Government derives a lot of its power from secrecy. Open the secrets and government loses power. But it is worse than you thought given this comment from Reason.
Interestingly enough, when you look at WikiLeaks, that’s the whole point behind it. Assange wasn’t trying to get all this information out there — he was trying to make the organizations so afraid of leaks that they were unable to function internally.
Make sure that no one can be trusted with the information, and that the workers in the org can’t trust each other, and then the org can collapse under it’s own bureaucratic weight.
Open government. Sounds like a good plan to me.
Comments
7 responses to “Collapsing Them With Fear”
Open government is a good thing. Publishing the names of people who were under the Afghan War equivalent of the Witness Protection Program probably wasn’t the way to go about it, though.
mmph, never mind, apparently they found no names in the leaked document. Assuming they’re being ‘open’ about that, anyway.
whinning get you nowhere as I have to keep telling my liberal friends. I am a liberal tactician. For the uninformed stratagy is the goal to be achieved. tactics is what you have to do to achieve the goal. thats my job. as sun tzu said if you know your enemy and yourself you need not fear the outcome of a hundred battles. if you know your enemy but not yourself as the liberal does you will lose as many battles as you win if you know neither as the conservative does you will always lose! conservatives are smarter then liberals but they are evil and self destructive see tricky dick nixon or bonzo’s iran/contra treason.
Wage and Price Controls Nixon a Conservative?
Are you kidding me?
Trotsky was a liberal tactician. Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot too.
What did it get them?
BTW have you solved Hayek’s knowledge problem yet?
Good job comrade cap! Now take your happy pills! There’s a good boy!
I doubt if Mr. Assange’s actions will have his intended effect in a society, such as the United States, that is not actually a unified authoritarian conspiracy. The United States has several distinct factions and, in a WikiLeaks environment, those that are most inclined to secrecy will do something stupid. (This might already be happening. Did the the belief in a “vast right-wing conspiracy” produce a culture of secrecy that resulted in the health-care trainwreck?).