WikiLeaks: five expert opinions

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The New York Times has a thoughtful set of contributions from various experts on the significance of the WikiLeaks disclosures.

Evgeny Morozov, a Stanford scholar who has a book about the “dark side of Internet freedom” coming out in January, ponders the likelihood that WikiLeaks can be duplicated, and finds it unlikely.

A thousand other Web sites dedicated to leaking are unlikely to have the same effect as WikiLeaks: it would take a lot of time and effort to cultivate similar relationships with the media. Most other documents leaked to WikiLeaks do not carry the same explosive potential as candid cables written by American diplomats.

One possible future for WikiLeaks is to morph into a gigantic media intermediary — perhaps, even something of a clearing house for investigative reporting — where even low-level leaks would be matched with the appropriate journalists to pursue and report on them and, perhaps, even with appropriate N.G.O.’s to advocate on their causes. Under this model, WikiLeaks staffers would act as idea salesmen relying on one very impressive digital Rolodex.

Ron Deibert from the University of Toronto thinks that the “venomous furor” surrounding WikiLeaks, including charges of “terrorism” and calls for the assassination of Julian Assange, has to rank as “one of the biggest temper tantrums in recent years”.

Many lament the loss of individual privacy as we leave digital traces that are then harvested and collated by large organizations with ever-increasing precision. But if individuals are subject to this new ecosystem, what would make anyone think governments or organizations are immune? Blaming WikiLeaks for this state of affairs is like blaming a tremor for tectonic plate shifts.

Certainly a portion of that anger could be mitigated by the conduct of WikiLeaks itself. The cult of personality around Assange, his photoshopped image now pasted across the WikiLeaks Web site, only plays into this animosity. So do vigilante cyberattacks carried out by supporters of WikiLeaks that contribute to a climate of lawlessness and vengeance seeking. If everyone can blast Web sites and services with which they disagree into oblivion — be it WikiLeaks or MasterCard — a total information war will ensue to the detriment of the public sphere.

An organization like WikiLeaks should professionalize and depersonalize itself as much as possible. It should hold itself to the highest possible ethical standards. It should act with the utmost discretion in releasing into the public domain otherwise classified information that comes its way only on the basis of an obvious transgression of law or morality. This has not happened.

Ross Anderson, who is Professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge and the author of the standard textbook on building dependable distributed information systems, thinks that the WikiLeaks saga shows how governments never take an architectural view of security.

Your medical records should be kept in the hospital where you get treated; your bank statements should only be available in the branch you use; and while an intelligence analyst dealing with Iraq might have access to cables on Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia, he should have no routine access to information on Korea or Zimbabwe or Brazil. But this is in conflict with managers’ drive for ever broader control and for economies of scale.

The U.S. government has been unable to manage this trade-off, leading to regular upsets and reversals of policy. Twenty years ago, Aldrich Ames betrayed all the C.I.A.’s Russian agents; intelligence data were then carefully compartmentalized for a while. Then after 9/11, when it turned out that several of the hijackers were already known to parts of the intelligence community, data sharing was commanded. Security engineers old enough to remember Ames expected trouble, and we got it.

What’s next? Will risk aversion drive another wild swing of the pendulum, or might we get some clearer thinking about the nature and limits of power?

James Bamford, a writer and documentary producer specializing in intelligence and national security issues, thinks that the WikiLeaks disclosures are useful in forcing governments to confess.

A generation ago, government employees with Communist sympathies worried security officials. Today, after years of torture reports, black sites, Abu Ghraib, and a war founded on deception, it is the possibility that more employees might act out from a sense of moral outrage that concerns officials.

There may be more employees out there willing to leak, they fear, and how do you weed them out? Spies at least had the courtesy to keep the secrets to themselves, rather than distribute them to the world’s media giants. In a sense, WikiLeaks is forcing the U.S. government into the confessional, with the door wide open. And confession, though difficult and embarrassing, can sometimes cleanse the soul.

Fred Alford is Professor of Government at the University of Maryland and thinks that neither the Web operation WikiLeaks, nor its editor-in-chief, Julian Assange, is a whistle-blower.

Whistle-blowers are people who observe what they believe to be unethical or illegal conduct in the places where they work and report it to the media. In so doing, they put their jobs at risk.

The whistle-blower in this case is Bradley Manning, an United States Army intelligence analyst who downloaded a huge amount of government classified information, which was made public by WikiLeaks. Whether or not Manning’s act serves the greater public interest is a contentious issue, but he has been arrested and charged with unlawful disclosure of classified data.

Some have compared the role of WikiLeaks to that of The New York Times in the publication of the Pentagon Papers several decades ago. WikiLeaks is the publishing platform that leverages the vast and instantaneous distribution capacity of the Internet.

The WikiLeaks data dump challenges a long held belief by many of us who study whistle-blowing — that it is important that the whistle-blower have a name and face so that the disclosures are not considered just anonymous griping, or possibly unethical activity. The public needs to see the human face of someone who stands up and does the right thing when none of his or her colleagues dare.

But he also thinks that “for better and worse, this changes whistle-blowing as we’ve known it.”

YouTube stats

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According to this week’s Economist, “YouTube is now taking in 35-hours’ worth of video content every minute of the day, up from about six hours’-worth in June 2007”.

Wot — no links?

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The website Catholic Online has an excellent precis of my Guardian piece about the significance of the WikiLeaks row. But strangely, one thing is missing: a link to the piece itself.

This doesn’t stop the site recommending that readers pass on its own piece to friends, including a link to Catholic.org.

This is not just discourteous; it’s also insulting to readers because it doesn’t give them an easy way of reading the original piece. After all, they might not agree with Deacon Fournier’s summary of my views. They might even think he had been too complimentary. All in all, bad Karma.

Amazon: why we dumped WikiLeaks

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First of all, here’s the company’s explanation.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) rents computer infrastructure on a self-service basis. AWS does not pre-screen its customers, but it does have terms of service that must be followed. WikiLeaks was not following them. There were several parts they were violating. For example, our terms of service state that “you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content… that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity.” It’s clear that WikiLeaks doesn’t own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content. Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren’t putting innocent people in jeopardy. Human rights organizations have in fact written to WikiLeaks asking them to exercise caution and not release the names or identities of human rights defenders who might be persecuted by their governments.

Analysis:

1. Amazon asserts that WikiLeaks didn’t own the content it was publishing.

2. Amazon asserts that its T&Cs require one to “warrant that … use of the content you supply … will not cause injury to any person or entity.” The company then goes on to state it is “not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren’t putting innocent people in jeopardy”.

I don’t have a problem with 1, which seems perfectly factual. By definition, WikiLeaks didn’t own the content of the cables. I’m no constitutional lawyer, but Claim #2 seems much more problematic. Amazon merely asserts that something is “not credible” and on the basis of that restricts WikiLeaks’s freedom of speech. On what grounds may a commercial company make a decision like that, in the US?

Assange and the herd instinct

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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.

WikiLeaks: the choice

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From my piece in today’s Guardian.

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 – with the exception of Twitter, so far – 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 – and probably of much else besides – are out there, distributed by peer-to-peer technologies like BitTorrent. 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.

Journalists and WikiLeaks

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Dan Gillmor has some sharp things to say about hysterical attitudes of some US towards Wikileaks and its founder.

The political class’ frothing against WikiLeaks is to be expected, even if it’s stirring up the kind of passion that almost always leads to bad outcomes. But what to make of the equally violent suggestions from people who call themselves journalists?

Two Washington Post columnists, among many others, have been racing to see who can be the more warmongering. The reliably bellicose Charles Krauthammer invited the U.S. government to kill Julian Assange, while his colleague Marc A. Thiessen was only slightly less bloodthirsty when he urged cyber attacks on WikiLeaks and any other sites that might be showing the leaked cables.

Of course, the New York Times, Washington Post and many other news organizations in the U.S. and other nations have published classified information themselves in the past — many, many times — without any help from WikiLeaks. Bob Woodward has practically made a career of publishing leaked information. By the same logic that the censors and their media acolytes are using against WikiLeaks, those organizations and lots of others could and should be subject to censorship as well. By Krauthammer’s sick standards, the death squads should be converging soon on his own offices, as well as those of the Times and London’s Guardian and more.

Yep.