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The truth will always win
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Ten Theses on Wikileaks Why WikiLeaks Is Good for America Dossier WIKILEAKS
Julian Assange ‐ Geert Lovink and Patrice Riemens ‐ Evan Hansen David Leight and Luke Harding
Wikileaks is a self-described "not-for-profit media organization," launched in 2006 for the purposes of disseminating original documents from anonymous sources and leakers. Its website says: "Wikileaks will accept restricted or censored material of political, ethical, diplomatic or historical significance. We do not accept rumor, opinion, other kinds of first hand accounts or material that is publicly available elsewhere." Julian Assange is an Australian citizen who is said to have served as the editor-in-chief and spokesperson for Wikileaks since its founding in 2006. Before that, he was described as an advisor. Sometimes he is cited as its founder. The media and popular imagination currently equate him with Wikileaks itself, with uncertain accuracy. Wikileaks has moved through three phases since its founding in 2006. In its first phase, during which it released several substantial troves of documents related to Kenya in 2008, Wikileaks operated very much with a standard wiki model: the public readership could actively post and edit materials, and it had a say in the types of materials that were accepted and how such materials were vetted. The documents released in that first phase were more or less a straight dump to the Web: very little organized redacting occurred on the part of Wikileaks. Wikileaks's second phase was exemplified with the release of the "Collateral Murder" video in April 2010. The video was a highly curated, produced and packaged political statement. It was meant to illustrate a political point of view, not merely to inform.
Photo Cover : Tristana Rey for CameraPress / Ojo de Agua
The third phase is the one we currently see with the release of the diplomatic cables: Wikileaks working in close conjunction with a select group of news organizations to analyze, redact and release the cables in a curated manner, rather than dumping them on the Internet or using them to illustrate a singular political point of view. After this we cannot be ignored Wikileaks and their influence in our behavior for to read the news. With this edition we can to put the elements for this reflections.
HumouraroundWikileaks ...................................................................... 4p. WhyWikileaks is goodforAmerica ...................................................... 6p The truth willallways win ....................................................................... 8p Wikileaks ................................................................................................... 12p Ten theses on Wikileaks ......................................................................... 13p
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truly free press - one unfettered by concerns of nationalism - is apparently a terrifying problem for elected governments and tyrannies alike. It shouldn't be. In the past week, after publishing secret U.S. diplomatic cables, secret-spilling site WikiLeaks has been hit with denial-of-service attacks on its servers by unknown parties; its backup hosting provider, Amazon, booted WikiLeaks off its hosting service; and PayPal has suspended its donation-collecting account, damaging WikiLeaks' ability to raise funds. MasterCard announced Monday it was blocking credit card payments to WikiLeaks, saying the site was engaged in illegal activities, despite the fact it has never been charged with a crime. Meanwhile, U.S. politicians have ramped up the rhetoric against the nonprofit, calling for the arrest and prosecution and even assassination of its most visible spokesman, Julian Assange. Questions about whether current laws are adequate to prosecute him have prompted lawmakers to propose amending the espionage statute to bring Assange to heel or even to declare WikiLeaks a terrorist organization. WikiLeaks is not perfect, and we have highlighted many of its shortcomings on this website. Nevertheless, it's time to make a clear statement about the value of the site and take sides: WikiLeaks stands to improve our democracy, not weaken it. 6
The greatest threat we face right now from WikiLeaks is not the information it has spilled and may spill in the future, but the reactionary response to it that's building in the United States that promises to repudiate the rule of law and our free speech traditions, if left unchecked. Secrecy is routinely posited as a critical component for effective governance, a premise that's so widely accepted that even some journalists, whose job is to reveal the secret workings of governments, have declared WikiLeaks' efforts to be out of bounds. We should embrace the site as an expression of the fundamental freedom that is at the core of our Bill of Rights. Transparency, and its value, look very different inside the corridors of power than outside. On the campaign trail, Barack Obama vowed to roll back the secrecy apparatus that had been dramatically expanded under his predecessor, but his administration has largely abandoned those promises and instead doubled-down on secrecy. One of the core complaints against WikiLeaks is a lack of accountability. It has set up shop in multiple countries with liberal press protections in an apparent bid to stand above the law. It owes allegiance to no one government, and its interests do not align neatly with authorities'. Compare this, for example, to what happened when the U.S. government pressured The New York Times in 2004 to drop its story about warrantless
wiretapping on grounds that it would harm national security. The paper withheld the story for a year-and-ahalf.WikiLeaks' role is not the same as the press', since it does not always endeavor to vet information prior to publication. But it operates within what one might call the media ecosystem, feeding publications with original documents that are found nowhere else and insulating them against pressures from governments seeking to suppress information.
WikiLeaks is a distributor of this information, if an extraordinarily prolific one. It helps guarantee the information won't be hidden by editors and publishers who are afraid of lawsuits or the government. WikiLeaks has beaten back the attacks against it with the help of hundreds of mirror sites that will keep its content available, despite the best efforts of opponents. Blocking WikiLeaks, even if it were possible, could never be effective. A government's best and only defense against damaging spills is to act justly and fairly. By seeking to quell WikiLeaks, its U.S. political opponents are only priming the pump for more embarrassing revelations down the road.
wilikeaks.org
Instead of encouraging online service providers to blacklist sites and writing new espionage laws that would further criminalize the publication of government secrets, we should regard WikiLeaks as subject to the same first amendment rights that protect The New York Times. And as a society, we should embrace the site as an expression of the fundamental freedom that is at the core of our Bill of Rights, not react like Chinese corporations that are happy to censor information on behalf of their government to curry favor.
WikiLeaks does not automatically bring radical transparency in its wake. Sites like WikiLeaks work because sources, more often than not pricked by conscience, come forward with information in the public interest.
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Kaycircle
These things have stayed with me. WikiLeaks was created around these core values. The idea, conceived in Australia , was to use internet technologies in new ways to report the truth. WikiLeaks coined a new type of journalism: scientific journalism. We work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to prove it is true. Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the The British tried to shut him up but Keith original document it is based on. Murdoch would not be silenced and his efforts led to the termination of the That way you can judge for yourself: Is disastrous Gallipoli campaign. Nearly a the story true? Did the journalist report it century later, WikiLeaks is also fearlessly accurately? publishing facts that need to be made public. I grew up in a Queensland country Democratic societies need a strong media town where people spoke their minds and WikiLeaks is part of that media. The media helps keep government honest. bluntly. WikiLeaks has revealed some hard truths They distrusted big government as about the Iraq and Afghan wars, and something that could be corrupted if not broken stories about corporate corruption. watched carefully. The dark days of People have said I am anti-war: for the corruption in the Queensland government record, I am not. Sometimes nations need before the Fitzgerald inquiry are to go to war, and there are just wars. But testimony to what happens when the there is nothing more wrong than a politicians gag the media from reporting government lying to its people about those wars, then asking these same the truth. IN 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide's The News, wrote: ĂŹIn the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win.ĂŽ His observation perhaps reflected his father Keith Murdoch's expose that Australian troops were being needlessly sacrificed by incompetent British commanders on the shores of Gallipoli.
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citizens to put their lives and their taxes on the line That is because The Guardian, The New York for those lies. If a war is justified, then tell the truth Times and Der Spiegel are old and large, while WikiLeaks is as yet young and small. We are the and the people will decide whether to support it. underdogs. The Gillard government is trying to If you have read any of the Afghan or Iraq war logs, shoot the messenger because it doesn't want the any of the US embassy cables or any of the stories truth revealed, including information about its own about the things WikiLeaks has reported, consider diplomatic and political dealings. how important it is for all media to be able to report these things freely. WikiLeaks is not the only Has there been any response from the Australian government to the numerous public threats of publisher of the US embassy cables. violence against me and other WikiLeaks Other media outlets, including Britain 's The personnel? One might have thought an Australian Guardian, The New York Times, El Pais in Spain prime minister would be defending her citizens and Der Spiegel in Germany have published the against such things, but there have only been same redacted cables. Yet it is WikiLeaks, as the wholly unsubstantiated claims of illegality. co-ordinator of these other groups, that has copped the most vicious attacks and accusations from the The Prime Minister and especially the AttorneyGeneral are meant to carry US government and its out their duties with dignity acolytes. and above the fray. Rest assured, these two mean to I have been accused of save their own skins. They treason, even though I am an will not. Every time Australian, not a US, citizen. WikiLeaks publishes the There have been dozens of truth about abuses serious calls in the US for me committed by US agencies, to be ìtaken outî by US Australian politicians chant special forces. Sarah Palin a provably false chorus with says I should be ìhunted the State Department: down like Osama bin Ladenî, “You'll risk lives! National a Republican bill sits before the US Senate seeking to have me declared a security! You'll endanger troops!” Then they say there is nothing of importance in what WikiLeaks ìtransnational threatî and disposed of accordingly. publishes. It can't be both. Which is it? An adviser to the Canadian Prime Minister's office has called on national television for me to be It is neither. WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing history. During that time we have changed whole assassinated. governments, but not a single person, as far as An American blogger has called for my 20-year-old anyone is aware, has been harmed. But the US , son, here in Australia, to be kidnapped and harmed with Australian government connivance, has killed for no other reason than to get at me. And thousands in the past few months alone. US Australians should observe with no pride the Secretary of Defence Robert Gates admitted in a disgraceful pandering to these sentiments by Prime letter to the US congress that no sensitive Minister Gillard and US Secretary of State Hillary intelligence sources or methods had been Clinton have not had a word of criticism for the compromised by the Afghan war logs disclosure. other media organisations. 10
The Pentagon stated there was no evidence the WikiLeaks reports had led to anyone being harmed in Afghanistan. NATO in Kabul told CNN it couldn’t find a single person who needed protecting. The Australian Department of Defence said the same. No Australian troops or sources have been hurt by anything we have published. But our publications have been far from unimportant. The US diplomatic cables reveal some startling facts: The US asked its diplomats to steal personal human material and information from UN officials and human rights groups, including DNA, fingerprints, iris scans, credit card numbers, internet passwords and ID photos, in violation of international treaties. Presumably Australian UN diplomats may be targeted, too.
Officials in Jordan and Bahrain want Iran ‘s nuclear program stopped by any means available. Britain’s Iraq inquiry was fixed to protect “US interests”. Sweden is a covert member of NATO and US intelligence sharing is kept from parliament. The US is playing hardball to get other countries to take freed detainees from Guantanamo Bay . Barack Obama agreed to meet the Slovenian President only if Slovenia took a prisoner. Our Pacific neighbour Kiribati was offered millions of dollars to accept detainees.
In its landmark ruling in the Pentagon Papers case, the US Supreme Court said “only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government”. The swirling storm around WikiLeaks today reinforces the need to defend the King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia asked the US right of all media to reveal the truth.
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While travelling through Serbia in August 1991, the US secretary of state, James Baker, learned that Gorbachev had been overthrown – not from secret intelligence but from watching CNN. Similarly the first news of the terrorist outrage at Domodedovo airport in Moscow in January this year came to the Kremlin not from intelligence sources but from Twitter. Through technological progress the exclusive rights of the great powers to keep their most sensitive information secret appear to have been summarily withdrawn. Hillary Clinton's diplomatic pillow talk is no longer privileged information, and her fury knows no limits. The man found to have been the ultimate culprit is kept naked in an American military facility with President Obama's explicit support. The recipient of a quarter of a million classified US documents and the purveyor of these indiscretions, Julian Assange, fears the possibility of extradition to the United States after indictment in Sweden for rape. US Representative Peter King, once a notoriously firm and open backer of IRA terrorism but now chair of the homeland security committee, wants to designate WikiLeaks "a foreign terrorist organisation". Sarah Palin unthinkingly asserts that Assange has "blood on his hands". She argues that he should be pursued like the Taliban and alQaida (ie executed without trial). Yet even the Pentagon admits that there is no evidence that his revelations have resulted in bloodshed. It is therefore worth asking why Assange has found widespread support for his actions. The 12
prevalent mistrust of government, notably in the United States and Britain, did not appear from nowhere. It arose from the war in Iraq, the elaborate lies told to justify it and the lack of accountability of the Bush and Blair administrations to the broader public, whose soldiers died for the cause and whose purse paid
And the US government itself is responsible for the insecure communication system that made release not just possible but inevitable. One wonders whether foreign intelligence services were not already purloining its contents for some time prior to the WikiLeaks revelations and are feeling even more aggrieved at Assange than Washington that the system is now terminated. Ironically it was due to the US government's determination to mobilise cyberspace to enhance security after 9/11 that WikiLeaks was able to expose American diplomacy across the board. If ever there were a good argument that when
governments act ambitiously their results often bear no relation to their intentions, this is it. Two of the three books under review – David Leigh and Luke Harding's WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy (Guardian Books, £9.99) and Daniel Domscheit-Berg's Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website (Jonathan Cape, £9.99) – give us a breathless and informative narrative. The third, Micah Sifry's WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency (Yale, £9.99), focuses instead on the politics from a high moral plane. Sifry's core point is that "If we promote the use of guardian.co.uk 13
the internet to overturn repressive regimes around the world, then we have to either accept the fact that these same methods may be used against our own regime – or make sure our own policies are beyond reproach."
then they would be released under the normal archival schedule. Second, the documents were at the lowest level of secrecy: confidential, not top secret. One can access confidential documents in some archives up to the very recent past (at the Brazilian Foreign Ministry, for instance).
Domscheit-Berg, in contrast, relates the history of WikiLeaks as a disillusioned former assistant. It is Third, diplomats continue to write assessments that unquestionably enlightening. are indiscreet; otherwise what But accounts of Assange else would they do? Fourth, since "bumbling" with microphones, the Americans are so powerful, not washing his socks and however much they insult Putin acting the office dictator is or Berlusconi it will really make what might appear in a nasty no significant difference to the divorce case in a legal drama state of relations with Russia or on TV. I am not convinced we Italy. Far worse has been done in need to know all this unless the past with no result. (And it is considering future employment impossible to embarrass at WikiLeaks or, worse still, Berlusconi.) sharing an apartment with the great man. Leigh and Harding, These foreign statesmen on the other hand, have no axe themselves know very well that to grind and combine an their own services spill the beans objective history of events about their counterparts. It is a with sufficient personal little embarrassing to have dirty illustration to be convincing. linen washed in public, but no more than that. Politicians are, That said, WikiLeaks might after all, focused on interests, not be, as they claim, the "biggest feelings. Moreover, the White leak in history", but is it really House has as a result of the the most important? Seymour scandal rolled back on Hersh wrote a whole book on information sharing; so it is no Henry Kissinger based entirely longer possible to access on such leakage and Daniel confidential State Department Ellsberg got into hot water for communications via the military leaking volumes of the network. We are unlikely to see a Pentagon papers at a time repetition of these events. when the war in Vietnam was still in progress. One should not forget Watergate, Lastly, the state of trauma evidently suffered by either. Clinton will ensure less rather than more openness with respect to releasing diplomatic records in And what exactly are the consequences of the future. Her predecessor did not want anything WikiLeaks? At the present rate of release it will released. Let us hope a more enlightened view will take over two decades to see all the documents. By take hold and ultimately prevail. 14
These 0.
"What do I think of Wikileaks? I think it would be a good idea!�
These 1. Disclosures and leaks have been of all times, but never before has a non state -or non-
corporate affiliated group done this at the scale Wikileaks managed to with the 'Afghan War Logs'. In a certain sense, these 'colossal' Wikileaks disclosures can simply be explained as a consequence of the dramatic spread of IT usage, together with a dramatic drop in its costs, including those for the storage of millions of documents. These 2. For better or for worse, Wikileaks has skyrocketed itself into the realm of high-level international politics. Out of the blue, Wikileaks has briefly become a full-blown player both on the world scene, as well as in the national sphere of some countries. These 3. In the ongoing saga termed "The Decline of the US Empire", Wikileaks enters the stage as the slayer of a soft target. It would be difficult to imagine it doing quite the same to the Russian or Chinese government, or even to that of Singapore - not to speak of their ... err ... 'corporate' affiliates. These 4. One of the main difficulty with explaining Wikileaks arises from the fact it is unclear and also unclear to the Wikileaks people themselves - whether it sees itself and operates as a content provider or as a simple carrier of leaked data (whichever one, as predicated by context and circumstances, is the impression) These 5. The steady decline of investigative journalism due to diminishing support and funding is an undeniable fact. The ever-ongoing acceleration and over-crowding in the so-called attention economy makes that there is no longer enough room for complicated stories. These 6. Wikileaks is a typical SPO (Single Person Organization). This means that initiativetaking, decision making, and the execution process is largely centralized in the hands of one single person. Much like small and medium-size businesses the founder cannot be voted out and unlike many collectives leadership is not rotating. These 7. Wikileaks is also an organization deeply shaped by 1980s hacker culture combined with the political values of techno-libertarianism which emerged in the 1990s. The fact that Wikileaks has been founded, and is still to a large extent run by hard core geeks, forms an essential frame of reference to understand its values and moves. These 8. Lack of commonality with congenial 'another world is possible' movements forces Wikileaks to seek public attention by way of increasingly spectacular - and risky - disclosures, while gathering a constituency of often wildly enthusiastic, but totally passive supporters. These 9. Wikileaks displays a stunning lack of transparancy in its internal organization. Its excuse that "Wikileaks needs to be completely opaque in order to force others to be totally transparent." amounts to little more than Mad Magazine's famous Spy vs Spy cartoons. These 10. We do not think that taking a stand in favor or against Wikileaks is what matters most. Wikileaks is there, and there to stay till it either scuttles itself or is destroyed by the forces opposing its operation. Wikileaks has rendered a sterling service to the cause of transparency, democracy and openness. aks' or not.
Kate Smile