*sigh*
so much to say on the general subject of gov't secrecy and it's
abuses... perhaps *everyone* except maybe Nick and Glen can just hit
delete and save themselves the aggravation.
I'm clearly from a different planet...
Nick's earlier (circa 5/15/2013) admonition:
/Come on, Steve, try!/
/Just being grumbly about that mean old government won’t hack it.
They did, after all, save some people from being drenched in blood
and exploded genitalia before falling into the north atlantic like a
stone, never to be heard from again. /
/The thing about cynicism is that it gestures toward an ideal that
it does not explicitly commit itself to. It wallows in
disappointment. /
/Nick/
This is well motivated (I agree with everything you say here Nick, I
just don't think it applies to me nor to what I said which elicited it
from you?). I can't meet the Red Queen's high mark of believing 6
impossible things before breakfast but I have long since given over to
"tentatively believing mutually contradictory points of view", at least
long enough to mull them over thoroughly.
In this case: "/A secret is a secret is a SECRET/" and "/A promise is a
promise is a PROMISE/" vs "/but my conscience does not allow me to leave
these secrets in the hands of people who have demonstrated to me that
they are abusing this status to the harm of those who empowered them to
hold said secrets/".
I am very sympathetic with both positions and the likes of Bradley
Manning and now Edward Snowden help to bring this contradiction into
more clear focus for me.
On 6/10/13 1:36 PM, glen wrote:
I had to go back and reexamine my analysis for the AP leak versus the
PRISM leak, just to see if my attitude has changed. It hasn't. Delete
now or forever hold your peace. ;-)
To be clear upfront, from the video I watched of Snowden talking about
why he leaked, my "bullsh!t" detectors were dinging like mad. Snowden
seems disingenuous in a way I can't put my finger on. But, then again,
reading the "violate a sacred trust" response by Clapper was worse than
disingenuous. Clapper's response is, to use his own words, profoundly
offensive. Rather than consider _why_ someone would violate such a
sacred trust, Clapper just assumes the sanctity of secrecy and
immediately moves to condemn.
Glen might have watched a *different* interview with Snowden than the
one I watched
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden-why>.
I have my own "bs detectors" and a natural suspicion of those who might
tell stories where they are the natural victim/hero. In this case, he
seemed not only articulate and insightful but relatively straightforward
about what/why was up in this case. Julian Assange was much less
convincing to me in his early communications (he came off to me as an
egotistical twerp), but time in the public eye seems to have supported
most of his claims.
In any case, the problem still seems to be one of motivation and
incentive. The people I've known who were poised to climb the
government secrecy ladder all wore their patriotism and "duty, honor,
respect" badges on their sleeves. OTOH, most of the sysadmins and many
of the systems engineers I've known, perhaps by virtue of their need to
wear many hats, tended to be more libertarian and/or anarchist. You
would think the white hat hackers in our government would have found
methodology for dovetailing these cultures, particularly by ensuring
that employee's motivations lined up with the objectives of any given
project, if not the agencies' missions.
I know we had such policies at lockheed when I worked there. One of my
mentors had made it quite clear to his bosses that he would only work on
defensive weapons systems. And, believe it or not, they honored his
ethic, though without making promises that they wouldn't lay him off
when/if they ran out of FTEs in defensive weapons jobs.
I signed papers and swore oaths to protect secrets for over 30 years and
in fact, I held true to that, but I also *quaked* at times as I came
close to learning things that I *feared* would turn out to be beyond
what my conscience could bear. I did, in fact, learn plenty of things
which would probably serve the world/country/humanity better if they
were to be exposed, but for the most part they were pretty mundane and
really just evidence of incompetence and petty abuse of power or
position... no specific lives at stake but perhaps some general ones and
certainly many livelihoods. I chose to honor my word of honor about not
disclosing secrets I would not have had access to without that word
rather than (re)acting on relatively minor abuses by relatively petty
and stupid functionaries and grabbing at the whistle in the dark. Had
I encountered something bigger, it is possible it would be I who was
sequestered in the Columbian Embassy in London or locations unknown in
Hong Kong (or more likely in a shallow grave, the bottom of a large body
of water or the ash-bed of an incinerator somewhere).
Fortunately I entered the game of secrets fairly ideologically, a
pacifist who believed in MAD (believing this before, during and after
breakfast). By the time I had moved on to a more critical perspective
on the US nuclear policy, I understood enough about the complexity of
our situation to still agree/understand that "pulling one's hand out of
the pool is harder than putting it in without causing destructive
ripples". Whether I *liked* MAD or not, it was the game we were in,
and I didn't see us getting out of it easily. The fall of the Soviet
Union and the Iron Curtain might be seen as a success of the game of
MAD, outspending the opposition, validating the value of a (claimed to
be) free market system and a (claimed to be) democratic and
representational form of government. Whatever to myriad causes of the
end of an obvious "opposite" in the "Mutual" of "Assured Destruction",
it left me to more clearly ponder: "if MAD is no longer viable, perhaps
it never was?" Nevertheless, the point is that Nuclear Secrets were easy
for me to keep. I accepted that if *anybody* had the big stick it
should be "us", and giving it away would not be prudent in any case.
The petty incompetence and abuse of position aside, it was not hard to
keep these secrets.
As I *left* the game, however I had graduated to the world(s) of
Military and Civilian Intelligence and found the assumptions of National
Security founded in some very questionable models of society,
governance, and foreign relations. It didn't help that it was in the
era of War on Drugs, War on Terror, and War on other Inanimate Objects
and Adjectives, and the anything BUT petty incompetence and abuses of
Bush II . I found myself still avoiding learning more than I
absolutely had to, to do my job effectively. I *was* drawn to the
challenges of puzzle solving in a time of accelerating technological
support. The tools that I had dreamed of 30 years before as a
small-town PI were at my fingertips and I had the skills (more
importantly) to build yet more tools, etc. It was a heady time, but
fortunately I had the perspective to know that the kind of power that
amassed, indexed and correlated information (think Big Data,
Network/Graph Analysis, High Dimensional analysis, etc.) could bring was
not only a petri dish for potential abuse, but for sure in the
wrong-minded hands of our generation.
This is perhaps one of the stronger reasons for my leaving the game at
an otherwise *very* inopportune time. Had I left 5 years later (like
today) I could probably have "retired early" with a livable if not
extravagant lifestyle. Had I left (to start my own business) any time
other than just as the market fell out, I might be living high on the
hog instead of eating the squirrels that I can plink from the back porch
of my Appalachia-inspired Adobe Homestead.
So I watch the Bradley Mannings and the Edward Snowden's of the world
with a different eye than many here might. "But for the grace of some
damn thing, there might go I"?
But, perhaps Snowden's position as a _contractor_ is relevant? Our
recent acceleration in the amount of responsibility we (particularly the
military, but I'm sure intelligence has the same problem) we take out of
employees' hands and put into contractors' hands is great for those of
us convinced of the power of decentralized systems. But, you have to
admit that it's more difficult to verify or ensure a stable, coherent,
common purpose to the members of a decentralized collective. I suppose
documented evidence of which hierarchies through which Snowden _tried_
to express his concerns would shed some light on whether his status as a
contractor, rather than an employee, had a significant impact on the
conflict between his motivation and the objectives of his client.
Since leaving the direct employ of a direct contractor the US government
(I don't find the distinction between contractors and employees all that
meaningful here?), I have worked on (unclassified) projects to develop
tools that might be helpful to Big Brother with (classified) data. In
other words, I may have contributed to the utility of the kind of data
that Snowden just identified as being collected (probably, apparently,
surely) against the rule of law. I imagined that I *might* be able to
beat those swords into plowshares (or at least use my metaphorical
knowledge of metaphorical metallurgy to do the metaphorical same)...
Put the same tools into the hands of the average person, or perhaps more
apropos to investigative journalists and activists of all stripes
seeking to expose corruption and abuses of power. So far, I'd say that
has borne little if any fruit.
glen wrote at 05/15/2013 01:49 PM:
The issue is less about danger to any given group and more about the
confusion between motivation and incentive. Do our soldiers enlist and
do what they do because of the response of the civilians? No. Do the
inventors, movers, and shakers of society do what they do because they
want to get rich and make lots of money? No. Would that putative CIA
employee do what they would because of the artificial incentive
scaffolding nearby? No.
The real danger is conflating incentive with motive.
I think I agree with this line of reasoning but feel the need to explore
it further. I agree that incentive and motive (and many many other
"duals" in our language) are often conflated and if I understand you
correctly, you are suggesting that the "bad behaviours" we see in our
culture align with imagined motives which very likely do not exist or
did not exist when the game started, yet somehow became part of the
motivational milieu anyway?
I know I often cringe when I hear people dismiss various other (groups
of?) people's motives in some obvious way. For example, Snowden *might*
just be a glory hound, or *might* be (cleverly?) setting himself up for
a cushy life under the care of one of our nations "enemies" or perhaps
just be self-deluded and self-aggrandizing. Or, he might be what he
appears (to me) to be which is an individual who found himself in a
crisis of conscience which he believes he has found a way to relieve.
The crux to me seems to be "what is the difference between a
whistleblower and a snitch" or "a whistleblower and a treasonous
bastard"? And how can we sort this out (especially when most people
align on one side of the tug-of-war pit or the other without much thought)?
- Steve
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