To: "Whalen, Jeanne" <Jeanne.Whalen[at]wsj.com> From: John Young <jya[at]pipeline.com> Date: Sun, 22 Aug 2010 12:45 +0600 Subject: RE: from the WSJ Jeanne, Following up our telephone exchange on Friday: 1. You said the WSJ editor turned down the use of Rupert Murdoch's penthouse for an inteview because editorial and business are kept separate and Murdoch is business. That is hoarily disingenuous for no media keeps editorial and business separate, the two are inseparable with business always in control. 2. I said there is no need for me to comment further on Wikileaks, the story is now a churn of publicity stunts by Wikileaks, its supporters and detractors. 3. You said there was interest in reporting on Cryptome in addition to Wikileaks. I said that is another story, not related to Wikileaks. To amplify 3, Cryptome shares with Wikileaks and many others older and newer, the aim of reducing secrecy in government, business, organizations, institutions and individuals. Pervasive secrecy corrupts as an essential protector of those who want control and manipulate the citzenry and subjects. Those who advocate secrecy always justify it by claims of threats that require secrecy to prevent or fight. In truth, secrecy protects and empowers those who use it and weakens those for whom it is invoked to protect. Secrecy hides privilege, incompetence and deception of those who depend on it and who would be disempowered without it. The very few legitimate uses of secrecy have served as the seed for unjustified expanded and illegitimate uses. A vast global enterprise of governments, institutions, organizations, businesses and individuals dependent up the secrecy of abuse of secrecy has evolved into an immensely valuable practice whose cost to the public and benefits to its practitioners are concealed by secrecy. Secrecy has led to a very large undergournd criminal enterprise dealing with stolen, forged, faked, and planted "secret" information involving governments, businesses, NGOs, institutions and individuals. Its value likely exceeds that of the drug trade, with which it works in concert to hide assets, procedures and operators that is keep the secrets in emulation of the secretkeepers. Ex-secretkeepers are involved in this undergroung enterprise as beneficiares, informants, facilitators of exchanges with the agoveground secretkeepers and as spies for hire. Secrecy is the single most threatening practice against democracy and democratic procedures such that it is highly likely that there is no democracy or democratic institutions unsullied by secrecy. Secrecy poses the greatest threat to the United States because it divides the poplulation into two groups, those with access to secret information and those without. This asymmetrial access to information vital to the United States as a democracy will eventually turn it into an autocracy run by those with access to secret informaton, protected by laws written to legitimate this privileged access and to punish those who violate these laws. Those with access to secret information cannot honestly partake in public discourse due to the requirement to lie and dissumlate about what is secret information. They can only speak to one another never in public. Similarly those without access to secret information cannot fully debate the issues which affect the nation, including alleged threats promulagsted by secretkeepers who are forbidden by law to disclose what they know. Senator Patrick Moynihan, among others, has explored the damaging consequences of excessive secrecy. Attempts to debate these consequences have been suppressed or distorted by secrecy practices and laws. Efforts, governmental and private, to diminish secrecy have had modest effects, and the amount of secret information continues to grow virtually unchecked and concealed by the very means questioned, secrecy itself. These secrecy-reduction efforts are continually being attacked by the secrets enterprise by secrecy-wielding oveseers, including presidents, legislators and the courts. While some of the privileged media challenge these practices, most do not and thereby reinforce the unsavory. It should not be surprising that this leads to an increase in efforts to challenge secrecy practices by those excluded, including such initiatives as, among many others around the globe, Cryptome and Wikileaks. Cryptome disagrees with the use of secrecy by Wikileaks and its monetization of secret information which mimics those it ostensibly opposes, say, Rupert Murdoch, among untold others. John
http://cryptome.org/0002/wsj-secrecy.htm
