Quotulatiousness

September 10, 2011

How much damage to personal liberty will the new US/Canadian security deal inflict?

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:35

An article in the Globe and Mail discusses — in very general terms — the new security deal negotiated between the US and Canadian governments:

U.S. and Canadian negotiators have successfully concluded talks on a new deal to integrate continental security and erase obstacles to cross-border trade.

Negotiators have reached agreement on almost all of the three dozen separate initiatives in the Beyond the Border action plan, said sources who cannot be named because they are not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. The few remaining items mostly involve questions of wording and should be settled in time for an announcement in late September.

[. . .]

Opponents have raised alarms that an agreement would cost Canadians both sovereignty and personal privacy. But failure to implement the agreements could further impair the world’s most extensive trading relationship, and put manufacturing jobs across the country at risk.

Details of the agreement are closely held. But goals outlined earlier include specific proposals to co-ordinate and align such things as biometrics on passports, watch lists, inspection of containers at overseas ports and other security measures.

[. . .]

Canadians who believe that the United States has sold its liberty because of fears for its security, or who resist any further economic integration with the troubled economic giant, are likely to oppose the Beyond the Border proposals.

I don’t oppose trade with the US — far from it — but I do feel very strongly that the US has reduced the liberties of its citizens in pursuit of security (check the topic SecurityTheatre for lots of examples). I don’t want to see that trend exported to Canada in exchange for better economic access to their markets.

July 26, 2011

The implied relationship between traffic tickets and corruption

Filed under: Economics, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:11

Tim Harford linked to this Forbes graphic showing an interesting correlation:

This nicely illustrates what he wrote in 2006:

An alternative view, popular among the common-sense crowd, is that corruption is a problem in Indonesia because Indonesians are crooks by nature; poor countries are poor because they are full of people who are lazy or stupid or dishonest. I disagree out of faith, rather than because the evidence is compelling. But then, what evidence could there be? You would need to take people from every culture, put them somewhere where they could ignore the law with impunity, and see who cheated and who was honest.

That sounds like a tall order for any research strategy, but the economists Ray Fisman and Edward Miguel have realised that diplomats in New York city were, in fact, the perfect guinea pigs. Diplomatic immunity meant that parking tickets issued to diplomats could not be enforced, and so parking legally was essentially a matter of personal ethics.

Fisman and Miguel found support for the common-sense view. Countries with corrupt systems, as measured by Transparency International, also sent diplomats who parked illegally. From 1997-2005, the Scandinavians committed only 12 unpaid parking violations, and most of them were by a single criminal mastermind from Finland. Chad and Bangladesh, regularly at the top of corruption tables, produced more than 2,500 violations between them. Perhaps poor countries are poor because they are full of corrupt people, after all.

July 23, 2011

Today’s drive-by smear courtesy of the Globe & Mail

Filed under: Asia, Cancon — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:50

The Globe‘s Steve Rennie must think he’s blown the lid off a dark, sordid conspiracy, the way he reports on the booze tab of the Canadian embassy in Kabul:

Canada’s diplomatic corps in Kabul did not go thirsty.

Hospitality forms show embassy staff and dignitaries drank plenty of booze while posted to Afghanistan, an Islamic country where imbibing is not just taboo, it’s against the law.

But aren’t the grounds of an official embassy are considered to be part of the country whose embassy it is? If so, then the embassy grounds are under Canadian jurisdiction, where alcohol is quite legal.

The embassy consumed close to 3,000 bottles of alcoholic beverages from mid-2007 to last November. The tab for the beer, wine and hard liquor was at least $20,000.

Unfortunately, no numbers of people are provided — we’re invited to imagine all this booze being consumed by a few red-nosed diplomats with livers the size of Etobicoke. No, later in the article, he mentions that it was more than just a couple of soused embassy officials keeping the bar open:

There were sendoffs for departing staffers and shindigs to welcome new ones. The embassy entertained visiting generals, diplomats, journalists and politicians.

At about this point, after sneering at the diplomat’s choices of beer, Rennie realizes perhaps he needs to heighten the contrast, by showing that the soldiers and civilians operating in Kandahar had it tougher:

It was not the same for Canadians serving in the country’s restive south. Booze was banned at Kandahar Airfield and at Camp Nathan Smith in Kandahar City. Soldiers, diplomats and civilians stationed there had to wait until holidays or special events for a cold one. And there was little danger of getting tipsy with a strict two-beer limit.

But as Rennie had already pointed out, the Kandahar installations were in the middle of an Islamic country that formally prohibits booze. Even if it’s a Canadian Armed Forces base, it has to observe the laws of the country in which it’s situation — it’s not Canadian soil in the way the embassy is. Not to mention that Kandahar was a fricking war zone: armies that drink booze while on active operations against an enemy are less effective armies.

Oh, but then we’re back to those awful alcoholics in the diplomatic corps, who were drinking in “an Islamic country where imbibing is not just taboo, it’s against the law”. Rennie must have forgotten writing that in the first few paragraphs, as it doesn’t mesh well with this later assertion:

Beyond the fortified walls of the embassy, there is no shortage of watering holes around Kabul for the many diplomats, aid workers and journalists who call the city home.

At one time, some popular hang outs included the Tex-Mex restaurant La Cantina and the Gandamak Lodge, a guest house with a British pub in the basement set up by a BBC journalist a decade ago after the Taliban regime fell.

Under Afghan law, anyone caught drinking alcohol can be fined, jailed or whipped. But these punishments are rarely handed down.

Didn’t you just trump your own ace there?

H/T to Chris Myrick for posting the link to this article on Google+, saying “I don’t blame them at all. I imagine Kabul would be intolerable otherwise.”

July 17, 2011

Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch on a libertarian foreign policy

Filed under: Government, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:31

The third part of an interview with Gillespie and Welch, covering libertarian foreign policy ideas:

June 13, 2011

QotD: Canadian foreign policy

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:03

Further proof of the Americanization of our politics: the journalistic elevation of the drunkard’s walk known as Stephen Harper’s foreign policy to the level of a “doctrine.” We spent the post-Gulf War nineties hearing about “the Powell doctrine”, and in 2001, Charles Krauthammer gave George W. Bush a doctrine of his own as a post 9/11 present. Today, the Globe and Mail’s John Ibbitson gifts our prime minister with his very own “Harper Doctrine,” spelled out as follows:

     “We know where our interests lie and who our friends are,” he declared, “and we take strong, principled positions in our dealings with other nations, whether popular or not.”

I’m no foreign policy guy, and John Ibbitson has taught me more about how Canada works over the years than I like to admit. But apart from supporting Israel “four-square, without reservation” — which Harper does seem keen on — I don’t see the evidence for the rest of it. “No foreign aid funding for abortion” doesn’t seem like much of a doctrine to me. As for “aggressively asserting our sovereignty in the North” … how so?

Andrew Potter, “Canada’s foreign policy, in black and white and orange”, Maclean’s, 2011-06-13

May 13, 2011

Will China’s rise eclipse the United States?

Filed under: China, Economics, History, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:49

Jon sent me this link, suggesting that it was good “hobby horse bedding”. It starts with the notion that the pattern (and method) of China’s rise to economic superpower status actually follows that of the United States:

The last time a rising power came bursting onto the international scene and successfully supplanted the existing dominant power was when the United States was a boisterous upstart with a stampeding economy. Back then, America employed its own ruthless political machinations to advantage economic production — slavery and Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal policies made cotton king, while the three-fifths compromise ensured southern political control of Congress.

Meanwhile, we stole designs of British factories for replication here, jump-starting our own industrial revolution. And we forced Britain into a two-front war in the midst of its cataclysmic fight with Napoleon. To outside appearances, America orchestrated political, military, and economic power in ways that shrewdly upended existing rules to our advantage.

Just enough historical parallels to make an interesting story. But the Chinese are not (yet) in a position to actually supplant the Americans, and much of the reason for that isn’t so much economic as it is political:

America is the democracy that those people living under authoritarian regimes choose whenever they get the opportunity. It is a democracy often mistaken in the short run, with the best means of correcting itself, and by its sheer existence, a reminder to others of what they might make for and of themselves. The international order is genuinely different because of the rise of an economically and politically liberal American polity. The Chinese model doesn’t have the kind of advantages that make for success competing against the American one. There’s no reason to believe Chinese citizens aren’t yearning for what Americans get to take for granted. To the contrary, there are many signs that the Chinese are increasingly agitating for it.

American power is robust and enduring because it is built on the strength of ideals that foster our advantage. China is banking on prosperity reducing the desire for political rights, on centralized control by elites that will make “better” choices than individuals would make for themselves, on nationalism and grievance to trump the appeal of values we claim to be universal, on mercantilist foreign policies and the threat of force making them preferred allies. It didn’t work for Palmerston in a much more conducive age and it is unlikely to work for China’s leaders.

A quick search of the blog will come up with lots of posts on China and its economy. This is what Jon refers to as my “hobby horse”.

March 8, 2011

“El Neil” goes to town on the United Nations

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:07

L. Neil Smith isn’t fond of the UN. I mean really not fond of them:

The UN was conceived in 1939, a brain-child of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his buddies, who had failed to understand the lesson to be learned from the collapse of its ludicrous predecessor, the League of Nations, that the people of a war-weary planet, fed up to here with self-important bloviating cretins in funny hats ordering them around, were not interested in a world government, or anything even resembling one.

Instead, all the really important people — the equivalents, in 1945, of Barack and Michelle Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank — got together in one meeting after another, and without so much as a nod at voters and taxpayers forced at gunpoint to support this gaggle of worthless preening parasites, established the UN in its now-crumbling headquarters on the Hudson River.

Its single all-important mission? To succeed where Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Adolf Hitler had all failed: at the involuntary expense of individuals who actually worked for a living, try to take over the world.

Since the ignominious collapse of the Soviet Union, the new world nerve center for socialism is the UN, which is no less an enemy of everything worthwhile in the western world than Hitler and Stalin were. The UN has been at the very hub of the global warming hoax since the conspiracy began. It has done everything it can to limit American industrial technology and reduce us all to a prehistoric standard of living. It demands the authority to reach into otherwise sovereign countries and extract and punish those who fail to comply with its edicts. The UN admits openly that it wishes to obliterate the American Constitution — especially the Bill of Rights — with an hysterical emphasis on the Second Amendment. And now we’re beginning to have a clearer idea what it wants to substitute in place of those ideas and institutions.

[. . .]

The nearest equivalent to what the UN has in mind for all of us is the infamous Highland Clearances” of the 18th and 19th centuries, when English “landowners” evicted the Scots they had conquered, by the hundreds of thousands, burning whole villages and forcing the Scots to leave their crops rotting in the ground, compelling a people who had been cattlemen for generations to harvest seaweed on the cold and rocky coast — or emigrate to the Americas — so aristocrats could “ride to hounds” and replace their displaced victims on the land with sheep.

February 10, 2011

Workplace diplomacy

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:42

An aside to an email discussion we were having provoked DarkWaterMuse to post his thoughts on the matter:

Diplomacy is a major cause of workplace inefficiency. Mostly, it doesn’t actually matter how things get said.

dwm tends to say whatever is rattling around at the top of his head. Too often what rattles around up there then manages to roll down mysterious passageways carved throughout his brain before it tumbles off the tip of his tongue.

Sometimes the words that escape just lay there, stunned and motionless on the floor, as other people in earshot simply glare at them.

Even worse though is when dwm doesn’t say anything at all. That probably means either there’s a log jam of words building up pressure inside his head, a clear sign of imminent unbounded and unpredictable cranial flatulence, or he’s mentally undressing one of the women who happens to be trapped in the same meeting room.

dwm has never really appreciated the need for diplomacy. Especially when there’s clearly work to be done. He subscribes to the notion that people like to be part of success, however it manages to manifest.

As it turns out, diplomacy isn’t necessary for success. It’s just necessary to manage the people who aren’t focused on it.

I’m not convinced, as I’ve found diplomacy to be one of the most frequently used “tools” in my arsenal. I suspect DarkWaterMuse, as primarily a “producer” of essentially original content has less functional need for the social lubricant of careful wording than someone like me (a “consumer” if you will), who generally requires the active co-operation of others to provide me with the raw material I happen to need to accomplish my tasks.

His point about diplomacy being “a major cause of workplace inefficiency” would more closely hit the mark if he were using it to describe weasel wording rather than diplomacy. As Sir Humphrey Appleby says “A good Civil Servant must be able to use language not as a window into the mind but as a curtain to draw across it.” What is ideal for a civil servant is toxic for good working relationships in non-bureaucratic environments.

February 4, 2011

As expected, BBC offers apology for Top Gear anti-Mexican remarks

Filed under: Americas, Britain, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:26

It still won’t change anything:

The BBC has now obliged, with a statement which concedes that while the remarks were “rude” and “mischievous”, there was “no vindictiveness” behind them.

The Corporation continues: “Our own comedians make jokes about the British being terrible cooks and terrible romantics, and we in turn make jokes about the Italians being disorganised and over dramatic, the French being arrogant and the Germans being over-organised.”

It adds that “stereotype-based comedy was allowed within BBC guidelines in programmes where the audience knew they could expect it, as was the case with Top Gear“.

The apology concludes: “Whilst it may appear offensive to those who have not watched the programme or who are unfamiliar with its humour, the executive producer has made it clear to the ambassador that that was absolutely not the show’s intention.”

Indeed, said executive producer apologised personally to señor Medina-Mora Icaza, and we look forward to seeing that meeting on Top Gear in due course, complete with witty commentary from Clarkson, Hammond and May.

February 2, 2011

BBC’s Top Gear team spark hostile response from Mexico

Filed under: Americas, Britain, Media — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:25

I guess that diplomats must do things like this, but anyone who’s watched more than five minutes of Top Gear would not take them seriously as political commentators. Hilariously funny, yes, but not particularly representative of British or British government views. Mexico, however, has chosen to take offense and has sent a demand to the BBC for a formal apology:

The irreverent British motoring show “Top Gear” has driven into diplomatic hot water after a host branded a Mexican car “lazy, feckless and flatulent” and said it mirrored Mexico’s national characteristics.

Mexico’s ambassador to Britain fired off a letter to the state broadcaster protesting the show’s “outrageous, vulgar and inexcusable insults” and demanding an apology.

In the episode, host Richard Hammond likened a Mexican sports car to “a lazy, feckless and flatulent oaf with a mustache, leaning against a fence asleep, looking at a cactus with a blanket with a hole in the middle on as a coat.”

Co-host James May went on to describe Mexican food as “like sick with cheese on it,” or “refried sick,” while Jeremy Clarkson predicted they would not get any complaints about the show because “the ambassador is going to be sitting there with a remote control, snoring.”

I’m sure the BBC will provide the requested apology, but I doubt that it will change anything. Top Gear without the over-the-top commentary would be just another bloody car show.

January 26, 2011

Nostalgia for the Dreadnought era?

Filed under: China, Economics, Germany, History, WW1 — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:03

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard finds the parallels between the rise of Imperial Germany in the years leading up to the first world war and attitudes toward China today:

And we all learned how the Kaiser overplayed his hand. That much was obvious.

Yet it is difficult to pin-point exactly when the normal pattern of great power jostling began to metamorphose into something more dangerous, leading to two rival, entrenched, and heavily armed alliance structures unable or unwilling to avert the drift towards conflict. The Long Peace died by a thousand cuts, a snub here, a Dreadnought there, the race for oil.

[. . .]

Is China now where Germany was in 1900? Possibly. There are certainly hints of menace from some quarters in Beijing. Defence minister Liang Guanglie said over New Year that China’s armed forces are “pushing forward preparations for military conflict in every strategic direction”.

Professor Huang Jing from Singapore’s Lee Kwan Yew School and a former adviser to China’s Army, said Beijing is losing its grip on the colonels.

“The young officers are taking control of strategy and it is like young officers in Japan in the 1930s. This is very dangerous. They are on a collision course with a US-dominated system,” he said.

The problem with drawing parallels from history is that it’s never as neat and clean-cut as you’d expect. First, China is supposed to be like Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany, then more like Japan after WW1. I have to say I’m not totally following this line of thought. But, getting back to today’s situation:

There is a new edge to Chinese naval policy in the South China Sea, causing Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines to cleave closer to the US alliance. Has Beijing studied how German naval ambitions upset the careful diplomatic legacy of Bismarck and pushed an ambivalent Britain towards the Entente, even to the point of accepting alliance with Tsarist autocracy?

Factions in Beijing appear to think that China will win a trade war if Washington ever imposes sanctions to counter Chinese mercantilism. That is a fatal misjudgement. The lesson of Smoot-Hawley and the 1930s is that surplus states suffer crippling depressions when the guillotine comes down on free trade; while deficit states can muddle through, reviving their industries behind barriers. Demand is the most precious commodity of all in a world of excess supply.

H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord, for the link.

January 18, 2011

Singapore diplomats caught speaking very undiplomatically

Filed under: Asia, China, India, Japan — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:15

Sometimes, the information in the various WikiLeaks releases shocks and surprises. Other times, it merely confirms common beliefs:

Singaporean officials are putting up a brave face after highly embarrassing Wikileaks’ disclosures. They have rubbished the leaked cables as “cocktail talk” and accused the media of blowing the casual remarks out of context. Singapore-specific cables have shown that diplomats and officials of this tiny but prosperous city state have scant regard for leaders of neighboring countries and have insulted their neighbors with disparaging remarks.

[. . .]

Tommy Koh, a senior diplomat of Singapore, took pot shots at Japan and said that Japan was “the big fat loser” in the larger strategic matrix as China’s relations with ASEAN nations continued to improve. This is not insulting had Koh stopped at that only. However, the Singaporean diplomat blabbed on and blamed Japan’s “stupidity, bad leadership, and lack of vision.” Koh dragged in the Indians as well and called India “stupid” for being “half-in, half-out” of ASEAN.

Another leaked cable quotes Peter Ho, Singapore’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs and Permanent Secretary, telling a U.S. official in March 2008 that Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak was an “opportunist”. Another Singapore diplomat remarked senior colleague in Singapore’s foreign ministry, Bilahari Kausikan, told US Deputy Secretary of Defence for South that ousted Thailand leader Thaksin Shinawatra was ‘corrupt’, along with “everyone else, including the opposition.”

The art of diplomacy is saying in public what your government wants everyone to believe, while saying to your government what is really happening.

December 14, 2010

Christopher Hitchens on the real Henry Kissinger

Filed under: History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:14

I must admit that I never understood the adulation Henry Kissinger has attracted. I started paying attention to politics in the early 1970s, and Kissinger was one of the main players on the world political stage at that point. His connection to the deeply repugnant Richard Nixon should have been enough to keep him out of the limelight after his boss was forced out of the presidency. Yet he somehow managed not only to stay in the public eye, but to increase his popularity.

Christopher Hitchens thinks that the latest revelations from that era will finally bring Kissinger the odium he so richly deserves:

Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded. No more dinners in his honour; no more respectful audiences for his absurdly overpriced public appearances; no more smirking photographs with hostesses and celebrities; no more soliciting of his worthless opinions by sycophantic editors and producers. One could have demanded this at almost any time during the years since his role as the only unindicted conspirator in the Nixon/Watergate gang, and since the exposure of his war crimes and crimes against humanity in Indochina, Chile, Argentina, Cyprus, East Timor and several other places. But the latest revelations from the Nixon Library might perhaps turn the scale at last.

Chatting eagerly with his famously racist and foul-mouthed boss in March 1973, following an appeal from Golda Meir to press Moscow to allow the emigration of Soviet Jewry, Kissinger is heard on the tapes to say:

“The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

(One has to love that uneasy afterthought….)

In the past, Kissinger has defended his role as enabler to Nixon’s psychopathic bigotry, saying that he acted as a restraining influence on his boss by playing along and making soothing remarks. This can now go straight into the lavatory pan, along with his other hysterical lies. Obsessed as he was with the Jews, Nixon never came close to saying that he’d be indifferent to a replay of Auschwitz. For this, Kissinger deserves sole recognition.

It’s hard to know how to classify this observation in the taxonomy of obscenity. Should it be counted as tactical Holocaust pre-denial? That would be too mild. It’s actually a bit more like advance permission for another Holocaust. Which is why I wonder how long the official spokesmen of American Jewry are going to keep so quiet. Nothing remotely as revolting as this was ever uttered by Jesse Jackson or even Mel Gibson, to name only two famous targets of the wrath of the Anti-Defamation League. Where is the outrage? Is Kissinger — normally beseeched for comments on subjects about which he knows little or nothing — going to be able to sit out requests from the media that he clarify this statement? Does he get to keep his op-ed perch in reputable newspapers with nothing said? Will the publishers of his mendacious and purloined memoirs continue to give him expensive lunches as if nothing has happened?

December 10, 2010

The Economist: “America … should learn from its mistakes in the past decade and stick to its own rules”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:23

A very good column in The Economist seems to cover the issues quite well:

BIG crimes deserve tough responses. In any country the theft and publication of 250,000 secret government documents would deserve punishment. If the leak costs lives, let alone the careers and trust that have already perished amid the WikiLeaks disclosures, the case for action is even stronger.

[. . .]

For the American government, prosecution, not persecution, offers the best chance of limiting the damage and deterring future thefts. The blustering calls for the assassination of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder now in custody in London awaiting extradition to Sweden on faintly mysterious charges of sexual assault, look both weak and repellent. If Mr Assange has broken American law, it is there that he should stand trial, just like Bradley Manning, the alleged source of the stolen documents. If not, it may be some consolation that the cables so far reveal a largely flattering picture of America’s diplomats: conscientious, cool-headed, well-informed, perceptive and on occasion eloquent.

[. . .]

If America sticks to those standards now it will display a strength and sanity that contrasts with the shrill absolutism and cyber-vandalism of the WikiLeaks partisans. Calling Mr Assange a terrorist, for example, is deeply counterproductive. His cyber-troops do not fly planes into buildings, throw acid at schoolgirls or murder apostates. Indeed, the few genuine similarities between WikiLeaks and the Taliban — its elusiveness and its wide base of support — argue against ill-judged attacks that merely broaden that support. After a week of clumsy American-inspired attempts to shut WikiLeaks down, it is now hosted on more than 700 servers around the world.

The big danger is that America is provoked into bending or breaking its own rules, straining alliances, eroding credibility and — because it will not be able to muzzle WikiLeaks — ultimately seeming impotent. In recent years America has promoted the internet as a menace to foreign censorship. That sounds tinny now. So did its joy of hosting next year’s World Press Freedom Day this week. Chinese and Russian glee at American discomfort are a sure sign of such missteps.

H/T to John Perry Barlow for the link.

Update: This certainly matches what I expected Julian Assange’s personality to be like:

Defectors include Daniel Domscheit-Berg, otherwise known as Daniel Schmitt, who made a high-profile exit from WikiLeaks in September, and Herbert Snorrason, an Icelandic student. Both resigned in September. Snorrason is quoted as telling Assange, in an online chat log acquired by WiReD:

And you’re not even fulfilling your role as a leader right now. A leader communicates and cultivates trust in himself. You are doing the exact opposite. You behave like some kind of emperor or slave trader.

Snorrason’s departure was fomented by this declaration from Assange:

I am the heart and soul of this organization, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organizer, financier and all the rest. If you have a problem with me, piss off.

And he did.

December 9, 2010

Bruce Schneier on the WikiLeaks situation

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:48

Bruce Schneier has some useful observations about the ongoing WikiLeaks document release:

4. This has little to do with WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks is just a website. The real story is that “least trusted person” who decided to violate his security clearance and make these cables public. In the 1970s he would have mailed them to a newspaper. Today he uses WikiLeaks. Tomorrow he will have his choice of a dozen similar websites. If WikiLeaks didn’t exist, he could have put them up on BitTorrent.

5. I think the government is learning what the music and movie industries were forced to learn years ago: it’s easy to copy and distribute digital files. That’s what’s different between the 1970s and today. Amassing and releasing that many documents was hard in the paper and photocopier era; it’s trivial in the Internet era. And just as the music and movie industries are going to have to change their business models for the Internet era, governments are going to have to change their secrecy models. I don’t know what those new models will be, but they will be different.

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