Andrew Fergusson

I have a love-hate relationship with all news sites’ comments. There’s the trolls, the fact-less hacks which can be rebuffed by reading the story, the folks with whom I don’t agree, those who operate in an ideological bubble which can not be breached, and the people who post images for no reason on Mashable. The level of intelligence in the comments section does say a lot for a site, and sometimes I thoroughly impressed by some 200 word essay on various topics.

In the Slashdot story “Wikileaks a Clear and Present Danger says WaPo“, a commenter named GameMaster wrote quite succinctly about controlling information for the sake of opinion management. Here is his comment in full, which can be read with on the site or without context below.

Time and time again, over the course of many decades, the US military has show that it is completely willing to miss-classify information as “secret” if there is even a slight chance that it will be embracing to them, either individually or as an organization. Specifically, from the Vietnam war on to today, they have made it very clear, publicly, that they actively try to manipulate what information gets out for no other reason than to manipulate public opinion about their operations.

The US is a representative democracy. It’s one of the things we are most proud of and most defines us as a country. We don’t get to micromanage what our elected officials/military do, but we do get to exert control over them every few years at election time. You can not have a functioning democracy if the government, actively, works to hide the truth from the voters. The entire concept of “controlling public opinion” should be considered a form of treason. If public opinion of a war or administration is only positive because the voters don’t really know whats going on then what you have is a de-facto dictatorship/oligarchy.

Wikileaks is a small group of people dealing with lots and lots of data. It’s not surprising that they screwed up and released papers with personal info in them. The main point here, though, is that if the US military limited their “secret” information to only what was directly, operationally, vital and released all “secret” info in a timely manner when it didn’t, absolutely, need to be confidential any more then there wouldn’t be a need for Wikileaks. Like the release of the Pentagon papers before this, groups like Wikileaks have to exist, regardless of any collateral damage from mistakes, until such time as the people hiding the information start treating “state secrets” in a responsible manner.