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Tue Dec 7 12:50:07 PST 2010

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Subject: Live With the WikiLeakable World or Shut Down the Net. It's Your
	Choice
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MiniFunPeople........................................ISSN 1098-7649
Forwarded-by: Peter Langston <MiniFunPeople at psl.to>
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/12/06-9
/Published on Monday, December 6, 2010 by The Guardian UK/

  *Live With the WikiLeakable World or Shut Down the Net. It's Your Choice*

  Western political elites obfuscate, lie and bluster b and when
  the veil of secrecy is lifted, they try to kill the messenger

  by John Naughton

"Never waste a good crisis" used to be the catchphrase of the Obama team in 
the runup to the presidential election. In that spirit, let us see what we 
can learn from official reactions to the WikiLeaks revelations  
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/the-us-embassy-cables>.

The most obvious lesson is that it represents the first really sustained  
confrontation between the established order and the culture of the 
internet. There have been skirmishes before, but this is the real thing.

And as the backlash unfolds b first with deniable attacks on internet 
service providers hosting WikiLeaks <http://tinyurl.com/38h7xlr>, later 
with companies like Amazon and eBay and PayPal  
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11917891> suddenly "discovering" 
that their terms and conditions preclude them from offering services to  
WikiLeaks, and then with the US government attempting to intimidate 
Columbia students posting updates about WikiLeaks on Facebook b the 
intolerance of the old order is emerging from the rosy mist in which it has 
hitherto been obscured. The response has been vicious, co-ordinated and 
potentially comprehensive, and it contains hard lessons for everyone who 
cares about democracy and about the future of the net.

There is a delicious irony in the fact that it is now the so-called liberal 
democracies that are clamouring to shut WikiLeaks down.

Consider, for instance, how the views of the US administration have changed 
in just a year. On 21 January, secretary of state Hillary Clinton made a 
landmark speech about internet freedom, in Washington DC, which many people 
welcomed and most interpreted as a rebuke to China for its alleged 
cyberattack on Google. "Information has never been so free," declared 
Clinton. "Even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping 
people discover new facts and making governments more accountable."

She went on to relate how, during his visit to China in November 2009, 
Barack Obama had "defended the right of people to freely access 
information, and said that the more freely information flows the stronger 
societies become. He spoke about how access to information helps citizens 
to hold their governments accountable, generates new ideas, and encourages 
creativity." Given what we now know, that Clinton speech reads like a 
satirical masterpiece.

One thing that might explain the official hysteria about the revelations is 
the way they expose how political elites in western democracies have been  
deceiving their electorates.

The leaks make it abundantly clear not just that the US-Anglo-European  
adventure in Afghanistan is doomed but, more important, that the American,  
British and other Nato governments privately admit that too.

The problem is that they cannot face their electorates b who also happen to 
be the taxpayers funding this folly b and tell them this. The leaked 
dispatches from the US ambassador to Afghanistan provide vivid confirmation 
that the Karzai regime is as corrupt and incompetent as the South 
Vietnamese regime in Saigon was when the US was propping it up in the 
1970s. And they also make it clear that the US is as much a captive of that 
regime as it was in Vietnam.

The WikiLeaks revelations expose the extent to which the US and its allies 
see no real prospect of turning Afghanistan into a viable state, let alone 
a functioning democracy. They show that there is no light at the end of 
this tunnel. But the political establishments in Washington, London and 
Brussels cannot bring themselves to admit this.

Afghanistan is, in that sense, a quagmire in the same way that Vietnam was. 
The only differences are that the war is now being fought by 
non-conscripted troops and we are not carpet-bombing civilians.

The attack of WikiLeaks also ought to be a wake-up call for anyone who has  
rosy fantasies about whose side cloud computing providers are on. These are 
firms like Google, Flickr, Facebook, Myspace and Amazon which host your 
blog or store your data on their servers somewhere on the internet, or 
which enable you to rent "virtual" computers b again located somewhere on 
the net. The terms and conditions under which they provide both "free" and 
paid-for services will always give them grounds for dropping your content 
if they deem it in their interests to do so. The moral is that you should 
not put your faith in cloud computing b one day it will rain on your 
parade.

Look at the case of Amazon, which dropped WikiLeaks from its Elastic 
Compute Cloud <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Elastic_Compute_Cloud> 
the moment the going got rough. It seems that Joe Lieberman, a US senator 
who suffers from a terminal case of hubris, harassed the company over the 
matter. Later Lieberman declared grandly that he would be "asking Amazon 
about the extent of its relationship with WikiLeaks and what it and other 
web service providers will do in the future to ensure that their services 
are not used to distribute stolen, classified information". This led the 
New Yorker's Amy Davidson to ask <http://tinyurl.com/2akqw7z> whether 
"Lieberman feels that he, or any senator, can call in the company running 
the New Yorker's printing presses when we are preparing a story that 
includes leaked classified material, and tell it to stop us".

What WikiLeaks is really exposing is the extent to which the western  
democratic system has been hollowed out. In the last decade its political  
elites have been shown to be incompetent (Ireland, the US and UK in not  
regulating banks); corrupt (all governments in relation to the arms trade); 
or recklessly militaristic (the US and UK in Iraq). And yet nowhere have 
they been called to account in any effective way. Instead they have 
obfuscated, lied or blustered their way through. And when, finally, the 
veil of secrecy is lifted, their reflex reaction is to kill the messenger.

As Simon Jenkins put it recently <http://tinyurl.com/35lg6yv> in the 
Guardian, "Disclosure is messy and tests moral and legal boundaries. It is 
often irresponsible and usually embarrassing. But it is all that is left 
when regulation does nothing, politicians are cowed, lawyers fall silent 
and audit is polluted. Accountability can only default to disclosure." What 
we are hearing from the enraged officialdom of our democracies is mostly 
the petulant screaming of emperors whose clothes have been shredded by the 
net.

Which brings us back to the larger significance of this controversy. The  
political elites of western democracies have discovered that the internet 
can be a thorn not just in the side of authoritarian regimes, but in their 
sides too. It has been comical watching them and their agencies stomp about 
the net like maddened, half-blind giants trying to whack a mole. It has 
been deeply worrying to watch terrified internet companies b with the 
exception of Twitter, so far b bending to their will.

But politicians now face an agonising dilemma. The old, mole-whacking 
approach won't work. WikiLeaks does not depend only on web technology. 
Thousands of copies of those secret cables b and probably of much else 
besides b are out there, distributed by peer-to-peer technologies like 
BitTorrent <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_%28protocol%29>. Our 
rulers have a choice to make: either they learn to live in a WikiLeakable 
world, with all that implies in terms of their future behaviour; or they 
shut down the internet. Over to them.
_______________
B) Guardian News and Media Limited 2010
John Naughton is professor of the public understanding of technology at the 
Open University

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/12/06-9
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