the blast shack

[Eugen Leitl]

http://www.webstock.org.nz/blog/2010/the-blast-shack/

The Blast Shack

22 December 2010

We asked Bruce Sterling (who spoke at Webstock b09) for his take on
Wikileaks.

The Wikileaks Cablegate scandal is the most exciting and interesting hacker
scandal ever. I rather commonly write about such things, and Ibm surrounded
by online acquaintances who take a burning interest in every little jot and
tittle of this ongoing saga. So itbs going to take me a while to explain why
this highly newsworthy event fills me with such a chilly, deadening sense of
Edgar Allen Poe melancholia.

But it sure does.

Part of this dull, icy feeling, I think, must be the agonizing slowness with
which this has happened. At last b at long last b the homemade nitroglycerin
in the old cypherpunks blast shack has gone off. Those bcypherpunks,b of all
people.

Way back in 1992, a brainy American hacker called Timothy C. May made up a
sci-fi tinged idea that he called bThe Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.b This
exciting screed b I read it at the time, and boy was it ever cool b was all
about anonymity, and encryption, and the Internet, and all about how wacky
data-obsessed subversives could get up to all kinds of globalized mischief
without any fear of repercussion from the blinkered authorities. If you were
of a certain technoculture bent in the early 1990s, you had to love a thing
like that.

As Tim blithely remarked to his fellow encryption enthusiasts, bThe State
will of course try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing
national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax
evaders, and fears of societal disintegration. Many of these concerns will be
valid; crypto anarchy will allow national secrets to be traded freely,b and
then Tim started getting really interesting. Later, May described an
institution called bBlackNetb which might conceivably carry out these aims.

Nothing much ever happened with Tim Maybs imaginary BlackNet. It was the kind
of out-there concept that science fiction writers like to put in novels.
Because BlackNet was clever, and fun to think about, and it made impossible
things seem plausible, and it was fantastic and also quite titillating. So it
was the kind of farfetched but provocative issue that ought to be properly
raised within a sci-fi public discourse. Because, you know, that would allow
plenty of time to contemplate the approaching trainwreck and perhaps do
something practical about it.

Nobody did much of anything practical. For nigh on twenty long years, nothing
happened with the BlackNet notion, for good or ill. Why? Because thinking
hard and eagerly about encryption involves a certain mental composition which
is alien to normal public life. Crypto guys b (and the cypherpunks were all
crypto guys, mostly well-educated, mathematically gifted middle-aged guys in
Silicon Valley careers) b are geeks. Theybre harmless geeks, theybre not
radical politicians or dashing international crime figures.

Cypherpunks were visionary Californians from the WIRED magazine circle. In
their personal lives, they were as meek and low-key as any average
code-cracking spook who works for the National Security Agency. These
American spooks from Fort Meade are shy and retiring people, by their nature.
In theory, the NSA could create every kind of flaming scandalous mayhem with
their giant Echelon spy system b but in practice, they would much would
rather sit there gently reading other peoplebs email.

One minutebs thought would reveal that a vast, opaque electronic spy outfit
like the National Security Agency is exceedingly dangerous to democracy.
Really, it is. The NSA clearly violates all kinds of elementary principles of
constitutional design. The NSA is the very antithesis of transparency, and
accountability, and free elections, and free expression, and separation of
powers b in other words, the NSA is a kind of giant, grown-up,
anti-Wikileaks. And it always has been. And webre used to that. We pay no
mind.

The NSA, this crypto empire, is a long-lasting fact on the ground that webve
all informally agreed not to get too concerned about. Even foreign victims of
the NSAbs machinations canbt seem to get properly worked-up about its
capacities and intrigues. The NSA has been around since 1947. Itbs a little
younger than the A-Bomb, and we donbt fuss much about that now, either.

The geeks who man the NSA donbt look much like Julian Assange, because they
have college degrees, shorter haircuts, better health insurance and far fewer
stamps in their passports. But the sources of their power are pretty much
identical to his. They use computers and they get their mitts on info that
doesnbt much wanna be free.

Every rare once in a while, the secretive and discreet NSA surfaces in public
life and does something reprehensible, such as defeating American federal
computer-security initiatives so that they can continue to eavesdrop at will.
But the NSA never becomes any big flaming Wikileaks scandal. Why? Because,
unlike their wannabe colleagues at Wikileaks, the apparatchiks of the NSA are
not in the scandal business. They just placidly sit at the console, reading
everybodybs diplomatic cables.

This is their function. The NSA is an eavesdropping outfit. Cracking the
communications of other governments is its reason for being. The NSA are not
unique entities in the shadows of our planetbs political landscape. Every
organized government gives that a try. Itbs a geopolitical fact, although
itbs not too discreet to dwell on it.

You can walk to most any major embassy in any major city in the world, and
you can see that it is festooned with wiry heaps of electronic spying
equipment. Donbt take any pictures of the roofs of embassies, as they grace
our public skylines. Guards will emerge to repress you.

Now, Tim May and his imaginary BlackNet were the sci-fi extrapolation version
of the NSA. A sort of inside-out, hippiefied NSA. Crypto people were always
keenly aware of the NSA, for the NSA were the people who harassed them for
munitions violations and struggled to suppress their academic publications.
Creating a BlackNet is like having a pet, desktop NSA. Except, that instead
of being a vast, federally-supported nest of supercomputers under a hill in
Maryland, itbs a creaky, homemade, zero-budget social-network site for
disaffected geeks.

But who cared about that wild notion? Why would that amateurish effort ever
matter to real-life people? Itbs like comparing a mighty IBM mainframe to
some cranky Apple computer made inside a California garage. Yes, itbs almost
that hard to imagine.

So Wikileaks is a manifestation of something that this has been growing all
around us, for decades, with volcanic inexorability. The NSA is the worldbs
most public unknown secret agency. And for four years now, its twisted sister
Wikileaks has been the worldbs most blatant, most publicly praised, encrypted
underground site.

Wikileaks is bundergroundb in the way that the NSA is bcovertb; not because
itbs inherently obscure, but because itbs discreetly not spoken about.

The NSA is bdiscreet,b so, somehow, people tolerate it. Wikileaks is
btransparent,b like a cardboard blast shack full of kitchen-sink
nitroglycerine in a vacant lot.

That is how we come to the dismal saga of Wikileaks and its ongoing Cablegate
affair, which is a melancholy business, all in all. The scale of it is so big
that every weirdo involved immediately becomes a larger-than-life figure. But
theybre not innately heroic. Theybre just living, mortal human beings, the
kind of geeky, quirky, cyberculture loons that I run into every day. And man,
are they ever going to pay.

Now we must contemplate Bradley Manning, because he was the first to immolate
himself. Private Manning was a young American, a hacker-in-uniform, bored
silly while doing scarcely necessary scutwork on a military computer system
in Iraq. Private Manning had dozens of reasons for becoming what
computer-security professionals call the binternal threat.b

His war made no sense on its face, because it was carried out in a headlong
pursuit of imaginary engines of mass destruction. The military occupation of
Iraq was endless. Manning, a tender-hearted geek, was overlooked and put-upon
by his superiors. Although he worked around the clock, he had nothing of any
particular military consequence to do.

It did not occur to his superiors that a bored soldier in a poorly secured
computer system would download hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables.
Because, well, why? Theybre very boring. Soldiers never read them. The
malefactor has no use for them. Theybre not particularly secret. Theybve got
nothing much to do with his war. He knows his way around the machinery, but
Bradley Manning is not any kind of blackhat programming genius.

Instead, hebs very like Jerome Kerveil, that obscure French stock trader who
stole 5 billion euros without making one dime for himself. Jerome Kerveil,
just like Bradley Manning, was a bored, resentful, lower-echelon guy in a
dead end, who discovered some awesome capacities in his system that his
bosses never knew it had. It makes so little sense to behave like Kerveil and
Manning that their threat canbt be imagined. A weird hack like that is
self-defeating, and itbs sure to bring terrible repercussions to the
transgressor. But then the sad and sordid days grind on and on; and that
blindly potent machinery is just sitting there. Sitting there, tempting the
user.

Bradley Manning believes the sci-fi legendry of the underground. He thinks
that he can leak a quarter of a million secret cables, protect himself with
neat-o cryptography, and, magically, never be found out. So Manning does
this, and at first he gets away with it, but, still possessed by the malaise
that haunts his soul, he has to brag about his misdeed, and confess himself
to a hacker confidante who immediately ships him to the authorities.

No hacker story is more common than this. The ingenuity poured into the
machinery is meaningless. The personal connections are treacherous. Welcome
to the real world.

So Private Manning, cypherpunk, is immediately toast.

No army can permit this kind of behavior and remain a functional army; so
Manning is in solitary confinement and he is going to be court-martialled.
With more political awareness, he might have made himself a public martyr to
his conscience; but he lacks political awareness. He only has only his
black-hat hacker awareness, which is all about committing awesome voyeuristic
acts of computer intrusion and imagining you can get away with that when it
really matters to people.

The guy preferred his hacker identity to his sworn fidelity to the uniform of
a superpower. The shear-forces there are beyond his comprehension.

The reason this upsets me is that I know so many people just like Bradley
Manning. Because I used to meet and write about hackers, bcrackers,b
bdarkside hackers,b bcomputer undergroundb types. They are a subculture, but
once you get used to their many eccentricities, there is nothing particularly
remote or mysterious or romantic about them. They are banal. Bradley Manning
is a young, mildly brainy, unworldly American guy who probably would have
been pretty much okay if hebd been left alone to skateboard, read comic books
and listen to techno music.

Instead, Bradley had to leak all over the third rail. Through historical
circumstance, hebs become a miserable symbolic point-man for a global war on
terror. He doesnbt much deserve that role. Hebs got about as much to do with
the political aspects of his war as Monica Lewinsky did with the lasting
sexual mania that afflicts the American Republic.

That is so dispiriting and ugly. As a novelist, I never think of Monica
Lewinsky, that once-everyday young woman, without a sense of dread at the
freakish, occult fate that overtook her. Imagine what it must be like, to
wake up being her, to face the inevitability of being That Woman. Monica,
too, transgressed in apparent safety and then she had the utter foolishness
to brag to a lethal enemy, a trusted confidante who ran a tape machine and
who brought her a mediated circus of hells. The titillation of that massive,
shattering scandal has faded now. But think of the quotidian daily horror of
being Monica Lewinsky, and that should take a bite from the soul.

Bradley Manning now shares that exciting, oh my God, Monica Lewinsky,
tortured media-freak condition. This mild little nobody has become
super-famous, and in his lonely military brig, screenless and without a
computer, hebs strictly confined and, no doubt, hebs horribly bored. I donbt
want to condone or condemn the acts of Bradley Manning. Because legions of
people are gonna do that for me, until webre all good and sick of it, and
then some. I donbt have the heart to make this transgressor into some
hockey-puck for an ideological struggle. I sit here and I gloomily
contemplate his all-too-modern situation with a sense of Sartrean nausea.

Commonly, the authorities donbt much like to crush apple-cheeked white-guy
hackers like Bradley Manning. Itbs hard to charge hackers with crimes, even
when they gleefully commit them, because itbs hard to find prosecutors and
judges willing to bone up on the drudgery of understanding what they did. But
theybve pretty much got to make a pureeb out of this guy, because of massive
pressure from the gravely embarrassed authorities. Even though Bradley lacks
the look and feel of any conventional criminal; wrong race, wrong zipcode,
wrong set of motives.

Bradleybs gonna become a bspyb whose bespionageb consisted of making the
activities of a democratic government visible to its voting population. With
the New York Times publishing the fruits of his misdeeds. Some set of
American prosecutorial lawyers is confronting this crooked legal hairpin
right now. I feel sorry for them.

Then there is Julian Assange, who is a pure-dye underground computer hacker.
Julian doesnbt break into systems at the moment, but hebs not an bex-hacker,b
hebs the silver-plated real deal, the true avant-garde. Julian is a child of
the underground hacker milieu, the digital-native as twenty-first century
cypherpunk. As far as I can figure, Julian has never found any other line of
work that bore any interest for him.

Through dint of years of cunning effort, Assange has worked himself into a
position where his bcomputer crimesb are mainly political. Theybre probably
not even crimes. They are bleaks.b Leaks are nothing special. They are
tidbits from the powerful that every journalist gets on occasion, like crumbs
of fishfood on the top of the media tank.

Only, this time, thanks to Manning, Assange has brought in a massive
truckload of media fishfood. Itbs not just some titillating, scandalous,
floating crumbs. Therebs a quarter of a million of them. Hebs become the
one-man global McDonaldbs of leaks.

Ever the detail-freak, Assange in fact hasnbt shipped all the cables he
received from Manning. Instead, he cunningly encrypted the cables and
distributed them worldwide to thousands of fellow-travellers. This stunt
sounds technically impressive, although it isnbt. Itbs pretty easy to do, and
nobody but a cypherpunk would think that it made any big difference to
anybody. Itbs part and parcel of Assangebs other characteristic activities,
such as his inability to pack books inside a box while leaving any empty
space.

While others stare in awe at Assangebs many otherworldly aspects b his
hairstyle, his neatness, too-precise speech, his post-national life out of a
laptop bag b I can recognize him as pure triple-A outsider geek. Man, I know
a thousand modern weirdos like that, and every single one of them seems to be
on my Twitter stream screaming support for Assange because they can recognize
him as a brother and a class ally. They are in holy awe of him because, for
the first time, their mostly-imaginary and lastingly resentful underclass has
landed a serious blow in a public arena. Julian Assange has hacked a
superpower.

He didnbt just insult the captain of the global football team; he put spycams
in the locker room. He has showed the striped-pants set without their pants.
This a massively embarrassing act of technical voyeurism. Itbs like Monica
and her stains and kneepads, only even more so.

Now, I wish I could say that I feel some human pity for Julian Assange, in
the way I do for the hapless, one-shot Bradley Manning, but I canbt possibly
say that. Pity is not the right response, because Assange has carefully built
this role for himself. He did it with all the minute concentration of some
geek assembling a Rubikbs Cube.

In that regard, onebs hat should be off to him. Hebs had forty years to learn
what he was doing. Hebs not some miserabilist semi-captive like the uniformed
Bradley Manning. Hebs a darkside player out to stick it to the Man. The guy
has surrounded himself with the cream of the computer underground, wily old
rascals like Rop Gonggrijp and the fearsome Teutonic minions of the Chaos
Computer Club.

Assange has had many long, and no doubt insanely detailed, policy discussions
with all his closest allies, about every aspect of his means, motives and
opportunities. And he did what he did with fierce resolve.

Furthermore, and not as any accident, Assange has managed to alienate
everyone who knew him best. All his friends think hebs nuts. Ibm not too
thrilled to see that happen. Thatbs not a great sign in a
consciousness-raising, power-to-the-people, radical political-leader type.
Most successful dissidents have serious people skills and are way into
revolutionary camaraderie and a charismatic sense of righteousness. Theybre
into kissing babies, waving bloody shirts, and keeping hope alive. Not this
chilly, eldritch guy. Hebs a bright, good-looking man who b letbs face it b
canbt get next to women without provoking clumsy havoc and a bitter and
lasting resentment. Thatbs half the human race thatbs beyond his
comprehension there, and I rather surmise that, from his stern point of view,
it was sure to be all their fault.

Assange was in prison for a while lately, and his best friend in the prison
was his Mom. That seems rather typical of him. Obviously Julian knew he was
going to prison; a child would know it. Hebs been putting on his Solzhenitsyn
clothes and combing his forelock for that role for ages now. Ibm a little
surprised that he didnbt have a more organized prison-support committee,
because hebs a convicted computer criminal whobs been through this wringer
before. Maybe he figures hebll reap more glory if hebs martyred all alone.

I rather doubt the authorities are any happier to have him in prison. They
pretty much gotta feed him into their legal wringer somehow, but a botched
Assange show-trial could do colossal damage. Therebs every likelihood that
the guy could get off. He could walk into an American court and come out
smelling of roses. Itbs the kind of show-trial judo every repressive
government fears.

Itbs not just about him and the burning urge to punish him; itbs about the
public risks to the reputation of the USA. They superpower hypocrisy here is
gonna be hard to bear. The USA loves to read other peoplebs diplomatic
cables. They dote on doing it. If Assange had happened to out the
cable-library of some outlaw pariah state, say, Paraguay or North Korea, the
US State Department would be heaping lilies at his feet. Theybd be a little
upset about his violation of the strict proprieties, but theybd also take
keen satisfaction in the hilarious comeuppance of minor powers that shouldnbt
be messing with computers, unlike the grandiose, high-tech USA.

Unfortunately for the US State Department, they clearly shouldnbt have been
messing with computers, either. In setting up their SIPRnet, they were trying
to grab the advantages of rapid, silo-free, networked communication while
preserving the hierarchical proprieties of official confidentiality. Thatbs
the real issue, thatbs the big modern problem; national governments and
global computer networks donbt mix any more. Itbs like trying to eat a very
private birthday cake while also distributing it. That scheme is just not
working. And that failure has a face now, and thatbs Julian Assange.

Assange didnbt liberate the dreadful secrets of North Korea, not because the
North Koreans lack computers, but because that isnbt a cheap and easy thing
that half-a-dozen zealots can do. But the principle of it, the logic of doing
it, is the same. Everybody wants everybody elsebs national government to
leak. Every state wants to see the diplomatic cables of every other state. It
will bend heaven and earth to get them. Itbs just, that sacred activity is
not supposed to be privatized, or, worse yet, made into the no-profit,
shareable, have-at-it fodder for a network society, as if global diplomacy
were so many mp3s. Now the US State Department has walked down the thorny
road to hell that was first paved by the music industry. Rock and roll, baby.

Now, in strict point of fact, Assange didnbt blandly pirate the massive hoard
of cables from the US State Department. Instead, he was busily bredactingb
and minutely obeying the proprieties of his political cover in the major
surviving paper dailies. Kind of a nifty feat of social-engineering there;
but hebs like a poacher who machine-gunned a herd of wise old elephants and
then went to the temple to assume the robes of a kosher butcher. That is a
world-class hoax.

Assange is no more a bjournalistb than he is a crypto mathematician. Hebs a
darkside hacker who is a self-appointed, self-anointed, self-educated global
dissident. Hebs a one-man Polish Solidarity, waiting for the population to
accrete around his stirring propaganda of the deed. And they are accreting;
not all of bem, but, well, it doesnbt take all of them.

Julian Assange doesnbt want to be in power; he has no people skills at all,
and nobodybs ever gonna make him President Vaclav Havel. Hebs certainly not
in for the money, because he wouldnbt know what to do with the cash; he lives
out of a backpack, and his daily routine is probably sixteen hours online.
Hebs not gonna get better Google searches by spending more on his banned
MasterCard. I donbt even think Assange is all that big on ego; I know authors
and architects, so Ibve seen much worse than Julian in that regard. Hebs just
what he is; hebs something we donC"bt yet have words for.

Hebs a different, modern type of serious troublemaker. Hebs certainly not a
bterrorist,b because nobody is scared and no one got injured. Hebs not a
bspy,b because nobody spies by revealing the doings of a government to its
own civil population. He is orthogonal. Hebs asymmetrical. He panics people
in power and he makes them look stupid. And I feel sorry for them. But
sorrier for the rest of us.

Julian Assangebs extremely weird version of dissident bliving in truthb
doesnbt bear much relationship to the way that public life has ever been
arranged. It does, however, align very closely to what webve done to
ourselves by inventing and spreading the Internet. If the Internet was
walking around in public, it would look and act a lot like Julian Assange.
The Internet is about his age, and it doesnbt have any more care for the
delicacies of profit, propriety and hierarchy than he does.

So Julian is heading for a modern legal netherworld, the slammer, the
electronic parole cuff, whatever; you can bet there will be surveillance of
some kind wherever he goes, to go along with the FREE ASSANGE stencils and
xeroxed flyers that are gonna spring up in every coffee-bar, favela and
university on the planet. A guy as personally hampered and sociopathic as
Julian may in fact thrive in an inhuman situation like this. Unlike a lot of
keyboard-hammering geeks, hebs a serious reader and a pretty good writer,
with a jailhouse-lawyer facility for pointing out weaknesses in the logic of
his opponents, and boy are they ever. Weak, that is. They are pathetically
weak.

Diplomats have become weak in the way that musicians are weak. Musicians
naturally want people to pay real money for music, but if you press them on
it, theybll sadly admit that they donbt buy any music themselves. Because,
well, theybre in the business, so why should they? And the same goes for
diplomats and discreet secrets.

The one grand certainty about the consumers of Cablegate is that diplomats
are gonna be reading those stolen cables. Not hackers: diplomats. Hackers
bore easily, and they wonbt be able to stand the discourse of intelligent
trained professionals discussing real-life foreign affairs.

American diplomats are gonna read those stolen cables, though, because they
were supposed to read them anyway, even though they didnbt. Now, theybve got
to read them, with great care, because they might get blindsided otherwise by
some wisecrack that they typed up years ago.

And, of course, every intelligence agency and every diplomat from every
non-American agency on Earth is gonna fire up computers and pore over those
things. To see what American diplomacy really thought about them, or to see
if they were ignored (which is worse), and to see how the grownups ran what
was basically a foreign-service news agency that the rest of us were always
forbidden to see.

This stark fact makes them all into hackers. Yes, just like Julian. Theybre
all indebted to Julian for this grim thing that he did, and as they sit there
hunched over their keyboards, drooling over their stolen goodies, theybre
all, without exception, implicated in his doings. Assange is never gonna
become a diplomat, but hebs arranged it so that diplomats henceforth are
gonna be a whole lot more like Assange. Theybll behave just like him. They
receive the goods just like he did, semi-surreptitiously. They may be wearing
an ascot and striped pants, but theybve got that hacker hunch in their necks
and theybre staring into the glowing screen.

And I donbt much like that situation. It doesnbt make me feel better. I feel
sorry for them and what it does to their values, to their self-esteem. If
therebs one single watchword, one central virtue, of the diplomatic life,
itbs bdiscretion.b Not btransparency.b Diplomatic discretion. Discretion is
why diplomats do not say transparent things to foreigners. When diplomats
tell foreigners what they really think, war results.

Diplomats are people who speak from nation to nation. They personify nations,
and nations are brutal, savage, feral entities. Diplomats used to have
something in the way of an international community, until the Americans
decided to unilaterally abandon that in pursuit of Bradley Manningbs oil war.
Now nations are so badly off that they canbt even get it together to
coherently tackle heroin, hydrogen bombs, global warming and financial
collapse. Not to mention the Internet.

The world has lousy diplomacy now. Itbs dysfunctional. The world corps
diplomatique are weak, really weak, and the US diplomatic corps, which used
to be the senior and best-engineered outfit there, is rattling around
bottled-up in blast-proofed bunkers. Itbs scary how weak and useless they
are.

US diplomats used to know what to do with dissidents in other nations. If
they were communists they got briskly repressed, but if they had anything
like a free-market outlook, then US diplomats had a whole arsenal of gentle
and supportive measures; Radio Free Europe, publication in the West, awards,
foreign travel, flattery, moral support; discreet things, in a word, but
exceedingly useful things. Now theybre harassing Julian by turning those
tools backwards.

For a US diplomat, Assange is like some digitized nightmare-reversal of a
kindly Cold War analog dissident. He read the dissident playbook and he
downloaded it as a textfile; but, in fact, Julian doesnbt care about the USA.
Itbs just another obnoxious national entity. He happens to be more or less
Australian, and hebs no great enemy of America. If hebd had the chance to
leak Australian cables he would have leapt on that with the alacrity he did
on Kenya. Of course, when Assange did it to that meager little Kenya, all the
grown-ups thought that was groovy; he had to hack a superpower in order to
touch the third rail.

But the American diplomatic corps, and all it thinks it represents, is just
collateral damage between Assange and his goal. He aspires to his tpolitical
tactility is beneath his dignity. Hebs extremely intelligent, but, as a
political, social and moral actor, hebs the kind of guy who gets depressed by
the happiness of the stupid.

I donbt say these cruel things about Julian Assange because I feel distant
from him, but, on the contrary, because I feel close to him. I donbt doubt
the two of us would have a lot to talk about. I know hordes of men like him;
itbs just that they are programmers, mathematicians, potheads and science
fiction fans instead of fiercely committed guys who aspire to topple the
international order and replace it with subversive wikipedians.

The chances of that ending well are about ten thousand to one. And I donbt
doubt Assange knows that. This is the kind of guy who once wrote an
encryption program called bRubberhose,b because he had it figured that the
cops would beat his password out of him, and he needed some code-based way to
finesse his own human frailty. Hey, neat hack there, pal.

So, well, thatbs the general situation with this particular scandal. I could
go on about it, but Ibm trying to pace myself. This knotty situation is not
gonna bblow over,b because itbs been building since 1993 and maybe even 1947.
bTransparencyb and bdiscretionb are virtues, but they are virtues that clash.
The international order and the global Internet are not best pals. They never
were, and now thatbs obvious.

The data held by states is gonna get easier to steal, not harder to steal;
the Chinese are all over Indian computers, the Indians are all over Pakistani
computers, and the Russian cybermafia is brazenly hosting wikileaks.info
because thatbs where the underground goes to the mattresses. It is a godawful
mess. This is gonna get worse before it gets better, and itbs gonna get worse
for a long time. Like leaks in a house where the pipes froze.

Wellb& every once in a while, a situation thatbs one-in-a-thousand is met by a
guy who is one in a million. It may be that Assange is, somehow, up to this
situation. Maybe hebs gonna grow in stature by the massive trouble he has
caused. Saints, martyrs, dissidents and freaks are always wild-cards, but
sometimes theybre the only ones who can clear the general air. Sometimes they
become the catalyst for historical events that somehow had to happen. They
donbt have to be nice guys; thatbs not the point. Julian Assange did this; he
direly wanted it to happen. He planned it in nitpicky, obsessive detail. Here
it is; a planetary hack.

I donbt have a lot of cheery hope to offer about his all-too-compelling
gesture, but I dare to hope hebs everything he thinks he is, and much, much,
more.

Bruce Sterling