WikiLeaks Posts Mysterious ‘Insurance’ File • Hacker News Board

Re: WikiLeaks Posts Mysterious ‘Insurance’ File

#31

Post by derefr » Sat, Jul 31, 2010, 7:06 AM UTC

thwarted wrote: post #28

derefr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But who decides what "has to" be exposed, and what doesn't? The problem is that there is no third party at all trustworthy enough to bear the responsibility of "filtering" through all the world's dirty laundry to just find the "morally reprehensible" parts. So, there must be some (transparent) strategy set in advance: they either release nothing (most news agencies), everything (Wikileaks), or use some other pre-defi…

How do you determine if the transparent and inspectable filtering program is operating correctly if you only have access to the output and none of the inputs? You'd need all of the inputs, and at that point, you just have access to all the information anyway, and wouldn't need the program to do the filtering.

Reliable computing isn't just for NASA; it also works when an individual codebase may have been designed to "malfunction." Instead of a single machine, you contract several independent, mutually untrustworthy parties to implement (open, inspectable) machines, with an architecture that takes votes from all machines into account. You could then spit out a log of (hash of input, vote) pairs from each machine to see that the voting architecture is also operating correctly.

Re: WikiLeaks Posts Mysterious ‘Insurance’ File

#32

Post by todayiamme » Sat, Jul 31, 2010, 7:10 AM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #26

todayiamme wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today the following information is kept secret by many governments: - Accidental civilian deaths in raids. - Details of people "detained" for questioning. - Botched up intelligence operations and lack of analysis capabilities. - How much money is being spent on "intelligence" and why. Need I go on? It is true that they can be used for good or for ill, but the problem comes in when you take away accountability from th…

You don't disagree with me; you agree with me and disagree with the idealist, quasi-anarchist view that state secrets shouldn't exist at all. Note that all (but perhaps one) of the secrets I listed is now well documented public knowledge. I think this example should be followed.

I don't want to agree or disagree with anything. All I want to agree with is that innocent people have the right to exist without getting shot in the middle of the night.

You know what's the biggest problem over here? It's okay if someone from country ABC kills people living in XYZ. That's collateral damage, but as soon as a few ABC civilians get killed it's war.

It's like somehow everyone in this world have agreed to play a game where they all assume that they're the heroes and the fate of the planet rests on their shoulders. Somehow they've agreed that it's okay to kill other people because they just don't agree with them. Somehow they've agreed that this is just the way things are and this is how they must be.

Why?

I think that it's safe to say that no one can analyze state secrets or anything in this world. It's just a long chain of causality that is propagated forward by implicit agreement.

Re: WikiLeaks Posts Mysterious ‘Insurance’ File

#33

Post by maika » Sat, Jul 31, 2010, 7:18 AM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #25

maika wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you don't need to continue your litany without context. I here a lot of bleating about national security, good of the state, and all, but that is used far too often as a blanket justification to cover up anything. Restriction, or manipulation, of information is what gave rise to the powers that your examples had to counter. For example, if all information relevant to the public, was public, then the Afghan/Iraq w…

"How can you have a democracy that includes censorship?" If it wasn't for censorship, democracy wouldn't have survived the 20th century. There are concrete, non-hypothetical secrets democratic states did keep during the 20th century which safeguarded their continued existence and the reestablishment of democracy throughout much of the world. Everything you say can and has been applied to every power of the state--the…

> censorship

A state should not have the power to veto any information under the pretence of national security. There is no accountability. What I am really advocating is the abolishment of secret secrets, or any secrets that govern public policy, government decisions/workings/connections/longevity, and that all secrets should be made available to the records of history after they go beyond their limited window of opportunity. Hopefully, in time to counter abuses of power while they are still relevant.

> Privacy and secrecy are two names for the same thing.

By private, in the previous context I am referring to the individual.

> Violent nightmare

Examples would be appreciated. I don't understand what this idea of all information being immediately and universally available and the necessary decent into a dystopian nightmare, is based on.

Re: WikiLeaks Posts Mysterious ‘Insurance’ File

#34

Post by Rod » Sat, Jul 31, 2010, 7:21 AM UTC

faramarz wrote: post #14

dlytle wrote: post #2

It feels like I'm watching someone try to act out the part of a character in a spy novel. Big encrypted files called Insurance, twittering about being followed by government agents, sensationalizing the things they post... I think they have good reasons for what they're doing (or at least good intentions), and I do like the concept behind WikiLeaks. I just think they're getting a bit caught up in the whole drama/myst…

I have to agree with you. I think if there ever is a downfall to the Wikileak initiative, it will be due to the gloating and the drama they perpetuate. Julian and his gang need to stop with the commentary and just release the documents. leave the opinions to be formed by the people. The twitter account is going to come back and bite them in the ass if they keep pushing commentary out. I fully support the need for an…

"Leave the opinions to be formed by the people."

Yes, because the average American surely has the time to read 100s of classified documents. The goal of the release is to attain reform, and if drama stokes discussion and catalyzes reform, so be it. What's the problem with drama exactly? The more notorious Assange gets, the harder it will be for the powers that be to get rid of him.

Do you honestly think that drama leads to the downfall of media? Do you remember CNN, Fox, NYTimes in early 2003, when they all claimed that Iraq had WMD? Why do they still have credibility? They do because media has become part of the enterntainment industry, which makes it obvious why WL is necessary.

Re: WikiLeaks Posts Mysterious ‘Insurance’ File

#35

Post by mishmash » Sat, Jul 31, 2010, 7:26 AM UTC

maika wrote: post #27

mishmash wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Schneier[1] n should be closer to ~2600000000000000000000000000000000000000. For each single available core, m would be smaller, say 20 wouldn't it? On the other side, consider 8 or more cores a box for the NSA by 500,000 boxes (wildly conservative guess??) for about P = 4,000,000?? NSA probably has much more compute power than this, though: " With supercomputers measured by the acre and estimated $70 mi…

Yeah n would be bigger, but if you limit the key to a composition of characters (alphabet, letters, funky characters %^&*, etc), would that drastically reduce the search space?

Oh good point. Would it then be 95 printable ASCII characters by 32 (for the effective key size in bytes)? If so, that gives a laughably large number:

1937114844585011541643853683619338993862294591963291168212890625

Another question, and I'm way over my head here (also time for bed), but considering this snippet below, is it possible the NSA or another group would have an undiscovered attack against it?

"NSA was embroiled in some minor controversy concerning its involvement in the creation of the Data Encryption Standard (DES), a standard and public block cipher algorithm used by the U.S. government and banking community. During the development of DES by IBM in the 1970s, NSA recommended changes to some details of the design. There was suspicion that these changes had weakened the algorithm sufficiently to enable the agency to eavesdrop if required, including speculation that a critical component—the so-called S-boxes—had been altered to insert a "backdoor" and that the reduction in key length might have made it feasible for NSA to discover DES keys using massive computing power. It has since been observed that the S-boxes in DES are particularly resilient against differential cryptanalysis, a technique which was not publicly discovered until the late 1980s, but which was known to the IBM DES team. The United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reviewed NSA's involvement, and concluded that while the agency had provided some assistance, it had not tampered with the design.[11][12] In late 2009 NSA declassified information stating that NSA worked closely with IBM to strengthen the algorithm against all except brute force attacks and to strengthen substitution tables, called S-boxes. Conversely, NSA tried to convince IBM to reduce the length of the key from 64 to 48 bits. Ultimately they compromised on a 56-bit key.[13]"

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency

Re: WikiLeaks Posts Mysterious ‘Insurance’ File

#36

Post by Rod » Sat, Jul 31, 2010, 7:37 AM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #17

riffer wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Julian appears to me to be trying to do is to reduce the ability of large bureaucratic militarized organizations to dominate innocent individuals. Secrets exist for many purposes, but their primary impact on history is to permit groups of people to organize in order to persecute other less organized groups of people. Ultimately, it was the combination of industrialization and secrets that made it possible for na…

Sixty to seventy years ago, the following information was kept secret by Western governments: -How to build an atom bomb -How to build effective radar systems to detect incoming bombers -The fact that German and Japanese encryption codes had been compromised -The US Navy's awareness of Japan's intention to attack Midway Island -The fact that Patton was actually removed from command, and that his travels around Italy…

Both Ellsberg and Assange have claimed that they do believe that there are legitimate secrets (e.g., cyphers, nuclear technology, and the like). Your argument is based on the assumption that WL sees all secrets as being born equal, which is utter nonsense. Do you honestly believe that:

- the Afghan war diaries contain secrets of the same magnitude as, say, U.S. radar tech 70 years ago?

- Pakistan does not know that the U.S. knows that elements of the Pakistani intelligence are collaborating with the Taliban? (of course they are, they know the Taliban will most likely win, and they want to ensure tranquility after the U.S. gets tired, declares "victory", and leaves)

- the enemy does not know it's using heat-seeking missiles against U.S. choppers?

- the enemy does not know the attacks on U.S. forces? They were the ones who carried the attacks out!

Think about it. The release of the documents contains very little the enemy does not know about. Therefore, your entire argument is invalidated. Apples and oranges. The secrets you alluded to do compromise national security. The secrets exposed last weekend by WL only compromise the politicians who lied to the world about how the war was going in order to avoid losing popular support.

Re: WikiLeaks Posts Mysterious ‘Insurance’ File

#37

Post by ahn » Sat, Jul 31, 2010, 8:37 AM UTC

dlytle wrote: post #2

It feels like I'm watching someone try to act out the part of a character in a spy novel. Big encrypted files called Insurance, twittering about being followed by government agents, sensationalizing the things they post... I think they have good reasons for what they're doing (or at least good intentions), and I do like the concept behind WikiLeaks. I just think they're getting a bit caught up in the whole drama/myst…

>It feels like I'm watching someone try to act out the part of a character in a spy novel.

In that case we should be able to figure out his key and decrypt the file. The key in the spy novels is always something you feel like you should have seen coming, something predictable.

Re: WikiLeaks Posts Mysterious ‘Insurance’ File

#38

Post by Confusion » Sat, Jul 31, 2010, 8:57 AM UTC

dlytle wrote: post #2

It feels like I'm watching someone try to act out the part of a character in a spy novel. Big encrypted files called Insurance, twittering about being followed by government agents, sensationalizing the things they post... I think they have good reasons for what they're doing (or at least good intentions), and I do like the concept behind WikiLeaks. I just think they're getting a bit caught up in the whole drama/myst…

  It feels like I'm watching someone try to act out the part
  of a character in a spy novel.

It feels more like I'm watching someone forced to act out that part. Those novels me be dramatized, but many are still based on the way things actually happen. Ian Flemming couldn't have kept that out if he wanted to, because he simply knew.

  sensationalizing the things they post

You can't sensationalize something on your own.

Re: WikiLeaks Posts Mysterious ‘Insurance’ File

#39

Post by Confusion » Sat, Jul 31, 2010, 9:00 AM UTC

NathanKP wrote: post #5

Is anyone else getting just a little bit sick of WikiLeaks? The basic concept of providing transparency is good, but I think they are taking things way too far. I hadn't even thought of the issue of the Taliban being able to read the records themselves to find out who the informants are. Just because something is a secret doesn't mean it has to be exposed, and I think that is the fundamental problem with Wikileaks. S…

  Just because something is a secret doesn't mean it has to
  be exposed

Why does everyone suppose WikiLeaks is being naive about this? I'm sure there are plenty of files that they won't leak, because they think it will endanger more people than it will save.

In this case, the safety of a few Afghan informants could be considered collateral damage: you can't expect WikiLeaks to keep their hands completely clean, when they are trying to out pools of blood on the hands of others. There isn't an optimal solution; they will have to make case-by-case judgments. If you don't like that and want them to censor the documents: by all means, start volunteering for them to read all the stuff. In the mean time, putting this out in the open may save countless Afghan civilians in the years to come.

Re: WikiLeaks Posts Mysterious ‘Insurance’ File

#40

Post by Confusion » Sat, Jul 31, 2010, 9:06 AM UTC

todayiamme wrote: post #32

philwelch wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't disagree with me; you agree with me and disagree with the idealist, quasi-anarchist view that state secrets shouldn't exist at all. Note that all (but perhaps one) of the secrets I listed is now well documented public knowledge. I think this example should be followed.

I don't want to agree or disagree with anything. All I want to agree with is that innocent people have the right to exist without getting shot in the middle of the night. You know what's the biggest problem over here? It's okay if someone from country ABC kills people living in XYZ. That's collateral damage, but as soon as a few ABC civilians get killed it's war. It's like somehow everyone in this world have agreed t…

  All I want to agree with is that innocent people have the
  right to exist without getting shot in the middle of the
  night.

Which is a naive view, because without American intervention in Afghanistan, their citizens ran the risk of being shot in the middle of the night anyway, because they rubbed some Taliban the wrong way.