money quote for the day
I would look at this a lot differently if what had happened here is that there is somebody inside one of these firms who found out what was being plotted and decided that it was just so extreme and so awful that they could not in good conscience allow it to remain concealed, and then decided they were going to blow the whistle on it, just some conscientious whistleblower. Then you might say, “Well, look, this is just a weird aberrational over the line proposal that even someone in this company, one of these companies decided it needed to be public.” That isn’t what happened here. What happened here is that this was just a random hack of e-mails. I mean this group [Anonymous] just basically took their hand and randomly and blindly stuck into the hat of these companies’ e-mails and just pulled out as many as they could. And it just turned out that among these e-mails happened to be plans this incriminating and this pernicious. - Glenn Greenwald
To reiterate. This was a random hack - in response to taunting, not a whistleblowing scenario. And look at what it yielded, look at what Anonymous essentially blindly stumbled over. It could have just been a case of “Ha you have the wrong names, lu5er!” Instead it kept unfolding and unfolding and unfolding. How many other scenarios a la HB Gary are playing out among other security companies, law firms, government entities, heavy weight corporations like Chamber of Commerce are also playing out, right now?
More bluntly, we don’t just need ‘Leaks and transparency for whistleblowing and explicitly leaked material. We really need it in general for transparency, accountability, and having legal restrictions and restraints actually enforced for all, not just over the less powerful, less monied, and less privileged.
Originally published at What's that you said?. You can comment here or there.