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In reply to the discussion: Revealed: US plans to charge Assange [View all]JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)still, I think the question must be asked about the protection of secrets. First, is the information really secret? Who decides? What are the criteria for deciding?
I like working puzzles, so I'm always interested in research and spy stories. Right now I am reading a book on Gehlen, the German spy who, after WWII, began spying for the West.
When I read about the real espionage of the WWII, and the Cold War period, the kinds of undercover things they did, the kinds of information they found out, I think the Wikileaks are pretty superficial. And apparently Stratfor was selling a lot of publicly available information mixed in with less accessible material.
I don't quite understand why some of the information is considered confidential or secret in the first place. If we were really interested in this, say, if we worked for a large corporation with offices in various countries, we could probably find a lot of this stuff out for ourselves. Our employees would probably be smart enough to figure it out -- if we hired intelligent employees.
I wonder whether the real point in all of this is to discourage people from asking questions and talking about certain subjects. If so, it probably won't work.