On
2 October Julian Assange took part in a debate at the Parliamentary
Assembly of the Council of Europe. PACE’s conclusion was that
Assange had been a political prisoner.
Assange
said, '“only
US citizens have free speech rights; Europeans and other
nationalities do not have free speech rights.” the
US “Espionage
Act still applies to them regardless of where they are. So, Europeans
in Europe must obey US secrecy law with no densenesses at all,”An
American in Paris”
“can
talk about what the US government is up to – perhaps. But for a
Frenchman in Paris, to do so is a crime without any defence and he
may be extradited just like me.”
As
part of his plea deal to end his incarceration, Assange is prevented
from filing
a case at the European Court of Human Rights or even a freedom of
information act request”
in the US.
From
the Socialist Standard January 2011
‘Wikileaks
is currently under heavy attack.
In order to make it
impossible to ever fully remove Wikileaks from the Internet,
Wikileaks is currently mirrored on 1426 up-to -date sites (from
WikiLeaks website)
Once
upon a time, if you wanted to keep a secret, you locked it in a
drawer and held the only key. When states wanted to keep secrets,
they used huge underground warehouses with security locks and armed
guards to store the vast quantity of information compiled by their
spies, spooks and secret police. Most of this information was
useless, and most of it never saw the light of day. Then the
information revolution happened.
A very large wired
information network looks exactly like a sieve, and that's
essentially what it is. Information leaks out of it in any number of
ways, on purpose or by accident. When you can hold the personal
details of 50,000 people on a pen-drive no larger than a cigarette
lighter and when these can fall out of pockets on the tube train
home, the potential for leakage is gigantic. Then there is email,
which is not secure and which has become the preferred mode of
communication for all businesses and public services. Just a few
emails brought about 'Climategate' in 2009, in which a few careless
phrases by researchers at the University of East Anglia fatally
undermined the authority of the Independent Panel on Climate
Change.
The recent WikiLeaks' exposure of the private
lives and opinions of the world's movers and shakers has been so
prodigiously covered in the press that the details are scarcely worth
covering again, yet from a socialist standpoint the furore deserves
to be set within a wider context than the conventional media never
discusses. The capitalist class, as indeed all hitherto ruling
classes, owes its power not only to its private ownership and control
of wealth but also its private ownership and control of information,
and inevitably socialists must ask themselves to what extent the
overthrow of the latter is likely to lead to the overthrow of the
former.
While controlled leaks have always been a tool of
government, or internecine feuds within government, it was rare until
recently for damaging information ever to escape and when it did,
retribution was punitive. When in the 1970s Philip Agee, a CIA agent
working in the UK, published an exposé of CIA operations including
names of operatives, the US authorities reacted with fury, had him
deported and mounted a smear campaign against him involving sex
allegations and alcoholism that ran to 18,000 pages (Guardian,
19 December). In 1971 Richard Nixon was tape-recorded speaking thus
of Daniel Ellsberg, another Pentagon mole gone public: "Let's
get the son of a bitch into jail.... Don't worry about his trial. Try
him in the press."
Mud, glorious mud
The
founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, has made no secret of his
involvement in the leaks, so one would be astonished not to see
governments trying to fling whatever mud they could at him. And sure
enough, he is currently on bail in the UK and facing possible
extradition to Sweden to answer sex crime allegations, followed by a
possible further rendition to the US to face a lifetime wearing an
orange jumpsuit in a certain Cuban seaside resort.
That
these allegations are a frame-up is a conclusion that many people
have leapt to with a conviction thus far unsupported by the known
facts, however it is undeniable that the whole business looks damned
fishy. If the UK or Swedish authorities go one step further and allow
the Americans to get their hands on him, the affair may well blow up
to become the Dreyfus case of the 21st century.
But how do
you try a website? WikiLeaks is a game-changer for state security
forces and radicals alike, challenging the whole notion of secrecy
and calling into question what if anything can be kept secret. The
universal state condemnation of WikiLeaks rings increasingly hollow
and comical when one looks at the massive public support for it. The
vast number of mirroring sites – sites that duplicate WikiLeaks –
means that WikiLeaks could not realistically be shut down without
shutting down the internet.
It isn't only source websites
which pose a problem for state security, it's also destination sites.
If you wanted to leak a confidential document in 1950, there would
only be a few newspapers or small printing presses to leak it to,
most of whom would not risk touching it. Conventional media tend to
have a symbiotic, back-scratching relationship with government which
ensures that newspapers are self-regulating so direct news bans – D
notices – are rarely invoked. Media bosses are capitalists
themselves and have no interest in rocking the boat. But the other
side of the information equation is publication and distribution, and
the internet has created unlimited scope for both.
Thus
Wikileaks can sidestep conventional media and leak to anywhere, even
to the Socialist Standard if it chose to, which means that the
capitalist class has for all practical purposes lost control of the
mass media. It cannot hope to strike mutually agreeable deals with
every media outlet, especially not those avowedly hostile to it, and
any attempt to coerce or threaten such outlets would be likely to
blow up in its face and make matters worse.
Off with
their heads
Aside from the allegations against Julian
Assange, Wikileaks itself is not however above criticism. Its
foundation in 2006 is shrouded in some mystery. Founders allegedly
include Chinese dissidents, mathematicians, technologists and
journalists, yet none have been identified. There is supposedly an
advisory board of 9 members, yet one 'board member' has said that his
involvement is minimal and that the board is merely 'window
dressing'. One volunteer told Wired Magazine that
Assange considers himself "the heart and soul of this
organisation, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder,
organiser, financier, and all the rest". Indeed, WikiLeaks
is not even a Wiki anymore because Assange has removed public editing
access to it, and has moved away from being a mere whistleblowers'
conduit to a full publisher in his own right. Whether or not he set
out to do so, Assange does seem to be going for personal glory but in
doing so is drawing down all the fire on himself. One-man-bands don't
play well when they're playing against the state. One way or another,
American and European state agencies are out to get WikiLeaks which
is why the obvious move is to go for a decapitation strike against
Assange himself.
Even if they succeed in bringing down
Assange, there is no stopping what he started. This month a former
Wikileaks advisor is set to found a new website called OpenLeaks,
which aims to avoid the problems WikiLeaks has encountered,
specifically by being governed democratically and by remaining as a
conduit for anonymous information rather than empire-building into a
publishing enterprise. At heart is the open source philosophy which
holds that cooperative and transparent endeavour is more productive
and progressive than the secretive and territorial ethos which
underpins most capitalist activity: "Our long term goal
is to build a strong, transparent platform to support whistleblowers
– both in terms of technology and politics – while at the same
time encouraging others to start similar projects" (Wikipedia,
OpenLeaks). There is a parallel here with file-sharing sites, which
started as centrally controlled databases (Napster) that were easy to
target and kill, before evolving into distributed peer-to-peer
systems which had no centre and could never be nailed down and
neutralised. There is a further parallel to be made here with
democratic models in politics. Socialists oppose leaders and
vanguardist leadership-based groups on the left, not only in fact but
also in theory, because top-down hierarchy structures are too easy to
neutralise. In fact, as a distributed, egalitarian and transparent
organisation, we could lay claim to being the original political Open
Source movement.
All of a Twitter
There is a
momentum of workers' disgust at capitalism at the moment, at least in
the western countries, starting with the sub-prime collapse which
exposed nonsensical business logic, then massive bail-outs and
bankers bonuses, together with squalid parliamentary expense fiddles,
followed by the most savage cuts in living memory and attacks on the
poor and those on benefits. Anyone who thought 'the yoof of today'
could never be motivated by politics is having to eat their words as
students pour onto the streets, camcorders in hand to record and
upload police cavalry charges onto YouTube just as the police attempt
to deny them. Meanwhile 'hacktivists' attack banks with massive
Denial of Service offensives and the spontaneously organised UK-Uncut
group occupy and picket the stores and offices of banks, mobile phone
companies and high street stores accused of large scale tax
avoidance. Though one could always quibble with these activists'
grasp of the bigger picture over tax, or their tactics in singling
out individual companies when, after all, they're all at it, you've
got to admire how the digital native generation are mobilising their
opposition in ways that the ruling class has not anticipated and is
ill-prepared for.
The grubby game that is capitalism is
being exposed as never before in its history, and more people are
getting to know about it every day. The genie is out of the bottle,
and there's no putting it back in. These are interesting times for
socialists.’
Paddy
Shannon
