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If millions of people know something, can it really be considered a secret anymore? That’s one of the questions at the heart of an ongoing debate in Washington about how much, and which, documents to classify in the age of Wikileaks, iPhones, and Edward Snowden.
That challenge, underscored by Mr. Snowden’s leaks of details exposing the National Security Agency’s top-secret surveillance programs, has given transparency experts new hope that they can help intelligence agencies take advantage of new thinking around classification to ensure that what needs to be secret stays secret.
“The calculation has changed recently, because a single individual, either out of negligence or malice or some other motive, can disclose whole libraries of records,” says Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy. “That’s something the government has not yet figured out how to deter or prevent.”
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday May 27 2017, @02:31AM (1 child)
The question is, why in hell must everything be digitized, put into databases, and then hooked up to the web(s)? In theory, the government has it's own digital web(s), but that has an interface with the WWW. What could POSSIBLY go wrong?
Well, for starters, this whole networking thing is still in it's infancy. Computers, for that matter - still in their infancy. Let's call it 50 (for simplicity) years from the first CPU to today. How much have things changed, in just 5 decades? How much are things going to change in the next decade? This stuff is highly volatile. The newest, bestest, fastest computer you can buy TODAY is going to be obsolete in less than a decade.
The various webs are changing as well. Maybe they change a little slower than the hardware we use on the web, but they are changing. Not very long ago, almost no one used HTTPS - today it is ubiquitous.
So, tell me again - who in hell thinks it's a good idea to trash all of the old, proven protocols, and move to digital? When stuff is on paper, someone has to gain access to the paper, then read it, or steal it for later reading. Digital? It has been demonstrated again and again that some bored school kid in Bangladesh can gain access to top secret digital secrets.
We think we are so clever, and the opposition is so stupid, that we can hide our best stuff out in plain sight, and no one will ever look at it. Clever, or stupid?
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Saturday May 27 2017, @10:47AM
In addition to indirectly connecting repositories of secrets to enemy networks, the most computerized nations are in conflict with the least computerized nations and are under continuous atack. This is about as sane as a shin kicking contest [wikipedia.org] where contestants kick their own shins.
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