History Repeating
By mistermix November 28th, 2010
Wikileaks impending release of 250,000 “Secret” cables from the State Department reminds me of this story about the State Department’s main diplomatic code of the 20’s, called the GRAY code:
What also made the work of foreign cryptanalysts easy was America’s continued use, year after year, of the old codes. The GRAY code especially became so familiar to American foreign service officers that when colleagues tendered a senior consul at Shanghai his retirement dinner late in the decade, he responded with a farewell speech in GRAY —which the old-timers followed with ease.
That’s from David Kahn’s great book, The Codebreakers, which is full of stories of security breaches of diplomatic communication.
Posted in Foreign Affairs
I have a feeling that the sheer volume of Wikileaks material is going to drown out anything important about them. The more material they get and release the less I think average people really care about it.
I just don’t care a whole lot about the leaks anymore.
November 28th, 2010 at 8:55 am
If you keep using the same “secret” system over and over, you deserve to get your ass kicked.
/Bill Belichick
November 28th, 2010 at 8:58 am
If you keep using the same “secret” system over and over, you deserve to get your ass kicked.
/Josh McDaniels
November 28th, 2010 at 9:06 am
I promise that if anything really interesting is in the leaks, many average people will be interested.
November 28th, 2010 at 9:23 am
we deserve to get our asses kicked because we are unjust.
that is why Manning and whoever else helped him turned.
because the injustice was unbearable.
we are not a great, noble and just nation.
we are not a “beacon of freedom” to the world.
we are missionaries with guns attempting to proselytize the third world with our jeebus-democracy.
we are global bullies and global pussies (bullies are always pussies inside), going down in pantswetting fear to a handful of crazy fundies.
we were just the more subtle version of the British Raj.
and al-Islam kicked our ass.
i <3 wikileaks.
Assange got the Intelligence Experts Award, did you know that Manatee?
i personally cant wait for the Garani Massacre video—coming soon to a theater of war near you—Blackhawk down redux!
hopefully that will speed our exit from A-stan.
there are reportedly 600,000 diplomatic cables.
Assange is retaining the dangerous ones…the ones that might cause the outbreak of wars or the assassinations and imprisonments of activists under the tyrant states we prop.
Just like he did in the A-stan doc drop.
Twitter stream.
Big black eye for the “Unipolar power”, eh?
November 28th, 2010 at 9:39 am
awww…am i in moderation because i linked wikileaks twitter stream?
November 28th, 2010 at 9:39 am
@Odie Hugh Manatee: Barring any particular huge revelation (definition purposely left vague), I think these releases are going to greatly improve the abilities of historians, military scholars, scholars of lots of other types more accurately approach what has happened in Afghanistan and Iraq, able to research a chronology of events typically lost to being too minor and too buried.
November 28th, 2010 at 9:43 am
@matoko_chan: I think the number of links is the issue, not the link itself.
November 28th, 2010 at 9:48 am
@mistermix: oh yez i forgot.
there are reportedly 260,000 cables. (typo in my comment)
Assange has already redacted the 10000 most compromising ones, like he did with the A-stan docs.
Koh is trying to blame Assange and Wikileaks, just like Iraq and A-stan.
But it was OUR security protocols and OUR ideology that failed.
November 28th, 2010 at 10:02 am
@Odie Hugh Manatee: We will obviously need to wait and see what is in the leaked documents and how that information is reported, but I for one am quite interested to learn what my country is doing vis a vis the rest of the world, particularly when my governments engages in activities that they don’t want anyone to know about (for example, if we really don’t trust someone like Karzai then why hasn’t our foreign policy in regards to him and our occupation of Afghanistan taken that into account?). And yes, I would prefer we pulled entirely out of Iraq & Afghanistan.
As for wikileaks ability to get these documents in the first place, perhaps the U.S. government needs to review its processes and procedures for how this information is sent and received, who it is sent to and how they may further disseminate it, and where and how long it is stored. The idea that the same pfc who leaked the military documents is the source of all this diplomatic material seems ridiculous as one would think there would be some kind of segregation of military from diplomatic info.
November 28th, 2010 at 10:03 am
@marcopolo: Manning is the pharmekos. The channel for the mutiny of the analysts.
Because of need-to-know and compartment codeword classification there is no way he had access to all this stuff.
In a way, this is the same house of cards as our ecomony.
“American Exceptionalism” was never anything more than traditional Big White Christian Bwana souless rapacious exploitation…never anything more than farming the resources of the small dark non-christian global population in a super Ponzi scheme of power brokering.
For their own good, of course.
:)
November 28th, 2010 at 11:00 am
I understand that administration and other government types have gotten ahead of the leaks and have been warning their foreign counterparts that unflattering personal stuff is included in the leaks because these leaks are of personal, confidential, and off-the-record internal communications.
Revealing questionable military practices is one thing. This latest round of leaks, however, is tantamount to one’s co-worker forwarding an unflattering e-mail comment about one’s boss to that boss, for the sole purpose of getting the commenter into trouble, just for kicks. There’s no way I can defend Wikileaks in this case.
November 28th, 2010 at 11:02 am
@Ash Can:
Do you or anyone else know what years the leaks cover?
November 28th, 2010 at 11:07 am
@Ash Can: lawl, if “coworkers” were using our national security protocols to dish on each other…at a cost of X billion taxpayers dollahs per year—they deserve exactly the humiliation they are going to get.
i <3 wikileaks.
November 28th, 2010 at 11:59 am
I have to agree Ash Can.
It’s not obvious to me either that the currently planned leaks serve any antiwar purpose.
I have no desire to undermine diplomacy in general. Often it is the best alternative to war.
November 28th, 2010 at 12:01 pm
@matoko_chan:
It’s going to be a tense time at State.
November 28th, 2010 at 12:12 pm
@Maude: i think from 2000 to date.
heres the rollout schedule.
follow the wikileaks twitter feed i linked above for more info.
November 28th, 2010 at 12:20 pm
@THE: the US declared war on the Hacker Nation.
this is web counter-insurgency.
America will lose the Web War, just like we lost in Vietnam, and in Iraq, and in A-stan.
November 28th, 2010 at 12:27 pm
@matoko_chan:
#17. Bookmarked the twitter, thank you.
This makes me so uneasy.
If they were gossiping on official cables, that has to be be dealt with by the WH.
I notice hillary Clinton is quiet and that’s why I asked about the time frame.
The Clintons will be bookends on this one.
November 28th, 2010 at 12:40 pm
Wikileaks is starting to look more and more nihilistic to me.
If you weaken the United States without also weakening the other great powers like China and Russia, then you are only substituting one “oppressor” for a possibly even worse one.
Even a world without great powers has significant dangers in it of global disorder arising from competition between lesser powers.
If you think the USA was so bad, in the second half of the 20th century, then you should consider what the alternatives were, like Nazi Germany and Stalinist USSR.
Frankly I think we were lucky to have America.
November 28th, 2010 at 12:44 pm
Let them publish something that embarrasses Russia, and see how quickly Putin will “hack” them.
November 28th, 2010 at 1:57 pm
@THE:
I certainly agree with this statement and its use of the past tense. America was, for the most part, a positive force in the world—or at least a force whose positives generally outweighed its negatives—until 2000, at which point it ceased to be a democracy in anything but name. The events of the last ten years have persuaded me that we are essentially a soft dictatorship with a term-limited dictator, and every four years, we go to the polls amid great pomp and circumstance to choose between replacement dictators who agree on 80% of the issues. When the next Republican takes the White House, he or she will make us all miss the “good old days” of Bush II.
November 28th, 2010 at 3:05 pm
@Citizen Alan:
Well I don’t believe USA is above criticism. And I don’t support much of current US policy. Particularly I don’t like the wars.
I don’t like the international bank clique and the way they seem to have subverted the global economy.
But these are still specific criticisms. It doesn’t mean I want to tear the whole global order down. It worries me, what the world is evolving into, at a time when the West seems to be in serious decline. What is going to replace it?
It’s not hard to imagine an emerging world system that is many times worse.
November 28th, 2010 at 4:26 pm
It looks like there will be enough embarrassment to go around if this first report is any indication. After all, any diplomatic cable has a point of origin and a point of arrival, and many times those are between two different powers.
November 28th, 2010 at 5:54 pm
@THE: you cant stop the hackers because they write the ice.
Unis have hacker teams that go to Hacker class.
can’t stop the signal in a democracy.
FYI, Russia is not a democracy.
November 28th, 2010 at 7:38 pm
Delia’s point is an excellent one. If you expose diplomatic communications between two powers, you are revealing the secrets of two countries, not just the United States.
That could make many dangerous enemies for Wikileaks.
Russia is a democracy matoko.
It is just not a very liberal democracy that’s all.
Putin was elected by popular vote.
I have little doubt he would win again, if the Russian constitution allowed him to stand.
November 28th, 2010 at 8:15 pm
Matoko,
Check Putin’s approval rating
November 28th, 2010 at 8:48 pm
@THE: dude, the US did everythin’ it could to stop the Iraq doc dump.
they hired mercenary hackers, threatened other countries not to shelter Assange, cooked up a rape smear, cut off wikileaks money brokers account….
they could not stop it.
some percentage of high cognitive ability analysts WILL become whistleblowers.
cant stop the signal.
November 28th, 2010 at 8:49 pm
It’s not just the USA, Wikileaks has to worry about matoko.
Read Delia’s comment.
November 28th, 2010 at 8:56 pm