WikiLeaks: the Internet Age Jumps the Shark
At the moment, the bad guys seem mostly interested in knocking off the rich ranchers and cattle barons who can afford to hire armies to protect them. Tweaking the tail of the lion by dumping diplomatic cables on to the internet or publishing the cell phone numbers of politicians and bureaucrats is serious mischief-making but doesn’t threaten our privacy or well being directly.
What about 10 years from now? Can the concept of “openness” and “transparency” be taken too far? Suppose an Assange-like messiah arises who declares that personal assets, bank accounts, credit card numbers, Social Security numbers, tax returns and other very personal information have no business being hidden from view; that privacy itself is an authoritarian construct; and that everybody should know everything about everyone else. Only then can we all be truly “equal.”
A far-fetched scenario to be sure, but a logical, if not reasonable, extrapolation from the current state of affairs. How could you prosecute the violator? Revealing some of that information is against the law, but we would run into basically the same problem we have with prosecuting Mr. Assange. It all depends on how the law is interpreted, and given the fact that applicable statutes were written in a pre-internet age, there are probably holes through which a clever attorney can maneuver his client to freedom.
We all know how the internet has revolutionized communication. But flowing underneath the surface of history over the last 15 years or so has been an even more startling and worrisome trend: these new means of communicating have created an impetus to openness that might be unhealthy. Transparency as an ideal is a good thing. But can too much of a good thing lead to untoward consequences?
The WikiLeaks dump will probably damage the global conversation. Nations will be less likely to share with the United States. Agencies will be tempted to return to the pre-9/11 silos. World leaders will get their back up when they read what is said about them. Cooperation against Iran may be harder to maintain because Arab leaders feel exposed and boxed in. This fragile international conversation is under threat. It’s under threat from WikiLeaks. It’s under threat from a Gresham’s Law effect, in which the level of public exposure is determined by the biggest leaker and the biggest traitor.
Assange has his defenders who remind one of the way that some British Conservatives used to talk about Hitler back in the 1930s: To paraphrase, “Well, he’s a little extreme, isn’t he? But his heart is in the right place when it comes to the Soviets.”
Averring that what Assange has accomplished is mostly good, or that his efforts and methods may be extreme but he has the right idea about transparency, just doesn’t wash. He has given us a glimpse into a possible future where transparency is an end in and of itself by which any violation of our personal space can be, and probably will be, justified under the rubric of everyone’s “right to know.”
The government agencies and corporations who hold our most personal and private information will have to become fanatics about protecting it in order to counter the fanatics who are seeking it. This was not done in the WikiLeaks matter, as the irresponsibility of those who made it ridiculously easy for someone to waltz in and download 250,000 cables shows. The pre-internet mindset of those in charge must change and change now before information that might start a war, or teach a terrorist how to circumvent security, or instruct some monstrously arrogant man-child how to build a nuclear bomb makes us sorry the internet was ever invented.
Hopefully we’ll see Julian fully exercise his freedom of speech by publishing the secret papers of Russia, China, N. Korea, Venezuela, or maybe Cuba. Can’t wait to see the superior societies show us how it’s done. Go on Julian do it to one of them. How lucky you are that you’ve picked a country that actually has laws, moral values, justice and openness. Yes, openness. Name any country that has more. Prove to us how superior you are, do it to one of the five above, Julian. Or better yet, do it to Iran, Pakistan, or maybe, Saudi Arabia. Go on. Yeah, I thought so. COWARD.
There’s an old cliche paraphrased as “everything comes with a price.” So it goes with the internet and its dangers.
The internet has impersonalized the world to a degree, certainly added to the alienating of both neighbors and political persuasions. You can “talk” to someone half a world a way and still not be aware of who lives next door. I never found that healthy, as we need a sense of proximal community.
But if I were to measure pro and con, I still believe that the sharing of information has far more strengths than weaknesses. Where else can I learn just how dishonest the MSM has been, and in the next moment determine out how to turn the blinking light off my thermostat?
I’ve learned more from the community at PJM in 18 months than I did half my vastly overrated and overpriced collegiate books.
If you want to stop the shenanigans of the Julian Assanges of the world, you don’t do it with useless and costly regulation, or throwing the baby out with the bathwater. You stop it the same way we ought to be stopping terrorists or Wall Street cheats.
You make the penalty of the sin so severe, that no one dare attempt the feat again. Put Julian Assange in front of a firing squad and see how many are willing to follow his lead. Take a white collar Wall Street cheat and throw him in the dink sharing a jail cell with rapists and murders for 20 years.
I can virtually guarantee you’d see a slowdown….
A form of the main stream media has been around for about 200 years now. Newspapers were there in the old days, ready, willing, and able to print whatever secrets it could get its hands on. Why is it that the main stream media is treating this Wikileaks scandal as a First Amendment issue when, in reality, it’s a simple case of espionage? People have stolen state secrets for hundreds of years. Technology has only made it easier and has made the crime bigger through its distribution. But it’s still espionage, pure and simple, and should be treated as such. All Americans who were involved in this should be executed for either espionage or treason (take your pick) and the man who distributed the secrets, Assange, should be hunted down and either put in prison or executed for taking American state secrets, just like any other spy would be treated.
Tell me, if during the Cold War a citizen from a foreign country, say Australia, obtained some state secrets from the United States and decided to print them in an Australian newspaper, don’t you think the CIA and the Australian government would want to have a “chat” wih that person? Don’t you think they also would have stopped this person from printing those secrets? Of course they would have. So why is the Internet any different? We are only talking about a matter of degree here, in the distribution of the documents. But espionage is still espionage, no matter how you slice it or dice it. We are dealing with the same old crimes here. The only thing that has changed is the way the information is handled. That’s all.
“Can the concept of “openness” and “transparency” be taken too far? Suppose an Assange-like messiah arises who declares that personal assets, bank accounts, credit card numbers, Social Security numbers, tax returns and other very personal information have no business being hidden from view; that privacy itself is an authoritarian construct; and that everybody should know everything about everyone else. Only then can we all be truly “equal.””
I think we’re there already. Anyone can glean any information about anyone in America – this is the Best Country in the World after all.
As to the POS Assange, he is an enemy of the United States and should be treated accordingly.
As to those who let the information available to 3,000,000 ‘users,’ heads should roll. We’ve always possessed our spies; that is why the secrets ought to be guarded better. That one angry gay can download millions of secret documents tells the whole story.
I’m all for free press, but aiding and abetting the enemy by publishing this crap should be treason and have consequences.
This has nothing to do with everyone’s “right to know,” or Internet per se. This was a crime perpetrated a group of people.
Punish them all.
Damn straight, Rick. When Barry Dunham and his administration are shown as the incompetent morons that they are, we have too much of a good thing. Openness and transparency are only useful when they make Republicans look bad.
My favorite headline this week:
Tom Friedman – What if China Had a
WikiLeakerOrgan Donor?Tom, of course went into his ‘we need to be more like China’ spiel, but I thought the irony was tasty.
You might as well wail about the roads bank robbers use to drive to the bank. We have laws. We have cops. The government did nothing when its secrets were published, and can now live with the results. The fault is not that the internet exists, or that it lacks TSA agents to strip search our e-mails.
Oh, those Pentagon Papers were different, an evil Republican was president. You get what you tolerate. Any parent can tell you that.
Not bad from the editor of RightWing Nut House. The very position of the NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times and their ilk, which might reasonably be thought the left wing nut house. Access to the internet must be filtered for “the good of the people”. That idiot public, those common dumbos AND those dangerous nuts by their betters of pre- internet media. Free access to information, which is money, means loss of control of that money pot. This loss of control cannot of course be a part of this sudden interest in “the good of the people”?
As commoners we should trust elite journalists/ personalities, TV talk show hosts/esses, our elected representatives and elite professors who have always to our knowledge shown interests in the good of the people during these past 50 years.Often “at great cost” to their own inerests? Right?
As WE THE PEOPLE are inferior in intellect, judgement, experience, and knowledge of the inner workings / subtleties of those private gentlemens clubs of the “best and brightest” in all institutions that affect our lives, we must trust to their care of our interests.
AS WE NOW see with this administration, which has already attempted internet control. This administration with its media supporters/ cheerleaders which has avoided and dismissed matters of Law potentially crucial to the nation.
Funny, none of these media took that position in the 1960s-70s when the leaker was known as “Deep Throat”. At which time a “new” information medium was becoming paramount, Television. BUT this medium was quickly controlled by those “betters”. AND contrived history controlled by them and those of like mind. The authority of TV gave to those in control and their staffs inordinate, unaccountable power over the direction and actions of the actors on the world stage. Especially the at the time richest,free-est and most powerful nation. Leading ultimately as the end game to this present governing claque in the USA.
That old problem arises : WHO shall watch the watchers/ the overseers of who and what is accessed : TRUST US, the establishment media and the “liberal” politicians who have given full evidence that they do NOT much like “democracy” because it’s messy and dangerous for their dreams of control. They have already given proofs that to trust them is suicidal behaviour for Americans.
You make some good points. My issue is…who put Julian Assange in charge? I certainly didn’t ask him to publish my country’s sensitive documents. By doing so, he has f***ed with my welfare, my security, my life. I didn’t give him permission to do that. He just decided, all on his own, what’s good for me. That makes him wrong – at least as wrong as the government and the news media.
Can you consider the possibility that people in government, even at highest levels in whom you place your trust, might have reasons for these exposures and the ease with which effected ?
Persons who assiduously DO protect information about their own private lives, even to the point of Executive Order to seal pertinent documents from public review ?
These acts affecting your security cannot have been a mere muddle. As many other commentators have noted there are draconian methods in the offices of government to keep secrets secret. How did these become so easily accessed ? With the effects of making trust in the USA actions and commitments suspect world-wide. With little aggressive response from the defenders of the USA in the government. Very odd wouldn’t you say. Especially in an administration which despite promises bringing people together has forced a very big wedge among the people who trusted to his and his advertisers’ word.
AND in which, as evidenced by this article, the immediate response from the powers that be is to pursue methods to limit the freedoms of the public to continue to get information NOT filtered by those who hold power elected and / or unelected, i.e. the Media, Hollywood and “secret” advisors.
The cure would be worse than the disease;
The only hope of preserving freedom is to
make sure the people continue to have a way
of finding out what the government is doing.
For once I agree with you.
Yeah, why would real Americans want to know some of the crap our nation does in the name of “Freedom”? It is better when we just don’t know what our leaders do (of either party) on our behalf. Yeah, don’t crowd my head with too many details, I’m just an American and I like my “Freedom®” at whatever the cost!
I have mixed feelings about Assange. Although he has published secrets that will damage our government, these acts have also had some favorable effects. Most of the embarrassments resulting from wikileaks have done damage to the Obama Administration, something conservatives should like. One great service Assange has done for us is that he has established the fact that there are traitors working for our government who leak secret documents to the public domain. Assange has done less damage than the NY Times has done when they reported on the CIA “black sites” used to hold and interrogate terrorists. Who are these traitorous leakers? That is the big secret that remains to be fully released.
This article has a parallel in history. Those people who advocated destroying the printing press of 200 years ago because they thought it allowed people to share information which the elitists deemed dangerous.
Imagine what Ben Franklin would say to this assault on free speech.
Elitists who want a nanny state to control us are using the army’s failure to properly vet and supervise a malcontent in its IT operation to limit freedom of information.
“Suppose an Assange-like messiah arises who declares that personal assets, bank accounts, credit card numbers, Social Security numbers, tax returns and other very personal information have no business being hidden from view”
Suppose “they” can enter your home, search your belongings, leave and never tell you they were there. Without a warrant.
It’s not privacy that is an authoritarian construct. The Patriot Act is.
You decry the world you seek.
I for one am looking forward to the leaks of the banks Assange has promised. Once the public gets a load of how an entire world was thrust into a depression and millions of 401ks subsequently looted by insider hedge funds, maybe the FBI will step in.
Rather than bailing out the banks they should have had their records opened by the gov’t and prosecuted. Instead banks were rescued from their own corruption and the bill was paid for out of retirement accounts and tax payers. Corruption and right out in the open, nice and legal.
I used to get over 4% on a simple savings account, now, zip, so my money continues to be looted unless I care to put myself at the mercy of an insider hedge fund whose owner has 900 million dollars in his own bank account. Crime pays.
Just look at the law-ignoring Obama administration and mayors across this country and DREAM Act morons and the whole lot. Sneak into the country, break the law and get a free education. Crime pays. According to the US Constitution as gibberishly interpreted by our illustrious judges, everyone in the world is a US citizen. Bring the populations of a broken country to the US and you have just one more broken country.
Too bad Assange can’t leak the names of 12 million illegal aliens so we can kick them the hell back to the Copper Age.
If yesterday someone had told me that Julian Assange had performed a service to the USA, I would have suspected them of doing drugs! This blog has managed to change that. He has exposed some very dangerous practices in our State Department! The first is the obvious inability to keep the confidential, confidential. The second and as important, is the mindless useless chatter that clogs communications. Third, and possibly most important, is to fail to recognize the important from gossip!! A year ago a father warned us about his son and on of these chattering ninnies did not see it as important. What else has taken last place to mindless gossip? Virtually all the cables I have read contain NO USABLE INFORMATION!!! Why is this allowed? I can not imagine that this is isolated to the State Department! Hillary! Stand up! Take the pressure off your brain, and fix it, instead of just hiding it!!!
Like the author, it occurs to me that one response to all this from every government on Earth will be, “We have to shut down the internet!”
“The drive for transparency and openness has revolutionized communication, but can we reach a point where it becomes too much of a good thing?”
Yes, happened ages ago.
So when is Julian going to be open and transparent with the source of his funding?
I thought the USA was the leader in computer technology. Why is it so easy to hack into American sites and so difficult to hack into the sites of backwards countries like North Korea or Cuba?
I’m sure the US has those systems in their back pocket. No need to tip our hand until it’s needed for something special. Iran has been having some problems with the firewall on their nuclear systems. Guess that’s special. We innovate, the rest copy. If we hold back a bit, there’s nothing to copy. The Chinese haven’t innovated anything since 2 Haley’s Comets ago.
Good people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
George Orwell
How would D-Day have gone had the plans been made public? Only 5 men knew what was to happen with the largest invasion force in history.
How would Shermans march have gone if the free press published his plans to do away with supply lines? They didn’t know anything about it, and they had no right to know. As he famously wrote to the people of Atlanta: Now that war has come to you…
Didn’t General Grant famously get in trouble for saying if he spotted a reporter anywhere near his camp they would accidently be shot? He apologized but reporters stayed away non the less, they had no right to know his plans, he would have shot them as spys.
There is no `right to know’ state secrets and methods.
Great stuff! But, it stopped just before the order to terminate Assange with extreme prejudice is demanded—probably by a Russian or a Brit, since we have perhaps a stronger moral code about such tactics. Where is 007 when he is needed?
Does anyone else find it curious that our government is claiming that,just like with Osama Bin Laden, they don’t know where Julian is? We have one of the best foreign intelligence services on Earth and we can’t find this arrogant little boy? It seems to me that when our government REALLY wants to find someone,they find them. It wouldn’t surprise me if we find out in the future that Julian is a CIA operative.
I don’t think it’s very hard to find assange. Just pose as a journalist and he’ll practically give you a lap-dance. For a guy who claims to live on the run, he’s very media-friendly.
At the moment, I believe there is no particular impediment to him being arrested over this bogus sweden claim. Apart, of course, from it being bogus. His lawyers reckon the UK police know where to find him:
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/world/wikileaks-julian-assange-escapes-arrest-in-uk-due-to-clerical-error/story-e6frf7lf-1225964528602
The problem you have is that you can’t just waltz into a country and abduct somebody you don’t like. At least – not in democracies.
Julian Assange obviously has a death wish. As they say, though, be careful what you wish for because you just might get it.
Julian will not publish any of the Chinese or Russian secrets even if he had them. He undoubtedly knows they will do what we should have already and that is slit his throat.
“Imagine someone like Assange getting his hands on a nuclear weapon some day. With his kind of fanatical devotion to an ideal — openness and transparency — there is no telling how he would use the device, only surety that he would. Anyone with that kind of burning desire to expose “the truth” as he sees it could justify anything — including the incineration of millions”
And you accuse the internet of jumping the shark?
You just claimed that assange is a willing mass murderer. That he’d feel compelled to “incinerate millions” just because somebody gave him the means. Do you really want to be taken seriously?
My impression is that people get very het up about the dangers of openness the moment something gets leaked that they happen not to like. If you wrote a similar article about shark-jumping after the CRU leaks, then by all means point me towards it so that I can see your even-handed philosophical rigor in action.
And save the “CRU leaks proved the blah blah blah”. Firstly, no they didn’t. Secondly it’s no different to the current situation. Except possibly in one way – this leak (I believe) does actually involve official correspondence. The CRU leaks were mostly emails that weren’t written with anyone but the recipient in mind. We haven’t, for example, heard people second-guessing the meanings of what certain communiques actually said, because they were written to be read by third parties.
Julian Assange, London, England
Daniel Assange, 20 year old son, Nunawading Victoria, Australia
Christine Assange ,mother, Queensland, Australia
Golly, it is amazing, is it not? What one can find on the internet.
You think either one of them would be able to get in touch with Julian in an emergency? I do.
Well, there you go – he’s probably about to get nicked.
WikiLeaks site down, Assange close to arrest
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/12/03/3084384.htm
That’s a pity. The rape charges look bogus, and everyone knows it. If sweden forges ahead with the prosecution they’ll end up looking very silly. And everyone knows it. So … this will be interesting to watch. Their reasons for pushing ahead with the arrest are already quite questionable.
The rape charges look bogus? Why is that? It would be just as easy to assume that this little popinjay, like Roman Polanski, believes the rules don’t apply to him.
Do you know anything about the case at all?
Go and do some googling. It’s pretty dodgy. Unless there is some previously-unreleased piece of information, this would never get to court in the US or australia. At best it’s he-said-she-said, at worst it’s somebody setting out to get revenge. Here are some places to start:
http://www.crikey.com.au/2010/12/02/when-it-comes-to-assange-r-pe-case-the-swedes-are-making-it-up-as-they-go-along/
http://radsoft.net/news/20101001,01.shtml