Secrecy Is Dead. Here's What Happens Next.

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: January 23, 2018 at 7:36:36 AM EST
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Secrecy Is Dead. Here's What Happens Next.
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> Secrecy Is Dead. Here's What Happens Next.
> By Alexis Sobel Fitts
> Dec 16 2017
> <https://www.wired.com/story/secrecy-is-dead-heres-what-happens-next/>
>
> “Hey Don, we have an unusual idea. Leak us one or more of your father’s tax returns.”
>
> WikiLeaks slid that message into Donald Trump Jr’s Twitter DMs—an unusual request for the son of a then-presidential 
> candidate. Since its founding, WikiLeaks had portrayed itself as the ultimate fourth estate—a digital drop-box where 
> secrets could be deposited and released as public information. But in the runup to the presidential election, 
> WikiLeaks’ dispatches began to show a partisan slant. There was an email trove from a hack of the DNC; a searchable 
> database of Hillary Clinton’s emails. A release from Trump “will dramatically improve the perception of our 
> impartiality,” the message continued. “This is the real kicker.”
>
> The exchange happened last year, but it came to light this year, in 2017: a moment when all of our secrets began 
> bursting into the open. Hack after ginormous hackcompromised our health data, credit card numbers, and email 
> passwords. From the contents of your inbox to your credit card statement, every possible category of personal 
> information seems up for grabs.
>
> It’s also been the year that we began to hear and respond to the pieces of knowledge that had been bobbing just below 
> the surface. Every day a news alert spreads word of a notable man who has been accused of sexual harassment. Many of 
> these stories were previously known in private circles or stalled in Human Resource departments. Louis C.K.’s 
> masturbation habit had been parodied on television; at New York’s Spotted Pig, assault was so common that staffers 
> nicknamed the private dining room “the rape room.” It took pushing them into the public for the stories to finally 
> have an effect. Susan Fowler’s harrowing essay led to a broader reckoning at Uber. Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore 
> lost the election. Time named the “Silence Breakers” its person of the year.
>
> Fundamental to this movement is a structural change in how we communicate. Texts and emails leave a trail, making it 
> easier to document incidents and interactions. Secrets used to be the purview of people. Now they are owned by the 
> platforms and databases into which we deposit them—and those have proven easy to penetrate. As more and more of our 
> private lives are captured online, we build opportunities for our most embarrassing moments to leak.
>
> For the institutions used to wielding information to reinforce their power, it has been a difficult transition. 
> Private investigators and spies dug up secrets for Harvey Weinstein as a way of keeping his victims silent by owning 
> their sexual pasts. Facebook makes easy money from the secretive system that allows nefarious actors to hide which 
> ads they buy. The NSA has collected our private correspondence for years, unchecked.
>
> But this unmooring is painful for the rest of us, too. Releasing our secrets willingly, as in the #MeToo movement, 
> requires us to encounter our darkest traumas and offer them up for public judgement—to a public that may contend with 
> our secrets in ways we can’t yet envision. In order to build this new system, we’re burning the old one to the 
> ground, a dismantling that requires us to confront each ugly reality. This openness is the price of a better world, 
> full of the things we want—things like a respectful workplace for women; a society free from entrenched racism; 
> trans-friendly bathrooms. And yet: The old system may have been bad, but at least we understood how it operated.
>
> It’s glorious, but also terrifying. We can’t choose how our thoughts and actions may be weaponized. When all 
> information can be made public, it’s no longer a question of “if” a secret will be revealed, but rather when, and by 
> whom. In a world without secrets, we are still learning the rules.
>
> There is one rule of secrets we’ve learned this year: They are political. Secrets emerge when someone has something 
> to gain from their exposure. Sometimes the motivation is straightforward. (Hackers always have a reason to get at 
> your credit card number.) But other secrets only emerge under complicated circumstances.
>
> In theory, WikiLeaks offered the ultimate transparency. A neutral whistleblower, with no interference between 
> information and its public release—just secrets made not-secret. As the journalist Jochen Bittner wrote last year, 
> “One element of Assange-think has been clear from early on: There is no such thing as a legitimate secret. The public 
> is entitled to share any knowledge governments hold.”
>
> In practice, this idea is bullshit. Transparency is not clean. It’s murky and complicated. Every piece of information 
> represents the culmination of dozens of choices, each made with nuanced motivations. As WikiLeaks’ vendetta against 
> Clinton demonstrates, even pure information can be released as a particularly deceptive form of bias. For each secret 
> disclosed, there are thousands that remain unpublicized.
>
> [snip]
>
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