This is the first of a two-part examination of Wikileaks. Part II, “The New McCarthyism” will be posted on Thursday morning. 

GL.

It’s only when you poke the beast that you get a sense of its true nature.

The American government, media, and corporate establishment are all in a tizzy over the latest poke from Wikileaks:

The “whistleblowing” site (it really isn’t, but I’ll get to that in a minute) is releasing excerpts from a cache of some 250,000 diplomatic cables and other documents. These cables were sent from various American embassies back to the State Department between 1966 and 2010. The leaks have been dripping out since November 28, revealing a whole host of tawdry but so far trivial tidbits of American diplomatic behavior.

None of the “secrets” revealed by Wikileaks are really secrets: They’re mostly confidential appraisals of the U.S.’s allies and rivals; much of it is gossip, or merely pedestrian—demonstrably so:

Of the 251,287 documents Wikileaks has obtained, 134,000 are outright unclassified; 102,000 are classified “confidential”; and 15,652 are classified as “secret”. Source is linked here, confirmation is linked here.

None of these documents are classified “top secret” or higher—anyone claiming that they are “top secret” or that they “put lives in danger” is at best exaggerating, and at worst lying.
The reason none of the data Wikileaks acquired was “top secret” or higher in its classification is because the data in question was accessed through the SIPRNet system (Secret Internet Protocol Router Network) that the U.S. government has set up. This is a sort of parallel internet for the Department of Defense and the State Department. Three million people have access to SIPRNet, which by design handles at most “secret” documents. Material rated “top secret” or higher in the classification scale use a completely different system, accessed by far fewer individuals.

So the latest Wikileaks “revelations” are actually not particularly important, in and of themselves.

More than anything, they have been embarrassing—such as the acknowledgment that American officials cast a blind eye on rampant Afghani government corruption; that Saudi Arabia has been clamoring for the U.S. to attack Iran just as loudly as the Israelis; that Hillary Clinton directed American diplomats to spy on United Nations delegates, up to and including gathering their credit card, e-mail, and “biometric” information.

But none have been important, or have offered some startling surprise. The three most important “revelations” were already well-known facts: That al-Qaeda and other Islamic radicals are funded by Saudi Arabia; that Yemeni government missile strikes on al-Qaeda training facilities in that country were actually carried out by the American military; and that China’s government had indeed executed the “hacking attack” on Google between June 2009 and January 2010, which eventually drove the company out of the country.

In diplomatic, military and cyber-security circles—and not particularly elevated circles at that—these “revelations” were as well known as the truth about Santa and the Easter Bunny.

What is important about the latest Wikileaks release is the reaction these revelations have caused in the realms of government, media and corporate power in America—a collective reaction that I for one found startling, not to say frightening.

To me, it revealed a New McCarthyism that transcends mere party affiliation and ordinary political divisions, and glides off into a realm of hatred for the individual—an enforced moral acquiescence, whereby a truth spoken is a truth that must be shut up, regardless of the cost.

So I figured I’d find out all I could about Wikileaks, so as to understand what the hubbub was all about—and understand my own reaction.

The Origins and Rise to Prominence of Wikileaks

As soon as you start looking into Wikileaks, you come across the name Julian Assange, the 39 year-old “official spokesperson” of the organization. If you look more closely, you start to realize that Julian Assange is Wikileaks, and Wikileaks is very much him: In outlook, priorities and modus operandi.

Julian Assange

Australian by birth, the child of divorce and a gypsy upbringing, Julian Assange has that pasty-faced expressionless Nordic look of a cruel and steely-eyed English barrister who got buggered senseless in his upper-crust public school—or maybe an inscrutable Euro-trash arms dealer who obsessively plays baccarat up and down the Côte d’Azur. In other words, he is an adventurer, but a cypher as well.

He first gained prominence as a teenager in Australia in 1991, when he was arrested for computer hacking, managing to carry out some fairly sophisticated hacking of Canada’s Nortel. But according to The New Yorker (in a long and detailed profile of him that I highly recommend), the Australian judge concluded there was no aim of lucre or vandalism on Assange’s part: “There is just no evidence that there was anything other than [a] sort of intelligent inquisitiveness and the pleasure of being able to—what’s the expression—surf through these various computers.”

This was indeed the case: Before his arrest, as a 16 year-old, Assange had joined up with two other hackers in Australia to form a group they called “The International Subversives”. (Before we laugh, let’s remember all the stupid clubs we invented for ourselves when we were sixteen.) The stated goal of this little cyber-treehouse club was to break into corporate and government computers and see what was in them, without stealing or hurting anyone.

(What I personally find very interesting—and reminiscent of my own teenaged misery—is that Assange wrote detailed and formal rules for this band of cyber-pranksters. This urge to impose structure and order on the self—while at the same time trying to subvert structure and order in the world outside the self—is very much a divorce-baby’s metier.)

The other aspect of Assange’s biography that bears mentioning is a terrifically long and bruising custody battle over his child, which turned from a legal fight with his child’s mother, into a legal fight with the Australian state, which for various bureaucratic reasons was unresponsive to Assange’s custody appeal, excepting a pitched legal battle.

Out of this traumatic experience, Assange seemed to develop the idea that Left vs. Right, Rich vs. Poor, and other such old-fashioned political dichotomies were missing the point: It was the bureacracy/corporation versus the individual.

From these two strains—computer hacking, and fighting a large bureaucratic power—one could not predict, but could certainly explain, how Assange got the idea to create Wikileaks around 2006.

It was without question his idea, and he was the prime mover behind the site. Though he was helped along the way, Assange was the architect of Wikileaks, wrote the basic code, and developed the security system. At various times, various people have helped Wikileaks; some have even been on staff, some of them even being paid—

—but at the end of the day, Wikileaks is a one-man band: Julian Assange is the band leader.

Wikileaks was up and running by late 2006—but like all sites, it lacked the crucial ingredient:

Content.

With no content, he could not show that his Wikileaks site was worth submitting anonymous material to. Without content, his site was like a bright and shiny new used-car dealership—but with no cars.

He got his content the old fashioned way—by stealing it from thieves. To be more precise, Assange/Wikileaks noticed that a server they had access to was being used as a node for the transmission of various governments’ data—and this node was being hacked by some Chinese hackers, for reasons unknown. Therefore, Assange/Wikileaks leached on to the Chinese, and hacked what they were hacking.

This was how Assange landed the first batch of Wikileaks content: In December of 2006, they could claim that they had “over 1,000,000 government documents”, which was technically true—and some of it was almost interesting.

But it’s import didn’t matter: With this first batch, Wikileaks was off and running, accreting more data by the very fact that it had accumulated a lot of confidential government data.

This is what apparently drew Spc. Bradley Manning, a homosexual Army intelligence analyst, to pass along a trove of some 90,000 Army documents to Assange/Wikileaks, including battlefield video. (As of this writing, though people seem to suggest Manning is the source of both the 90,000 Army documents and the additional 250,000 State Department cables, it is unclear if that is truly the case, or if there were two or more separate leaks. For purposes of this discussion, it’s irrelevant.)

Screen captures from “Collateral Murder” (click to enlarge):
Top left, Reuters reporters and other Iraqi civilians, talking.
Top right, the group comes under fire from Apache gunship.
Bottom left, men fleeing. Bottom right, men all dead.

Certainly one of the videos Spc. Manning provided—“Collateral Murder”—was the most chilling, and created instant controversy around the world: Released in April 2010, the video shows a 2007 incident where an Apache helicopter gunship killed a group of Iraqis, who turned out to be Reuters reporters. Two children were also severely injured in the attack by American soldiers. 

This video put Wikileaks on the map. 

I won’t give a Greatest Hits recitation of Wikileaks’ various coups between the time it started and the “Collateral Murder” release. I’ll limit myself to pointing interested readers to this list in the UK Telegraph, recounting the most memorable Wikileaks exploits. 

However, for all their exploits—some of them quite amusing, such as their leaking the confidential British military manual outlining how to prevent Wikileaks from publishing confidential material—Wikileaks is not really a whistleblowing site. 

It claims it is a whistleblowing site—a claim which is the basis for its entire effort at self-promotion. But it soon becomes apparent that Wikileaks doesn’t want to call attention to malfeasance per se: Rather, Wikileaks just wants to reveal secrets—the bigger the better, the more embarrassing the better. 

I say this because Wikileaks has consistently published confidential material that in and of itself did not serve the purpose of opening governments to greater accountability, yet which hurt individuals egregiously. 

For instance, there was the case of Wikileaks revealing the e-mail data and personal photos of Sarah Palin—but that was merely juvenile. 

Far more serious was the release of the confidential Belgian police report which named a potential suspect in an ongoing criminal investigation, as was the release of the names of local Afghans assisting American forces in their occupation of that country: These revelations exposed these individuals to harm, but certainly did not advance the cause of government openness, or highlight any particular injustice.

In the above cases where individuals were harmed by Wikileaks’ revelations, criticism by Wikileaks’ allies led it to begin conscientiously redacting the names of individuals from future document dumps.

This reaction to its allies’ urgings, rather than Wikileaks itself moving to strike the names of blameless individuals who would come to harm because of these revelations, goes to show a moral blankness of Assange/Wikileaks:

He/it did not recognize what was bad about releasing information about a private individual, even someone as deplorable as Palin. The information was simply released with an eye to maximum media impact, but without a corresponding eye towards the morality and goodness of making the information known. 

This goes to show what Wikileaks’ is really interested in: It doesn’t want to blow any whistle—it wants a world without secrets. And it wants to make sure the world knows that Wikileaks is the reason the world has no secrets. 

This reflects a hacker’s worldview—which should surprise no one, of course, because that’s what Assange is: A former teenaged hacker.

Who Assange is, and what his organization, Wikileaks, really is—a hacker’s site, not a whistleblowing site—inevitably creates tensions with people who genuinely are appalled by the behavior of the Western democracies over the last ten or fifteen years.

In a case like “Collateral Murder”, Assange/Wikileaks’ hacker’s mantra of No Secrets coincides perfectly with the political goal (such as my own) of open democracies that are truthful and reliable, no matter how bitter the truth or the political cost of discovery.

I want to know of incidents like those shown by “Collateral Murder”—because I want to know what crimes my government has been committing in my name, and how my government has been deceiving me. I want to know these bitter truths so that I can (through democratic proxies) prosecute the guilty, assuage the suffering of the innocent victims, and ultimately make a better state for both myself, my family and my children.

But from a morally blank hacker’s point of view, the titillation and horror of the footage of “Collateral Murder” is not a means to achieving some political goal—the sensory rush of the footage is an end in itself. From the hacker’s point of view, the whole idea behind releasing something like “Collateral Murder” is to bask in the glow of people’s reaction to the footage—but nothing more.

These two conflicting points of view fit together perfectly in the case of something like “Collateral Murder”: Where the hacker’s interest ends, the democratic moralist’s interest begins.

A true whistleblower—a moralist trying to improve a democratic society’s systems of government by way of public release of confidential information which highlights failures of that government—is what Spc. Bradley Manning is: He gained access to information that conclusively proved crimes and misdemeanors carried out by government agents and covered up by that government, and sought to release that information to the wider public.

Bradley Manning is the true hero of this entire situation—and he will likely spend the rest of his life in prison: A fate which should haunt every American’s conscience.

Why? Because Manning had no other motive than goodness and justice. He released this information at great risk to himself, with no desire for publicity (obviously), and no possibility of recompense. His only motive, clearly, was so that people’s sense of injustice would be so outraged by the footage and documents that they would demand of their government some accountability—some semblance of justice.

Julian Assange and Wikileaks—because of their hacker’s mentality—were interested in maximum impact.

They’re very good at it, too: Maximum impact.

Assange very shrewdly got himself to the big time by way of his rather brilliant strategy of releasing new information that he has developed: A strategy of media exclusivity—ironically the exact opposite of the openness Wikileaks claims to seek.

It all has to do with information—and how it is presented. 

The internet is much like the sea: If I were to take a diamond the size of a fist, and place it on the surface of the ocean, it would sink without a sign, and no one would ever know it had been there.

But if I take a banana, put it on a neon-orange dinghy in the middle of the busy Sydney harbor, then fire flares into the night sky hour after hour, while blaring fog horns nonstop, what will happen? Why, in no time at all, I’ll get a huge crowd, all of them jostling one another to catch a sight of this marvelous banana, amazed by it as if they’d never seen one before.

Same with information on the internet. 

Rather than simply dumping tons of documents into the internet ether, and have its impact dissipate like smoke, Wikileaks has selectively released documents and material to a few high-profile, indisputably serious mainstream news sources in different countries. In the case of the State Department cables, Wikileaks gave simultaneous exclusives to the New York Times, Germany’s Der Spiegel, France’s Le Monde, Spain’s El País, and the UK’s The Guardian. 

This plays to the media outlet’s vanity, giving them an “exclusive” in their home country (which is the market they care about), while insuring that the material will be released, and released prominently: If, say, the Times had failed to publish the material, the other four would likely have published it, garnering the media glory. The editors at the Times would know that—so they’d have no choice but to publish the material, and publish it prominently. 

This is, of course, what Wikileaks wants: There’s no point in outing a secret if nobody hears that it’s been outed. 

But like the banana released to hoopla in the middle of Sydney harbor, in the case of the State Department cables, this very clever media strategy has had the effect of making trivial and unimportant “revelations” have a heft and weight that they do not objectively have—which makes the reactions to the latest Wikileaks document dump far more interesting:

The collective hissy-fit the American establishment is having is over things which do not matter. 

Remember that, as we survey the reactions to the State Department cable dump: As of this writing, none of the Wikileaks revelations from their cache are either unknown, or surprising, or revealing, or secret.

And so far, Wikileaks has not been charged with breaking any law.

“Part II—The New McCarthyism” will appear on Thursday morning. In that post, I will discuss the specifics of the government, media and corporate reactions to this latest release from Wikileaks; the sex crime allegations against Assange; and the legal fate of Assange and Wikileaks. 

GL