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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday January 03 2018, @06:24PM   Printer-friendly
from the a-rolling-stone-gathers-no-ellsberg dept.

The Rolling Stone has run a web version of its 1973 interview with Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg is the former US military analyst who blew the whistle on the Nixon administration's misdeeds regarding the Vietnam War. Specfically he photocopied an extensive, secret study and gave it to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and later to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and nearly a score of other newspapers. These documents he released became known as the Pentagon Papers eventually published as excerpts and commentaries by The New York Times. Both The New York Times and The Rolling Stone have since drifted from that kind of coverage and the article provides an interesting contrast to how those publications are now.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 03 2018, @11:16PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 03 2018, @11:16PM (#617406)

    If your state is a Republic which goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy, then that's not true at all. In fact it's the opposite of true. A free and open society is fundamentally incompatible with a culture of secrecy and lies.

    That's patently absurd.

    Do you honestly not see the benefit of keeping the location of nuclear submarines secret? How about the minimum size object a missile-detection-radar can detect? What about the encryption keys used for transmitting diplomatic cables to your overseas ambassadors?

    If you can literally think of nothing that even a paragon-of-virtue-society should keep secret, I'm thankful that you are not the one in charge; your society would quickly be destroyed by a more nefarious and predatory one.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Arik on Thursday January 04 2018, @02:00AM

    by Arik (4543) on Thursday January 04 2018, @02:00AM (#617460) Journal
    "That's patently absurd."

    Not at all.

    "Do you honestly not see the benefit of keeping the location of nuclear submarines secret?"

    I said a culture of secrecy and lies.

    You don't have to have a culture of secrecy and lies to keep operational security - the notion that you do is quite simply a lie, one that's been consciously fed to us by those who profit from us believing it.

    But while we're talking about nuclear submarines - consider that those are kept for deterrence (and they'd better be, as the only other possibility is mass, premeditated murder.) A weapon which is secret provides no deterrence, it's necessary to leak some info about them for them to serve their role. They're best deployed close to home, in friendly waters where they cannot just be attacked at will, if only the 'bad guys' knew where to strike. Should you broadcast their current location? Probably not. But if the secrecy of that information is so critical that it just cannot be compromised, then you've made a big mistake back up the chain and you need to fix that rather than try to use secrecy as a band-aid. Even the most draconian and authoritarian state can't keep such things perfectly secret at all times.

    "How about the minimum size object a missile-detection-radar can detect? What about the encryption keys used for transmitting diplomatic cables to your overseas ambassadors?"

    None of these things should be hidden away behind permanent secrecy, nor can they be. Even the encryption keys are going to be useful for a limited period of time, and there is no legitimate republican purpose served by keeping them secret for a minute beyond that time. Again, assuming we want to keep the homeland safe, as we so often claim.

    What a culture of secrecy and lying does is not to magically make it possible to keep these things secret. It only enables the powerful to thumb their nose at the law.

    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?