The Christian Science Monitor explores the issue of whether something produced entirely by aggregation should become secret and whether the Washington Post, by bringing together disparate pieces in a story detailing the top secret world of America, may have produced in its survey a review that is more than the sum of the parts. The Monitor writes:
The Post’s two-year investigation into the nation’s massive post-9/11 security buildup was constructed almost entirely from public records, according to the paper. But in a larger sense the project may have produced an overall picture that the US government would consider classified, had it produced such a report itself.
In recent years the US has consistently pushed a “mosaic theory” of intelligence gathering. This holds that individually harmless pieces of information, when combined with other pieces, can produce a composite picture that reveals national security vulnerabilities.
“Under the mosaic theory, even if the individual pieces are part of the public domain, a particular aggregation of data, or method by which the data was compiled, could in fact be classified,” says Stephen Vladeck, a professor and expert in national security law at American University’s Washington College of Law.
It is certainly true that any intelligent aggregation and synthesis of disparate data is valuable. The process is often referred to as extracting information out of data. Combining the pixels to form a picture. Connecting the dots. It is a very familiar process. Dots by themselves have little intrinsic value. It is how they are connected that give them most of their value. The Defense Security Service recently sent out a bulletin to the dots alerting them to the Washington Post article.
Early next week, we expect the Washington Post to publish articles and an interactive website that will likely identify government agencies and contractors allegedly conducting Top Secret work. The website is expected to enable users to see the relationships between the federal government and its contractors, describe the type of work the contractors perform, and may identify many government and contractor facility locations. …
We recognize that this information can be put to legitimate use. However, without a doubt, foreign intelligence services, terrorist organizations, and criminal elements will also have interest in this kind of information. It is important that companies continually review their overall security posture to ensure that it meets required standards. We recommend that companies affected by this publication and website assess, and take steps to mitigate, risk to their workforce, facility and operations. These steps should include reinforcement of security and counterintelligence (CI) protections, and a dedicated effort to enhance workforce awareness of threats.
But does heightened awareness among the dots offset the disadvantage of being placed on a map? Questions over the the dangers posed by the sheer availability of data have been raised in connection with Google’s tireless mapping of darned near everything. Google has been snapping up information on the apparent premise that its sheer acquisition sets off a process analogous to creating a critical mass of fissile material. Put enough ordinary stuff together and suddenly the particles they share among each other creates a chain reaction that goes boom. The potential of aggregating and indexing information may be as unknown as the effects of the first Atomic Bomb. Before the Trinity Test was conducted “a betting pool was also started by scientists at Los Alamos on the possible yield… ” because no one really knew what it would do.
Yields from 45,000 tons of TNT to zero were selected by the various bettors. The Nobel Prize-winning (1938) physicist Enrico Fermi was willing to bet anyone that the test would wipe out all life on Earth, with special odds on the mere destruction of the entire State of New Mexico!
Fortunately it did not blow up the world. But while we know the limits of critical mass in uranium , we may not know it about information yet. Today the familiar little Google street view cars tootle round the world, equipped as we now know not only with panoramic cameras, but an unseeen ‘camera’ for recording network information from home networks as they bowl along. While everything they collect may be in the public domain (the view from the street) there are concerns that enough ordinary information adds up in the end to something extraordinary. Already the case can be made that the Internet itself, along with its associated search engines and databases, are a far greater espionage tool than the Washington Post article itself, which is simply an a subclass of the parent. Journalists have already remarked the Washington Post “story” is particularly groundbreaking (for a newspaper) because it takes the form of a visualization tied to a database. The Washington Post says, in a kind of introspection, that “as others have begun to note, the Post’s editors broke with convention by publishing the series on Monday, instead of in the Sunday paper, to reach a broader national audience who read The Post online. Even more, it’s the form of Dana Priest and William M. Arkin’s Post investigation that shows the potential for something new: It takes years of research and turns it into digestible pieces for the click-happy dilettante readers of the Internet. ” Flowing Data spelled it out: “of main interest: a network diagram shows organizations and their top secret activities and a map shows the geographic distribution of government organizations and companies within Top Secret America. ”
Click on a specific organization for within group breakdowns. At this point it gets a little confusing with drill-down pie charts, especially if you’re just browsing, and a spiral view is also offerred which feels extraneous. The overall story and heavy research, however, makes it worth clicking through the clunky at times set of interactives.
All this was supposed to have been done for the public good. The Washington Post makes a not entirely convincing case that the American Top Secret system has grown so big that nobody can find the secrets. By laying out the map of the sprawling and Byzantine empire the newspaper can claim the public policy goal of highlighting a real intelligence weakness. The WaPo argues that there is so much secrecy that no real secrets can be found in this mountain of whispers:
Two “super users” in the department told the Post that it’s impossible for them to keep track of the mountains of top-secret info they’re exposed to. “I’m not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything,” one said. … Agencies are collecting so much data that they don’t have enough translators or researchers to analyze it …. Turf wars among agencies can prevent the sharing of information.
So in a way the Washington Post agrees with the “mosaic theory” since it uses it to prove its point. Here’s the mosaic and it proves the intelligence system is too complicated. But it cannot now turn around and say that its mosaic, so valuable in producing its political conclusion has no value to the enemy. After all, any blade will cut both cheese and chalk. Ironically the best defense of the security establishment against the Washington Post expose may have been to keep growing because the best way to invalidate the cache is to change the data. Once the 854,000 who the WaPo says have top secret clearances have doubled in number, then the SVR will only have half the picture.
The key resource in a world which relies on aggregating data to product information isn’t the dots but control over the aggregator. Using the Internet itself as a model of an information structure, the battle between the spider and the web is a never ending one. It appears that information is growing faster than the spiders can scuttle around it. In 2007 the searchable Internet was believed to contain more than 15 times larger than all the information contained in the Library of Congress. But it was a mere fraction of the actual information “out there”. Some estimate that up to 99.98% of the information potentially available is for various reasons beyond the reach of the spiders. This is the Darkweb which is even beyond the possibility of aggregation.
Maybe the greatest comfort that national security agencies can derive from the story is that Dana Priest and William M. Arkin wrote it. That makes it self-limiting. These two will never be able to keep the intelligence “story” cache current. The real threat would have been if the Washington Post had turned their effort into a kind of open source project or adopted some form of information collaboration which would have multiplied the spiders. When journalism does that then all the SVR will have had to do from here on is surf the web, unless we create a web in which the servers somehow know what and what not to display depending on who’s asking. The biggest intelligence challenge of future may not be compartmentalizing information — keeping the dot as dots — so much as making the dots aware of who they are talking to. If mosaics are necessary to intelligence then some way must be created for the pieces to become conscious of what they are becoming part of. Collaboration means nothing unless it is intelligent collaboration. Every party that comes to an information dance should ideally know what it is going to get and convey what it will potentially bring. How one can do this in an online world, where we increasingly rely on online information and reputation to determine what a thing or person is and what he is doing will be one the grander challenges of the near future.
Looking for the light of a new love
To brighten up the night, I have you love
And we can face the music together
Dancing in the dark, dancing in the dark
Dancing in the dark
Tip Jar or Subscribe for $5
While I’m sure that WaPo would sell its mother for a story, I’m also sure that about 99% of what the government classifies would be better as public information anyway, so I have a hard time getting excited about this. Heck, they might even agree, that 99% are just “dots” and they have to classify it to hide the 1%. But it still stinks.
Wretch, Dana Priest is a girl.
Thank eagles for setting me straight. Have corrected and am very mortified.
THE ORB SPIDER
The sheer tensile strength of the orb spider’s web
Is many times greater than steel
She sits and she waits for her dinner to come
Stirring thrums in the web she will feel
Then she pounces at once with a motion so quick
That the eye cannot follow the leap
And the dot is enclosed in the orb spider’s silk
That she’ll toss on the top of the heap
Connecting the dot to the others she’s stored
All tied with her strong silken knots
She never does sleep and she never does rest
She’s kept busy connecting the dots
There is an old story that if I recall correctly involves the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon. An individual engaged him in conversation at a party an pronounced that, “90% of science fiction is crap.” his reply was
“Sir 90% of everything is crap.”
In intelligence a lot of information out there is deliberate crap, nestled cheek by jowl with inadvertent crap. People connecting the dots about subjects they have little real knowledge of won’t increase the value of the mosaic.
I remember an old cartoon showing two Indian warriors on a hill looking down at an old Indian pointing at something on the ground to some Indian kids. One warrior is telling the other, “When you get to old to fight or hunt they put you to work teaching the kids about shit.” I think a big number of the media have entered premature shit lecturing.
I’ve noticed that the Post’s big expose isn’t making all that much of a splash. This kind of story may have jumped the shark.
Why couldn’t they put this much effort into a bunch of other big stories that I can think of, right off the top of my head? Grumble mumble mumble.
While we’re on the subject of connecting dots, and the previous topic of “overclass? what overclass?” is still fresh in our heads, there’s this tidbit from Neal Gabler’s column at boston.com. He’s writing about JFK’s cadre of Ivy Leaguer’s who so badly hashed the Vietnam War:
“Hablerstam” by the way is David Halberstam writing in The Best and the Brightest.
Perhaps a clickable map of connections between various political figures would be a good resource. Marriages, patronage connections, lobbying, etc. along with funding sources (e.g. taxpayer funding, Soros, varous foundations, Fortune 500 companies, etc.) I imagine most of us here would look at the dense mass of connections between all these fools and shrug. “Whaddya expect?” But it might make for an interesting picture for other people who either say “everybody does it” or for others who haven’t quite had the lightbulb go off.
Unlike the exploding volumne of information Wretchard talks about as the downfall of the spiders, I think this Map of the Neobility would find closure.
Such as the great firewall of China? (This is a rhetorical question, not an accusation…Reading what I just wrote sounds a lot more defensive than I really intend it to be.)
This whole thing reminds me a bit of the old Bruce Willis flick Mercury Rising.
Indeed that has become the eponymous and also somewhat apocryphal “Sturgeon’s Law”.
Wikileaks has just dumped a bunch of files it says are from US classified. The question I put on comments before was how do we know where the leaked info comes from? Wikileaks is not saying where it got its ‘classified’ data. So you have two lineage problems instead of one. Suppose the classified data says there are Nazis on the Dark Side of the Moon. How do we check a statement about something for which we have no collateral source?
Wretchard #10
Stephen Hayes doesn’t try to answer the question about the source(s) of the leaked documents but does note that the Times article says nothing new:
“The central claim in the piece is not new. Tom Joscelyn and Bill Roggio have written about ISI’s duplicity for years.”
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/wikileaks-pakistan-and-afghanistan-isi-intelligence
Well, the first thing that comes to mind is to ask, “What difference does it make if there are Nazis on the Dark Side of the Moon? What are they doing up there that we care about?”
If they are there and are doing something we care about, there should be observable phenomenon associated with it. Rockets carrying supplies to them, mysterious radio signals bouncing off of Mars, something. Thus we should be able to find collateral sources. In every instance of intelligence collection, there’s got to be an initial datapoint, one that
isn’thasn’t yet been connected to any other datapoint.Of course we have to beware of fabricated collateral signals as well. A smart disinformation op will create those too. But creating multiple in-sync supporting signals that appear valid is harder than creating a single standalone piece of disinformation, so at least we’re making them work harder.
Stephen Hayes doesn’t try to answer the question about the source(s) of the leaked documents but does note that the Times article says nothing new:
“The central claim in the piece is not new. Tom Joscelyn and Bill Roggio have written about ISI’s duplicity for years.”
I tend to believe in the ISI duplicity and if I believe the Wikileaks documents at all it is probably because of Bill Roggio’s collateral. Which returns us to the problem. Why not believe Bill Roggio and Tom Joscelyn in the first place? Of course you can say that now the documents have been leaked, this proves Roggio and Joscelyn were right. And why exactly is that? I may believe the central story of the Wikileaks releases but not necessarily because they are leaked.
How do we know something is true these days? Consider that in Journolist we had a bunch of guys who are possibly cooking up collateral among themselves. And unlike the Washington Post’s expose of the US Secret world, or Wikileaks expose of US secrets in general we are told we have no right to it. No right to walk up and touch it.
Maybe. But why is that? What makes some kinds of information privileged with respect to its veracity or protection and others fair game?
Here’s what I think. For anything to be claimed as “true” we ought to potentially be able to verify the thing ourselves. In other words only facts which do not depend on a privileged point of view can be regarded as public facts. You can write about the Empire State building (because anyone can in principle walk up to it) but you can’t write with authority about Nazis on the Moon. So in the case of Afghanistan, we have a degree of belief based on the fact that a bunch of guys (some of whom we know) have walked up to it and touched it, concluding that, yeah, the ISI and the Taliban are colluding.
The more independent samples we get and better we know the reputation of these dudes the more likely (I am at least) to believe that it is true. Someday if I get to go and see for myself, then my belief will increase even more. But just because Wikileaks says so, even if I am inclined to believe the narrative myself, what is the reason to regard it as true? In a way its veracity arises from its plausibility; the plausibility does not arise from the source.
Going back to Journolist. Why do we feel uneasy about it? Maybe it is opaqueness of the sources (the list is closed to us) and the inability to measure the reputation of the people involved in the magic circle that makes one say, if it was on the up and up why bother to meet in the shadow? Why not all the cards on the table?
Cards are all laid on the table because we want to establish as a public fact the value of the deal. That is what everybody acknowledges to be true. Now if Journolist says I have a King of Hearts in hand but I don’t want to show it to you what is your belief about the existence of said King of Hearts? It might be there, but then again it might not.
Spc Bradley Manning is the Army intel guy who bragged he gave Wikileaks tens of thousands of classified documents, including the Iraq war video. I think they’re just too damn loose in selecting intel personnel. i sure wouldn’t trust some of the ones I have met.
#7 JMH:
“Perhaps a clickable map of connections between various political figures would be a good resource. Marriages, patronage connections, lobbying, etc. along with funding sources (e.g. taxpayer funding, Soros, varous foundations, Fortune 500 companies, etc.) I imagine most of us here would look at the dense mass of connections between all these fools and shrug. “Whaddya expect?” But it might make for an interesting picture for other people who either say “everybody does it” or for others who haven’t quite had the lightbulb go off.”
Hmmm, I’m thinking about Kim du Toit’s rule of presentations. If you can’t boil it down to 5 bullet points or less, people lose concentration and don’t retain it. So maybe if someone made the chart of connections and it could be analyzed and boiled down to the nastiest 5 connections and then presented, it might cause a splash??
This might be an anecdote that sheds no light, but twenty years ago I joined a few friends in a football pool. We each picked games against the point spread and kept track of the results. At the end of the season the winner had to take everyone else out for dinner and the losers had to salute the winner as being smarter than we all were. For the first two years I finished second or third out of seven. So for the third year I subscribed to all sorts of football newsletters and tout sheets and studied all the data. I considered whether the team did better on grass or astroturf, at home or away, in an early game or a late one, following or preceding a Monday night game, etc. That year I finished last. Too much data.
Perhaps with computer assistance today I could do a better “SABER-METRIC” analysis and finish first, but unless I devoted as much energy to it as to my profession, I still fear I would be overwhelmed with data and underwhelmed with meaning.
Finally, with too many data points and too little intelligent weighting of the data, any superstitious conspiracy theory can find just enough data points to support it and thus gain traction. With too much data come too many distractors as well.
#16 Batman
Yeah–data in and of itself is useless. You can drown in it. The key is picking out the data that is meaningful for the task or purpose you are trying to accomplish. When you can’t distinguish the signal from the noise you are doomed, and increasing the rate of input does not help at all, it tends to make matters worse.
JMH@7 said:
“Perhaps a clickable map of connections between various political figures would be a good resource.”
It’s been done.
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/
Wretched@10 said:
“How do we check a statement about something for which we have no collateral source?”
Simple – Google “Nazis on the Dark Side of the Moon”
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=%22+Nazis+on+the+Dark+Side+of+the+Moon%22&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=
Julian Assange goes on about his high minded crusade to create “good journalism” challenging abusive powers, in a link to the Guardian. He talks about the “true nature” of the war, and why his actions are the “new Pentagon papers”, because of course Afghanistan is the ‘new Vietnam’. But I think the real payload is to spread around sources and methods. A lot of avid readers on the other side aren’t going to care jack about the politics. They’re going to mine it for SOPs.
Of course Assange expects to protect his own sources and methods from exposure. We aren’t supposed to ask where he got things, or even if one does, nobody is supposed to take them to task. Can this kind of asymmetry be sustained? If its open season on US military secrets, then why not open season on Wikileaks and Journolist information stores? Notice that one doesn’t have to be a fan of the War in Afghanistan or even of the US military to argue for the symmetry. It’s just a question of whether anyone, like Assange, can claim a privileged position or viewpoint. Why not all cards on the table? If you live by the rule that you can publish the secret stuff of your political opponents then why should it not apply to you? Assange says in the Washington Post that:
“If they are intelligent … abuses … stop this”. The Pentagon Papers, Vietnam: the repeatable, updatable eternal meme. “Dig down in time” says Assange. If its true for the people he exposes, shouldn’t it be true for him?
The difficulty as I see it, is that the problem isn’t bounded as neatly as Assange would have us believe. I don’t accept his narrative purely on his say-so. It might be true but there ought to be a way in which anyone interested can determine that to his satisfaction without relying on a belief in him.
It seems the only way out of this box is more, not less information. We need to know who released the information; what the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel intended when they entered into a partnership with Wikileaks to spread this around; what the contemporaneous Iranian, Saudi, Russian, Chinese and Pakistani intercepts were over the same period of time. You want to see both boxers in the ring, not one in which Rocky Marciano fights a digitally missing opponent dishing out punches into the air and taking hits from invisible hands.
Then we’ll see who the good guys are. Or maybe that everyone’s a bad guy. But we’re never going to get a full picture with information flows going one way.
We need a way to “pull” more data into the public view instead of waiting for the Benevolent Dictators for Life of world opinion to “push” their check-ins into the Blessed Repository of the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel. Who are these guys checking-in the info? Can we download the branches and the history of the thing or do we take it as black box? We base our political architecture on information we would not not trust to design a bicycle.
In a world where information cannot be secret the only chance at leveling the field is to let her rip. There can’t be secrecy for some and ‘transparency’ for others.
Richard, an excellent and thoughtful post as always.
While I was reading it and the comments so far, I was also reminded of another dimension to all of this data acquisition and surveillance in general: marketing. Richard K Morgan, noted SF writer, has postulated along these lines in an article here: http://www.richardkmorgan.com/articles/marketing-miracle/
Finally I am really comforted by Julian Assange’s assurance that none of this information he’s spread around is security sensitive. I hope it’s not impertinent to ask why believes that, what special methods he used to assure himself of that fact; how he determined that describing this or that might not allow the enemy — can one still use that word? — to escape detection, deduce SOPs, etc and thereby kill somebody. Again he might be right, but we’re not talking about he Oracle at Delphi are we? Or are we? Did the Oracle of Delphi get paid? Did anyone figure it would boost their circulation? Can we ask that? Or is that uncivil?
Nothing says “overclass” as much as this presumed ability to second guess an elected government. God knows I think very little of Barack Obama’s competence. But that’s my personal opinion. The fact is that he was elected; and like it or not he’s Mr. President. Who elected the New York Times and Julian Assange? Did someone worry, in the middle of the night, whether this business would result in killing some 19 or 20 year old from Nowheresville? Or was that taken care of in the thought that “we’re stopping the war”. Isn’t that Congress’s business, little as one might think of them?
It’s not the conclusion that is so bothersome it’s the process. I think whoever did this is tone deaf. Here you have a guy in Sweden in a t-shirt overruling the judgment of US military authorities ably assisted by the Guardian, Spiegel and the New York Times. And then they’re going to object: ‘overclass? What overclass?’
JMH@7
“Perhaps a clickable map of connections between various political figures would be a good resource.
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Thinkmap%20SDK%202.5%20Standard%20Edition/webapp/TM-1VER/index.asp?keyword=Ford%20Foundation
The “If they are intelligent …” part of Assange’s statement really says it all. The truly, truly, ugly thing about the contemporary Western ruling class is the utter contempt they have for the people they rule. In the recent past they at least made some attempt to conceal it. That doesn’t seem to be true anymore.
I have been watching the internet and its uses and I am not convinced it is really doing any of us any good. Oh, sure, Netflicks and other services are useful, and I like the online books in the public domain, but overall, it seems to me that the internet is having a negative impact, overall, on society. My spam folder is chockablock with criminal solicitations daily, many claiming to be the FBI itself. Hackers are trying constantly to enter my computer and steal information or use my machine to spam others and as DNS attack dogs. Internet crime and fraud has exploded like a fusion bomb.
I believe, for our own protection, we may have to do away with anonymity on the internet. While that will stifle people in Iran and China, it will serve to protect the rest of us. As of right now, the internet is the number one channel for terrorists and criminals to connect with each other.
I would suggest that all government agencies only have simple contact information and pictures on their websites. Nothing more. In other words, nothing more than a slick pamphlet.
While I do read news on the ‘net, and use email, I eschew all social networking sites for privacy and other good reasons. I am no Luddite, but I see the danger in allowing everyone to have their own soapbox. It is the internet which has convinced half the world that Bush 43 ordered 9/11, that the towers were brought down by explosive charges planted by the Israelis and not the aircraft and their fuel loads, and that we never landed on the moon, despite rather convincing scientific and physical evidence to the contrary of all the conspiracy theories.
Of course, I also see the flip side, in that we can no longer trust our media outlets to be loyal and neutral truth-tellers, especially after the recent admission of how Obama was softballed a-purpose. The internet lets us read all the stories, even the ones which are simply silly, and those which are deliberate “dizinformation”.
It would have been nigh impossible for a child pornographer, pre-internet, to hide some of their filth in my home to keep it away from the police, and pick it up after the heat died down, but a skillful pervert can hide the pictures within a normal picture I may download of, say, flowers or airplanes, and retrieve it at his leisure. And if it is discovered, I am the one the police drag off to gaol and destroy my reputation, even thought I knew naught about it.
Nobody would send viruses to our televisions to destroy them or hold the programs hostage, pre-internet. It used to be, that if someone wanted to steal the medical records of 10 million people, they’d need a convoy of semi-trucks with forklifts, as the paper records would weigh many scores of tons. Now they need a laptop, a wi-fi and a thumb drive with cracking programs installed and a hard drive of the required capacity. They can sit near any wi-fi access area and download the medical records or financial records or credit card records and simply get up and walk away, from halfway around the planet. They can then release the data maliciously or try and hold the companies up for blackmail. It only takes a few minutes and a 3 pound (or less) laptop.
I was one of the veterans who had their data stolen in the massive data theft. One of many millions. The internet has made it so easy to steal, to illicitly transfer funds, etc.
So while I see the positive aspects of the internet, I do not believe it outweighs the bad. I am prepared to do away with it in its current form and reduce it to a strictly commercial thing such as game playing and Netflicks, and doing away with the social and record keeping functions.
I also admit I want to be able to send a signal which will kill the senders of spam, traders in child porn, criminals, etc., by hypnotizing them to lay down on a railroad track.
Veracity of Information: It seems that sometimes information can be, to a degree, self-verifying in that there are patterns revealed that fit well with already know information and that must have a very low probability of being without relevance. Of course, the source and reproducibility will enhance or detract from the credibility.
This may be a simple way of looking at it, but there seem to be two ways of attacking the problem presented by Assange. 1) Increase security of information at the source, so that it is less likely to be leaked. 2) Track down the leakers. In the short-run it may be impossible to prevent discreet, though potentially damaging, leaks. It should be, however, possible to project power, be it diplomatic, military, or otherwise, to put pressure on a static outlet.
As for the aggregation of dots, it seems that this is a new reality that must be considered by the keepers of “Top Secret” information. One way to make the information dynamic and hence decrease the shelf life of any potential aggregation is to build a continuous shift into the system. i.e. mandate vendor changes periodically on a staggered basis. While there may be some efficiency losses, there may be commensurate efficiency gains where “permanent” vendors could get complacent.
I don’t think it is possible to win the information war by staying on the defensive. The basic problem is that the public has accepted the imbalance. When the other side is allowed to do everything and while their opponents cannot “stoop to their level” and when, moreover, the other side reserves the right to sit in judgment of what constitutes stooping then the game is rigged. It’s a sham.
Why has the public accepted the imbalance? One possible explanation is they’ve been taught to. In which case that teaching has to be challenged. Put through the crucible of democratic debate. But the tough part is that challenging the unfair rulebook is itself considered “stooping”. In that case there will be increasing incentive to tear up the rulebook because you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. So you might as well don’t.
You can make the argument that the Assange incident destabilizes the system to some extent because it decreases the perceived fairness of the game. After a while people leave a crooked casino. There may even be calls for restrictions on the Internet, to pull the license of Fox News etc. You know, fix things. As for the NYT, that is never broken.
The irony of cases like this is that the restrictions may fall proactively on the “usual suspects” — from a certain point of view — and never the right ones. They’ll fix the roulette wheels so that they all play the same statistical way. That way nobody notices the bent ones.
I just got my print edition of Der Spiegel in my mailbox. The cover shows a faded picture of GIs over a faded stars and stripes. The title is Task Force 373: The Afghanistan Protocol: Aerica’s Secret War. A quick glance inside reveals the coverage to be 16 pages long, including a 2-page interview with Assange, and another 2 pages about him in which the subhead says he is dangerous And in danger. This article will be read, and the Ami haters will have a field day reinforcing their predjudices.
What Journolist taught us is that nothing is necessarily as it seems. There’s a news story from AFP reporting the Obama administration secretly sent signals to the Scottish government nudging them in the direction of releasing the Lockerbie Bomber without overtly appearing to do so.
It has been suggested that the release would have benefited BP, one of Obama’s biggests corporate supporters. Now of course, who could believe a thing like that? Surely not. But all the same it makes you wonder who is working for whom.
So once again, where did Assange get the data? Why did the NYT, Spiegel and the Guardian ‘handle’ it? To embarass the President or to hand him something he can use? Are we looking at an exit strategy from Afghanistan? Because if political support evaporates from a ‘war of necessity’, why who could blame the President for washing his hands of the whole thing. Now if all this sounds like conspiracy talk — because who could be that devious? — then the best way to dispel it is to put Assange on the stand and get him to say who gave him the data. Now what are the odds that will happen?
So–if 90% of everything is crap (Theodore Sturgeon), and 90% of life is just showing up (Woody Allen), does this mean that just showing up is crap?
I recall when I was going through Naval nuclear power school that essentially all of the training material we had was classified “top secret”. Including things like the periodic table. I suspect the 90% rule mentioned above is underestimating things, and the overwhelmnig majority of top secret documents are not very interesting. The meta-analysis approach maight be the only way to get anything useful out of it.
When everything is “top secret” it opens the door for dishonest institutions like the New York Times to pick and choose what they want from these leaks to advance their own unrevealed objectives. I see this as a real problem.
I also recall from my readings (no source, maybe someone else knows) that the most effective intelligence department the US had during WWII were a few guys in DC who just read copies of the German newspapers every day and figured out what the Germans were probably going to do from that. No secret anything and their track record was very good.
“a map shows the geographic distribution of government organizations and companies within Top Secret America.”
Maybe after I wake up and mow the yard, I’ll see which politicians got what and how they voted to get it. Or maybe it will rain and I’ll go back to bed.
Betsy, without finding my calculator and with less then 1 cup of coffee, I would say off the top of my sleep befuddled head that 81% would be about right. There are enough disclaimers there to keep a bus full of lawyers hapy. Now if someone would be kind enough to drive it off a cliff, the day will be off to a good start. Maybe the week too.
I’m hoping Kim is Krazy enough to start launching nukes at a US aircraft carrier. The Dems are too. Nothing like a short victorious war to pump up the polls and increase one’s chance of getting re-elected.
So…… Does anyone think that this leak to Wikileak might have been orchestrated or at least encouraged by the Obama administration? Something to keep the American public’s eye off the imploding economic situation or something to assist in getting the U.S. out of Afghanistan???? They certainly cannot run out of crises (which they cannot be allowed to waste).
17. Tcobb & #16 Batman
Yeah–data in and of itself is useless. You can drown in it. The key is picking out the data that is meaningful for the task or purpose you are trying to accomplish.
It’s interesting that a public discussion about the nature, utility and associated difficulties versus benefits of processing and connecting the dots in massive amounts of data should now be considered appropriate for the national discourse by the MSM. They certainly didn’t consider it so during the Abel Danger coverup. As that episode showed, one problem with doing that successfully is that it can be risky to those ferreting out the meaningful data.
Claude Shannon’s great contribution was the concept of statistical entropy being a measure of information.
Suppose I want to transmit one of 256 possible codes. I can do this by transmitting one ASCII character, having log_2(256) = 8 bits. Suppose I want to transmit one of 512 codes — that takes one more bit or a total of 9 bits.
Suppose the codes I want to transmit are not all equally likely — “e” and “s” and “t” are transmitted all of the time, think of the letter-guessing strategy in Wheel of Fortune, and “@” is transmitted rarely if at all. In that case one weights the log_2 of the number of possibilities — the number of bits — by the probability of that character. Hence the average number of bits per symbol i is the information source entropy
H = sum p_i log_2(1/p_i)
What we are dealing with in JournoList, ClimateGate, and now WikiLeaks are sources with very low entropy H. There is very little information in these sources as they all appear to be mappings of the same underlying code book with very few distinct symbols in it.
Back around 1977 a friend of mine knew an American, an amateur radio operator, who worked as an engineer in Iran. A US news magazine published a picture of his apartment building with his ham radio HF beam antenna on top labeled “CIA Listening Post In Iran.” When the Islamic Revolution popped the man was barely able to escape from the country alive and lost everything he had there. The Iranians “knew” he was a CIA spy; after all Newsweek said so, didn’t it?
So in answer to Wretchard’s “Suppose the classified data says there are Nazis on the Dark Side of the Moon.” The answer is simple for some people; nuke the Moon.
no matter how they spin it, this leak is embarrasing for Obama and causes him a *lot* of difficulty in dealing with Pakistan, so I don’t think he or his people would have done this.
Hillary, on the other hand – think about it. Her people certainly had access to all of this, and she’s sick of being upstaged as the invisible Sec. of State. Watch for her to resign shortly after this fall’s election – this could be step one in an inside the Dem party coup in 2012.
This story is being given more credibility then it deserves. Dana Priest obviously thinks that classified = intelligence. However, most classified information pertains to acquisition and operations, not intelligence. I do not know her agenda for publishing this story. The timing could merely be coincidental to the confirmation of the new DNI but it might be a misguided attempt to put pressure on Congress to place greater authority to control classifed programs in the hands of the DNI. However, when Lt Gen Clapper moves from USDI to the DNI he will actually lose access to most Department of Defense programs. The HASC and SASC generally do not allow defense programs to be visible to the IC and the intelligence oversight committees.
Well, I found a way. I correspond with over two dozen men who have had at least one tour in the Afghan and have met at over 10 others in person who have that time under their helmets there.
They tell me the truth as they know it. Sure it is just what happened to them in their small area of operations but if you put it all together along with Milblogs that quote those “that have been there and done that” you begin to develop a picture of how it “really is”.
I follow Michael Yon and other independent writers that have been there or there now. Their opinions are mixed in with the rest. It is up to YOU to determine the truth of the matter. As it has always been, when dealing with this kind of information.
I wrote about this mess here earlier because I have two [2] grand sons in this fight. I don’t have time to find the link now as I need to get the girls to the neighbors and get myself back out on the line, into the fight here for our Republic.
Suffice to say. There is much info on the net but person to person is still the best way to form an opinion.
And NO, I don’t yet have any sources in the NSA, CIA or other intelligence services. But I would believe them less than I do the grunts that will talk to me.
Gotta go…The most important fight, for the present and for years, is still right here, right here in our Republic.
Buy more Ammo.
Papa Ray
ONE LINK:
Wretchard: “There may even be calls for restrictions on the Internet, to pull the license of Fox News etc…to fix things.”
IIRC, a bunch of leftists–and some of the scum on Journolist–have already called for not renewing the licenses of Fox stations when they come up for renewal.
Excellent discourse; but, I cannot help but LOL whenever I read or hear “connect the dots” because it will forever be associated in my mind with Schwarzenegger’s idiotic babbling in front of the cameras about Obama’s failed response to the Christmas bomber..
You mean like how violent crime is used as an excuse to restrict gun ownership among law-abiding citizens? Or (better yet) how corrpution by existing elected officials is used as an excuse to make fund raising harder for their future challengers?
One way to analyze large datasets with many possible connections is to prune out the irrelevant connections. So, we could analyze political datapoins by connecting them with “proposed changes” and those doing the proposing. Makes a nice triangle, three points (data, person, proposed change) and three connections. Then we can simply delete all the triangles were the same person always proposes the same solution regardless of the datapoint. Those are irrelevant to any rational discussion because it’s just someone looking for excuses to do what they want. Thus, the Brady Campaign would be eliminated from public discussion because everything is a reason to restrict gun ownership. The current AGW crowd would go too, since both increased and decreased temperatures are “proof” of a looming eco-disaster. Actually, most of the left would be eliminated from discussion because it’s all outcome based thinking.
A crisis is certainly a terrible thing to waste.
Now, on the one hand, this is an onion-esque proposal. We don’t need fancy graphs and data manipulation to know that whatever Barney Frank proposes is somehow crooked, even if we can’t quite see the corruption. But obviously not everybody sees that quite so easily. Maybe a visualization technique that makes it easier for people to see the specious reasoning might help open enough eyes to matter.
Speaking of visualization or presentation, I looked at discoverthenetworks.org and, while happy that someone is doing this, I’m underwhelmed by the presentation.
The double standards on everything:
Sandy Bergman violates federal law on classified documents and walks free whereas the average guy with his clearance would still be in Leavenworth. A Hacker attack on DOD nets from England gets a few harsh words though it is regarded as an act of war by those affected. Internet crime seems to be regarded as minor misdemeanors though they do the equivalent economic damage of a couple of successful raids on Federal Depositories. If you always defend you will lose.(see “500 pound bomb on an ISP to discourage them.”
What happens when the right starts applying the double standard and the general public goes ho-hum. The left has buttered its bed and I hope they enjoy the “lye” that follows.
Wretchard, #23 IMO, Assange is a dangerous psychopath. His crusade against the US military appears to me to be motivated by more than an antiwar/political agenda. It’s personal, and I get the feeling he feels very inadequate when measured against a soldier. Perhaps it’s his orientation, but he really doesn’t care how much damage he does or what collateral damage his actions cause.
He is a terrorist with a cause.
As a curiosity, some of his minions (or Julian) seem to want pushback, trying to engage opponents in a justification process for their actions, or pretending to want to hear the other side. This is just not the way normal whistleblowers with intact psyches act.
Everything about Assange would make one consider him a Central asset.
Surely all of his leaks are aimed at the West, and America in particular.
As a thought experiment: Assange leaks SVR secrets. How long does he roam?
I am quite able to believe that our war in Afghanistan is compromised by all sorts of ugly secret agreements with duplicitous Pokistoni forces.
I expect the information process to be messy.
In fact, I *demand* the process be messy, I want multiple conflicting channels with different priorities and investments.
Why complain about WaPo playing the game? Why complain about Wikileaks? Because complaining is another part of the dialectic.
The truth is ours to discover, as much here as in the Golden Wood.
As for revealing sensitive secret information and compromising agents or activities in the field: that would be a bad thing.
But it’s no secret to the DoD what kind of scum they are working with on the Pokistoni side, what is secret is what they do about it. And I suspect that is too subtle for the likes of Dana Priest and the WaPo.
The warning to companies is to say that even if the information is full and correct, it doesn’t mean the wraps are off.
That’s a very old warning, by the way.
The press doesn’t get to play twenty questions.
blert
Maybe along the lines of Soros as an asset. Possible, not plausible? The world scenario today is one huge clandestine petri dish.
James Bowman muses interestingly on Journolist and the, **ahem**, ethics of the scribbling professionals.
http://www.jamesbowman.net/diaryDetail.asp?hpID=403
Off Topic:
A new post at Whiskey’s Place!
http://whiskeys-place.blogspot.com/
Hey, is that Mrs Arquette?
“physicist Enrico Fermi was willing to bet anyone that the test would wipe out all life on Earth”
I’d take that bet! For a physicist, that ain’t too bright.
The “mosaic theory ” in reality. Makes my point quite nicely.
= = =
#40 Papa Ray “Well, I found a way. I correspond with over two dozen men who have had at least one tour in the Afghan and have met at over 10 others in person who have that time under their helmets there.
They tell me the truth as they know it. Sure it is just what happened to them in their small area of operations but if you put it all together along with Milblogs that quote those “that have been there and done that” you begin to develop a picture of how it “really is”.
I follow Michael Yon and other independent writers that have been there or there now. Their opinions are mixed in with the rest. It is up to YOU to determine the truth of the matter. As it has always been, when dealing with this kind of information.
IF I headed the intelligence forces of our enemie(s) I would spend real money to prop up the MSM so they could continue to publish valuable intel. All it would take are front companies buying add space.
If I was the head of US counter intel… Wikileaks, Wapo, NYT, Gaurdian would be sufferering computer meltdown and lots of (non-lethal) bad things would be happening to the reporters, editors and media owners involved. (tax audits, identity theft and fraud, stolen cars, leaky roofs, frogs and locust)
J.E. Dyer on “Wikileaks and the Final Defeat of Tet”:
“The question in the coming days will be whether the Old Media — of which Time, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, et al. are members — can establish a counterfactual narrative and make it politically decisive. Will Congress, for example, consider itself bound to accept the narrative that this massive leak amounts to a set of game-changing revelations?
I predict not. Although John Kerry has stated already that the leaked documents ‘raise serious questions about the reality of America’s policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan,’ my sense is that there is simply too much knowledge of that reality, both in Congress and among the public, for the political gambit to go anywhere. Much credit for that knowledge must go to New Media — independent online reporters like Michael Totten, Michael Yon, and Commentary’s Max Boot, websites like Long War Journal and Small Wars Journal — which has labored to bring the war to the average reader in a level of detail unimaginable even two decades ago. . . .
The severity of the leaks is related primarily to the damage they may do to our forces’ operational security in Afghanistan, and much of what is reflected about their activities is outdated now. Meanwhile, the eager hope of left-wing pundits that this leak will turn American sentiment to widespread anger and unrest is unfounded. From 1968 to 1971, Americans had few alternatives to Walter Cronkite and the New York Times. Today they have thousands. I believe the New Media will succeed in the signal task of burying Old Media’s ‘Tet-effect’ talisman, once and for all.”
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/j-e-dyer/333851
#32 Bismark66 – You might want to expand your readings a bit. Recommend reading something about Ultra and the Enigma. See how reading German newspapers helped us win the Battle of the Atlantic (to name just one of the many theaters of conflict) or the air war over Germany to name another.
(Of course, had the Japanese read the Chicago Tribune prior to Midway, they might really have learned something). The Germans would have just had the editors shot.
—————-
“I also recall from my readings (no source, maybe someone else knows) that the most effective intelligence department the US had during WWII were a few guys in DC who just read copies of the German newspapers every day and figured out what the Germans were probably going to do from that. No secret anything and their track record was very good.”
visitor
they may hoist themselves on their own petard. desperate people do desperate things, as we see in the state-run media nowadays. Heck, old George Soros is singlehandedly keeping a number of state media outlets in operation with his sugar daddy bucks for bongs etc, here and abroad.
Nothing is as it seems, and the petri dishes are overflowing.
#56 The Real Old Salt
(Of course, had the Japanese read the Chicago Tribune prior to Midway, they might really have learned something).
Newspaper leaks have been a problem since the 1860s, as Sherman knew– and so has the self-righteousness of journalists:
From Dale Brown’s article on “Sherman and the Reporter” from the Army War College’s Parameters:
“Enraged by newspaper listings of the Union order of battle prior to engagements, Sherman banished reporters from his lines and referred to them as ‘dirty newspaper scribblers who have the impudence of Satan.’ . . . . [Some reporters] circulated reports of Sherman’s alleged insanity.
The tension reached a head when a reporter for the New York Herald, Thomas Knox, defied Sherman’s orders and forwarded an account of the Union defeat at Chickasaw Bluffs. Sherman had Knox arrested and bound over for court-martial. The reporter responded, ‘Of course, General Sherman, I have no feelings against you personally, but you are regarded as the enemy of our set and we must in self-defense write you down.”
The court found Knox guilty and ordered him banished from the theater. As the Herald was a strong supporter of Lincoln, the President countermanded the sentence on the condition that Sherman’s superior,U. S. Grant, agreed. Grant would do no such thing, and Knox was forced to appeal to the man he defamed. Sherman’s reply:
Come with a sword or musket in your hand, prepared to share with us our fate . . . and I will welcome you as a brother; but come as you now do expecting me to ally the reputation and honor of my country and my fellow soldiers with you as the representative of the Press which you yourself say makes so slight a difference between truth and falsehood and my answer is Never!
Knox left the theater.”
http://www.carlisle.army.mil/USAWC/Parameters/Articles/04autumn/archives.pdf
The AP reports that the WH made no attempts to stop the leaks from being published. Gibbs simply sent a message via reporters to Assange to get him to redact anything that might endanger US personnel.
What touching faith Mr. Gibbs has in that crew’s ability to comb through 91,000 documents and spot security risk. Back in the day it was the devil of a time to sanitize an underground safehouse. You’d look through the trash, under the sofa, go floor to ceiling. In no case would you ever leave files around. No matter how harmless. Just too much information that could be compromising. Modern audiences have an almost mystical faith in the ability of TV detectives to figure out the identity of a serial killer from the forensic analysis of a bus ticket and none whatsoever in foreign intelligence to make anything out of thousands of documents screened by Assange.
Is it impolite to ask whether Gibbs would have entrusted his own life to this kind of process? But then Gibbs is an agent, not a principal, so he can’t be blamed much.
You can often tell the manufacturer or a product by its authorized outlets. In this case, Wikileaks went via the New York Times, Der Spiegel and the Guardian. It is probably within bounds to ask ‘who benefits’ from this leak.
A number of answers suggest themselves.
1. ‘The public’;
2. Some narrative. Now if so, what narrative?
“I enjoy crushing bastards:” Julian Assange, you are such a brave hombre, hiding in your backpack: http://snipr.com/zvfnv [www_spiegel_de]
For those with interest and time, read MARCHING ORDERS – by Bruce Lee.
ISBN 0-306-81036-0 Da Capo Press
The final stop line for the Anglo-Allies is explained — and Ike was just following orders — the line came from Washington and no where else.
More interestingly was the development of a cadre of super-analyst/ information integrators who published extremely informed work circulated to the Washington super-elites.
This ‘little’ publication was of the highest security classification: it drove all major war policy.
Patton was made the Commander of First US Army Group and forced to shunt around the Med because of the analysis by Washington. The slapping incident was strictly for public consumption — and for Patton’s!
So as far as known these situation reports were destroyed. The select recipients were not allowed to mention them in any way at any time — for all time.
These reports integrated ALL intel deemed worthy of strategic import however acquired. Pulling the signal out of the noise was performed by a brainiac talent pool: the best and the brightest.
No one outside of Washington was in this loop: being a General of the Army didn’t get you ‘in.’
It was these reports that pre-occupied Truman upon his Presidency. It’s a good thing that he liked to read.
Anyhow, it’s this ‘periodical’ that formed the basis for Truman’s decisions on virtually anything. Subsequently the CIA was formed. The secret weekly meetings became the National Security Council. And what had been originally very ad hoc became highly formal.
—–
The only open source intel during WWII worth a damn was American news. We just can’t shut-up. Unlike Britain, USSR, Germany — we have the First Amendment. That, and the big mouths on the floor of the Senate and House means that astonishing information is constantly bubbling up — even in wartime!
——-
Tojo found out that his Navy was ruined at Midway over a month late — from the Germans — quoting the NYT, et.al.
This and other incidents within the German Command show for the record the command paranoia that ran riot in the Axis Powers. The Dictators didn’t want bad news to get out — to such a point that even top commanders found themselves being blind-sided by adversities.
The Navies were step-children in all of the Axis Powers. That’s doubly amazing for the Japanese — the island power.
Just where was the U-boat picket-line awaiting D-Day in the Spring of ’44?
Missing , that’s where.
The Luftwaffe was sacrificed to the needs of the Germans in the West. Protests from Speer and Galland that feeding newly fledged pilots into the maw of the P-51 were in vain.
BTW it’s not true that the Luftwaffe sent but two fighters to stop D-Day. It’s just that only two got to the beachhead — and apparently didn’t even fire a shot. The counter-invasion air strike was crushed by an endless sequence of fighter boxes ranging hundreds of miles towards Germany. I believe that June 6 was the heaviest day of losses for the Luftwaffe — even exceeding the debacle at Stalingrad!
[Even a brain-dead commander should have realized that day-light counter attacks against the Anglo-Americans not only would not work but that even one attempt would break the back of the Luftwaffe. The only angle that might have worked was night action with homing torpedoes dropped from very high altitude. Bundling a pair of Jumos with a Ju-88/188/288 should have permitted thin-air bombing above the envelope of Allied fighters.]
But I digress.
——-
Mr. Assange is off-the-scale arrogant in his interview with Der Speigel. I mean, like, 15 kiloJohnEdwardses of arrogance. And I find it interesting that his focus is on the mundane horror of war, his hope is that people will read this and decide, “No More!”.
Which makes me wonder if he’s planning on translating all 90,000 pages into Arabic. Or having someone read them in Arabic for presentation by video, since the illiteracy rate among AQ foot-soldiers and the populations from which they derive is so high. In his dream world, the US stays at home and never sends troops abroad for any purpose other than to hand out water and food, and then without weapons. If he achieves his goals, the people whose actions he is seeking to curtail might actually be curtailed, and then the second-order effects begin. Mahmoud the goat-herder or Malik the engineer may not have read the WikiLeaks archive, but they will understand that the silence in the air is the lack of patrolling jets and helicopters, that the silence of the borders is the fact that the Americans have gone home, and they can get down to what they really want to do: act out the religious campaign they’ve been taught is their duty. They will not be troubled by the WikiLeaks database. Only if they trouble themselves to ask why some counter-intuitive policy exists could they find out, “Oh, the Americans do such-and-such, so we do this-and-that to avoid/defeat them.” Maybe, maybe they will learn that ultimately it was a database set up by an Australian that helped them to learn so much. If this comes to pass, I really hope Mr. Assange gets to personally meet the people he’s helping. Because he’s ultimately helping the enemy. I would advise him, in that eventuality, to learning how to say flawlessly in Arabic, “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his Prophet,” three times, as fast as he can. I somehow doubt that the restriction on attacking “People of the Book” applies when the book is by Marx or Hegel.
If WikiLeaks is to begin to be credible, it needs to fill in the blanks from other countries, as Claudia Rosett points out. In addition to her list of requests, I would add some documents I would like to see, like the internal investigations into Chinese environmental policy and building codes — issues that have killed and will kill far more people than the Afghan war. Because there is no American to hate in the majority of these situations, I doubt there will be anything published in this regard. Fortunately, we have the leaker in custody and I sincerely hope he is sentenced to the fullest extent of the UCMJ. The best way to take down WikiLeaks is to do what we should be doing — prosecuting people who intentionally release classified information.
I also sincerely hope that he gets deeply involved in investigation of the secret activities of Israel. For one thing, they’re probably a heck of a lot more exciting than our secret activities, and were I to ever read anything from WikiLeaks, I’d like it to be interesting. Secondly, he’d attract the attention of Mossad, and they’re far more likely to make ‘editorial deletions’ than the CIA is.
Truth be told, this incident reeks of hubris, and if hubris is come, a nemesis cannot be far behind. Mr. Assange is assudiously courting personal disaster by “showing up” his fellow travellers in the press. They will be on him like a duck on a june bug, in part because they believe as he believes, and he’s making them look bad.
WRT the Post database, as long as we’re with the art metaphor, art is a lot easier to grasp if you have an interpreter with you to point out the differences in works, how they compare and contrast. The ‘Top Secret World’ may have been points before, but the WaPo has made themselves the interpreter for the exhibition. That nondescript building in an office park there — they make the targeting software for Reapers. That warehouse across the river is where the electronic “sniffers” that listen for satphone or cell phone transmission in Waziristan are made. Yes, WaPo has made it easier for everyone to enjoy ‘Top Secret World’, but the vast majority of people are either not bothered or even comforted by the existence of a secret network. I am not so arrogant as to demand to know “everything”, I assume that there are people whose job it is to do that. There is also a minority that is significantly put-out by the fact that there is anything that is secret, and an even smaller number who may see the WaPo database as a rather convenient target list.
Strikes me that there is a question about the aggregation of information, namely, who does it serve? It serves the WaPo’s web advertising income, clearly. The vast majority of WaPo’s print and online readership really don’t care, so the real beneficiaries are primarily leftist groups who have a list of who to protest, and devotees of The Turner Diaries or selected bits of the Koran who now know where to park the Ryder Truck for maximum impact. Very little upside, and significant downside, at least to my estimation. It’s not illegal, it just seems quite stupid.
Eyes without a face?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-ZBSnW_pSo&feature=related
Wretchard #30
It has been suggested that the release [of the Lockerbie bomber] would have benefited BP, one of Obama’s biggests corporate supporters. Now of course, who could believe a thing like that? Surely not. But all the same it makes you wonder who is working for whom.
Be nice if Obama would actually do some work for a change. The juxtaposition of two other news items from the Chicago Sun-Times and Drudge (via American Digest) makes you wonder what planet this family is living on:
“President Obama says he can relate to the plight of Americans striving in the struggling economy to pay bills while saving for their kids’ education.
He says he and first lady Michelle Obama took a hit like everybody else when the economy nearly collapsed, telling ABC that a college fund for daughters Malia and Sasha has gone ‘up and down’ with the stock market.
Obama says the first couple is ‘not that far removed from what most Americans are going through.’ He tells the network ‘it was just a few years ago that we had high credit card balances, we had two kids, thinking about college. We had our own retirement accounts, wondering if we were going to be able to get enough assets in there.’
http://www.suntimes.com/news/politics/obama/2529446,CST-NWS-obamacash24.article
From Gerard’s site: link to details about the Obamas’ upcoming luxury vacations (yep, the plural is correct):
“Two years in and still milking it for all it’s worth. Didn’t they just get back? I have to admit I’m losing track.
You have to admire the intensity with which this entire family avoids work. Amazing role models one and all when you think about it, aren’t they?”
http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/enemies_foreign_domestic/the_hardest_working_presi.php
What Gerard leaves out is the fetching little detail about Bo: the First Pooch gets to travel separately on Bark Force One: http://michellemalkin.com/2010/07/17/obamas-dog/
No room in this crowded social schedule for minor matters like Wikileaks’ document dumps and possible security breaches.
A little-known reason for keeping activities clandestine is that it really cuts down on the hassle.
When I was at the Pentagon I got the job of answering a FOIA request from some group wanting to know if the Shuttle astronauts on a particular mission had photographed the Soviet industrial city of Chelybinsk using their hand held cameras. The group wanted confirmation of this reported activity because they were “investigating links between NASA and the intelligence community.” Well, gee, at one time the Shuttle was supposed to be the ONLY vehicle we would have to put anything into orbit, and national intelligence payloads would have to fly on the vehicle, so there had to be some links. And the National Reconnaissance Office certainly had better assets to take pictures of stuff in Russia than an astronaut hanging out of the back of the Shuttle with a Brownie Hawkeye. So it was all quite silly.
But the NRO officially did not exist at that time so I go the FOIA tasking. I referred to some reference works in the Pentagon library, called the NRO and told them what was going on, and in the end responded to the FOIA by saying that we had no information on the subject, which was quite true.
If you don’t exist then you don’t have to answer the dumb phone calls and letters. Congressional staffers and the GAO and the like have to be rather more circumspect about showing up at your door. And all that is worth a lot, believe me.
Blert #61:
In WWII the Japanese launched 15,000 balloon bombs at the US. The first few were reported by the US news media but then when we realized what was going on the Feds asked the media to keep quiet about it. And they did. From the Japanese perspective they were pumping out thousands of balloons and none were getting there. They quit. The secrecy did result in the deaths of 7 people in Oregon who were foolish enough to go over to a bomb and poke at it, but it utterly deprived the Japanese of any feedback.
BOB #52: Of course you should take the bet. Win or lose you will never have to pay off!
Wretchard @13 “For anything to be claimed as “true” you ought to potentially be able to verify the thing…”
I recognize this sentence, you’ve used it before. Things aren’t what they seem.
During the 2006 election members of the intelligence services actively campaigned for the democratic candidate–gave private speeches, lobbied against the WH’s war aims. I found that very frightening. And now I wonder how much worse is it? With the media/govt/intel agencies all coordinated, how is one to know what is going on?
Mad Men’s most recent episode featured an underhanded advertising ploy–two actresses were paid to fight,in a grocery store, over a HoneyBear Ham. The incident was picked up in the press and HoneyBear Ham sales soared.
How much more advanced are we from 1964, where now our intelligence agencies can be arrayed against us, when every tool of human behavioral science is known, when stories are suppressed or stepped on by one bigger or advanced beyond their importance?
I’m going to wait til I can verify the thing.
From the Spiegel interview: “Assange: Yes. This material shines light on the everyday brutality and squalor of war.”
War is hell? Who’da thunk it?
Darren (#62): “If he achieves his goals, the people whose actions he is seeking to curtail might actually be curtailed, and then the second-order effects begin.”
Second-order effects? No savvy. Now stop trying to distract me, I have to wash this icky war off of me.
(Btw, good comment throughout.)
blert (#61): “The Navies were step-children in all of the Axis Powers. That’s doubly amazing for the Japanese — the island power.”
Amazing to us. When you’re a dictatorship, your main worry is your own populace. That plays a role in the allocation of your military spending and in your entire military outlook.
RWE (#65): “In WWII the Japanese launched 15,000 balloon bombs at the US. The first few were reported by the US news media but then when we realized what was going on the Feds asked the media to keep quiet about it.”
What?! Not only did the Administration needlessly embroil us in this war with its provocative embargo, but now it is behaving as a dictator and suppressing news of the resulting carnage? And by doing so, it is risking countless American lives?!! Impeach Roosevelt!
Dave (#66): Precisely.
I am told that we should conserve natural resources and am thus troubled by the amount of water that will become necessary for hand-washing as a result of these information releases.
(By the way, does anyone remember the “Nuremberg Files” controversy?)
(Also, if I weren’t lazy and if I didn’t hope Israeli action would render the point moot, I’d make a list of all the pundits assuring us there is no need for alarm over Iran and nukes, contra Israeli propaganda/paranoia. (It’s out of respect for this site that I wrote “list” and not “hit list”.))
From what I have read in the Wikileak documents most of the docs don’t have any information in them that would warrant a Top Secret classification, and in a lot of cases there is no information that would help our Middle Eastern enemies. Unit locations months or years after the unit has moved has very little value. The names of military personnel is another matter, and I think this may cause some damage. I am sure there are other issues in these documents that may damage US security. I do think that whoever released these documents needs to be punished severely. The punishment should be so severe that others would think hard and long before repeating this action.I think security on an operational level is in most cases very good, but it seems that the level of security drops to stupid when you get close to Washington DC. Regardless of the damage this does the crime at least approaches treason.
Bret Stephens on the potential human cost of withdrawal from Afghanistan: “From Wikileaks to the Killing Fields”:
“It’s also interesting to note that the further the debate moves politically leftward, the louder the calls for an immediate withdrawal become. Here again, the same people who protest every drone strike as a violation of the laws of war, or trumpet every inflated Taliban claim of civilian casualties as irrefutable fact, also want America out of Afghanistan. Right now. For the sake of peace. . . .
But somewhere in the bowels of the State Department, somebody might want to think hard about the human consequences of American withdrawal. What happens to the Afghan women who removed their burqas in the late fall of 2001, or the girls who enrolled in government schools? What happens to the army officers and civil servants who cooperated with the coalition? What happens to the villagers who stood with us when we asked them to?
It is a peculiar fact of modern liberalism that its best principles have most often been betrayed by self-described liberals. As with Cambodia, they may come to know it only when—- for Afghans, at least—- it is too late.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703700904575390951264307766.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
I would give worlds to see the face of the Open-Running-Sore-in-Chief when he pick up NeuYorkTimes and see that Mr. Ass-ange has leaked the residential menus, transcripts of phone calls to SEIU founders & Acorn conspirators, his travel schedule and security arrangements.
Will mr. Ass-ange share those with, say Al-Zajeera 60 days prior to publication, if they promise not to share any information with bad people, that might get innocents slaughtered?
///////////////////
Of course, none of that would ever happen. Ass-ange is not interested in revealing secrets that do not advance the Marxist-Progressivist Agenda. We will never see WikiLeaks revelations about the brutality of the Chinese Laogai Prison Labor System, or a review of how the Saudi religious police forced schoolgirls to stay in a burning school and DIE rather than let them emerge into the public street WITHOUT THEIR hejabs and scarves.
PA Cat (#71):
To once again use the reference from my previous comment, the “liberals” are innocent of any blood that will be spilled; the blood is on Nixon/Bush/… and the wogs involved.
Chris Dodd will have “served” 30 years in the Senate. The American people, Connecticut branch, elected him to the “World’s Greatest Deliberative Body” five times.
Afghanistan was politically oversold because it was not Iraq. It was useful in order to establish the narrative of a “good war” in contrast to the ‘bad wars’ of GWB. The price for doing this was to pervert its true value while while the centers of enemy gravity were simply defined out of policy existence. Eventually they would have to take back their shoddy goods. To weasel out from under their extravagant promises.
What we are watching is a changing of the narrative. The “good war” is about to become “a failure of bad intentions made worse by the blunders of George W. Bush”. Well it was never the former nor the latter; worst of all it was never what it was said to be: one battlefield in a global war whose existence is too inconvenient to be recognized.
The Wikileaks episode, considered in the context of the last 9 years, suggests that the media and the political elite are almost totally dishonest. Their economics is a lie; their global warming a lie; their military ‘strategy’ another lie; and even their accounts of the lies are lies. Personally I think Assange, far from being a revolutionary outsider, is just another operative in the backroom. But that’s not news. The really significant thing is that things don’t work the same way any more. That apart from being total liars they are now total bankrupts. The global financial crisis, the discrediting of “global warming” and the crisis in the media are really reminders that the old magic is losing its power.
Your credit is good, but we need cash.
Maybe someone had the idea that mega-exposes like the Washington Post’s Secret America and the Wikileaks dump of classified would bring back the golden years of 1973. When everybody wanted to be Woodward or Bernstein. Maybe Assange thinks that Hollywood will soon get a top matinee idol to play him in the new version of ‘All the President’s Men’. Maybe. But I wouldn’t take out a big loan to attend J-school just yet. The sparkle isn’t there any more; and the movie that is really going to bill is ‘Sunset Boulevard’. There is a curious flatness in the public response to these earth-shaking revelations. It’s the dog that didn’t bark in the night.
Well, if I make, from totally innocuous household chemicals, an explosive or a poison, is it not still illegal to possess?
If I produce ricin from the ubiquitous castor bean plant, can I not be charged with a felony?
So yes, I believe that the whole is in many cases more than the sum of the parts. Several things, all perfectly legal, can become illegal if collected and arranged in certain ways. Why should this be any different?
Wretchard @ 74: “the old magic is losing its power.”
Isn’t that the truth! Racism — yawn. War crimes — yawn. The comic comes on and does his old routine, but the audience isn’t applauding like before, except for the guys in the orchestra pit who are paid to applaud.
The tectonic plates really are beginning to shift, which makes the future very unpredictable.
So what happens next? How long before a tax strike starts to snowball? Or will some black swan event render today’s Political Class irrelevant?
In the Army they sent us notification about the WaPo articles before they were published, along with guidelines as to how we were all to avoid the press. That was good for a quzzical laugh, because nobody around here has ever seen the press and never will. But those of us least in need got reams of guidance. Rather, guidance should have been sent to the leakers, as if they would have heeded it, because the very next week here’s the WikiLeaks scandal.
In the environment where I work if you traffic in classified information and get caught you wind up in Leavenworth for life at best. That point gets driven home at least twice a year to even the gardeners around here with mandatory training classes. We have laws on the books for doing this kind of damage to US national interest.
We do not enforce these laws on our betters, such as the journo-elite. We simply don’t. No question, if I handed over the kind of information the NYT has published on several occasions, much less WikiLeaks, they’d throw away the key. You wouldn’t even know my name unless you had to undergo DoD training.
As it is, the NYT, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel ought to be listed as terrorist organizations, and have their US assets frozen, and have various people from each organization swinging from a tree right now for treason. That would not be an imposition of a new dispotic regime, either. That would be enforcing the laws on the books as they stand today.
But, we won’t. We’ll allow ourselves to get rolled by these cretins. And that, once again, is for the worst.
Columbia Journalism Review mentions the fact that names of collaborators are in the documents, and they are now targets: http://tinyurl.com/32dhtlt
Julian Assange and his cowardly group are just petulant little creeps with a lot of somebody’s money and a whole lot of ideological baggage and personal angst to dump on us. They haven’t provided all the documents yet, so there is still potential for harm, and I’m not as optimistic as the rest of you. There is more harmful info in the posted docs than anyone wants to admit.
As for Manning and his ilk, execute them.
#78 eaglesdontflock
Julian Assange and his cowardly group are just petulant little creeps with a lot of somebody’s money
Can’t help wondering whether there’s a bank clerk somewhere who’d be happy to leak info. (if only to the tax collector) about JA’s bank account.
Someone linked to this site describing the other side of the Enron prosecution. I didn’t even know there was another side. But counternarrative is apparently that somebody was after some scalps. And Enron was a way to get them. If a few innocents got thrown in with the guilty, well you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. The site says:
The crazy thing is that it’s no longer unintelligent or naive to believe that set-ups occur. Think of Duke Lacrosse. Could ENRON be at least in part, the same? What the collapse of the media/academic myth has done is make us wonder just how much of the conventional wisdom is really fiction. In Australia I know two academics who were deeply embittered by what they discovered in the course of original research. They didn’t find what they expected. Rather they found that the standard story was a lie. Then they got blackballed and had difficulty publishing.
Old-time SF author Brian Aldiss wrote a story about a group of people who re-discovered their world was really a multi-generational starship. The fact had been forgotten until finally the last generation lost the secret, until somebody figured it out again. The problem with reaching such a radical conclusion in our own context is that it takes one very near to paranoia. The best way forward, I think, is still to assume the standard narrative is still true until you categorically learn otherwise. You keep the world, conceding that you might have to revise your estimate about the extent to the area of lies. In recent years we’ve watched this territory grow and grow and grow until sometimes you want to shut your eyes and shout ‘is there anything out there that isn’t a cheat?’ You want to save your world. The media has got it wrong. We want to believe; want to desperately. It’s a measure of how bad things are that this is becoming difficult.
When that happens you go out and walk the ground, touch the leaves and feel the wind. Messages from the Creator unmediated by man. Wouldn’t it be strange if all the things that the sophisticated world taught us not to believe in were the only things that were really true?
Wretchard #80
In Australia I know two academics who were deeply embittered by what they discovered in the course of original research. They didn’t find what they expected. Rather they found that the standard story was a lie. Then they got blackballed and had difficulty publishing.
Are you referring to Keith Windschuttle and The Fabrication of Aboriginal History? I came across that controversy several years ago in the course of doing research on genocide.
59. wretchard
You can often tell the manufacturer or a product by its authorized outlets. In this case, Wikileaks went via the New York Times, Der Spiegel and the Guardian. It is probably within bounds to ask ‘who benefits’ from this leak.
A number of answers suggest themselves.
1. ‘The public’;
2. Some narrative. Now if so, what narrative?
………..
If you define “the public” here as upper class whites in New York London and Berlin — then the narrative would be something like the tattered remains of “All Quiet On the Western Front”. The futility of war and the ultimate decline of the West.
I read somewhere that Norman Mailer went out to the pacific in WWII with that WWI book as his frame so that no matter what happened in the Pacific — his book, about the Pacific war “the Naked and the Dead” would impose the “all quiet on the western front” WWI frame on events. According to this NY Times review of the Naked and the Dead “The general, furthermore, on whom so much of the story’s motivation depends, is clearly an over-intellectualized version of a Fascist, neither convincing nor typical.”
Why would Mailer demonize the brass? Again, according to the NY Times “The generation that grew to manhood on the eve of the last war was not ideally suited to saving the world for democracy. It had been blighted by depression. Its minorities–two of the characters are Jewish, one a Mexican- America–had not yet been assimilated fully into the national dream.”
Therefor one might presume that mailer at the time he wrote the book in 1948– was taking potshots at the “insiders” ie poor whites-or the country class in modern parlance–while hanging his malice on the frame made respectable by “all quiet on the western front” –of the failure of the west.
Julian Assange is doing the same thing that mailer did with his WWII story. Assange is imposing a narrative on the story that did not grow out of the events themselves. But rather an older narrative of failure in viet nam. Why?
one can only guess that he is using that narrative to take potshots at the “insiders”. Only this time the roles are reversed.
In this case the “insiders” are the country class in the USA England and Germany.
But why is it that the “all quiet on the western front” narrative so important to the upper class [white] public in New York, London & Berlin?
Because these publics are cut off from their respective peoples. They have based their life on this assumption. They have a kind of vested interest in the failure of their national civilizations. This is the flow they are going with. They are outsiders to their own civilizations. They live strictly within their own cliques. Their lives are lived at the top of tall towers and they separated from their countrymen by other races.
That’s my wag.
There are lots of holes in this.
A final word here. Its important to understand the great cities like New York, London & Berlin have more in common with each other than they do with their surrounding country side.
When is a secret not a secret? When everybody knows it, of course. Pakistan being more enemy then ally isn’t a secret OR even news.
The problem here is that the Left sees all war as bad. They don’t distinguish between aggressive war and defensive war. So they (4th worlders) see ALL wars as new Vietnams. That is wrong of course. The VC never destroyed any major US Landmarks, killing 3,000 non-combatants in the process. If they had the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War would have gotten as little traction as the anti-war movement did during the Iraqi campaign.
So both the Washington compost’s article AND the Wikileak thingie will sink into the sea of data, leaving little more then a trail of bubbles. Not even an OIL slick or flotsam.
No sex, no blood, no legs.
There was nothing new under the sun with Enron. Enron was a pure futures-market gamble. It worked well while it worked, but then it didn’t work and it blew up. I found myself with Ken Lay once and I told him. I told him he was doing nothing but playing dice with futures, to his face. I warned him it would blow up and burn people for miles, again, to his face, back when Enron was flying high.
But it was the time of the “New Economy” back then, and he was a maestro. There was nothing new about that new economy, the emperor had no clothes back then. Enron vomited death upon innocents when it imploded, and Ken Lay got portrayed as an amiable dunce who never understood what was going on. Wrong. I told him what was going on, myself, years beforehand. I told him in 1996.
There is no way I wasn’t the first nor the only one to tell Ken Lay this. I’m not that smart, if it was obvious to me then I certainly wasn’t the first. I didn’t hunt Lay down, either, as a matter of fact he happened upon me and asked me what I thought about Enron and I told him. He begged the question.
I think Lay didn’t want to know the truth about Enron. He wanted it to all work out happy, and he liked being a powerful guy. He just wrote you off as a hater and trusted his quants. They were going to keep leveraging it up and selling it higher, because they were the really smart kids.
Best and brightest.
Worked out great, didn’t it?
Funny the superficiality of the past two democrat presidents. Democrat party put a bizarre twist on the “anybody can grow up to be president” idea, with the latest two, clinton and obama both being bastards, and I mean that in the literal sense of the word. Bill, bastard son of William Blythe, dead before Bill Jr. was born, and then adopted and then abandoned by clinton senior. Stanley Dunham, underage and unmarried at the time of her impregnation by, imo, Franklin Davis, and adopted by the stooge, Obama Sr.
For as awful as Jimmie Carter was, he was at least, legitimate- e.g. born of two married Baptist parents, in a society that frowned on illegitimacy. Somehow democrat party wasn’t about to make the jimmie Carter mistake again, where legitimate birth was concerned.
I’ve seen the U.S. right now compared with Greece, and any plausible analogy is worth the time to exhibit it. But I find that, as Hillary hands over a cheque to Pakistan for, I guess, 300 million dollars, and the promise of 6 billion more, that Pakistan is as good a mirror image of us right now as anything else.
In Pakistan, when the military began to take any steps against the Taliban, the ISI would tip the taliban off, so the net effect was to cancel any effective action against the taliban. And counter attacks on the taliban were on our dime anyway, as was the funding for the ISI as well, one way or the other.
Rinse and repeat, thanks Hillary.
Wretchard #80:
What I find remarkable is that even when the story “everyone knows” is not false, it is almost always distorted significantly in some manner. Often this is due to people trying to avoid blame, and no doubt the news media’s efforts to squeeze things into a 15 sec soundbite – or simply their inability to understand what actually happened.
This situation is true not only about events “a long time ago and far, far away” but relatively recent and nearby ones as well. I recently wrote an article about the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger. I knew what had happened but dug out the reference works to get a few precise details. And I found that what I knew was wrong; NASA did not knowingly bust the temperature limits that day, because they did not have any temperature limits. And note, I am not an ignorant outsider but am in the business!
A professional historian told me he enjoys my writing because, unlike what he is allowed to do, my material says “And that is what really happened, you bunch of idiots!” Thing is, I usually start out as one of the idiots and have to have my mind changed by the carefully extracted facts.
Just as “no crisis should go to waste” is a powerful political tool let us not forget the power of a manufactured epiphany. If the narrative shifts direction in its outward form there is the perception that whoever was calling the shots was wrong, which can be truly inconvenient for whoever is calling the shots.
It is far easier to shift direction when great revelations occur that change the assumptions. Gosh–I never would have pursued policy X if I would have known fact Y, but now I do, and now I won’t pursue policy X. I only did it because I was misled as to the true state of affairs. It was not an error of judgment. Of course, fact Y might not be a fact at all, or more likely it was known all along by the folks who claim to have been ignorant of it.
I am not saying that this is what is happening now. I don’t know. But I do wonder. Are these revelations simply cover for radically changing directions in foreign policy?
Wretchard: “The Wikileaks episode, considered in the context of the last 9 years, suggests that the media and the political elite are almost totally dishonest. Their economics is a lie; their global warming a lie; their military ’strategy’ another lie; and even their accounts of the lies are lies.”
Indeed, Wretchard, this is a concise summary of everything that’s going on. Eventually the accumulation of lies reaches a “critical mass” and then implodes, taking down and destroying everything and everybody, the wicked and the righteous alike.
Cowboy @ 84: Enron was *not* a futures market gamble, as far as California was concerned. Enron owned the market, had their thumb on the wheel, a marked deck, convinced California to enter an absurd contract and soaked them (us) for billions.
Sucker: Oh, I’ve never played poker before! Is this a game of chance?
W.C.Fields: Not the way I play it, no.
#84 Cowboy:
I found myself with Ken Lay once and I told him. I told him he was doing nothing but playing dice with futures, to his face. I warned him it would blow up and burn people for miles, again, to his face, back when Enron was flying high.
While I never got to say it to his face, I felt the same way about Bernie Ebbers (Worldcom). I knew from his emergence that something wasn’t quite legitimate about him and his business practices. I suffered directly as a result of his shenanigans because I worked for an outfit that Worldcom’s foundation funded. It’s amazing when us “ordinary folks” can see things better than the “experts.” Of course, those experts aren’t necessarily blind, just dishonest and ineffectual.
Enron was aided and abetted in fleecing California by California’s own stupid laws. At the time, CA had to buy on the spot market, they could not purchase long-term contracts for electricity supply. I’m sure there’s a good, benefit-the-unions-and-keep-Californians-employed reason behind this, but the net effect was to put CA at the very thin mercy of the short-term market for electricity.
It got so bad that companies like Kaiser Aluminum in Washington, who had purchased long-term electricity contracts, stopped their operations and sent their workers home because they could make more money selling their electricity contracts day-to-day than they could using the electricity to make aluminum. The consumers in California got hosed, for sure, but the consumers in California were made to play the role of grasshopper to the ants of Kaiser Aluminum (and others) simply by the expedient of bad state law.
The Narrative is that Enron is the bad guy. I suppose if Enron whispered into the right ears in Sacramento, they set themselves up to take advantage of the inability to obtain long-term contracts that led to CA getting used on the spot market — but if they did, I have yet to see that story written (and would appreciate any correction). The Truth is that California’s regulators and lawmakers screwed up royally, but they have an evil capitalist to blame, so it’s back to The Narrative.
Enron was thoroughly put in it’s place. Hearings and the media saw to that. With politics/Houston involved who knows if this was fair.
But what of Fannie and Freddie? Is anyone aware that they too have/had stock holders? In May of 2008 our family was encouraged to invest heavily with those companies, buying preferred stocks. A guaranteed deal. What maroons! Everything was lost. I naively assumed congress would investigate.
Random thought: and who took down Conrad Black?
Tcobb (#88): “It is far easier to shift direction when great revelations occur that change the assumptions.”
“I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”
I have nothing to say about Enron. I will note that the Conrad Black case did not leave me with a particularly positive impression of the Justice system.
In the day we called it Content Analysis.
What would happen if someone applied a rigorous inspection to say, Hollywood? or the Dems?
I am sure there are some pros at the BC who can answer the question.
Cowboy’s critique of Enron predated the California chapter. I would be surprised if Cowboy didn’t recognize that California was being fleeced for Enrons gambling debts as the events were unfolding.
What lesson did California take away from the scandal? The Enron deal is seen as a product of deregulation meets greedy capitalist. Has California instituted new layers of regulations or did they remove regulations that force them to outsource much of their energy supply? Can anyone explain the shenanigans regarding the CA pension funds in the Enron deal to me?
The problem was less deregulation than partial deregulation. The part where California left its cheese in the wind is the dependence on spot-market energy prices while buffering the consumer from the consequences of their demand. No company can long remain in operation when they have to sell to the consumer for 6.7 cents what it costs them 50 cents to acquire. The brownouts were due in part to inadequacies in transmission lines, since a new power line was installed there really haven’t been the same kinds of brownouts.
The moral of the story is best summed up by S. David Freeman, who was appointed Chair of the California Power Authority during the crisis: “If Murphy’s Law were written for a market approach to electricity, then the law would state ‘any system that can be gamed, will be gamed, and at the worst possible time.’” This is the fundamental flaw of regulation: people will always find a way to game the system, either at the outset by giving a Senator a sweetheart mortgage, or by finding and exploiting unintended consequences.
The flaw of partial deregulation is the fallacy that you can get the positive benefits of a market without the negative consequences. The partial deregulation attempted to shield the consumer from the consequences of their consumption, while disincentivizing power producers and creation of better transmission systems. What did they really think was going to happen?
Of course, in keeping with The Narrative, Mr. Freeman went on to say, “And a market approach for electricity is inherently gameable. Never again can we allow private interests to create artificial or even real shortages and to be in control.” This is not entirely true. What you cannot do in a market is try to disconnect feedback loops to benefit a politically important group. If California could have bought electricity anywhere but the next-day market, this would have been a non-story. There still might have been some brownouts due to transmission line issues, but that’s a NIMBY problem that can be addressed by other means. California politicians wanted the idea of a market, but they got the reality of a gamed system they themselves unwittingly designed.
Ken Lay did nothing wrong. Nor did Jeff Skilling. The only wrong-doing at Enron was by Andy Fastow and a very small group of people in Global Finance.
What you’ve heard of Enron is nothing but a witch hunt. Prosecutors desperately wanted to hang them, to make their work criminal, and so they played dirty, lied, altered documents, “lost” vital evidence, intimidated witnesses, and backstabbed anyone who got in their path.
There was no fraud or conspiracy at Enron.
The Enron Blog
The problem was less deregulation than partial deregulation.
Which fits the insidious pattern of statist/leftist/bureaucratic sabotage of efforts to pry ourselves loose of big government and progressive policies. In another venue where this phenomenon has reared its ugly head: the Supreme Court can render judgement in favor of the 2nd Amendment all it wants, but if Chicago and Washington, DC municipal authorities don’t want to comply, they won’t, except through disingenuous and insolent interpretations of “compliance.” They same holds true for “deregulation.” In another instance, airline pilots are, on paper, allowed to be armed in the cockpit, but onerous FAA “psychological screening” interviews left most cockpit crew members exasperated to the point that they gave up trying to get “certification” to carry.
Rolling back the collossal federal and state governments is going to be a monumental task akin to the Italian campaign in WWII. The Germans had turned the entire Italian peninsula into one giant booby trap. It was slow, tough, casualty-laden going for the allies. That’s what it’s going to be like if we ever have administrations and legislatures intent on shrinking government significantly.
Rumor:
In its hunt for revenue it is said that the State of California, with some help from the IRS is starting to take a look at Hollywood production accounting. Those high gross movies with negative nets with zip in the way of taxes have long been considered something of a joke.
“Mr. Producer, time for your close up…..and it is going to be deep also”
The producer of the Bill Bennet Show claims Obama Justice is doing more to prosecute leakers than did the Bush Admin.
…since 700 odd cases were never prosecuted under Bush,
(virtually none were)that’s not saying too much.
#100. toadold
Yes, the old order, as well as the new, is based upon pretending. It all falls apart when people cease to pretend, which usually happens when pretending causes them individual hardship that bites them up front and in the face. At that point they fall back into rationality, and seek to crush the peddlers of snake oil who managed to deliver them into the unfortunate position in which they currently find themselves.
I am not a prophet, but I truly see the equivalent of the French Revolution happening here in America. Hopefully it won’t work like that, but the idea of a dirty and ragged Nancy Pelosi
holding a cardboard sign saying “WILL WORK FOR FOOD” is very appealing to me.
The Wikileaks scandal may do irreparable harm to the ability of the United States of America to recruit informants.
There is no particular point to having laws against espionage on the books when a culture of impunity arises from the lack of enforcement of these laws. Either this breach of protocol must be prosecuted, or we can reasonably assume that copycats will follow the lead of Wikileaks. Given that the Obama administration won’t even prosecute the New Black Panthers for anything, there is ample reason to believe the Obama administration will also be passive against Wikileaks.
The funny thing about the Wikileaks episode is that I think it may galvanize American resolve to see the broader war through. The Wikileaks outfit is transparently anti-war, and it is unequivocally an attempt to aid and comfort the enemy. If our enemies are effectively Iranian and Pakistani puppets, somebody may ask why we don’t make the unofficial wars against Iran and Pakistan official.
The broader war isn’t over. The Wikileaks episode makes it utterly transparent about what lengths self-styled pacifists and anti-war activists will go to ensure that al-Qaeda wins and their enemies lose.
Talk of rebellion and references to the French spasm of 1790′s need to be tempered by some sober reflection upon the excesses of that time.
It wasn’t just the Guillotine.
Read up on the suppression of “counter-revolutionaries” by the fanatics. Again, I invite readers to review the matter of the suppression of loyalist Chouans, Catholic clergy and their sympathizers in the Vendée region after they rebelled against the revolutionary excesses in 1793. (I’ve seen conservative estimates of 15 percent of the population slaughtered in a couple of years.) Look particularly at General Francois Joseph Westermann, famous for his letter back to the revolutionary leaders about his success in eliminating those rebels.
Be careful what you wish for. The idiots running things now seem to think they can control the tornado they’re ginning up.
They are wrong.
Civil collapse becomes an opportunity for every sullen and resentful lowlife to settle old grievances and long-nursed slights, however imaginary.
Bush’s ‘War’ on Terror Comes to a Sudden End!
January 24, 2009
Or at least so says the dangerously obtuse Dana Priest in yesterday’s Washington Post. That’s right, folks. Priest has declared: Ding-dong, the wicked witch is dead. George W. Bush is out of office, and so the “war” on genocidal jihadists that he and his neo-con cronies concocted, so that Dick Cheney can make more money for a company he no longer works for, is now over!
Next week we’ll hear from the so-called investigative reporter about how Karl Rove helped bin Laden plan 9/11 and about when Bush and the gang pulled that all-nighter planting the bombs in the World Trade Center.
—
“While Obama says he has no plans to diminish counterterrorism operations abroad, the notion that a president can circumvent long-standing U.S. laws simply by declaring war was halted by executive order in the Oval Office.
Key components of the secret structure developed under Bush are being swept away: The military’s Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, facility, where the rights of habeas corpus and due process had been denied detainees, will close, and the CIA is now prohibited from maintaining its own overseas prisons. And in a broad swipe at the Bush administration’s lawyers, Obama nullified every legal order and opinion on interrogations issued by any lawyer in the executive branch after Sept. 11, 2001.”
/www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/22/AR2009012203929.html
—
Oil on Mud Lake:
//cgvi.uscg.mil/media/main.php?g2_itemId=951387
CE @ 98: Ken Lay did nothing wrong. Nor did Jeff Skilling. The only wrong-doing at Enron was by Andy Fastow and a very small group of people in Global Finance.
…
There was no fraud or conspiracy at Enron.
So you believe their “Seargent Schultz” defense, that they knew nothing?
I don’t. Nor do I care, I’d hang them anyway for being blind and stupid.
Thanks to them we got SOX, fwiw.
“And how did an imbecile become a police inspector?”
“Well, he went down to the personnel office, and …”
What of the people at Enron and Worldcom who knew their bosses were operating outside the law? They kept silent for a long time. The gaming that was going on in both of these companies was obvious to some and went unreported for so long there was nothing left to protect. Yet the people who knew and kept their silence went unpunished. They were stealing their salaries from the stockholders of the companies. There was no compelling reason other than greed for them to remain silent.
For all his protestations of the greater good, Julian Assange and his poofo boys and not motivated by altruism. They need to be arrested.
@josh
“So you believe their “Seargent Schultz” defense, that they knew nothing?”
That was NOT their defense. I don’t blame you if you believe that was their defense; the media painted it that way, but it was NOT their defense at all.
“I don’t. Nor do I care, I’d hang them anyway for being blind and stupid.”
Wow, what a gentleman.
“Thanks to them we got SOX, fwiw.”
That was the idiocy, regulatory-reaching and general greed of congress.
I have read accounts in the WSJ and elsewhere that Enron’s minions were laughing as they shut down an inter-tie link that they owned/controlled running down from Oregon. In this way they gamed the spot rate into orbit.
Similar fun and games occurred in the nat gas transmission market.
On a short term basis electric demand is inelastic. During a given gambit no consumer in California realized that Enron’s spot rates were going into orbit.
The guiding assumption of the deregulators was that the energy market was deep and un-coordinated. As we have seen, energy supply is a natural oligopoly if not outright monopoly.
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The same type of economics rules oceanic shipping. The very biggest customers run a monopsony upon the trade. The average shipper faces a monopoly or oligopoly. This schism was how Rockeffer expanded out of Cleveland to become the world dominant oil cartel.
He compelled the railroads and shipping lines to gouge his competition and rebate the theft to him under the table by way of a ‘rate rebate’ for the volume he was shipping. His monopsony on transport gave him a monopoly on oil.
Other manipulations allowed Rockeffer to steal refineries, pipelines and own the politicians and the courts. It took a lifetime of research leading to an expose by the daughter of one of his victims to drag his sorry soul into the Supreme Court. It became quite clear that his entire fortune was based on corruption, theft and fraud with everyman in America picking up the bill.
In a world of no income taxes and awesome business secrecy, Rockeffer was gradually taking over everything in sight out of his cash flow. Yet the biggest oil years were still in the future!
Like Bill Gates, his attorneys were able to shunt all of the filth onto others while he ran around handing out dimes to every passerby.
Gates skips the dimes and swats at mosquitoes instead.
Like the elder Kennedy, every super-crook wants to get his progeny into the Senate, even the White House.
Opium, Warren Delano — FDR
Slavery, Tobacco the Gore Empire — al Gore
The NE Mob, Kennedy — Camelot and myth
Opium, James Grant Forbes — John Kerry
Will anyone take bets on Gate’s progeny?
#104. Mad Fiddler
Talk of rebellion and references to the French spasm of 1790’s need to be tempered by some sober reflection upon the excesses of that time.
With no disrespect intended, there is a significant difference between wanting something to happen and predicting what will happen based upon what you see. The French Revolution happened because the ruling class at that time had become utterly divorced from reality. The same thing is happening here. I would propose as a general hypothesis that the destruction to the ruling class when it all falls apart is directly proportional to the distance between the lifestyles of the rulers and the little people that they rule.
In light of whats happening now, with unsustainable debt and the economic gang-rape of the middle class, I doubt the story will have a happy ending. If there is another conclusion as to how the current trends will lead us to that which concludes in a happy ending I would be glad to hear it.
Rockefeller
too quick to type — too slow to correct
The opening edge of the French Revolution was a failure in the rye crop.
Can anyone say LSD-25?
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Likewise the October 1917 troubles in St Petersburg got rolling in the food lines.
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I predict that America will handle the food distribution with a little more grace.
The populations most in peril are muslim: Pakistan, Araby generally.
They are growing like topsy. Pakistan is virtually certain to have a water crisis within ten years. No meaningful additions to her watershed have occurred in decades.
Any war that shut down the Persian Gulf would not only stop oil exports — it would obviously stop food imports.
Iran is a major food importer. She has no ability to use Bandar Abbas as a substitute for terminals up the coast; not in the amounts that would be needed.
Starving citizens always equals governmental collapse.
The mullahs ought to consider what the consequence would be if Israel blockades her imports.
And yet, with Rockefeller’s virtual monopoly in place, he delivered a higher-quality, safer product at a lower price than his competitors. There was never any suggestion that he was gouging the consumer. He was just too successful, I’m sure there were some monopolists that were screwing consumers back in the day, but Standard Oil became a poster child for something it did not do.
In the current world, Wal-Mart = Standard Oil, at least for some people. Low prices, making money — they have to be doing something wrong.
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With respect to Pakistan, Ug99 wheat rust may take them out long before water problems do.
Not mean to singly you out, TCOBB.
I have to be true to my normal mealy-mouthed reputation, and pretend to be concerned about descending to the level of the vermin who’ve been stuffing the ballot boxes lately.
Besides, I have to establish my academic credentials by showing how I can quickly rummage through Wikipedia to cobble together some support for a flimsy premise…
#114. Mad Fiddler
I just have to say that anybody who has contempt for me or my thoughts can’t be all bad.
I will raise a toast of rum and coca-cola for you. Cheers, my friend.
RWE@87
“I recently wrote an article about the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger. I knew what had happened but dug out the reference works to get a few precise details. And I found that what I knew was wrong; NASA did not knowingly bust the temperature limits that day, because they did not have any temperature limits. And note, I am not an ignorant outsider but am in the business!”
Also, tiny obscure pieces of information can often make all the difference to understanding.
A few years before I retired, I was on a contract engineering assignment — yet another classified project for the Navy. Also on the crew was a system safety engineer who regularly worked for Morton Thiokol. He specialized in ferreting out those obscure gotchas that can sneak into complex engineered systems, and had done a review of the shuttle boosters for them. Some of us got into one of those lunchtime discussions, about the Challenger disaster, and he said he’d bring back something pertinent from his next weekend trip home.
He brought back a copy of his report, complete with the usual Document Control stamps ‘n initials ‘n stuff. He’d spotted a gotcha.
The solid rockets are mounted on quite substantial pylons: they’re rounded on the fore and aft edges, allowing airflow to create a stationary vortex just behind the trailing edge. And there was an O-ring joint in just the right place relative to one of the pylons to feed a blast of hot exhaust into that vortex in case of a normally harmless double O-ring blowout. Impinging on the liquid fuel tank like a cutting torch.
I’ve never been able to confirm whether that was indeed the critical failure.
RWE, I’d be interested in reading your article, if there’s a link to it…
Majority of data published in NYT or Guardian from wikileaks is not secret but, as someone mentioned, there are names of collaborators, people who co-operate with NATO and US forces. That means that Taliban does not need to put effort to get the collaborators names, it can just read wikileaks and kill.
Majority of data published in WaPo is not a secret,as well. But the reference is treasure trove for other people – people from China, Iran or Rusia, North Korea – you name it.. They do not need to put effort into collecting data, then process it, then finally use it. They got it all in black and white.
Some people seems to think that having no secrets is better then having any secrets, but then why other countries do have secrets and even have laws punishing people who leak the secrets? It seems that only US secrets are leaking, no other country have so many secrets printed or put on YouTube for everybody to see. It is like giving up your weapons when everybody else have guns.
The Wikileaks scandal may do irreparable harm to the ability of the United States of America to recruit informants.
Alexis
Yes, that was also my first thought. And without informants and inside information the nation gets blind – Al Qaeda is only small part of the whole..
82.
A last Whiskey thought on that would be that for homosexuals in high places like Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel in the big cities of london New york and Berlin –the blood of warriors would be almost as embarrassing and offensive as menstrual blood.
Much of what is stamped secret is not info about our stuff, but what we know about the bad guys, including how we got it and who we got it from. It doesn’t matter if Habib gave us incorrect information about the Taliban, the fact that he was collaborating with us at all marks him as a dead man.
You have to be very brave or very naive to think that the USA will keep your identity as a source a secret. There’s always some Leftie ‘speaking truth to power’ (or some such twaddle) who will leak everything he knows that harms the US, and they rarely get punished. Aldrich Ames and Robert Hansen are still breathing. I would have shot them myself. Nothing like a few good examples.
standard oil nazi germany
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