Beyond Rupert Murdoch

The Murdoch scandal may look like a domestic UK affair, with repercussions for the media also domestically in Australia and the U.S., where his News Corp is a big player.  But it is really an international affair about electronic information technology, one that continues a prior pattern:  the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping and Wikileaks come to mind.

The sad fact is that no electronic communications are genuinely secure.  That’s why the Pentagon has all but declared war in cyberspace.  Individuals are vulnerable, but the government is also vulnerable, as are companies and all the institutions of a modern open society.  Closed systems don’t do much better.  I can’t wait until the day some Chinese hacker turns his skills on the Communist Party.  Even Osama bin Laden’s extensive efforts at infosec proved vulnerable partly because his couriers used the internet.

The only reasonable way to respond to this vulnerability is to limit the extent of what we try to keep secret, and intensify the efforts to build a wall around that truly high value turf. Ninety-eight per cent of what most of us say and write should be said and written with the understanding that it might be heard or conveyed to the public.  Not that hacking into cell phones is justified.  Just difficult to prevent.

That has not however been the general impulse.  Institutions everywhere are trying to cast a broader net to protect a wide swathe of information.  Security officers are requiring that more and more computers and offices be swept for bugs, passwords changed, visitors screened and documents shredded.  I am not talking here about classified government information, but unclassified, publicly available data that I might post on www.peacefare.net.

When I was science counselor in the U.S. embassy in Brasilia, an American intelligence product published as secret photographs of a rocket launch facility that I had visited several times.  It was used every two years to launch U.S. Air Force sounding rockets but someone at the Pentagon imagined it so sensitive that they needed to take overhead photographs of it from outer space.  They were not amused when I offered to smile for the cameras next time I stood on the launch pad.

Don’t get me wrong:  there are some real secrets out there, including secrets about what is secret, since sources and methods are often as valuable as specific data.  I wouldn’t want our enemies knowing everything about us.  Loose lips used to sink ships.  Now even tight lips may do it, if they are attached to someone who uses email.

Murdoch and his sidekick Rebekah Brooks denied yesterday to a parliamentary committee that they had authorized or knew about hacking by News Corp.  It’s possible they did not know.  No great resources are needed to do the dirty deed, and any employee with sense would not tell the boss, to provide plausible deniability. That doesn’t jibe of course with Murdoch’s infamous attention to detail in his operations, but the one employee so far willing to speak up on this subject has expired of unknown causes.

Somehow it is fitting that Murdoch, who stands to lose billions as a result of the scandal, elicited the first whiff of sympathy when some low life in a plaid shirt (who wears a plaid shirt in London?) doused him with shaving foam (or was it really whipped cream?), and got clocked by Murdoch’s wife in turn.  Taste and behavior worse than Murdoch’s is hard to come by.  But there is always someone prepared to push the envelope: