Umberto Eco: "the crypts of state secrets are not beyond the hacker’s grasp..."

http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/article/414871-not-such-wicked-leaks

by fiaz • 16 years ago

108 51 16 years ago

presseurop.eu

danielnicollet• 16 years ago

Great article. I especially liked this thought provoking segment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1976276

blue1• 16 years ago

It seems that Eco's DVD player has no "pause" button.

Also, the interesting part regarding Berlusconi in the WL cables are not the facts, but the american opinions about them, which apparently are quite different from the official ones.

takrupp• 16 years ago

Makes sense. Another article spoke of how documenting the Bush and Obama presidencies will be tough and probably not that thorough, as the juicy bits are written on scraps of paper that are immediately disposed of.

There is a market for an offline, secure technology, like a modern day codex.

hugh3• 16 years ago

The Bush and Obama White Houses are still producing documents at a far greater rate than any prior White House, I'm willing to guess. If anything, it'll be a difficult job because the Bush and Obama Presidential Libraries will be filled with so many dull emails between White House staff members that you'll never be able to find the interesting ones.

Anyway, the really juicy bits have always happened in face-to-face meetings.

tptacek10• 16 years ago

Each Wikileaks dump is a different kind of funhouse mirror, aborbing the gazes of politicians, activists, philosophers, pundits, and what-have-you, repaying them with illusory advancements of their agendas.

So now we get --- respectfully! The Name Of The Rose is one of my all-time top-5 books! --- the take of a blowhard classically-trained Italian semiotician (yeah, there's someone who isn't going to see his life's work reflected in the Wikileaks narrative) on world politics.

And from it, we get these gems of foreign policy:

* The State Department doesn't know anything you can't learn in the newspaper

* Embassies have turned into spy centers (heavens!)

* Wikileaks did irreparable damage to Clinton and Obama (irreparable! Unlike, say, losing the house and practical control of the Senate?)

* Technology has advanced to the point where governments can't keep secrets anymore

These points, all utterly banal, some dubious, would have been shrugged off in any article not written by a famous person in the context of Wikileaks. But now that we have Wikileaks, anything any famous person writes, be it bridge trolls like Michael Scheurer and John Bolton or has-been literary stars like Umberto Eco, glistens with supposed insight.

I'm not a WL supporter, but I'm worried that the effect it's having on public discourse may be bothering me even more than the underlying principles.

PS: I'll concede the humor buried in the subtext of Eco making reference to Dan Brown.

elblanco4• 16 years ago

> The State Department doesn't know anything you can't learn in the newspaper

This is the bit that has me the most mystified...none of the released cables reveals anything particularly surprising (or at least not surprising to anybody who pays even minimal attention to world news)...yet the media is acting like these are huge revelations and it leaves me confused -- is the media reporting that wikileaks is leaking these completely obvious things? or are they reporting about these fantastic new completely obvious things?

tptacek10• 16 years ago

To the media, each Wikileaks dump is just another lump of fuel for the attention-gathering machine. Everyone knows this, including Assange, who acknowledges it openly.

One wonders whether a real impactful whistleblowing leak might be disadvantaged in this climate; it might, perish the thought!, be boring. Where would we find the persecuted elfin protoganist? What about the sex? The gossip? To whom would we sell the movie rights about a policy process story?

mcknz2• 16 years ago

What is fantastic and new is that these obvious things are documented and published, by people who are in a unique position to verify them.

We all know North Korea is nuts, but it's news when their BFF China calls it a spoiled child. Then China is forced to publicly acknowledge their desire for Korean unification.

brudgers4• 16 years ago

>"is the media reporting that wikileaks is leaking these completely obvious things? or are they reporting about these fantastic new completely obvious things?"

The media is doing what it usually does. It is reporting on the easiest things. Wikileaks is a bonanza because it contains thousands of documents which can be summarized with trivial analysis and hyperbolic rhetoric. All packaged in conformance with the no-gel foot orthotics fear mongering journalistic favored by the US main stream media.

I.e. Wikileaks can be used to signify pre-existing narratives.

lkozma2• 16 years ago

I disagree somewhat, there is revelation in these cables. There is a huge difference between "I know x is true" and "I know that you know that I know ...".

To use an example from Pinker's talk on language, in a dictatorship everyone knows the regime is bad, yet the value of public demonstrations is that you find out that others also know it and then you know that they know that ..., which is exactly why gatherings of people are usually controlled in a dictatorship.

wyclif2• 16 years ago

has-been literary stars like Umberto Eco

I've read quite a bit of Eco, and he probably has more genius in one of his little fingers than all of your heroes put together.

tptacek10• 16 years ago

Yeah, this sure sounds like an awesome argument to have.

I like him. I loved Rose and Foucault, tried and failed to get into Island, liked bits of Travels..., was bored to death by Kant..., and liked that little book where he was arguing with the Catholic Cardinal.

It is possible, you know, to be simultaneously a genius, a has-been, and a blowhard.

(My literary heroes? I admire David Foster Wallace, Vollman, and Pynchon. Who do you admire? Besides has-been blowhard Italian geniuses?)

juiceandjuice• 16 years ago

As far as I know, none of the documents were actually "Top Secret" status, a security designation reserved for much more delicate documents. The idea that these papers are the "most secret secrets" is a huge overstatement, along with the idea that a hacker has compromised the security of a nation.

The fact that Top Secret documents haven't been unearthed is both assuring and scary.

danenania2• 16 years ago

You make some valid points, but I think Eco intends this as an amorphous investigation into how the Wikileaks events affect the prevailing Zeitgeist. His assertions aren't meant as hard truths, but as launching points for reflection and discussion.

Something like "The State Department doesn't know anything you can't learn in the newspaper" is clearly not a factual statement and Eco certainly knows this. It's hyperbole designed to emphasize the changing relationship between the populace and the state.

After all, Eco is foremost a craftsman of fiction and fantasy. I don't think it's off base for him to inject a bit of literary whimsy if it adds insight or enlivens the dialogue.

tptacek10• 16 years ago

I said two things about his points, and you acknowledge only one of them. Yes, I think some of these arguments are dubious. But I think they're all banal. They're things anyone could have said about the US government 5, 10, or 15 years ago.

brudgers4• 16 years ago

>"Eco is foremost a craftsman of fiction and fantasy."

I would say above all he is a scholar and public intellectual. His novels are a means of communicating his ideas about semiotics to a wider audience.

add_hominem• 16 years ago

This coming from the blowhard-in-residence. You're a "bridge troll" (in your words) of Y Combinator News. I'm surprised you get anything else done.

Eco isn't writing a novel here, he's simply musing over current events in a short article for a broad audience.

> I'm not a WL supporter

Keep up the good fight. There is a desperate need for valiant defenders of the status quo like yourself.

> but I'm worried that the effect it's having on public discourse may be bothering me even more than the underlying principles.

Yes, you're constantly bellyaching against individual rights at the expense of the poor misunderstood government.

I'm not sure if people upvote you because they actually agree, or if it's because of the phenomenon that people who act like authorities can fool the easily impressionable (as with snake-oil salesmen, energy healers, mediums and psychics).

gruseom• 16 years ago

Oh please. A new account, just for that?

gcb• 16 years ago

Reading the article I had a very difficult time conciliating point 1and 2 from your summary in the same reality

neilk• 16 years ago

I like Umberto Eco, but a lot of this is what I call "profundity by paradox". Technology goes backward as it advances! The real secret is that there is no secret! Etc.

borism• 16 years ago

this is philosophy you know, not everything is what it sounds like at first!

steadicat• 16 years ago

Sadly, I find this extremely common in Italian writing (I am Italian). I wouldn't be lying if I said that this kind of logic (or lack thereof) is one of the main reasons why I left the country.

ggchappell• 16 years ago

I'd have to agree.

Also, that phrase "profundity by paradox" is a nice one. And remarkably little-used. Right now it gets just 3 Google hits (a 1993 book, a 2007 quote from that same book, and a 2009 philosophy discussion); perhaps we should see what we can do to increase that.

makmanalp• 16 years ago

>> "but (digital) CDs now only allow us quantum leaps from one chapter to another"

They say to write what you know about ...

jacquesm4• 16 years ago

Even though Umberto Eco probably does not realize that mr. Mannings activities do not really qualify as hacking he's right on the money in that any large trove of data will sooner or later become public.

There is a ratchet action at work here which causes information to be disseminated even when you really don't want to. The mere existence of information that more than just a very few people have access to almost guarantees a leak and eventual publication, with some direct numerical link between the number of people that have access and the chances of the information being leaked.

Those tasked with guarding our privacy are worried about all this precisely because they seem to be incapable of doing so, even when dealing with stuff that would never have seen daylight 20 years ago.

With every advance in telecommunications technology, computing and storage the amount of information explodes further and avenues through which it may leak out multiply.

Cellphones with cameras are one nice example of this effect.

When you put together a 'list of sensitive installations' you need to realize the impact of just creating such a list. Once created you have to assume that eventually it will fall in to the hands of those that you don't want to have it (and what a banal list it is, is that the best they could do?).

Spy novels have been preaching 'need to know' for a long time, and governments the world over have always struggled with finding the right balance between being able to do their jobs as well as not helping their perceived enemies or other parties to the information they so painstakingly collected.

It looks to me as though the big lesson of this leak (besides a bunch of important details in the cables themselves) is that this process is currently failing.

poet• 16 years ago

Jacques your rhetoric on Wikileaks is quite frankly awful. Here are some specific pieces I take issue with:

The mere existence of information that more than just a very few people have access to almost guarantees a leak and eventual publication

Empirically not true. What percentage of classified information has been leaked in the course of history? It's infinitesimally small.

With every advance in telecommunications technology, computing and storage the amount of information explodes further and avenues through which it may leak out multiply. Cellphones with cameras are one nice example of this effect.

The government can control what technology they allow into secured facilities. Cellphones with cameras are irrelevant when they aren't allowed into secure locations.

what a banal list it is, is that the best they could do?.

Obviously not. Do you really think the list that was leaked is the only such list? More detailed lists would obviously be classified at TS.

It looks to me as though the big lesson of this leak (besides a bunch of important details in the cables themselves) is that this process is currently failing.

The stuff that's been leaked is relatively low level Secret stuff. To claim that recent events prove that the government's ability to protect classified information is failing is ridiculous.

Why the standard of debate so low for this particular issue?

Umberto Eco: "the crypts of state secrets are not beyond the hacker’s grasp..."

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