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.
Glen might have watched a *different* interview with Snowden than the one I watched . 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.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.
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"?
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.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.
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.
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