Secrecy is ignorance made useful, ignorance turned to advantage. The secret is something that one person or two persons or (one count) the 854,000 people with top secret clearances in the U.S. Government can knowand that is worth keeping somebody else in the dark about. It's only a secret when there's advantage to the ignorance. I know what I had for lunch today and you don't: it's not a secret. I know what I'm getting my dearly beloved for Christmas, she doesn't: that's a secret. That one's a benign secret and will bring us both pleasure. Not all secrets are benign.

There is a reason for all the instances of secret negotiations among adversaries. Concessions are often impossible because of the fired-up constituencies on both sides. Giving that up is giving up a lot — too much in my opinion. It will cause conflicts to go on much longer than they should.

The underlying problem is the ease with which the press is co-opted or coerced — and in some cases so partisan that it is not interested in exposing truths that could be inconvenient to power. What happened at the New York Times in the run-up to the Iraq war, and what is happening daily on Fox News are strong arguments for supporting leakers. How do we achieve an independent, adversarial but still responsible press?

While I don't have a comprehensive theory as to who gets to keep their secrets, I'd like to correct several misperceptions about WikiLeaks that have arisen on this list:

1) Most of the redactions that WikiLeaks applied to the cables were suggested by the journalists working for its media partners — The Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais, Der Spiegel, and The New York Times. WikiLeaks publicly acknowledged that they do not have the expertise to do the redactions and relied on the journalists' expertise.

Furthermore, WikiLeaks did contact the US State Department prior to the publication of the cables and asked them to suggest any further redactions in case the release of the cables might endanger lives or national security. The State Department refused to weigh in on this matter out of principle, making Assange conclude that there was no such information contained in the cables.

I am not aware of any cables that were released by WikiLeaks but were not released by their media partners—- i.e. all of the cables released so far seem to have been vetted by establishment media (and contrary to numerous reports to the contrary, WikiLeaks has only released 2,000 cables so far, out of 250,000 total). It's certainly not a "dump" as is commonly assumed.

2) To portray Assange as a hacker may help us in understanding where he comes from ideologically, but there is no evidence whatsoever that the cables were obtained via hacking. WikiLeaks claims to have obtained them through their electronic dropbox technology, which provides anonimity to the leaker; thus, even WikiLeaks doesn't know who leaked the cables to it.

I think it is counterproductive to bring too many assumptions about hackers and techies in general into this discussion — at least as long as we want to understand the ethics of leaking. For all we know, these cables may have been leaked to Human Rights Watch; I'm not sure that their response to receiving such a package would be much different to Assange's, despite them not having many hackers on staff.

Furthermore, it's not clear if WikiLeaks has violated any laws, as is evident by the tremendous difficulty that the US government is having in building a case against Assange. The question of "who elected Assange?" is a fairly common question in global governance — but, once again, it is also asked of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders and plenty of other transnational players (and, if you want to think really globally, the Internet fits the bill too — technically, no one "elected" it and governments, both democratic and authoritarian ones, have quite a bit of trouble controlling it).

3) It may be useful to look at some of Assange's published writings to understanding the philosophy behind WikiLeaks. Two of Assange's most telling essays are analyzed here. As you would notice, they contain very little discussion about secrecy in the abstract; Assange's focus is almost entirely on what he calls "government conspiracies".

While I don't endorse Assange's philosophy, I think he's quite clear in that he is not seeking to violate the privacy of individuals; governments (and increasingly corporations) are his only focus. I'd also like to add that Assange was one of the masterminds behind Rubberhose, an encryption technology — to be used by human rights workers in authoritarian states — that would help them secure their data even if they were being tortured. Thus, as long as we want to zoom in on WikiLeaks, it's quite clear that they are not set out to eliminate secrecy per se. In fact, WikiLeaks has a history of sharing personnel with Tor, the leading tool for online anonymity (google "Jake Appelbaum").

Hope this clarifies a few common misconceptions.

The European, especially the German suspicion of new media and the new forms of transparency they bring or demand are definitely rooted in the dictatorships of the 20th century. It's only 21 years ago that the one-party state of the GDR collapsed and with it a secret police and a network of informants that permeated not only every corner of society, but even circles of friends and families. All over Europe scandals and heartbreaks are still discovered in the files of those dictatorships. Right now for example there's a fervent debate right now amongst the intellectuals of Romania that spills over to Germany, where many Romanians of German descent had settled during the reign of Ceau?escu.

A lot what was collected by these secret services was banal and mundane, details of everyday life that was used to create profiles of the observed. That is why Europeans tend to react strongly to the collection of banal and mundane data by Google Streetview or Facebook, even if you wouldn't classify them as secrets. Thus te amount of information kept by any state is definitely seen as a sign for the concentration of power.

In Germany the fear of new media goes even deeper. It goes hand in hand with the deep suspicion of science and pop culture. The rise of the Nazis and their genocidal ideology in German society was facilitated by the extensive use and abuse of new media, science and pop culture. After World War 2 this resulted in a deep almost dogmatic passion for highbrow culture in the German middle class. Which also resulted in a complete lack of middlebrow culture. The younger generation now imports middlebrow culture mostly from the US, be it intelligent pop music as the one heard on American college radio, DVDs of TV series like "Mad Men" or "The Wire", literature by writers like Jonathan Franzen or Bret Easton Ellis. This resulted in a culturally divided culture class system with a trashy pop market for the uneducated masses and an overly highbrow culture for the bourgeoisie and the elites.

In most countries the internet and all it's cultural phenomena fall mostly into a middlebrow segment of culture. That adds to the aversion of digital culture. Since that middlebrow non-existent, the tendency by the establishment is to see it as a purveyor of lowbrow trash undermining the core values of culture.

DANIEL HILLIS RESPONDS:

TO ANDRIAN KREYE:

Your observation that many German's are upset by Google Street view adds another dimension to the question of secrecy. The view of one's house from the street is surely not a secret, yet somehow, gathering these views into a database has aroused memories of authoritarian dictatorships. One of the few revelations that seems to have invoked European indignation in the recent diplomatic leaks is that non-hidden information was being collected on the leadership of the United Nations. Do you think Europeans make more of a distinction than Americans between collected and uncollected non-secrets? Is the concentration of information necessarily linked to the concentration of power

— Danny

In the matter of Wikileaks, certain observers know they're right a priori. On keeping secrets, isn't it too bad that some Superior Moral Father didn't spill the beans about Bletchley Park & the breaking of Enigma in (say) 1943? Then Britain could have starved and the Allies could still have lost the war. Of course, maybe today's state secrets are OK to reveal, and things were different back then. It's a tough moral problem. Who is to decide? A democratically elected government, obviously; not a hacker.

I agree that John Markoff raised an important point in mentioning the Pentagon Papers. No one can condemn all principled breaking of the law a priori, even of the democratically-enacted law of a legitimate democratic govt. But it seems to me that you have moral standing to break the law on principle to the extent that (at a minimum) you're willing to stand trial & face the consequences. Ellsberg did.

In considering the Pentagon Paper's it may be helpful to make a distinction between secrets and lies. A lie often requires keeping the truth a secret, but a secret does not necessarily require a lie. My understanding of the Pentagon Paper's is that they were revealed to expose the creation of a false narrative. Should this make a difference?

There's no such thing as a secret. There's just denial — agreement to pretend we don't know.

I concluded this after watching a performer a couple of years ago, a fellow who could tell when people were lying and when they were telling the truth. He did it like a parlor trick on stage, but his services have been used by governments, police, jury selectors, and so on. And pretty much every technique he was using to discern the truth was based on one cue or the other that the liar was giving. What poker players call a "tell." And these "tells" are part of overall communications matrix. They are part of the 93% of human communication that takes place non-verbally.

See, on some level, we are all telling the truth no matter what. Our husbands and wives know when we are lying to them, even if they haven't allowed what they know to be true to fully enter consciousness. Our lying is ultimately useless, except insofar as it serves as "manners." We pretend we don't know.

The net, by enabling faceless communication, has made it a bit easier to delay the process through which the truth inevitably rises to the surface. We think of it as an affront to our privacy and secrecy, but it has actually promoted it. The only difference now is that this privacy is itself apparent. And its violation is just as visible.

I used to say that the net was preparing us for a future when we are all connected, anyway. That we will eventually become a biologically networked organism, where we will all know each other's thoughts. That the net was a dry run, a practice session for this eventuality. Now, however, I think that's the way we have always been. The privacy we have experienced in our lives and world has been like those Japanese paper walls. We hear everything going on behind them — we simply act like we don't, and sometimes we believe it ourselves.

Concerning John Markoff's comments on the Pentagon Papers, this seems very much like pandering to a special case. When there is an unpopular war then it is OK to reveal secrets, but not otherwise?

Who gets to decide that?

Also, I have to ask. Does anybody have a really good analysis of the counterfactual — what would have happened if the Pentagon Papers had not been released? Was it a good thing?

Within journalism the idea that publishing the Pentagon Paper was a major event is holy writ, but that does not mean it is so.

The popular mythology is that the Pentagon Papers release was a good thing — but I have to wonder. Nobody (me included) is going to stand up in favor of the Vietnam war, but it is very far from clear that the publication of the Pentagon Papers was actually significant. Perhaps it is, but that would require real scholarship and analysis to make a coherent argument.

The papers themselves were largely an academic exercise — a study of the history of the Vietnam war from 1945 to 1967 commissioned by Robert McNamara. Although the final date covered in the papers was 1967, they weren't released until 1971. The Vietnam war didn't end until 1975, so its not like the papers brought a quick end to the war. They were secret even within the Johnson administration and it is unclear why McNamara even had them written. Supposedly it was done for future historians. Many assessments of the Pentagon Papers say that they never should have been classified in the first place — there was no actual national security information involved. That point of view is often taken to justify Daniel Ellsberg's actions, but by the same token, one could use this to say what was the actual importance of publishing them?

As Esther Dyson writes, WikiLeaks is not a wiki. It was when they started, but they gave up on that idea and decided to work with professional reporters instead, people at The Guardian, Le Monde, New York Times, Der Spiegel and El Pais.

There really isn't all that much difference betw this and previous leaks, except that this time, the Internet was used to transmit them. Not that big a distinction.

Re: Nassim Taleb's comments, WikiLeaks is not a wiki. For better or worse, it's tightly controlled. And it does not have power over anything: it gives the power of information to anyone who wants it.

I'm actually a big fan (with limits) of the free flow of information, but I see one point/coming problem that has been so far neglected: One strength of WikiLeaks, for all its flaws, is its practice of vetting the information for authenticity — usually with original sources, but also with common sense, knowledge of the sources, etc. So far as I know, nothing WikiLeaks has posted has proved to be inauthentic (as opposed to biased, scurrilous, embarrassing, dangerous, etc.).

Indeed, in an odd way, WL is an example of centralization and earning a brand: the central, acknowledged source for quality leaks. Now, there are likely to be imitations, fake mirrors, knock-offs and the like that are less responsible — as you say, hijacked by who knows what. In a truly distributed world, misinformation runs rampant.

I think the issue of "where we draw the line" is difficult — as such issues almost always are — but not insoluble, and in fact I think we already know pretty well where to draw the line, and have done so in the past. The Pentagon Papers is a pretty good example — but nothing is a perfect exemplar.

States, like individual agents, needsecrecy if they are to avoid being exploited in all their dealings. This is simply undeniable. You can't play 'rock paper scissors' if you write your list of moves on a piece of paper visible to your opponent. In a world in which agents (of all sizes and shapes) are constantly looking for an edge, keeping one's plans and one's knowledge of the world (and ignorance about the world) secret is a Good Trick with no alternative. So unless you are a radical anarchist/nihilist who prefers life in Hobbes' state of nature to the security of living in a law-governed society, you should endorse the need for state secrecy (And corporate secrecy—think of the law of trade secrets—and individual secrecy, and ACLU Governing Board secrecy, and . . . . )

But of course state secrecy is often abused, and then we have to hope that enterprising and tenacious journalists and conscience-stricken insiders, will spill the beans, selectively, for a purpose, minimizing collateral damage.Newspaper editors have huddled in secret over whether or not to print various secrets they have uncovered, and have a track record of making pretty good decisions. That going public with state secrets will be law-breaking in most instances is undeniable, but the state that chooses to prosecute the exemplary citizen who exposes major corruption/treason or other crime does so at the risk of its own perceived legitimacy. In a basically free society, judicious leakers earn our respect, even if they get harassed for a time or even jailed by those they expose.

"When does my right to privacy trump your need for security?" seems analogous to the question "What is fair use?", to which the answer is "Whatever activities don't get people convicted for violating fair use." Put another way, fair use is a legal defense rather than a recipe.

Like fair use, the tension between a right to privacy and a right to know isn't one-dimensional — there are many independent variables involved. For instance, does the matter at hand involve elected or appointed officials? Working in the public name? The presumption should run to public review.

Does it involve private citizens? Would its release subject someone to harassment or other forms of attack? The presumption should run to privacy. And so on.

There are a set of clear cases. Congress should debate matters openly. The President should have a private channel with which to communicate with other world leaders. Restaurants must publish the results of their latest health inspection. You shouldn't have your lifetime browsing history published by Google. These are not complicated cases.

The complicated cases are where our deeply held beliefs clash. Should all diplomats have the right to all communications being classified as secret? Should all private individuals be asked, one at a time, how they feel about having their house photographed by Google?

I do not know the answer to this class of questions. You do not know the answer to this class of questions. This is not because you or I don't have strong opinions about them; it is because our opinions differ significantly from the opinions of our fellow citizens, and putting just one of us in charge would be bad for democracy.

So my answer to "When does my right to privacy trump your need for security?" is whenever various democratic processes say it does. If I publish something you wanted private and you can't successfully sue me, I was in the right, and when not, then not.

The faith here has to be in a heuristic, not an algorithm, because the values that come into conflict, and the depth of our intuitions about those values, prevent there being any simple answer. The hardest questions in mediating our lives together have to be adjudicated using lawmakers and the courts and executive choice about what to enforce and how.

The only thing that could go really, terribly wrong right now would be short-circuiting that process.

~~

DANIEL HILLIS RESPONDS:

Clay, you say: The only thing that could go really, terribly wrong right now would be short-circuiting that process." Do you see Wikileaks as an example of short-circuting that process???

— Danny

~~

CLAY SHIRKY RESPONDS:

No, I see attempts to silence Wikileaks without due process as the short-circuit.

Wikileaks is just the kind of thing that happens from time to time (for which read: once every 500 years or so, as with the Dutch printers). What's at stake is whether democratic or extra-democratic processes become the way the world's democracies adjust.

— Clay

~~

DANNY HILLIS RESPONDS:

I understand your point about attempts to silence Wikileaks, but I am not sure I understand what your position is on WIkileaks itself. Should a democratic society be able to empower its diplomats to conduct confidential discussions? If so, and if those diplomats do the job they were asked to do, would you consider breaking the confidentiality of those discussions a short-circuit of the process??

— Danny

~~

CLAY SHIRKY RESPONDS

Danny,

Well, I think two things: diplomats need secrets, and government secrets are a threat to democracy. What I don't know is how those two conflicting observations should be balanced.

If the last couple of centuries of democracy have taught us anything, its that designing political process is more important than designing outcomes, so I also don't think that diplomats 'doing the job they were asked to' as being much of a Get Out of Jail Free card, since the job is in part to represent our interests, while working in our name (and, of course, being paid with our taxes.) All that suggests to me that diplomats (and foreign policy generally) can't be governed by any simple test of them 'doing their jobs' — unlike, say, postal employees or park rangers, the job of diplomat requires a lot of on-the-job judgment, and so should be part of democratic checks and balances.

I'm enough of a liberal (in the 19th century sense of the word) to believe that when fundamental principles clash (in this case, "international actors need private discourse" vs. "citizens should be able to observe the State's actions"), no one point of view is adequate to resolving them. My not having an answer isn't just "Better minds than mine..." begging off either. It's not that I don't don't think I can resolve the tension between those contradictory goods. I don't believe any single mind can resolve the tension.

(A funny illustration of the cognitive dissonance caused by one person advocating contradictory views is the famous "If by whiskey" speech by a Mississippi lawmaker on the possibility of legalizing whiskey, who gave an impassioned speech simultaneously for and against the proposition; the overall argument ran roughly "If by whiskey, you mean it's bad effects, I'm against legalization, and if by whiskey, you mean it's good effects, I'm in favor.")

Unlike people, though, systems can contain contradictory views. Democracies, when they work, are designed to prevent intellectually or ideologically coherent groups from governing. As a result, we have a bunch of processes where the composite position do not resolve the issues so much as hold them in iso. (Processes like trial by jury or the hashing out of spending bills, leading to results like the Fair Use doctrine or the current rules on abortion.)

These processes are not based on processing a set of facts through a clear theory. They are bargains, balancing fundamental incompatibilities in a way pleasing to no individual or group, but representing something that won't derail the system as a whole.

Consider our immigration policy. It is a farrago of differing rationales around letting people in legally, and around pursuing those here illegally, but the fact of the matter is that all of those arguments were as valid in 2004, and there was little such debate. The key question for immigration is not rational, but cultural and economic — when first-generation immigrants account for 1 in 10 citizens or more, or when there is a recession, the mood of the country turns anti-immigrant. There simply isn't a principled argument about immigration that accounts for these 'stocks and flows' thresholds around the US's cultural and economic carrying capacity.

Similarly, Richard Posner once pointed out that not only is it generally impossible to say whether the Supreme Court has correctly decided any given case, it should be impossible, since the design of the system should keep the Court from spending time on cases where current legal principles provide a clear answer.

So it is with Wikileaks and diplomatic secrets — principled argument isn't adequate to resolving the issue. Diplomats and world leaders have to be able to talk in private, to explore possibilities outside the range of acceptable public discourse. (The Israeli/Palestinian situation would be impossible to even approach diplomatically without this.) Yet the ability of diplomats to operate in secret not only violates principles of democratic oversight, it provides a huge loophole allowing for overproduction of secrets. And Wikileaks changes the balance of power in that situation.

Consider the nested questions involved in figuring out how Wikileaks does and should change that balance:

-Has Wikileaks, the organization, committed a crime? Is that crime bad enough to convince our allies to shut it down?

-Has Julian Assange committed a crime? Is it a crime bad enough to convince our allies to extradite him?

The answer to the first question seems likely to be No, per the Supreme Court's reasoning in the Pentagon Papers case. (IANAL.) The answer to the second question is less likely to be No, because of the wording of the Espionage Act; if Julian aided or persuaded Manning in any significant way, the Act seems to indicate that's a crime, but we don't know how much protection he gets as a publisher. There is also not much case law around the Espionage Act, so it's less clear what the precedents even say. And Julian, an Australian citizen, may be un-extraditable. And so on.

However, all previous reasoning about the legal liabilities of publishers and journalists — all of it — has taken place against a set of background assumptions about publishing: It is expensive. It requires a big, formal organization. The bigger its reach, the more expensive it is to be that kind of organization. Only a tiny group of people can be publishers with global reach. Every media outlet is deeply rooted in some country. And so on.

Like tree roots growing around a big rock, the law has grown up around these facts. Now the landscape has changed; the facts the law grew up around have changed shape, but the law has not yet been reshaped to fit the new facts.

We can't just assume that the old interpretations apply to the new situation, because a law that carves out a special place for a minority class of citizens — publishers and journalists — can't just be extended to the general populace without breaking things. If everyone who has the capacity to broadcast public speech is a journalist, and journalists are immune from testifying about people they've gotten secrets from, no one could ever be compelled to testify.

While I like the status quo ante (it's illegal to leak secrets but not illegal to publish leaks), I also recognize that that situation balanced a bunch of competing interests in an environment that no longer exists. So I don't think my opinion is adequate to capture whatever new balance is required, because the systems we have for setting the balance haven't done their work yet.

Julian's publication of the State Dept cables may be a crime, and if it is, the US may be able to make a case to our allies that it is one so serious he should be extradited. Wikileaks may also have committed a crime, and it may be so serious that the punishment merits shutting them down.

I am skeptical of these propositions to varying degrees, but I also know that the act of deciding them will create global precedents and important new information about the publishing law in the age of the internet. And that new information is almost certain to be contained in an If-by-whiskey-ish bargain, where incompatible principles are both affirmed. And we don't know what that bargain will look like yet.

Wolfram made this point in New Kind of Science: sometimes the energy required to calculate the answer to a problem is so significant that there is no way to model that outcome with heuristics and short-cuts. Sometimes the system just has to run flat-out for the full time it takes to arrive at the answer.

So this is a long-winded way of saying that the situation gives me ontological blindness. It's not that I think there is an answer to your question but I don't happen to know it. I don't think there is an answer to your question, period, and the novelty of the circumstance means there won't be an answer until the system has run flat-out for the time it takes to have a trial, and to see what new laws the world's governments are able to get passed.

And this is why I focused on the terrible risk of an extra-legal shutdown of Wikileaks; it's not just that if Julian doesn't get a fair trial, justice won't be served. It's that if Julian doesn't get a fair trial, we won't know what justiceis in a world where something like Wikileaks is possible.

— Clay

~~

DANNY HILLIS

Clay,

So it seems to me that you are saying that my question is un-computatble, in the mathematical sense of the word. I want to know where the lines "should" be drawn, but you are pointing out the the very concept of "should" assumes understanding of cause and effect that is impossible in this situation. Is that fair summary of what you are saying?

Who gets to keep secrets?

I think that the answer is that we all want to keep secrets, at some level.

That's why we have clothing, and doors to our bedrooms and bathrooms. Logically speaking, we don't need those things but we find them very desirable. A post by one of us argued that privacy is a recent concept — which I find quite unpersuasive in this context. Lots of desirably things are relatively recent, like proper nutrition, healthcare and lots of other things. The fact is that as society has gained the ability for people to have privacy and keep secrets, there is a clear preference for doing so. Along those lines, Douglas Adams, in one of his Hitchhiker books, argued that mental telepathy was considered a great punishment to species that had it because they couldn't have any private thoughts.

Secrecy is one of the reasons we play cards. Is some idealistic killjoy going to argue that a real time Wikileaks ought to tweet what cards are being dealt in poker or bridge games? Secrecy in that context is part of the fun. Secrecy in games works in part because they are a model for real world situations in which we have strong vested interests in keeping secrets. Much of the Wikileaks fallout is to ensure that US ambassadors can't send frank assessments to the Secretary of State. They are daily engaged in a poker game, of sorts, with their counterparts. That is the game of diplomacy. So why should that be exempt from secrets?

It is very difficult to imagine having negotiations without having some secrets. The reality is that secrecy and privacy are deemed to be highly desirable in a lot of human contexts.

Everybody on this email has secrets. One set is proprietary information. Anybody doing something nontrivial has some information which they consider proprietary. Usually the word "proprietary" has a business connotation to it, but a scientist's research results are often guarded even more tightly than commercial secrets. I know a physicist who used to throw himself onto his desk to cover up the papers he was working on if a colleague walked into his office — and that was AFTER he had won the Nobel Prize. Right now, the LHC results at CERN are proprietary — they need to be checked and verified, and the people involved want to get credit. The draft of the next book that John Brockman is about to sell — that is proprietary. The research result that isn't published yet. Everybody has proprietary interests.

Wanting to keep secrets does not, by itself mean that it is always desirable. People committing crimes have an obvious desire to keep their activities secret. Finding the balance between personal and societal rights is difficult. The way we run that in our society, as Nassim and David Gelernter point out is a system of laws and elected officials. However, imperfect they are, that is our system. Stepping outside that is something that is hard to condone as a general rule. Who elected Julian Assange to be in charge of this for the planet?

But what is the difference between what Wikileaks is doing and the Chinese hackers who were penetrating Google and other web sites trying (in part) to find evidence of dissidents that could then be punished and imprisoned? Does Google get to keep account info secret? Is it really OK that Chinese hackers can penetrate Google and read everybody's email?

Much of the response to Danny's question, and the response to Wikileaks more generally has a liberal / populist "lets stick it to The Man" quality to it. Dave Winer's response captures much of that. Wikileaks has so far attacked the US government, so people who don't like our government (which at one point or another is most of us!) can treat that as a special case and make special pleadings (as he did) that basically say it is OK to break laws and violate privacy so long as it is somebody I don't like you're doing it. That isn't an intellectual argument — it is an emotional and political argument.

I am sure that somebody will argue that the Chinese hacking of Google is different because it is the Chinese Government that is sponsoring it. If you follow this line of logic you wind up with an answer to Danny's question which is just "the people I don't like shouldn't keep secrets", which is hardly a principled position.