts from Wikileaks continue to multiply. Now, just getting a routine courier card renewed now involves pole vaulting over major mouse turds.
Message from the Director: Recent Media Leaks
November 8, 2010
We have seen in recent months a damaging spate of media leaks on a wide range of national security issues. WikiLeaks is but one egregious example. In some cases, CIA sources and methods have been compromised, harming our mission and endangering lives.
When information about our intelligence, our people, or our operations appears in the media, it does incredible damage to our nation’s security and our ability to do our job of protecting the nation. More importantly, it could jeopardize lives. For this reason, such leaks cannot be tolerated. The Office of Security is directed to fully investigate these matters. Unauthorized disclosures of classified information also will be referred to the Department of Justice. Our government is taking a hard line, as demonstrated by the prosecutions of a former National Security Agency official, a Federal Bureau of Investigation linguist, and a State Department contractor.
Here at the Agency, we are a family, which means we depend on each other—sharing burdens, challenges, and successes. But sharing cannot extend beyond the limits set by law and the “need to know” principle. The media, the public, even former colleagues, are not entitled to details of our work.
I would ask that every employee reflect on the responsibilities and privileges of service at CIA. Every officer takes a secrecy oath, which obligates us to protect classified information while we serve at the Agency and after we leave. A vast majority of officers live up to their oath, but even a small number of leaks can do great damage. Our adversaries benefit, while our credibility, our operations, and, ultimately, our ability to accomplish the mission all take a hit. Our sworn duty to the American people is to protect them and we must do nothing to violate the law or that sacred pledge.
Leon E. Panetta
Phi Beta Iota: Nothing has changed since the Moynihan Commission received testimony on CIA's refusal to brief Congress on its “sources & methods” that were and are very well known because CIA is a bureaucracy and persists in operating out of official installations. Its one very expensive attempt to create 21 non-official cover companies ended in failure, with 20 of the companies being closed down. What Panetta simply refuses to compute is that bad management and poor tradecraft are a much graver offense deleterious to national security, than straight-forward critical commentaries such as appear in the See Also and Miscellaneous sections below. We were surprised to see that Panetta now claims to oversee open source intelligence for the US Intelligence Community. It's hard to sink any lower in performance, but that does it for us. CIA has hit rock bottom.
The Pentagon's intelligence directorate is killing off one of its most strategically important mission areas: monitoring efforts by foreign governments to buy U.S. firms and technology, such as the multiple efforts by China's military-linked equipment company Huawei Technologies to buy into the U.S. high-technology sector.
Defense officials tell Inside the Ring that Thomas A. Ferguson, acting undersecretary of defense for intelligence (USDI) and a former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) space analyst, initiated the dismantling of the financial-threat intelligence monitoring.
Phi Beta Iota: US Intelligence is out of control–as good as some of the leaders are in terms of diversity of experience within the OLD system, they simply do not have the mind-set nor the authorities to restructure intelligence to the point that it can meet all appropriate needs. The person ostensibly responsible for strategy, a CIA body, has just been made deputy director of DIA, and we have no doubt that a “strategy” exists that might ultimately turn DIA into the analysis center and CIA into a collection management center (while NSA becomes the all-source processing center, all as outlined in Chapter 13 of ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World) as well as all subsequent books such as INFORMATION OPERATIONS: All Information, All Languages, All the Time, this is all too little, too slow, too incoherent, and too expensive. An Open Source Agency (OSA) under diplomatic auspices, and a voluntary shift of $200 billion from Program 50 to Program 150 as a lure for Newt Gingrinch coming into the 2012 coalition cabinet under Obama running as an Independent (miracles do happen), are both essential.
