Wikileaks Wages Cyber Warfare Against The United States & Our Government Does Nothing

While the tax cut issue is taking center stage this story is too important to allow to it to stay on the smaller stage:

In a disclosure of some of the most sensitive information revealed yet by WikiLeaks, the website has released a secret cable listing sites worldwide that the U.S. considers critical to its national security.

The locations cited in the diplomatic cable from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton range from undersea communications lines to suppliers of food, medicine and manufacturing materials.

In the message, marked “secret,” Clinton asked U.S. diplomatic posts to help update a list of sites around the world “which, if destroyed, disrupted or exploited, would likely have an immediate and deleterious effect on the United States.”

The list was considered so confidential, the posts were advised to come up with it on their own: “Posts are not/not being asked to consult with host governments in respect to this request,” Clinton wrote.

Attached to Clinton’s message was a rundown of sites included in the 2008 “Critical Foreign Dependencies Initiative” list. Some of the sites, such as border crossings, hydroelectric dams and shipping lanes, could hardly be considered secret.

But other locations, such as mines, manufacturers of components used in weapons systems, and vaccine and antivenom factories, likely were not widely known. The Associated Press has decided against publishing their names due to the sensitive nature of the information.

This is information warfare. Plain and simple. His goal? To hobble the United States and make the free-flow of information between agencies almost impossible.

9/10/01:

The irony is that WikiLeaks’ use of technology to post confidential U.S. government documents will certainly result in a less free flow of information. The outrage is that this is Mr. Assange’s express intention.

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Mr. Assange is misunderstood in the media and among digirati as an advocate of transparency. Instead, this battening down of the information hatches by the U.S. is precisely his goal. The reason he launched WikiLeaks is not that he’s a whistleblower—there’s no wrongdoing inherent in diplomatic cables—but because he hopes to hobble the U.S., which according to his underreported philosophy can best be done if officials lose access to a free flow of information.

In 2006, Mr. Assange wrote a pair of essays, “State and Terrorist Conspiracies” and “Conspiracy as Governance.” He sees the U.S. as an authoritarian conspiracy. “To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed,” he writes. “Conspiracies take information about the world in which they operate,” he writes, and “pass it around the conspirators and then act on the result.”

His central plan is that leaks will restrict the flow of information among officials—”conspirators” in his view—making government less effective. Or, as Mr. Assange puts it, “We can marginalize a conspiracy’s ability to act by decreasing total conspiratorial power until it is no longer able to understand, and hence respond effectively to its environment. . . . An authoritarian conspiracy that cannot think efficiently cannot act to preserve itself.”

Berkeley blogger Aaron Bady last week posted a useful translation of these essays. He explains Mr. Assange’s view this way: “While an organization structured by direct and open lines of communication will be much more vulnerable to outside penetration, the more opaque it becomes to itself (as a defense against the outside gaze), the less able it will be to ‘think’ as a system, to communicate with itself.” Mr. Assange’s idea is that with enough leaks, “the security state will then try to shrink its computational network in response, thereby making itself dumber and slower and smaller.”

Naivety in its extreme:

In fact, the only place where Assange’s theory could work is in a robust democratic society where people are already empowered to make changes based on new information. In other words, on a global scale Assange’s method of regime change will only affect those nation-states that need it least. And isn’t this always the problem with anarchy? It doesn’t serve justice–which requires structure and authority over the bad behavior of individuals–it benefits the strong and the ruthless who get along best without those hindrances.

So while those societies less free, less Democratic, are left to grow stronger our’s will become “dumber and slower and smaller.” Just what we need in a post-9/11 world eh? How long until this slower and dumber government is rendered incapable of stopping the next 9/11?

Wikileaks has made this Administration look naive, amateurish, and foolish in one fell swoop. They knew of this leak for 6-7 months or more and nothing has been done to stop it. Nothing.

I’m betting Hossein Vahedi and his family wish Wikileaks had been stopped. Or maybe the families of those 1,300 Kenyans massacred.

But hey, it’s only human lives right? They would of died someday anyways.

Curt

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