Wikileaks: Truth Really is Stranger Than Fiction
On November 28th, Wikileaks dropped a bombshell on the world and set the media ablaze by publishing the first 219 of 251,287 leaked diplomatic cables from US embassies around the world.i Perhaps like me, you could have imagined what sort of things these cables might contain – widespread corruption, double-dealing, and complacency about human rights abuses – the truth, it turns out, does not disappoint. In the few short weeks since then, diplomatic ties have been strained, a veritable army of hackers (over 9,000-strong and growingii) has waged war on the world powers, the sexual escapades of Wikileaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange have made headlines, and the world has changed in significant and irreversible ways. The question is now seriously posed: has technology advanced to such a point that information can no longer be contained?The stream of Wikileaks news has been steady (to the point of being overwhelming) and shows no sign of ebbing. “It’s a story that is destined to keep on giving”, says Curt Hopkinsiii of the technology blog ReadWriteWeb. Reportedly originating among Chinese dissidents and officially launched in 2006, Wikileaks is an online place (and means) for whistleblowers to publish classified, confidential and censored documents for all to see.iv These days, considerable effort has been made to portray it as the anarchist playground of a strange blond Australian (Julian Assange), but WikiLeaks has always been taken seriously by the journalistic community, having won the Economist magazine New Media Award and Assange himself having won the Amnesty International UK Media Award, both in 2008. The government of Russia has formally suggested that Assange should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and he is the Readers’ Choice for Time magazine’s 2010 Person of the Year award.
You may remember the video, posted last April, of a US attack helicopter firing on and killing Iraqi civilians and a Reuters journalist, complete with disturbing American cockpit chatter.v This video was followed by the Afghan War Diary (more than 76,900 documents) in July 2010 and the Iraq War Logs (almost 400,000 documents) in October, with support from major commercial media organizations. These are the field reports of the US Army, revealing that US troops had been advised not to interfere when they reported acts of torture and abuse by Iraqi and Afghan soldiers.vi They also exposed the real death count in Iraq, which it turns out, was a whopping 80% civilian.vii These were shocking revelations to those who still believed the war was about building schools for little girls and rooting bearded terrorists out of holes.
It’s the most recent leaks, however, that have the international ruling class up in arms – confidential communications between the US State Department and 274 embassies around the world, dating from 1966 to February 2010. In the words of Private Bradley Manning, who will likely spend 52 years in jail for handing over classified documents to Wikileaks, they expose “how the first world exploits the third, in detail.”viii “Everywhere there’s a U.S. post, there’s a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed.” For example, it has been revealed that the pressure to bomb Iran has come not just from Israel but also from Saudi Arabia and much of the Sunni Arab world.ix One of the leaked cables indicates that the US Undersecretary of State for Africa, Jendayi Frazer, began pushing Ethiopia in 2006 to invade Somalia and that American interests were in fact the driving force behind the 2007 war.x This war was a complete failure from the perspective of both Ethiopia and the US, and left 20,000 dead and up to 2 million Somalis homeless. God bless America.
Of course, there have been plenty of personally compromising tidbits as well. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton asked diplomats to spy on and collect the personal information of UN personnel, including credit card account numbers. This, at the UN headquarters in New York, where the US has made a formal commitment not to do any surveillance. She also apparently directed diplomatic staff to collect DNA, fingerprints and iris scans of officials in several African states.
Obviously, the world powers, anxious to defend their own imperialist interests, as well as their ties with American imperialism, have been trying to crack down on Wikileaks and its supporters. They had heard the November 28th leaks were coming, and just as they were about to be published, Wikileaks was hit with a massive DDoS attack. Distributed Denial Of Service attackxi is hacker-speak for harnessing the power of many unsuspecting computers (called zombies or bots) which suddenly and simultaneously bombard a particular web site or service with information requests, causing it to shut down so that it is unavailable online.xii Too late though, because instead of publishing them himself, Assange had decided to hand over the entire archive to some of the world’s biggest media outlets: Der Spiegel in Germany, El País in Spain, Le Monde in France, The Guardian in the UK, and of course The New York Times.
Meanwhile, Wikileaks has some friends around the world who are fairly web savvy and have put the leaks back up and on hundreds of other servers too.
America is at war with Wikileaks, and it’s a war on several fronts. Senator Joe Lieberman (Chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs) has been pressuring all the huge internet, credit card and financial corporations (Mastercard, VISA, Twitter, Facebook, PayPal, Amazon, ...) to cut off service and withhold funds from Wikileaks.xiii Even a Swiss bank has frozen Assange’s assets. Funny, they’ll turn a blind eye when serving high profile international gang- and drug-lords, but not our Australian friend who apparently hasn’t actually broken any laws that apply to him, as a non-American (unless “maybe having a condom break during consensual sex” is a crime, more on that below).
The first major front is in cyberspace, and Lieberman and Co. are up against the collective strength of the world’s brightest computer hackers who, in addition to being very talented, are quite clever. When PayPal, Mastercard and VISA decided to stop releasing Wikileaks’ funds, the international hacktivist group that calls itself Anonymous shocked everybody by shutting them each down for a few hours on December 8th. Think about that for a minute – they shut down PayPal, VISA and Mastercard. And apparently the brevity of the “outage” was intentional. They didn’t actually want to inconvenience your on-line shopping; they just wanted to make a point. Something along the lines of, “Look, we do DDoS attacks too, and we do them better than you, because we invented them!”
Anonymous is a fascinating group and probably deserves an article of its own. It is fascinating in its organization, or lack thereof, because they are essentially anarchist. In other words, nobody is in charge. It is fascinating in its integrity, carefully selecting targets, never taking any action against media, even when the media has attacked them. While the latest official numbers are 9,000, the software that Anonymous “volunteers” use to participate in a DDoS attack has now (as of December 15th) been downloaded over 300,00 times.xiv
I personally find this show of collective force completely fascinating and inspiring, and it’s the main reason that I am drawn to the Wikileaks issue and to the Wiki phenomenon in general. A wiki (yes, Wikipedia is one of them!) is a website that is collectively created and edited, and self- moderated. There’s a critical mass component, in that enough people, perspectives and areas of expertise must be represented to ensure accuracy. And there must be an established and accepted set of rules (often defined by the functions and capacities of the site itself). Completely shocking to my marxist-leaning sensibilities, Wikis seem to work. Wikipedia is a completely reliable source for information and it does self-regulate, despite the fact that anybody can edit (although, all information must be sourced and if it is not, it will be removed almost instantly by Wikipedia staff who you can contact to discuss why). I recently read a study (which I can’t find now, so I can’t verify with a source) that indicated that social-networking forums like Facebook and Twitter have similar self-regulating capacity. When “false” information was sent out into the universe (like, say, “condoms don’t prevent HIV transmission” or “the universe is 6,000 years old”), it was peer-edited and the “correct” information (“condoms do prevent HIV transmission”, etc.) came to dominate.
Back to the wiki in question – Wikileaks! Possibly even more intriguing than the cyber aspect of the war on Wikipedia (depending on your taste) are the painfully desperate, and frankly shameful attempts to get Julian Assange in custody. On August 20th, 2010 a Swedish warrant was issued for Mr. Assange’s arrest, in connection with two apparent sexual assaults (both supposedly resulting from
connections made at what must have been an arousing seminar on War and the role of the media in Stockholm ...).xv
The timing was definitely suspicious, but sexual assault is sexual assault, right? As I am learning from my recent study of Canadian criminal law as it applies to HIV, not really. It turns out that what he was actually wanted for was a Swedish-grown offense called “sex by surprise”, which means a condom might have broken – an offense with a $715 fine. Anywhere else in the western world, we would skip the fine and call this a public health intervention – the women were at an STD clinic, learned that they may have put Assange at risk for an STD, and public health did as public health does by giving sex partners a heads- up that they should also get tested. Too bad Assange was already on the run and the subject of an international manhunt, facing extradition to Sweden if arrested. So far, the story hasn’t gotten much stranger than that. Our anti-hero turned himself in to London police on December 7th and they’re waffling on what to do with him.
But wait a minute, he was actually arrested because American and world imperialism want him dead. Oh, right, silly me. What exactly has Assange done, and is it illegal? To be fair, Wikileaks is bigger than just Julian; the world does like to have a scapegoat. So, what exactly has Wikileaks done, and is it illegal? The truth is, no.xvi It is illegal in America to release classified US government documents. But Assange is not American and not in the US.
While I jest and am amused by the particulars (honestly, it reads like a really engaging post-modernist spy story), this is pretty serious business. I’m afraid that while we have no idea what tomorrow holds, the likelihood that Assange will wind up spending life in prison (or worse) is fairly high. If we have learned anything from Wikileaks, it’s that governments today don’t follow the rules. I said in my introduction that Wikileaks has changed the world in irreversible ways. Maybe you and I knew that American imperialism is an evil force, but we couldn’t prove it to the world. Wikileaks demonstrates that the flow of information might now be unstoppable. While I am afraid we may face some serious Chinese-style crackdowns on the world wide web, I have confidence in my Anonymous masked crusaders – the internet rules this world, and these folks rule the internet.
I’ve believed all of my adult life that humanity’s future survival depends on our ability to plan and coordinate rather than leaving the running of society and the economy up to the inhumane and wasteful forces of the capitalist economyxvii. I also believe that the only sustainable kind of planning and coordination is democraticxviii. Technology as it stands today, is such that we actually have a means for everybody to be engaged in discussion and democratic decision-making around issues that matter to them. We now have a tool. But my belief doesn’t come with faith, except faith that it’s possible. The changes that are taking place in the world right now are exciting to me, because there are so many of them, and change is good. But it’s also scary. I’ll end with a quote from Bradley Manning (the youngster who will hopefully not spend his life in jail) about the potential of Wikileaks:
“Worldwide anarchy in CSV format. It’s beautiful and horrifying.”
PS – I just learned (December 15th, 11:00pm PST) from my Twitter feed that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was named “Person of the Year” and not Julian Assange. Fair enough, Zuckerberg has changed the world too. Hopefully this is not a bad omen for our Australian friend ...
Miriam Martin
December 15, 2010
References:
i. Secret US Ambassy Cables. Retrieved from http://wikileaks.ch/cablegate.html
ii. Halliday, J. (2010, December 11). WikiLeaks backlash: The first global cyber war has begun, claim hackers. Guardian UK. Retrieved from http://www.guardian.co. uk/media/2010/dec/11/wikileaks-backlash- cyber-war
iii. Hopkins, C. (2010, December 3). Top 10 Culture of Tech Stories of 2010. ReadWriteWeb. Retrieved from http://www. readwriteweb.com/archives/top_10_culture_o f_tech_stories_of_2010.php
iv. Wikileaks. Wikipedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks
v. July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike. Wikipedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipe dia.org/wiki/12_July_2007_Baghdad_airstrike
vi. al-Jaza’iri, I. (2010, December 9). WikiLeaks: imperialist backroom deals revealed – free Bradley Manning, abolish secret diplomacy! In Defence of Marxism. Retrieved from http://www.marxist.com/ wikileaks-imperialist-backroom-deals.htm
vii. Iraq War Logs. Wikipedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War_Logs
viii. Verma, S. (2010, December 7). WikiLeaks suspect thought actions might ‘actually change something’. The Globe and Mail. Retrieved from http://www.theglobeandmail. com/news/world/americas/wikileaks-suspect- thought-actions-might-actually-changesome thing/article1827622/
ix. Goldfarb, M. (2010, November 29). WikiLeaks: limited damage. GlobalPost. Retrieved from http://www.globalpost.com/ dispatch/diplomacy/101129/wikilieaks-state- department-documents
x. Prince, R. (2010, December 14). WikiLeaks Reveals US Twisted Ethiopia’s Arm to Invade Somolia. AntiWar.com. Retrieved from http://original.antiwar.com/prince/2010/ 12/13/wikileaks-reveals-us-twisted-ethiopias -arm-to-invade-somalia/
xi. @wikileaks. (2010, November 28). We are currently under a mass distributed denial of service attack. Twitter. Retrieved from http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/89205304 88926208
xii. distributed denial-of-service attack. (2010, November 5). Search Security. Retrieved from http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/ sDefinition/0,,sid14_gci557336,00.html
xiii. Hopkins, C. (2010, December 12). ReadWriteWeb’s Comprehensive WikiLeaks Timeline. ReadWriteWeb. Retrieved from http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/read writewebs_wikileaks_timeline.php
xiv. Kiley, S. (2010, December 16). Exclusive: More Cyber Attacks Promised. Sky News. Retrieved from http://news.sky.com/skynews /Home/Technology/Cyber-Warriors-Anonymo us-Internet-Insurgents-Who-Support-Julian- Assange-And-WikiLeaks/Article/2010123158 56259?f=rss
xv. Timeline: sexual allegations against Assange in Sweden. (2010, November 16). BBC News Europe. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-119 49341
xvi. Ingram, M. (2010, December 7). Has WikiLeaks Actually Done Anything Illegal? Gigaom. Retrieved from http://gigaom.com/ 2010/12/07/has-wikileaks-actually-done-any thing-illegal/
xvii. Read Karl Marx.
xviii. Read Leon Trotsky.
