Credible deniability
The situation of credible deniability (also credible deniability ; English plausible deniability ) exists when a person or organizational unit can convincingly deny knowing or participating in morally reprehensible or criminal processes within their sphere of influence and therefore no responsibility can be proven, regardless of the actual veracity of this denial. The term was coined by the CIA in the early 1960s and describes the strategy of protecting high-ranking officials and government members from criminal prosecution or other negative consequences in the event that illegal or unpopular CIA activities would become public.
By analogy, the term is now also used to describe certain encryption techniques in computer science.
politics
Credible deniability describes a doctrine in politics that was developed in the United States in the 1950s and used in the then newly formed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
According to the doctrine, governance structures and chains of command should be so loose and informal that they could easily be denied if necessary . For example, an Operations Coordinating Board , a secret committee affiliated to the National Security Council, coordinated covert operations of the CIA or programs such as MKULTRA . A representative of the US President on this board, a role that the politician and industrialist Nelson Rockefeller assumed under President Eisenhower , allowed the President to remain informed about covert operations while at the same time providing "credible deniability" to the US Congress to uphold the partly illegal actions. The aim was to enable the CIA to be given politically sensitive assignments by people in power, including the president himself. The originator or the very existence of these orders should be contested if an undercover operation failed or if political damage was feared if an official body took responsibility. This strategy was later used by other organizations as well.
The doctrine has several disadvantages. First of all, it is an open gateway to abuse of power . It assumes that the organizations concerned can claim that they acted independently. This inevitably means that they can actually act independently, because any control instrument that limited independence would also be suitable for uncovering delicate arrangements. If the control is limited to a subsequent information obligation on the part of the organization, the recipient of the information is dependent on voluntary statements which, in case of doubt, are incomplete or incorrect.
After all, in the past, doctrine often did not work when applied: denying a fact was implausible. Independent media and the public saw the real connections. Critics also describe the credible deniability as a form of hypocrisy or as targeted disinformation .
The best known example of the failure of the strategy is the Watergate affair , in which the government failed to relieve President Richard Nixon of responsibility for the scandal. Another example is the Iran-Contra affair , in the course of which the responsible security advisor John Poindexter assumed all responsibility and thus exonerated President Ronald Reagan . But Poindexter's statements undermined the president's authority: They conveyed the image that he had lost control.
The term became topical again in the case of the MH17 passenger aircraft that was shot down by a Russian weapon system in 2014, when, just a few days after the shooting down, the punishment of the culprits was described as possibly unlikely. Only in the case of the Russian soldiers in Crimea did President Putin personally admit Russian activities, while Russia pursues a strategy of denial in the case of apparent military support in eastern Ukraine.
Information technology
In information technology , mechanisms for credible deniability are used in anonymous peer-to-peer networks or generally with data encryption in order to be able to deny the origin or the existence of information. They are procedures used to hide confidential data or the origin of data so that their existence or origin cannot be proven.
The Rubberhose file system developed by Julian Assange , Suelette Dreyfus and Ralf Weinmann in 1997 offered an early implementation of credibly controversial encryption . Well-known, more recent examples are the anonymous, censorship-resistant network Tor , Freenet and the file encryption software FreeOTFE , VeraCrypt and TrueCrypt . The encryption principle of off-the-record messaging (OTR) also ensures credible deniability.
Individual evidence
- ^ National Security Council Directive on Covert Operations, NSC 5412, National Archives, RG 273.
- ↑ Klaas Voss: Washington's Mercenaries - Covert US Interventions in the Cold War and their Consequences, Hamburger Edition HIS Verlagsges. mbH
- ↑ Gerard Colby, Charlotte Dennet Thy Will be Done. The Conquest of The Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil. Pp. 263-266
- ↑ The Watergate ghost is gone . In: Der Spiegel . No. 30 , 1987, pp. 86-89 ( online ).
- ↑ MH17: why the culprits may never be caught , The Telegraph, July 27, 2014
- ↑ Putin Has Committed Russia to a Risky Gamble , Bloomberg, March 16, 2018
- ^ Will MH17 air crash damage to Russia's Putin? BBC, July 23, 2014
- ↑ Marcel Rosenbach , Holger Stark : Public enemy WikiLeaks. How a group of net activists challenge the most powerful nations in the world . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-421-04518-8 , pp. 51 f .