During the Qin and Han dynasties, the whole society did not pay enough attention to information security. On the one hand, except for targeted laws and regulations for individual types of information leakage, the government has not formulated complete and universal restrictive laws and regulations.
On the other hand, Qin and Han society lacked a unified moral evaluation standard for information leakage, which made this behavior subject to limited moral constraints, and some leakers did not stop at anything to achieve their ends.
In addition, in exceptional cases, leakage is even encouraged to be laissez-faire. Under the influence of various factors, information leaks during the Qin and Han dynasties were common.
The content of information leakage, the channels for leakers to obtain information and the channels of information leakage were sorted out, and special situations such as leakers leaking information through fiction or fabrication of information, and information leakage through disaster prediction information were analyzed, forming a more systematic and comprehensive research framework for information leakage in the Qin and Han periods.
In this way, we can not only understand the information dissemination of Qin and Han society, but also understand the actual situation of political struggle, military warfare, interpersonal communication and other aspects of this period through information leakage incidents, which will help us to study the political history, military history, legal history, ideological history and other aspects of the Qin and Han dynasties more comprehensively and deeply, so as to promote the understanding of the history of the Qin and Han dynasties.
1. Leakage of military and political information during the Qin and Han dynasties
The leakage of military and political information during the Qin and Han dynasties specifically refers to a series of military and political information that may have an impact on the security and stability of the regime, the authority and interests of the ruling class, the victories and defeats of military wars, etc., and is limited to a certain time and group of people, intentionally or unintentionally leaked to the circumstances of improper knowledge of personnel within the scope of knowledge.
The political affairs of the Qin and Han dynasties were mainly political matters related to the management and ruling of the country such as monarchs and military ministers, including various types of political discussions, policy guidelines, administrative duties, and so on.
These contents are often related to the security and stability of the national political situation and are closely related to the interests of the ruling class, so if the relevant parties have not expressly authorized the disclosure of political information, the dissemination of political information is restricted, and once it is transmitted to others, whether intentional or not, it is very easy to form leakage incidents.
As far as the relevant handed down and excavated documents are concerned, in the context of the complicated political environment and the conflicting interests, although the Qin and Han dynasties had institutional norms and legal provisions in the protection of political information, it was difficult to completely prohibit the transmission of political information, and the leakage of political information occurred frequently.
As the ruler of an autocratic and centralized dynasty, some daily remarks of the Qin and Han monarchs, important political decisions of the monarch, etc., to a large extent, will reflect the political attitude of the monarch, affect the normal administrative operation and even the trend of the political situation, so it often becomes an important content of the information leakage of the monarch's political affairs.
Courtiers' discussions, specifically, are courtiers expressing their opinions to the monarch in accordance with specific procedures and in a specific format, and expressing information in writing or verbal discussions, which is a part of the courtiers' participation in politics and is also the duty of the courtiers, and the relevant information belongs to political information.
The leakage of courtiers' political affairs information mainly refers to the leakage of courtiers' discussion information. During the Qin and Han dynasties, there were other incidents that could be classified as leaks of political information, such as records as an important means of administrative management or the leakage of documents containing information about military and political work, including secretaries and local government secretaries.
During the Qin and Han dynasties, domestic rebellion wars broke out from time to time, battles between different military groups were particularly frequent at the time of dynastic changes, and the surrounding Xiongnu and South Vietnam gradually became the henchmen threatening the Qin and Han dynasties.
The leakage of Qin and Han military war information refers to the leakage of relevant information that affects the course of military operations and the success or failure, and is more common in military group struggles and ethnic wars.
Specifically, the content of information leakage includes information on combat effectiveness, military calculations, and the whereabouts of the defeated.
Second, the leakage of private information during the Qin and Han dynasties
During the Qin and Han dynasties, not only did there be leaks of military and political information, but also the leakage of private information was quite frequent.
When the leaker spreads private affairs that may be related to the lives, lives, reputations, and prospects of various people, including military and political personnel and ordinary people, and is in a state that the person concerned has not or is unwilling to disclose, the leakage of private information occurs.
Criminal information, mainly private individuals seriously interfere with and disrupt normal social order and affect the personal and property safety of others, and there are clear crimes and relevant acts recorded in the corresponding punishments in the laws and regulations of the Qin and Han Dynasties.
The actions of the perpetrator are often private and secret, and the relevant information will be avoided in front of others. When the ruler and the relevant authorities do not know the details, someone voluntarily provides illegal information about the perpetrator, and for these criminals, it is a leakage of information.
Private morality refers to private morality, cultivation, work style, habits, and moral norms for dealing with love, marriage, family problems, and neighborhood relations in private life.
During the Qin and Han dynasties, because it was related to feudal rites and the establishment of feudal social order, private morality, especially family ethics, was highly valued by the ruling class, and was an important criterion for measuring a person. As a result, relevant information often becomes the focus of leaks.
During the Qin and Han dynasties, when personal private verbal conversations involving contemporary or modern monarchs, politics, etc., those who wanted to put them at a disadvantage would leak these private words they heard to the imperial court as slanderous information.
In addition to the above types of private information leakage, during the Qin and Han dynasties, there were also cases of leaking information on personal physical characteristics, descendant inheritance, living whereabouts, "transportation" and so on.
Third, the basic link of Qin and Han information leakage
In the process of information leakage, the leaker must go through two basic links, the first is to obtain information through certain channels, and then to disclose the information to others in some way.
During the Qin and Han dynasties, although affected by a series of factors such as the background of the times, technical level and documentary materials, there were some incidents that were difficult to explore the specific leakage links because the records of the leakers were unclear.
However, in the vast majority of leaks, it is clear who the information belongs to, who leaked and who receives it, and the channels through which the leaker obtains the information and the way through which the information is leaked can be clearly detected.
Carefully reading the relevant materials of Qin Han's information leakage, we can find that the leaker has the following channels to obtain information. First, the leaker steals or buys information, and stealing information is that the leaker obtains the relevant information of the required party by stealing text carriers such as chapter documents or eavesdropping.
Second, the leaker spied on or monitored the information, and the leaker secretly inquired or observed to obtain certain private information, which is especially common when there is a conflict of interest or hostility between the two parties; Leaker surveillance information is similar to espionage information, both of which are obtained through inquiry or observation.
In the Qin Han information leakage incident, there is such a group of leakers, they are either information subjects, or event participants, or subordinates, service personnel or relatives and friends of information subjects, etc., with special identities and full advantages in information acquisition, and their identities themselves imply important channels for information acquisition.
According to the degree of activity and passivity of the leaker, the leaker's way of leaking information can be divided into two ways: one is that the leaker actively seeks ways to leak the information he has to relevant personnel. One is that the leaker passively leaks the information he knows to the recipient of the information under the drive of some factor.
The leaker holds the private information of the information subject, and under the stimulation of strong subjective motives, the leaker will actively disclose the information.
Generally speaking, the leaker is mainly driven by the following motives to carry out information leakage: First, there is a contradiction between the leaker and the information subject, and the leaker hopes to create trouble for the information subject and retaliate against the information subject. Second, the leaker wants to seek benefits from the recipient of the information.
Third, the leaker hopes to reduce his own punishment through information leakage. Fourth, the good friendship between the leaker and the recipient of the information often becomes an important motive for the leaker to disclose information. In order to avoid harm to the recipient of the information that was handed over, the leaker will actively disclose the information.
The reason why there is a way for the leaker to passively disclose information is mainly because the leaker itself has no intention of leaking information through some way, but it comes from the suspicion, interrogation and arrest of the information recipient, etc., which prompts him to disclose the information.
4. Special information leakage
During the Qin and Han dynasties, there were also some relatively special information leaks. Specifically, it refers to the use of information recipients by the leaker in order to seize the opportunity and obtain benefits.
In particular, the thirst for some information that may affect oneself, or the relevant situation of making up and altering information on the basis of a certain reality, or predicting information through disasters and directly conveying it to the recipient of the information as real information.
Whether the leaker deliberately fabricates or alters information for leakage, the relevant leaked content generated is essentially false information that deviates from reality.
It's just that the fictitious information is completely created out of nothing by the leaker; The alteration of information is the distortion and distortion of the leaker's true information about the subject of the information that he has.
The purpose of the two is also very different, through the leakage of fictitious information, the focus of the leaker is to seek opportunities and reputation rights for themselves; By leaking altered information, the leaker is intended to cause the subject of the information to be unfavorably traced.
The leaker's prediction of the leakage of information through the catastrophe is actually from the standpoint of this specific information subject, and the relevant views on the catastrophe prophecy that the catastrophe fulfills on himself.
For information subjects, without understanding the way to obtain information about the disaster, confidential information that they are unwilling to disclose suddenly becomes a catastrophe prophecy of the disaster, and they will subconsciously feel that this is a man-made information leakage incident.
It is said that a disaster is an information leaker, and his act of predicting information through disaster and communicating it to the recipient of information is an information leakage act.
brief summary
In the leakage of political information, the monarch has a strong sense of presence. As the supreme ruler, the monarch's position of power had a greater impact on the information leakage during this period.
In the leakage of military information and private affairs, the many illegal and criminal acts involved in the leaked content can see the control of society by state forces.
In the leakage of disaster prediction information, the disaster phenomenon is not controlled by manpower, but is a natural phenomenon that happens to appear, and it happens to be used by those who talk about disasters.
The success of catastrophe prophecy not only has the effect of information leakage, but also makes scripture more acceptable to those in power and into the political field. Under the respect of those in power, it is conducive to the development of scripture and at the same time helps to consolidate the status of scholars and scripture.