WikiLeaks: why it’s important (and why it’s complicated)

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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.

Old Europe takes on Google

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The news that the EU has decided to investigate whether Google is abusing its dominance of the market for internet searches naturally led your columnist to type "Google abuses market dominance" into, well, Google. In 0.19 seconds it reported 4.4 million results.

The same query typed into Bing, Microsoft's search engine, produced only 362,000 hits. On the other hand, typing "Microsoft abuses market dominance" into Bing produced only 218,000 results, whereas the same query produced 665,000 results in Google. From which we can draw two conclusions. The first is that the algorithmic machinations of search engines, like the Peace of God, passeth all understanding. The second is that the EU is about to spend a few years, and several million euros, coming to the same conclusion…

This morning’s Observer column.

Options for the Established Order: live with WIkiLeaks, or shut down the Net.

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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.

What the attacks on WikiLeaks tell us

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The current row over the latest WikiLeaks trove of classified US diplomatic cables has four sobering implications.

1. The first is that it represents the first really serious confrontation between the established order and the culture of the Net. As the story of the official backlash unfolds – first as DDOS attacks on ISPs hosting WikiLeaks and later as outfits like Amazon and PayPal (i.e. eBay) suddenly “discover” that their Terms of Service preclude them from offering services to WikiLeaks — the contours of the old order are emerging from the rosy mist in which they have operated to date. This is vicious, co-ordinated and potentially comprehensive, and it contains hard lessons for everyone who cares about democracy and about the future of the Net.

As I read the latest news this morning about the increasingly determined attempts to muzzle WikiLeaks, my mind was cast back to a conversation I had in the Autumn of 2000 on an island in the Puget Sound. I was attending a symposium about the political economy of the Internet, and at one stage a colleague and I took a break and sat outside on the deck smoking the politically-incorrect cigars to which he and I were partial.

My friend is one of the wisest people I know. He had a varied career, starting as an army officer and ending up as an internationally renowned scholar in the field of International Relations.

“Do you think”, he asked, “that this new technology is as revolutionary a threat to the established order as these people [at this point he gestured towards the room where the symposium discussion was raging] think?”.

“Yes I do”, I replied confidently, because I was in thrall to technological utopianism: like John Perry Barlow, I genuinely believed that the Net was beyond the reach of the established order.

My colleague said nothing but merely puffed on his cigar and gazed out to sea, where an enormous yacht, the property no doubt of a Microsoft billionaire, had anchored. Eventually I said: “What do you think?”. He puffed some more on his cigar, then looked round at me and said, simply: “We’ll see, dear boy. We’ll see.”

At that point my confident Utopianism began to evaporate. And it’s been evaporating ever since.

2. Like most people, I’ve only read a fraction of what’s been published by WikiLeaks, but one thing that might explain the official hysteria about the revelations is the way they comprehensively expose the way political elites in Western democracies have been lying to their electorates. The leaks make it abundantly clear not just that the US-Anglo-European adventure in Afghanistan is doomed (because even the dogs in the street know that, as we say in Ireland), but more importantly that the US and UK governments privately admit that too.

The problem is that they cannot face their electorates — who also happen to be the taxpayers who are funding this folly — and tell them this. The leaked dispatches from the US Ambassador to Afghanistan provide vivid confirmation that the Kharzai 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 every bit as much a captive of that regime as it was in Vietnam. (For a vivid account of that see the essay on Vietnam in Barbara Tuchman’s March of Folly: From Troy to 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, the same kind of quagmire as Vietnam was. The only differences are that the war is now being fought by non-conscripted troops and we are not carpet-bombing civilians, but otherwise little has changed.

These realities are, of course, plain to see, because even the mainstream media, despite its need always to pay tribute to “our brave troops”, has had to report some of it. But what nobody has known until now — outside of the magic circles of the Beltway, Whitehall and NATO HQ — is that our rulers privately concede the hopelessness of the venture. The implicit cynicism and hypocrisy of this is breathtaking — and it goes a long way towards explaining the irrational fury of our political elites at having it exposed in so brutal and unmediated a fashion.

3. Thirdly, the attack of WikiLeaks ought to be a wake-up call for anyone who has rosy fantasies about whose side cloud computing providers are on. The Terms and Conditions under which they provide both ‘free’ and paid-for services will always give them with grounds for dropping your content if they deem it in their interests to do so. Put not your faith in cloud computing: it will one day rain on your parade.

4. What WikiLeaks is exposing is the way our democratic system has been hollowed out. Governments and Western political elites have been shown to be incompetent (New Labour and Bush Jnr in not regulating the financial sector; all governments in the area of climate change), corrupt (Fianna Fail in Ireland, Berlusconi in Italy; all governments in relation to the arms trade) or recklessly militaristic (Bush Jnr and Tony Blair 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 in a really effective way, their reaction is to try to silence the messenger — as Noam Chomsky pointed out. In that sense, Simon Jenkins got it exactly right in his Guardian column yesterday:

I have no illusions about the press. I have watched enough dirt swilling down the journalistic sewer to abandon any quest therein for responsibility, accuracy, sensitivity or humility. The great American editor Oz Elliott once lectured graduates at the Columbia School of Journalism on their sacred duty to democracy as the unofficial legislators of mankind. He asked me what I thought of it. I said it was no good to me: I was trained as a reptile lurking in the gutter whose sole job was to “get the bloody story”.

Yet journalism’s stock-in-trade is disclosure. As we have seen this week with WikiLeaks, power loathes truth revealed. 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. As Jefferson remarked, the press is the last best hope when democratic oversight fails, as it does in the case of most international bodies.

Jenkins was attacked this week in the British press for his defence of WikiLeaks, on the ground that thieves should not revel in their crime by demanding that victims be more careful with their property. “But in matters of public policy”, he replied, “who is thieving what from whom? The WikiLeaks material was left by a public body, the US state department, like a wallet open on a park bench, except that in this case the wallet was full of home truths about the mendacity of public policy.”

Yep.

UPDATE: Interesting example of the State Department pressuring Columbia students against posting or discussing WikiLeaks stuff on Facebook:

In other words, if you want a job with Uncle Sam, lay off the WikiLeaks stuff.

Pedalling faster on Wednesdays

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Interesting report in Technology Review. The city of Lyon has had a public-bike scheme (called Velo’v) since 2005, and the system logs electronically when each bike is checked out and returned. Currently there are 4,000 bikes and 350 docking stations. Now some researchers at the Ecole Normale Superiere have analysed the data.

They looked at 11.6 million bicycle trips in Lyon between May 2005 and December 2007. The result is the first robust characterisation of urban bikers’ behaviour, they say.

Some of what they found is unsurprising. Over an average trip, cyclists travel 2.49 km in 14.7 minutes so their average speed is about 10 km/h. That compares well with the average car speed in inner cities across Europe.

During the rush hour, however, the average speed rises to almost 15 km/h, a speed which outstrips the average car speed. And that’s not including the time it takes to find a place to park which is much easier for a Velo’v bike than a car.

Other results reveal the habits of the urban cyclist for the first time. For example, there is a clear peak in average speed at 7.45 am and 8.45 am on working days, when presumably there is rush to get to work. The average speed drops to a more leisurely 10 km/h at weekends.

Curiously, the Wednesday morning speeds are systematically higher than on other days, even though there is no change in other factors such as the number of cars. This, say Jensen and co, is probably because women tend to stay at home and look after their children on a Wednesday in France. So the higher proportion of men pushes up the average speed.

The data also shows that bike journeys between two points are shorter in distance than the corresponding journey by car. There are no bike lanes in Lyon so this suggests that cyclists use other techniques to make short cuts, say Jensen and co. Their shocking conclusion is that cyclists often ride on the pavement, along bus lanes and the wrong way up one way streets.

That kind of information will be useful for urban planners. For the first time they have real data to show where to build cycle lanes and how well they will be used…

I wonder what a corresponding analysis of the Boris-bike scheme in London would show.

For some reason, the link to the arXiv.org paper isn’t working at the moment (2 December, 08:56).

The WikiLeaks bunker?

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From Christopher Mims:

If Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is trying to turn himself into a Bond villain, he’s succeeded: the ongoing distributed denial of service attack against Wikileaks has forced his minions to move the site to a fortified data center encased in a cold war-era, nuke-proof bunker encased in bedrock. Really.

The host is called Bahnhof, and considering that the attacks against Wikileaks already forced its original host, PRG, to boot the site, and its second host, Amazon.com, to bow to political pressure to do the same, one wonders why Swedish Bahnhof would take on the challenge of hosting a site that will probably be under permanent attack for the foreseeable future.

Unless it’s for the PR value: Bahnhof has hosted Wikileaks before.

The chap who made the movie seems inordinately amused by it.