Re:Wikileaks reveals CIA’s ‘Brutal Kangaroo’ toolkit for hac...
by derefr on Saturday June 24, 2017 @02:52PM
(#14626885)
You know that there can be more than one "patriot" in any given scenario, right?
The guy who actually exfiltrates a DB dump on a USB stick is one guy, and he might be a sociopath. But he (usually) doesn't just post it to the Internet; instead, he gives it to a journalist.
Now, is the journalist also a sociopath? Probably not. Probably he cares about lives that would be lost if actual "actively sensitive" classified information was leaked. So he doesn't publish that information. He just looks for the stuff that works as "news": basically, things that hurt the government (as a bureaucratic entity) without hurting the state (as a body representing the people.) He takes the body-destroying toxin he was sent, and purifies it down until it's a chemotherapy treatment. And then he hands it to his editor, who also cares what happens to the country, and they talk about it with the publisher, who in turn advocates for the positions held by the boards of the companies behind the ads that run in the paper, who might also be patriots...
In short, to the degree that "leaks" are mostly something that happen through the media, not through lone vigilantes, there is a sieve of probabilistic patriotism reducing the "splash damage" of any leak. The media is not a "fifth column."
The guy who actually exfiltrates a DB dump on a USB stick is one guy, and he might be a sociopath. But he (usually) doesn't just post it to the Internet; instead, he gives it to a journalist.
Now, is the journalist also a sociopath? Probably not. Probably he cares about lives that would be lost if actual "actively sensitive" classified information was leaked. So he doesn't publish that information. He just looks for the stuff that works as "news": basically, things that hurt the government (as a bureaucratic entity) without hurting the state (as a body representing the people.) He takes the body-destroying toxin he was sent, and purifies it down until it's a chemotherapy treatment. And then he hands it to his editor, who also cares what happens to the country, and they talk about it with the publisher, who in turn advocates for the positions held by the boards of the companies behind the ads that run in the paper, who might also be patriots...
In short, to the degree that "leaks" are mostly something that happen through the media, not through lone vigilantes, there is a sieve of probabilistic patriotism reducing the "splash damage" of any leak. The media is not a "fifth column."