Ryan Rafferty

Recently, a great number of military documents were stolen by a kindred officer who released them to a third party tasking itself with freeing information from the barricaded chambers of government… pushing information in to the public domain– an ethical quest that has hardly gone unnoticed.  The debate is still ablaze, searing and charring all those involved.  Two clear positions have materialized: the reactions of a hypocritical government, versus the platitudes of its citizenry.  What is missing is a clear philosophical appraisal, an elucidation of ethics– something I would like to try and provide.

“Information wants to be free”– a platitude that echoes true within the hearts of any genuine democratists, but does it hold universally?  In the quest to do what is right, and to preserve a way of life, the American Military has withheld information from the public– an act that has surely been measured against the many alternative scenarios available.  So now that this information is common knowledge, what should the American Military do?  It’s important to view the ethical actions behind the debate, and the reasons why these events took place– I believe this will help provide a course of action for the future.

The first conflict worth observing is the one which takes place in the minds of American citizenry– between the inherent freedom of information, and the government’s necessity for withholding it.  One example often recited is the capture of Osama Bin Laden… an act that, by its very nature, requires secrecy.  It would be nearly impossible to catch Bin Laden if all military movements were in the public domain– ultimately this state of affairs requires an examination of the ethics underlying it.  It is clear that capturing Bin Laden is the morally correct thing to do, it is not necessarily the ethically correct thing to do.  There are a great number of tactics the American government could have undertaken when dealing with Bin Laden… they could have just as easily funded and bolstered his position in order to infiltrate and identify his cadre, or they could have simply chosen to ignore him, and continued on a course of action that produced the maximal amount of stability and security, at the minimal cost.

The reality is, the American Government chose to purse the capture of Osama Bin Laden, and to destroy his harbingers– which, I would argue, is the ethically incorrect strategy– creating a further uncertainty: should an unethical strategy, such as capturing Bin Laden, be buttressed by an ethical one, such as freeing information?  The answer: it’s not logically possible to support an unethical situation with an ethical one.  An unethical strategy can only be supported by another unethical position, with the distinct possibility that the conclusion of this seemingly maligned strategy is an outcome that is morally correct.  Keeping information free is clearly the most ethically correct way of conducting a democracy, but it conflicts with the moral thing… capturing Bin Laden– so, the morally right thing, consequently, requires an unethical strategy.

Given that the loss of sensitive military information took place through the use of CD-RWs and social engineering…  the solution seems obvious to me: the military needs to proprietarize it’s information and technology systems.  If they wish to keep secrets in the future, they will need an IT infrastructure that is both hierarchical, and mirrors the systems of organisation the officers and commanders are already established in.

The American Military technology infrastructure should be redesigned from the ground up– its officers should be working on a proprietary operating system, on systems with proprietary hardware.  The access and use of all sensitive information should be centrally controlled, by a central computer system that manages and approves the requests to access confidential information… a centralized system that enables use on whatever device necessary, on an ad-hoc basis.  All information contained in this system should be encrypted, and the transportation of it should be regulated and tracked through the use of proprietary hardware vectors.  Ultimately, any piece of data should be traceable at any given moment, and its access approvable or revokable through a chain of command.

The approach of the government, and military, should not be to react to wikileaks, or to find and punish its founder Julian Assange… it should be to let this leaking organisation flounder, while strengthening and proprietarizing the ways in which the military works with information.  Furthermore, political and bureaucratic influences on the military need to be eliminated, especially if the military is ever to be expected to do its job properly.  Politicians should work to publicize military commanders in order to diffuse the blame that gravitates towards their careers, and bureaucrats should exclude themselves from involvement in the creation of military policy.

The solution above is perhaps not one that the most vocal citizenry desire… unfortunately, the platitudinal approach the vocal few espouse is simply an impossibility.  It is possible that a moral outcome can be arrived at through unethical means, and if the public wishes to attack military policy– it should do so based on the moral core of the situation, and not the ethics that the military strategy has henceforwardly required.

I would argue there are a great deal of other ways to deal with this situation, but I think the most trying and challenging approach involves working within the current system… not rewriting it from scratch.  The future holds a great deal of possibility, but this future will need to be mitigated by the efforts of ethicists, especially as the system in question becomes long in the tooth.