Anonymous Playing a Role in Egypt/Tunisia?

Well, now, THIS I hadn't expected. But, according to the Guardian, the notorious "hacktivist" group Anonymous are playing a role in the Tunisian/Egyptian/Algerian crises, by providing anonymization tools to in-country protesters and unleashing DDoS attacks on various governmental networks and websites. There's more detail here.

It reminds me a bit of the problem (and promise) of WikiLeaks. The organization is far from perfect, and governments are constantly complaining that the very organizations that demand their transparency are utterly secretive and anonymous themselves. But, honestly, they kind of have to be. Egypt's riots aside, there is still an enormous difference in power between regular people and the state. Anonymity and secrecy may be the only way that any sort of check on state power can possibly function.

A General Note About WikiLeaks

I honestly haven't seen an attack on the concept yet that didn't boil down to "all you proles should shut the hell up and go back to work". That's what all that "sometimes there needs to be secrecy" stuff generally boils down to.

Sure, diplomacy must have a secret component. Sources and methods should be protected, for example. But it's transparently (heh) obvious that there is far more secrecy than there needs to be. The reason is equally transparent: because in a democracy, the very last thing you want is for the voters to know what they're actually voting for. Keep the reality of the situation secret, lie to them with every breath, and hope that the lies are consistent and attractive enough that they'll go along with it.

See, if they knew what they were voting on, then they'd know what they can't vote on. All those bits of government that keep on rolling no matter who won the election? The ones that usually have something to do with blowing up random bits of the planet for "America's interests"? HELL no, you folks ain't going to be voting on that stuff. Democracy isn't supposed to go THAT far...Americans might disagree with what "America's interests" are, and then where would we be?

But just telling them "no, screw you, that stuff isn't up for debate" doesn't work. People can get annoyed when Their Betters make these sorts of decisions for them. So you keep them in the dark. Don't let them know that the decisions even exist, let alone how they've been made. That keeps them under wraps.

The sad thing is that the same people who defend this nonsense are the ones who rail against utterly open processes like the development of scientific consensus, or equally open government programs like food and drug safety. If you want to know how you're protected from horrible food poisoning, the information is out there. If you want to know why global warming is a threat, the information is out there. And if you want to know why those guys in the white suits came and removed the asbestos from your office, the information is out there too. And, hey, if you REALLY think it's bullshit? You can vote on it.

But not defense and foreign relations. Never that. Defense against food poisoning is one thing. Defense against, say, terrorism or instability is quite another. That's all supposed to be done FOR you, at great expense, while they snow you with a steady drumbeat of jingoistic nonsense and misplaced patriotism.

Certainly that's the press's reaction as well. THEY are allowed to know the truth. They are (or obey) Very Serious People. They ask The Right Questions, get The Right Answers, and tell all you idiots The Right Way To Think. And when The Right Way To Think turns out to be wrong, as is inevitably the case these days? Well, there are new Right Questions, new Right Answers, and new Right Ways To Think.

So you get assholes like Paul Carr, who say things like this:

I hate the fact that he’s trading on a myth that We The People have a right to know everything our governments are saying and doing in our name when, in fact, we elect people to act in our best interests on a global stage without necessarily giving us a heads up every time they want to have an off-the-record chat with a dictator.

 This is Right Thinking in spades. This guy is a tech columnist, one who clearly hasn't the faintest clue whether or not he's elected someone who will "act in our best interests". Certainly, if he either in Britain or America, the overwhelming tide of evidence suggests that they are NOT "acting in our best interests", never have, and arguably never will unless something seriously changes.  Like it or lump it, that's what WikiLeaks represents: a serious change.

How anybody, even someone this clueless, could even BEGIN to make this argument after the Iraq war is beyond me. I suppose he was too busy exulting in the the glory of having Steve Jobs dictate how he uses his computer, and thought that the same should apply to governance as well. Well, that, and trying to be some kind of Ellis-like cranky British scribe. Except without the talent. Or sense of humor.

Then again, maybe that's the issue, isn't it? The people who are crafting and repeating Right Thinking never live up to the responsibility. You're frankly doing a crap job. So why not let the rest of us decide?

Edit: Good bit on this was put up in, all of all places, The New Republic. Yeah, Peretz's rag. No, I don't get it either. But here's David Rieff, breaking it down in the midst of a weird Clay-Shirkyesque piece that somehow doesn't mention Clay Shirky:

In reality, there was only one group that was not privy to this information released by Wikileaks: the general public. And we can’t have them properly informed, now can we? Father (or, in the case of Secretary Clinton, “mother,” I suppose) knows best. I do not often agree with Noam Chomsky, but it seems to me that he was exactly right when he said that “one of the main reasons for state secrets is so that the state can defend itself from its citizens.” But, regardless of Washington’s motives, stopping Julian Assange (which, in any case, is not the same thing as stopping Wikileaks, as we are all starting to discover) will not be a victory over terrorism, as Senator Mitch McConnell has suggested so preposterously, for the simple reason that the one group we can be sure had the information in the cables before the Wikileaks are the terrorists.

In contrast, powerful people hate being shown up as much if not more than they hate failure, and people with insider information that gives them special status hate losing their intellectual monopoly, since they know that, if they do, loss of status will not be far behind. In this sense, the back-story of Wikileaks is not that American diplomacy is threatened or that Al Qaeda has been strengthened but that American diplomats have lost face, and American policy intellectuals have been confronted by an existential threat to their priestly monopoly on inside information. Oh, the pity of it!

That's something I've been banging on for a while. All these statements that "we elect our leaders to make these decisions for us!" miss the point that the people with the greatest say are not elected at all. The "priestly intellectuals" that set the ground and decide what the options are have never been elected by anybody but their colleagues and/or co-conspirators. They aren't even bureaucrats; at least bureaucrats are accountable to somebody. These jokers aren't really accountable to the people at all.

Which is probably why they keep showing up despite being wrong damned near 100% of the time.

Time Magazine's Cowardly Choice

Time's readers make the obvious choice for person of the year: Julian Assange. Time, instead, selects the Facebook guy. Who would have been a notable choice for 2009, mind you, when Facebook really hit its stride, but is only notable this year for having been the subject of a movie that he despises and believes is inaccurate.

But look at the symbolism of this. Time is utterly conventional, and absolutely dependent on government leaks. (Just like every other news source these days.) Everybody with any sense knows that Assange should have got the nod. Like him or hate him, he was a HUGE newsmaker over the past year. But the Time editors know that the government would absolutely lose their shit if Assange got the nod. They don't want him to be painted as a villain, they just want him and his organization to go the hell away. They want him tossed down the memory hole as soon as possible.

So, instead, we get Zuckerberg and his scary privacy-demolishing machine. One that, according to persistant rumors, has ties to American intelligence organizations. I don't know whether that's true or not—though certainly the stories about the hard-right early funding sources for Facebook are creepy—but it's undoubtedly true that Facebook collects a LOT of information about you and the sorts of things you like, and I have no doubt that the U.S. government would find that a useful resource, if they have access to it.

Certainly, this bit in their user agreement is creepy as hell:

We may use information about you that we collect from other sources, including but not limited to newspapers and Internet sources such as blogs, instant messaging services and other users of Facebook, to supplement your profile.

 But no matter what the truth of that is, the fact remains that Facebook is just about the opposite thing to a challenge to the established order. If anything, by being a single privacy-hating corporation that is trying to supplant the rest of the Internet and dictate what you can and cannot do on the Internet, it's big business and big government's wet dream.

So Time makes the safe, cowardly, government-friendly choice. The one that emphasizes taking secrets from the people, instead of sharing secrets with the people. Rather a bizarre position for journalists to take. Assuming that they're still really journalists in the first place. A hard assumption to make in 2010, and it's just getting harder.

Edit: Or, as a brilliant Twitter put it:

Mark Zuckerberg wants it utterly closed. Julian Assange wants it utterly open. #time chose Zuckerberg man of the year, its readers Assange.

Not That TNR Is Much Better Than Obama

I quoted Noam Schreiber in that last piece, but that doesn't change the fact that TNR is still a website that publishes people like Todd Gitlin who calls people on the internet "a wild street mob":

or indeed, where there is a state, there is diplomacy. Where there is diplomacy, some of it must take place out of the spotlight. The diplomats may well be better judges of which part that should be than the bureaucratic squads who stamp classifications on government documents. Surely, overall, the diplomats are better judges than the wild street mobs of the Internet.

This points to what's at the heart of the Wikileaks phenomenon: the complete inability of people like Gitlin to understand that elite opinion is the problem right now, not the solution. That's what the Tea Partiers are tapping into right now, though the Republicans and their think-tank allies are working hard to rechannel the sentiment in ridiculous, counterproductive directions.
Why the hell should Americans trust that diplomats are good judges of what should remain secret? Why the hell should ANYBODY? Sure, they're experts, but they're also an interested party, and the last two years are littered with stories about how interested experts got things wrong over, and over, and over again. Matt Taibbi has practically built his reputation on it, and the things he ferrets out are worse every day. What's the difference between a secret communique and, say, a rocket docket? Both are kept secret.  Both are the province of experts. And both raise one hell of a lot of questions about these experts' and elites' judgement and objectivity when brought to light.

The reason why Wikileaks is being castigated is the same reason why Taibbi got kicked out of one of those secret courts: because they expose just how jury-rigged and questionable these peoples' solutions are.

Australia: "WikiLeaks Is Just As Bad As Child Porn" (Edit: Not So Much?)

Yep, Australia has just added Wikileaks to its list of banned websites. Anybody who links to WikiLeaks can now get fined up to 11 grand a day.

THAT will stop Australians from reading it, I'm sure.

Edit: Doesn't this do enormous harm to the list in general? Sure, you can justify a list that blocks kiddie porn and fining people who link to it. Not a great justification, but you can.

But WikiLeaks? What's next, banning people from linking to the Government of New Zealand the next time a trade dispute comes up? Banning people from linking to Chinese websites because China said something mean about the Australian Prime Minister? Banning links to adult porn sites because it encourages "deviant sexuality"?

So the government is entitled to omnipotent surveillance, and the people aren't allowed to read SFA. Well done. You might as well put up a big banner that says "Welcome to Australia: we just proved why Assange may have a point!"

Edit: And, just as fast, it would appear that it has been removed.  But this is more interesting: Apparently the Australian government is willing to go along with any American prosecution of Assange. Assange is an Australian national, so he may be more vulnerable here.

Then again, he may just as well renounce Australian citizenship. I'm not sure how that would affect things, but if he goes to Iceland—which has basically become a WikiLeaks haven—then he might well be secure.

Either way, I don't think this will stem the tide. If WikiLeaks falls, someone else will take up the slack.

Could Saying Nice Things About WikiLeaks Get You Arrested?

Hot on the heels of that last post, I find this: WikiLeaks should be designated a 'foreign terrorist organization,' Rep. Pete King fumes.

Rep. Pete King (R-L.I.) urged U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to designate WikiLeaks a "foreign terrorist organization," saying it "posed a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States," and to prosecute founder Julian Assange for espionage.

Again: Not an American.

But aside from that, this is deeply disturbing. As NPR points out, the laws against supporting supposed foreign terrorist organizations are incredibly extensive. It's not just material support: even talking to them could get you arrested and indicted, if not shipped off to one of the foreign covert prisons that we're not supposed to know about.

So is that how this is going to play out? Are Americans supposed to pretend that the site doesn't exist, for fear of getting arrested? Or are Americans only allowed to pretend it exists if they engage in the sort of kabuki dance of overt condemnation that you normally only see in salacious sixties films about the dangers of drugs and promiscuity? It won't keep any of this information out of American hands, since the Internet is global. The best that the Government could do is redirect DNS requests, as they've tried to do with BitTorrent sites. But that didn't work, and wouldn't work. It's not worth it.

As Susan Delacourt says, this is really just another revolt against "elites". America clearly no longer trusts the people that are supposed to be running it. Either they're spitting angry against a government that doesn't care that they're out of work, or simply distrustful of a state that seems to be governed BY Wall St. bond traders, FOR Wall St. bond traders.

In a country where Matt Taibbi seems to uncover fresh horrors on a daily basis, where security theatre has TSA goons laughing at your genitals when they aren't smacking them with the backs of their hands, and when Congress collectively decides that protecting mortgage fraudsters is more important than ensuring that people don't die of starvation during the Christmas season...why the hell should anybody care about whether some diplomats get some egg on their faces?

I don't know about you, but I'm drawing a blank.

"US embassy cables leak sparks global diplomatic crisis"

Well, how could it not? Pretty much everything marked "noforn" is going to be utterly embarrassing for all involved. That's kind of the point.

The best part about the WikiLeaks controversy, so far, are all the right-wingers asking "why aren't they being prosecuted"? No matter how many times somebody says "you can't prosecute them, they aren't Americans", it never gets through. You can't even pass a law against it, either, or else every other nation in the world would be breaking U.S. law for engaging in their own espionage.  And the U.S. would be breaking theirs.

(The U.S. probably shouldn't bring that sort of thing up, anyway, considering they have been trying to collect passwords, encryption keys, and biometric data from U.N. diplomats. Whoops.)

Edit: I think the right-wingers know that prosecution is impossible. Their protestations aside, what they really want is for Obama to kill Julian Assange. Obama wouldn't do it because it's stupid, it would bring down universal condemnation, and wouldn't help stem the flow, since WikiLeaks is bigger than Assange.

But, hey, if the American right had realized that "beheading" attacks do not work in situations like this, they wouldn't have botched Afghanistan and Iraq so badly, would they?

The WikiLeaks Cables Are Out

Haven't delved into the so-called "Cablegate" too much yet. Checked out the Israel stuff, since that's likely to be the most immediately explosive, but most of them seemed to primarily focus on how Israel is convinced that Iran is its greatest potential threat. (Which isn't exactly news.)

To be fair, they aren't all out. In fact, supposedly a relatively small number are out. It seems like WikiLeaks is serious about scrubbing information that's dangerous, instead of merely embarrassing. I have no doubt that there is still going to be dangerous information released,
 mind you, since there are supposedly over 250,000 cables in total. But since none exceed Secret classification, and since WikiLeaks is being more careful. I think that the potential threat that they pose may be limited. I certainly hope so.

I'm of two minds about this. These things are supposed to be secret for a reason. As an advocate of pseudonymity and anonymity in debate and communication, I can't deny that in good conscience. Privacy in comunication is vital, and too many people forget that in their rush to build their public social presence online.

But these aren't individuals, these are governments. Yes, diplomats need to be able to conduct their business privately. Governments do too. But many (if not all) of the governments in question here cannot and will not acknowledge that they should respect privacy too. The American government wiretaps the hell out of its own citizens; the Europeans and Canadians are worse, and the rest of the world is even worse than THAT. Governments, as a rule, have not recognized that there is a single line of personal privacy that they can't cross for even the most ridiculous, prosaic rules. They're tearing apart personal privacy to protect COPYRIGHTS, for God's sake—ripping up any protection that citizens may have expected just to allow private holders of government-granted monopolies to sue the bejeezus out of some dumb college kid.

In that sort of environment, in that sort of world, how can I unconditionally condemn WikiLeaks? Sure, they don't respect governments' interests. But the one thing that comes across in all of their leaks is that governments don't respect our interests either. They can get away with that principally because of the secrecy that these sorts of institutions enjoy. We don't realize what they do to us. But they work for us, so we damned well should.

If the only way to change things is through this sort of extreme response, then it may be as necessary as it is disquieting.

Edit:  Good piece by Colin Koopman about how this presages widescale information transparency. I don't know if I fully agree, since WikiLeaks itself is a product of a dizzying level of secrecy and privacy-consciousness. Assange is only the front man: the organization itself is mostly anonymous, and as far as I can tell, takes pseudonymity and anonymity VERY seriously. I've read comments pointing out that they don't even know each other's names.


Still, I agree that we've been moving to a world where,  Colin said, "transparency trumps secrecy". We were already becoming more and more transparent to our governments. Now they're discovering that they could be just as transparent to us. They were NOT expecting that it goes both ways, and that's why they're collectively losing their shit over this.

WH Presser on Wikileaks Afghanistan Docs

This is a sad, sad thing. Gibbs is stammering and stuttering, trying desperately to look like he's on top of this. He sounds like he's about to cry.

The reporters are merciless. They aren't happy about how the NYT/Guardian/Der Spiegel scooped the hell out of 'em by doing real, honest-to-goodness investigative journalism. They're trying to score points by sounding tough, so as to have something to show for their (lack of) efforts. The smarter ones probably realize that they're struggling for their profession's existence: the main value of newspapers and television news was their ability to get interviews and primary source material, and wikileaks showed that non-newspapers can handle it.

The worst part is the whinging. Gibbs keeps saying "we didn't get to see the material beforehand! They didn't bring it to us! They won't talk to us!" Of course they didn't, Rob: Julian Assange has no reason to. You've already arrested his source, and he's been subject to a manhunt by your people since the helicopter footage leak. You aren't his friends. You aren't his allies. And since you aren't his government, he holds no allegiance to you. He clearly doesn't trust you, either, hence the Guardian/NYT/Spiegel stunt. He wanted to make sure that you couldn't pressure a single publication into shutting it down.

(As I write this, he admits that they would have tried to shut the NYT story down on "national security" grounds.)

The second-worst part is the "no new revelations" line. Leaving aside all the stories about the ISI bankrolling and supporting the Taliban, it only reinforces the idea that only novelty and spectacle is worth discussing. That's half the reason American media is so terrible. It doesn't need reinforcement. Assange himself has acknowledged that there is no single electrifying incident. He's said that the value of the documents is showing the broader nature and progress of the war. He's probably delayed releasing the really juicy stuff, since he's trying to minimize the harm the material could cause in the here-and-now.

What's really valuable, though, is the way that it snubs its nose at the trends in modern western media. Everything is short-form these days. Sound bites, twitters, and up-to-the-minute scrolling newstext are paramount. You can't get long-form analysis even if you want it. That someone would think that releasing a ton of information is a good idea, in the service of allowing people to understand it themselves is practically revolutionary in-and-of itself.  There's no mediation or digestion. You can read it for yourself.

(If you haven't, go read some of it now, if only to show to yourselves that you're grownups and not just "media consumers". The "propaganda" category is compelling, for example, since it gets into the nighttime anonymous letters that the Taliban uses to intimidate regular Afghans.)

...okay, now Gibbs just used "misunderestimated". I think we're done here. Go read some memos.

Wikileaks Blows Afghan War Wide Open

Holy hell, they did it.

There has been a lot of talk over the last few months about the thousands of documents that Wikileaks (and its founder/owner, Julian Assange) was sitting on about the Afghanistan war. That's one of the reasons why many had thought that Julian was going to get "disappeared" or at the very least arrested; the U.S. government would NOT want this leaked.

Well, get ready, because it's out. Not all of it, mind you. A lot of the documents have been withheld in order to prevent people from getting hurt. Once that's no longer an issue, they will be released too. Eventually it will all be published, assuming Wikileaks gets the change.

Assange explains his motivations in an interview on the Guardian website. He makes it clear that he knows what this means, and what sort of position this puts him in. He said "if journalism is good it is controversial by its nature. It is the role of journalism to take on powerful abuses; and when powerful abuses are taken on, there is always a back-reaction...this shows the true nature of this war." No doubt.

It doesn't look good, either. These are still early days and there are a LOT of documents to get through, but the news is grim, according to the Guardian's War Log analysis. The Afghanistan police and army are shooting at each other. The shadowy American special forces in "Task Force 373" are moving through the country assassinating Taliban targets, as well as killing civilian men, women and children—and even Afghan police officers—who stand in their way. Friendly fire deaths are rife.

(The Guardian, given early access to the logs, is doing impressive work in analyzing them.)

This is a major, major story. This is probably the greatest intelligence leak in history, or at least since the Soviets opened up the Russian diplomatic files. It cements Wikileaks as one of the most important organizations in the world right now. It means that investigative journalism is not dead in the age of the Internet. And, most importantly, it means that we should all keep a VERY close eye on what's going on with Julian.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that I fear for his life.