A first: now for some well written news: Science Fiction author and commentator Bruce Sterling has blogged a hugely interesting paper on the situation WikiLeaks has found itself in entitled 'The Blast Shack' (http://www.webstock.org.nz/blog/2010/the-blast-shack/ ).
WikiLeaks has inspired an explosion of journalists covering scandalous tales of international relations (/tensions), but a significant amount of attention has been directed solely at the public face of the organisation, Julian Assange. In his paper, Sterling tracks the process of whistle blowing and the types of people that generally find themselves in the imperilled by releasing sensitive information without ever really understanding the repercussions of their actions. Sterling speaks of Bradley Manning, a Private in the US Army who was found to have disclosed 260,000 US diplomatic cables that he had found himself in possession of, and thus wound up in solitary confinement, currently facing a court martial in the coming year. Throughout his piece, Sterling bulks up his view by privileging to-the-point logical argumentation and a proper attention to all the differing facets of 'Cablegate' – i.e. not focusing too much on Assange or any other figure, not relying on the past too heavily to add length to something most journalists still have little knowledge of, and providing a portentous plausible result of the scandal, without resorting to sensationalising. The fact that he is a fiction author and not journalist or even a full time blogger is evident, and adds weight to his statements throughout. His points are poetically textured in rapidly delivered, stunningly concise analogies, the kind of sentences that make the reader think “so that's what's meant by ___!”.
Sterling comments that Manning is a typical hacker - uncharismatic, unpopular, and lacking the full knowledge of the political sensitivity of his actions.
“Commonly, the authorities don’t much like to crush apple-cheeked white-guy hackers like Bradley Manning. It’s hard to charge hackers with crimes, even when they gleefully commit them, because it’s hard to find prosecutors and judges willing to bone up on the drudgery of understanding what they did. But they’ve pretty much got to make a purée’ 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 zip code, wrong set of motives.
Bradley’s gonna become a “spy” whose “espionage” 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.”
By devoting the first quarter of his piece to Manning and the typical bad results of hacking a superpower, Sterling is able to provide a fresh and novel view on Assange, someone who has been covered relentlessly in all areas of the press, but someone we actually don't know much about. This, Sterling states, is a symptom of Assange's goals, and the culture of mistrust which the WikiLeaks cables have infused diplomatic and press relations.
Sterling begins by arguing the case that a lot of what Assange is doing is really nothing new:
“Through dint of years of cunning effort, Assange has worked himself into a position where his “computer crimes” are mainly political. They’re probably not even crimes. They are “leaks.” 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.”
Leaks are indeed nothing new. They are the lifeblood of high profile investigative journalistic writings. The concept of such a type of journalism is to discover truths, unearth falsities, to deliver true news to the people.
What is novel about Assange is mainly the fact that nobody has ever been the name behind such a volume of leaks as him.
Sterling makes the additional point that hacking superpowers is nothing new either. The National Security Agency (NSA) of the US now functions as a an intelligence agency in place to protect against (among other things) internet leaks. This agency exists for the very reason that so many hackers attempt to break into US Govt. files every single day, and the fact that many have done this successfully. Though never has such a mountain of info been assembled by one organisation on the scale of WikiLeaks. Sterling comments on the difficulty of defining exactly what the NSA does, given that it forte naturally is secrecy - owing to the fact that it is a functioning intelligence agency. However the writer does use this clash of views in the context of the discretion vs transparency argument regarding information to helpfully describe the agency as essentially an “anti-WikiLeaks”. Sterling is continually disregarding the temptation to fully take sides, while recognising he can't ignore the need to provide opinion. His compromise is to provide a subtle weaving of interconnected reflections, which turns out to be quite a potent tactic.
The paper tracks the process of how politics entered hacking. He describes this particular organisation as completely new in this regard, as they seem to hold an odd combination of unprecedented resources of files while being run by Assange's vaguely political agenda.
Most striking about WikiLeaks, the writer points out, is the attention that has been paid to its spokesperson – the media really don't know what to do with him. On one level what he is doing is admirable, yet it is indeed dangerous; on one level he is a former hacker and a geek, and on another he is an suave intellectual. He has a broad knowledge, evident from his University studies: along with physics, mathematics, neuroscience, Assange has also studied philosophy. He is essentially an unorthodox geek with political ambitions – a whole new kettle of fish.
Unlike Bradley Manning, Assange is not out of his depth (yet), he appears to be remarkably in control of the external forces attempting to bring him down. While governments rack their brains trying to find ways to imprison him, he survives off a huge community of very active supporters, who are challenging a lot of conventional wisdom, by virtue of their support for the WikiLeaks leader. Unlike Manning, Assange has had years of front-line experience with the sensitive nature of leaks from his hacking days (he was convicted for hacking offences in Australia aged 16, his targets were, along with international businesses and a university, a subregion of the Pentagon). Sterling argues that Manning was essentially a bored military man who stumbled upon information that he simply couldn't handle. Hence the writer claims that pity is not an appropriate emotion to feel for Assange, for he has cultivated his public persona in a contrived manner unlike any other whistle blower. He has also managed to isolate many former colleagues and friends, his personal life today is difficult to penetrate. He is softly and precisely spoken, holds a calm demeanour, and has the look of a Bond character, emitting instant coolness bordering on coldness (his stylish name also seems lifted straight from a Bond film). Indeed, in the next few years it's quite possible we will see several films about his life, he has more scandals to give to the public. It is likely we will see a hugely popular film reacting to public the same curiosity of the internet celebrity figure that surrounded Mark Zuckerberg – ie “Who is this guy? How did he get so popular all of a sudden? He seems like an atypical celebrity, I want a dramatic account of his life to base my opinion of him on”). Commenting on the arresting indefinable nature of Assange, Sterling writes:
“Assange is no more a “journalist” than he is a crypto mathematician. He’s a darkside hacker who is a self-appointed, self-anointed, self-educated global dissident. He’s 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 ‘em, but, well, it doesn’t take all of them.”
Continuing on this, the writer develops a comical simile to accurately describe Assange's ability to negotiate the complexities of whistle blowing, by spurring diplomatic breakdowns as a distracting feature (something which crops up later in the paper in more depth):
“He’s 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 has formulated his own image with care, he seems to be impossibly gripping onto some control against a legion of furious powerful diplomatic bodies. His army of online supporters will support him to the end, and his sexual assault crime is quite a trivial one - not many doubt that pursuing extradition for this level of crime is politically motivated.
As sterling puts it:
“Assange is formless, indefinable, something we don't quite have a term for yet...
He’s a different, modern type of serious troublemaker. He’s certainly not a “terrorist,” because nobody is scared and no one got injured. He’s not a “spy,” because nobody spies by revealing the doings of a government to its own civil population. He is orthogonal. He’s 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.”
Sterling moves from his critique of Assange's character to a discussion of the reasons why WikiLeaks have been able to triumph over a superpower.
To develop this he makes an interesting analogy to the music industry:
“Every state wants to see the diplomatic cables of every other state. It will bend heaven and earth to get them. It’s 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.”
...
“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, they’ll sadly admit that they don’t buy any music themselves. Because, well, they’re in the business, so why should they? And the same goes for diplomats and discreet secrets.”
He is stating that everyone who reads the cables are hackers, guilty by association. Which is an interesting take. I suppose in the same way that drug dealers are always deemed responsible for corrupting users, Assange is guilty of feeding our slobbering curiosity on what the US really thinks of other countries.
In seeking to elucidate the muddled affair that it is, Sterling's coup-de-grace lies in his tactic of pushing the complicated nature of 'Cablegate' to its naturally aporetic conclusion.
The massive irony in all the commotion is that countries around the world are condemning what WikiLeaks is doing, yet the information released is adding to international tensions which thwart attempted collaborative moves to stop Assange. Assange has exposed the dysfunctionality in modern diplomacy, which leads to countries bickering over cables saying exactly who they don't like and exactly what plans they have in store for them. The fact that these cables are so sensitive, and are so diplomatically destructive that a truly concentrated international effort to stop him is yet to be arranged, consequently allows him to continue to release more cables.
To round of his paper Sterling returns to Assange personally again, combining insight into his indefinable character in earlier sections to link into his point on the various levels of irony cropping up in the scandal. The US government realises that Assange a nuisance. However he not a classic commie dissident - the kind of 'spy' America once had protocol to deal with during the Cold War. Assange is conversely an all new type of foe. He is an enemy who is using the very thesis that the West appears to support – free markets, free minds, and a quick flow of information – and is using it to (successfully) damage them. By using their own tools against them, Assange has struck a new fear into Western democracies.
'Cablegate', Sterling points out, has pushed to reveal the inherent contradictions in Western governance.
“ “Transparency” and “discretion” are virtues, but they are virtues that clash. The international order and the global Internet are not best pals. They never were, and now that’s obvious.”
The paper doesn't end on any sort of hopeful note, quite the opposite. Sterling notes that Assange is very likely to be pursued. WikiLeaks is likely to fall apart. Its current growth rate is unsustainable given the constraints now set into his Assange's life. Many of WikiLeaks former colleagues have however abandoned ship and, as a consequence, there are several new regionally defined leaks sites – Brusselsleaks, Indoleaks, Balkanleaks – which can pay attention to hot spots of international relations tensions and blow the cover of each competing country.
There will certainly be another twist in the saga. Journalists and bloggers alike are gearing up for a showdown between Assange and the US Govt. How this will turn out is very unclear. The legal complexities and nuances involved make a case against Assange difficult. But as WikiLeaks continues to distribute shocking cables to the respected dailies of the world, the US Govt. is becoming more and more certain that Assange is a man who needs to be stopped.
A botched trial of Assange would be the worst case scenario for the US. However uncomfortable the current status quo is, if he were to brought in to the US court system to be martyred and leaves a free man to leak again, the US appears may have permanently damaged its reputation, seeing impotent in the eyes of developing rivals, perpetuating and performing to its own concerns.
Either way it is certain to end in tears for at least one of the parties. The impossibility of a quiet resolution in WikiLeaks taking on the US is summed up by Sterling in clear terms:
“It’s not just about him and the burning urge to punish him; it’s about the public risks to the reputation of the USA. The superpower hypocrisy here is gonna be hard to bear. The USA loves to read other people’s 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. They’d be a little upset about his violation of the strict proprieties, but they’d also take keen satisfaction in the hilarious comeuppance of minor powers that shouldn’t be messing with computers, unlike the grandiose, high-tech USA.”
