I never said that all government information should belong to the people. I asked a question. I do believe there's a line. But I don't like where that line is now, in part because the line isn't well-defined.
Although, if I did have nuclear launch codes, I doubt I could do anything meaningful with them. As it should be. Simply knowing the codes is not enough to authorize one to launch nuclear weapons. That would be a catastrophic single point of failure.
Ahh, sorry I read your comment as more zealous than it was.
To my knowledge (and I could be very wrong), Manning and Assange released info about then-current troop operations in the middle east. People's lives were endangered by the release of the info. You might not like where the line is, but I don't think they have too much of a leg to stand on either (assuming my understand is correct).
TL;DR: I do think some of what Assange did was morally wrong, but not nearly as much as what he's legally guilty of. I feel that way because the way the US government weilds the information classification system makes it far too blunt a tool.
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Thank you for rereading and acknowledging. The then-current troop operations information is a great example of sensitive information that shouldn't be public for obvious reasons. (Although I don't want to tug at that thread too hard because it leads to opinions on the validity of the war in the first place. It's complicated. ;-)
That's a well-reasoned view of the specific thing that was done wrong. However, our government doesn't seem to want to draw the line there. There was a lot of other stuff in that dump. Some of it was embarrassing. Much of it was banal. But the US government doesn't want to make that distinction. It was classified information, whether that made sense in every case or not.
I can't say with any certainty, but I doubt the troop operations information was intentionally released. If, hypothetically speaking, all the other information in the dump was declassified, I don't think Manning and Assange would have wanted to release information that would endanger lives.
I think they were just overzealous and didn't have the time or want to take the time to comb through it all first. Look how long it took journalists to do it.
So if they were being specifically prosecuted for the troop ops info, that would be one thing in my book. It's quite another thing to be accused of high treason for disseminating embarrassing things and things that are only considered sensitive because that's the default classification.
Indeed, you have to be the president too. That person should always be able to launch the nukes at any target whatsoever, and ensuring this is possible is the task of the United States Nuclear forces.
No. So in his proposed system, we would define the procedure for making that information protected. The failure of our current government in this regard is that the default for any information is to classify it. There is more burden to create open documents than classified.
Or, better yet, a given set of information is automatically classified or not by virtue of what it is and what it's about, rather than an opt-in/opt-out system.
Of course, that's just the first step. Next we'd have to define who or what makes the determination for a given document.
And we'd have to define the granularity. Otherwise the system could be gamed in such a way that you could cause an entire document to be classified by inserting an otherwise unrelated footnote containing sensitive info.
In my experience, most information is classified by virtue of it being aggregated and manipulated on a classified system. The only way to declassify that information is to have someone laboriously scrub all the data you want to put on an unclassified system and get it approved. if your entire network is classified, there's going to be a lot of mundane stuff there that is classified by default, because securing such a network requires that people can't just take data off of it without oversight.
I have worked on classified systems. We would have rules drawn up for what was classified and what was not. If you can draw up clear rules with no edge cases, no missed possibly-leaky information, where decisions are unambiguous and 20 people would always make exactly the same decision for every piece of information, you should go file a patent for that method because it is a truly novel invention. And we were only covering a single tiny domain of data, not trying to build a rules set for all possible data that could ever exist.
