What, one wonders, is the difference between “news values” and the herd instinct? I’ve long been puzzled by the way in which hundreds of news editors, all of whom are apparently independently-minded and intelligent beings, can all magically home in on a consensus that a particular event or individual is “the” story. Over the last few days, this is what has happened with WikiLeaks: the most important aspects of the story are increasingly sidelined while the mass media focus on a single individual — the Founder.

The obsession with Julian Assange would be comical if it weren’t so misleading. One can see why news editors go for it, of course. First of all there’s a handsome, enigmatic, brooding, Svengali-like hero/villain allegedly pitting himself against the world’s only superpower. Add in allegations of sexual crimes, a handful of celebrity supporters and a Court-side scrum and you’ve got a tabloid dream story. Or — as Sean French muses — a new kind of thriller.

Assenge is undoubtedly an interesting figure, but to personalise the crisis in these terms is a failure of journalism. It’s the mirror image of the mistake that Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Bill Kristol & Co are making — the fantasy that if you cut off the head then you kill the snake.

The truth is that even if Palin’s wet dream came to pass, and some goon were to succeed in assassinating Assange, I suspect that it would make little difference. For WikiLeaks is not a snake. First and foremost it’s what Manuel Castells calls a “networked enterprise” — in the same way that, say, Al Qaeda is (at least according to Philip Bobbitt). And the thing about networked enterprises is that they are comprised of widely-distributed, autonomous nodes which use the Internet for communication and (sometimes) co-ordination.

But WikiLeaks, in addition to being a networked enterprise, is also a project and an architecture of considerable technical sophistication. The inescapable conclusion, therefore, has to be that WikiLeaks is bigger than Assange, and it would survive his disappearance, whether by imprisonment or worse – just as Al Qaeda would survive the death of Osama bin Laden. (Assuming, of course, that that hasn’t already happened.)

I’m not trying to imply, incidentally, that there is some kind of moral equivalence between WikiLeaks and Al Qaeda, only that Bobbit’s analysis of the difficulty the West has in dealing with Islamic terrorism seems relevant here. In order to deal with an adversary the first requirement is to understand him (or her). But because network thinking is alien to most of our established authority structures, they can’t cope when faced with a properly networked foe.

Bobbitt’s analysis is also eerily applicable in another aspect of the current crisis. The tone of much public American discussion about WikiLeaks is increasingly “extra legal”, to put it politely. The spectacle of public figures and elected representatives calling for the assassination of Assange is revealing, given Bobbitt’s assertion that the reason why the United States is not itself a terrorist state — even though its warfare brings suffering and destruction to many innocent persons, including civilians — is that it acts within the law. To which the only reasonable response is: let’s see. Clay Shirky made precisely this point on Newsnight last night when he mentioned the Pentagon Papers case. Publication of the papers in 1971 was held by the government to be illegal; the New York Times disagreed, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which decided in favour of the newspaper. This, Shirky argued, is the way a law-abiding society does business. And it should do exactly the same with the WikiLeaks releases, rather than trumpeting about “National Security”, the danger to service personnel, etc.

En passant, this argument about leaks putting lives in danger comes oddly from people whose overt policies and covert manoeuvring have been responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands of US and allied troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and God knows how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans. People who live in glass — or even White — houses ought not to throw stones.

From today’s Guardian.

Oh, and if you need a laugh, here’s the New Yorker‘s idea of what Hilary Clinton wished had been in those leaked cables.

From Wired.com.

Days after Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) caused an uproar by warning its students against linking to WikiLeaks or discussing the secret-spilling website’s latest cache of diplomatic cables online, the prestigious training ground for future diplomats has changed tack and embraced free speech.

Last week, the SIPA Office of Career Services sent an e-mail to students saying that an alumnus who works at the U.S. State Department had recommended that current students not tweet or post links to WikiLeaks, which is in the process of releasing 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables — many of them classified — because doing so could hurt their career prospects in government service.

“Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government,” the Office of Career Services wrote.

Now, SIPA Dean John H. Coatsworth has clarified the school’s policy and issued a ringing endorsement of free speech and academic freedom.

“Freedom of information and expression is a core value of our institution,” Coatsworth wrote in an e-mail to the SIPA community Monday morning (full e-mail message below). “Thus, SIPA’s position is that students have a right to discuss and debate any information in the public arena that they deem relevant to their studies or to their roles as global citizens, and to do so without fear of adverse consequences.”

Since our news media are just showing cutaways of Julian Assenge, it’s interesting to see him handling a press conference. This clip comes from August 2010.

Also interesting is this observation by Israel Shamir and Paul Bennett about one of the alleged ‘rape’ complainants. It comes from the issue of Counterpunch of September 14 last:

Anna Ardin (the official complainant) is often described by the media as a “leftist”. She has ties to the US-financed anti-Castro and anti-communist groups. She published her anti-Castro diatribes (see here and here) in the Swedish-language publication Revista de Asignaturas Cubanas put out by Misceláneas de Cuba. From Oslo, Professor Michael Seltzer points out that this periodical is the product of a well-financed anti-Castro organization in Sweden. He further notes that the group is connected with Union Liberal Cubana led by Carlos Alberto Montaner whose CIA ties were exposed here. Note that Ardin was deported from Cuba for subversive activities. In Cuba she interacted with the feminist anti-Castro group Las damas de blanco (the Ladies in White). This group receives US government funds and the convicted anti-communist terrorist Luis Posada Carriles is a friend and supporter. Wikipedia quotes Hebe de Bonafini, president of the Argentine Madres de Plaza de Mayo as saying that “the so-called Ladies in White defend the terrorism of the United States.”

And who, you may ask, is Senor Carriles? Well, see here.

Curiouser and curiouser, eh?

Thoughtful post by Tim Bray.

Let’s Be Specific · Here, in The Guardian, is a leaked cable describing an intervention with US officials in Afghanistan by Canadian ambassador William Crosbie, who seems competent and level-headed. He is depicted as urging the Americans to lower the boom on that schmuck Karzai over obvious election-fixing, pointing out that this is politically important to Canada: “We must be prepared for confrontation with Karzai on this issue, he said, or risk losing credibility among our own population if we go along with a rigged election.” Well, yep, we all did go along with the rigged election, didn’t we, and how’s that credibility looking? ¶

So here are two sides of it: Crosbie has offered to resign, on the grounds that this cable and others expected to leak will damage his ability to work with the Afghan government. And, since it seems like we have an intelligent dude there who’s saying the right things to the right people, that would be harmful. Bad, bad WikiLeaks.

On the other hand, as a Canadian I really want to know Why the fucking hell are we sending our young people to get killed there when our senior official on the ground is telling everyone that the team whose side we’re on are corrupt and stole the last election and are “making his blood boil”? The fact that our government has kept this intelligence secret while extending the Canadian mission is making mine boil. Thank you, WikiLeaks.

And:

Here’s the real problem I have. Cast your mind back to early this year, when WikiLeaks seized the world’s attention by releasing video of a Baghdad airstrike in July 2007, depicting what looked like a moderately-severe war crime. ¶

And the real problem is that officials from all the same governments who are screaming now were screaming in advance of that release, about how awful it was that the data was stolen, and the harm that would be done by releasing it; they had stonewalled Freedom Of Information requests for that video from the press.

Try to put yourselves in Assange’s shoes; the following fact would probably weigh heavily on your mind: You’re being told that releasing this stuff would be harmful by a bunch of people who condoned a war crime and then tried to cover it up.

I don’t know what kind of a person Mr. Assange is, and I’m not saying this is simple. But, sitting where he is, I might well have pulled the trigger and released the cables.

The New Yorker has a sharp piece by Amy Davidson, in which she discusses Senator Joe Lieberman’s grandstanding on the issue. Lieberman, who has long suffered from a terminal case of hubris, harassed Amazon into withdrawing its hosting of WikiLeaks on its Elastic Compute cloud. Later he issued this statement:

I will 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.

Davidson comments:

Lieberman may be exaggerating his own role, and Amazon can make choices about what business to be in. Still, is Amazon reporting to a senator now? Is the company going to tell him about “the extent of its relationship” with WikiLeaks—with any customer? He’s free to ask, of course, but in terms of an obligation to answer: Does somebody have a warrant or a subpoena for that? One wonders if 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. The circumstances are different, but not so different as to be really reassuring.

I wrote the other day about the “hysteria” of the responses to the leaks, and a friend commented that hysteria seemed too strong a term. Well, how about this (also from Davidson)?

Sarah Palin said that Assange should be hunted down like Osama bin Laden; Newt Gingrich said that he should be treated as an enemy combatant; and Bill Kristol wants the Obama Administration to think about kidnapping or killing Assange “and his collaborators.” Kristol doesn’t use the word “kill,” but rather “whack” and “neutralize,” as if some combination of slang and clinical talk made everything all right. Is that where we are? (This isn’t to dismiss Assange’s other, Swedish legal troubles; the characters here are neither supervillains nor superheroes.) One question that came up in the debate about Obama putting Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, on an assassination list without even making a pretense of going through the courts was who else you could kill on the same grounds. It is striking to see how unabashedly that line of reasoning has been pursued. If we can shoot down Julian Assange, how about any investigative reporter who might learn something that embarrasses our government? We seem to have hopelessly confused national security with the ability of a particular Administration to pursue its policies.

I’m with Tim Bray on this when he writes:

I’m fighting a rising tide of nausea as various flavors of functionary try to whack the WikiLeaks mole, applying the thoughtcrime principle, calling for Assange’s assassination, hounding Amazon and Tableau and EveryDNS and PayPal into hasty action (and I sure wish my profession had shown a little spine). Thought leaders including Sarah Palin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Enrico Berlusconi, and Vladimir Putin tsk-tsk in unison; those closer to the mainstream who are joining the chorus should be very fucking nervous about the company they’re keeping.

What we’re hearing is the screaming of ‘liberal democratic’ Emperors whose clothes have been shredded by the Net.

Yesterday, I wrote that the current WikiLeaks row is the defining confrontation between the old political order and the culture of the Net. Up to now, it’s all been about castigating authoritarian bullies like the Chinese regime. But now it’s about ‘liberal’ democracies. Dave Winer is explains it better — as usual.

While the politicians and reporters are getting a fumbling on-the-job education in the architecture of the Internet (an NPR reporter said, hesitatingly, that it appears as if the server is now in Switzerland), the next question is where does the running stop? When does the situation reach equilibrium? What’s the best outcome for the people of the planet?

It seems to me that at the end of this chain is BitTorrent. That when WikiLeaks wants to publish the next archive, they can get their best practice from eztv.it, and have 20 people scattered around the globe at the ends of various big pipes ready to seed it. Once the distribution is underway the only way to shut it down will be to shut down the Internet itself. Politicians should be aware that these are the stakes. They either get used operating in the open, where the people they’re governing are in on everything they do, or they go totalitarian, around the globe, now.

BitTorrenting is already under way. So we’ll see.

En passant: doesn’t Hilary Clinton’s landmark speech on Internet freedom look a bit ironic now? Here’s a sample:

The spread of information networks is forming a new nervous system for our planet. When something happens in Haiti or Hunan the rest of us learn about it in real time – from real people. And we can respond in real time as well. Americans eager to help in the aftermath of a disaster and the girl trapped in that supermarket are connected in ways that we weren’t a generation ago. That same principle applies to almost all of humanity. As we sit here today, any of you – or any of our children – can take out tools we carry with us every day and transmit this discussion to billions across the world.

In many respects, information has never been so free. There are more ways to spread more ideas to more people than at any moment in history. Even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.

During his visit to China in November, President Obama held a town hall meeting with an online component to highlight the importance of the internet. In response to a question that was sent in over the internet, he 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. The United States’ belief in that truth is what brings me here today.