ARMS-D-Request@MIT-MC.ARPA (Moderator) (12/05/85)
Arms-Discussion Digest Thursday, December 5, 1985 10:08AM
Volume 5, Issue 45
Today's Topics:
Exploiting any information
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Date: Thu, 5 Dec 85 9:41:30 EST
From: Jeff Miller AMSTE-TEI 4675 <jmiller@apg-1>
Subject: Exploiting any information
Dear sir,
You definitely have no argument from me that our politicians usually have
a strong penchant for not making all of the facts of any issue known to the
general public. And once in power, they often use the machinery of state to
obfuscate and conceal. Unfortunately, that's politics *in the Western
democracies*. ( The general public in the USSR don't have it anywhere near as
good. In a system where all public information is distorted through
government filters, there is no need to cloud the waters on one particular
issue.)
And you are almost on the money when you say that the Sovs may be the
ones to hang themselves in their campaigns of dezinformatsiya. In the mid
sixties, after a particularly well orchestrated campaign using simple
propaganda, false documents and out and out lies ( e.g. US-UK joint invasion
plans ), the KGB succeeded in touching off a wave of anti-Americanism in
Indonesia. ( A wave which, if you consult newspapers of the time, was
attributed to US Imperialism by many American commentators.) Unfortunately
for the KGB, the Indonesian Communist Party decided that the time was right
for a revolution without consulting their Soviet mentors. Result: Sukarno
crushed the revolt, massacring approx. 50,000 CP members, thus destroying it
as a political entity and upsetting the KGB's plans for the region. We know
now that internal KGB retribution was swift.
Unfortunately, the disinformation efforts of the Soviets have given them
tremendous successes too. I have already mentioned the ERW episode.
Two things worry me about your comment. First is your sense of
proportion. So you really think that US politicians and their staffs and
bureaucrats, when they mince about with the facts they use in their arguments,
are equivalent to the thousands of employees of Department A of the First
Chief Directorate of the KGB ? Employees whose entire careers are spent in
the development of, as KGB documents themselves say, "the dissemination of
false and provocative information"? Perhaps you simply do not know that much
about such organizations. The information is available....which brings me to
my second worry. I sincerely hope that you do not work with classified
material, or that you have not done so in the past. In that case I could
understand a certain amount of naivete about classified data. Firstly, you
would know that most non-techspec data is made available in unclassified form
after it has been "sanitized" so as to protect sources. What is not revealed
may involve a higher order of detail, or of imagery resolution, or names, or
places. In the presentation of such data, the data is what is important, not
the publicizing of the source. (Imagine how many East Bloc residents would be
willing to pass along information if they knew their names and addresses would
be broadcast by Jack Anderson on the Evening News ?)
Government spokesmen should never support a position by alluding to
classified data which cannot be revealed. The proper course is to try to use
declassified versions of the original data, or if not feasible, no comment.
I'll assume that you are not a babe-in-the-woods who believes that no
information should be made secret from the public.
As for your quite valid point that everyone likes to equate misinformed
opinion with opposite opinion, I will assume something in my examples touched
upon one of your personal beliefs. I would point out that the KGB does not
choose groups/issues to exploit based on absolute right or wrong. They are
documented as having used causes and organizations of the right as well as of
the left. The danger lies not in the existence of an idea in a democratic
country, but in vigilance against it being used by the KGB. Personally, I
believe in free speech, but I realize what is going on when US television
beams the soothing tones of Arbatov or Posner into American livingrooms.
J.Miller
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End of Arms-Discussion Digest
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