Monday, 6 December 2010
Umberto Eco: Not such wicked leaks
The WikiLeaks affair has twofold value. On the one hand, it turns out to be a bogus scandal, a scandal that only appears to be a scandal against the backdrop of the hypocrisy governing relations between the state, the citizenry and the press. On the other hand, it heralds a sea change in international communication – and prefigures a regressive future of “crabwise” progress.But let’s take it one step at a time. First off, the WikiLeaks confirm the fact that every file put together by a secret service (of any nation you like) is exclusively made up of press clippings. The “extraordinary” American revelations about Berlusconi’s sex habits merely relay what could already be read for months in any newspaper (except those owned by Berlusconi himself, needless to say), and the sinister caricature of Gaddafi has long been the stuff of cabaret farce.
Embassies have morphed into espionage centres
The rule that says secret files must only contain news that is already common knowledge is essential to the dynamic of secret services, and not only in the present century. Go to an esoteric book shop and you’ll find that every book on the shelf (on the Holy Grail, the “mystery” of Rennes-le-Château [a hoax theory concocted to draw tourists to a French town], on the Templars or the Rosicrucians) is a point-by-point rehash of what is already written in older books. And it’s not just because occult authors are averse to doing original research (or don’t know where to look for news about the non-existent), but because those given to the occult only believe what they already know and what corroborates what they’ve already heard. That happens to be Dan Brown’s success formula.The same goes for secret files. The informant is lazy. So is the head of the secret service (or at least he’s limited – otherwise he could be, what do I know, an editor at Libération): he only regards as true what he recognises. The top-secret dope on Berlusconi that the US embassy in Rome beamed to the Department of State was the same story that had come out in Newsweek the week before.
So why so much ado about these leaks? For one thing, they say what any savvy observer already knows: that the embassies, at least since the end of World War II, and since heads of state can call each other up or fly over to meet for dinner, have lost their diplomatic function and, but for the occasional ceremonial function, have morphed into espionage centres. Anyone who watches investigative documentaries knows that full well, and it is only out of hypocrisy that we feign ignorance. Still, repeating that in public constitutes a breach of the duty of hypocrisy, and puts American diplomacy in a lousy light.
A real secret is an empty secret
Secondly, the very notion that any old hacker can delve into the most secret secrets of the most powerful country in the world has dealt a hefty blow to the State Department’s prestige. So the scandal actually hurts the “perpetrators” more than the “victims”.But let’s turn to the more profound significance of what has occurred. Formerly, back in the days of Orwell, every power could be conceived of as a Big Brother watching over its subjects’ every move. The Orwellian prophecy came completely true once the powers that be could monitor every phone call made by the citizen, every hotel he stayed in, every toll road he took and so on and so forth. The citizen became the total victim of the watchful eye of the state. But when it transpires, as it has now, that even the crypts of state secrets are not beyond the hacker’s grasp, the surveillance ceases to work only one-way and becomes circular. The state has its eye on every citizen, but every citizen, or at least every hacker – the citizens’ self-appointed avenger – can pry into the state’s every secret.
How can a power hold up if it can’t even keep its own secrets anymore? It is true, as Georg Simmel once remarked, that a real secret is an empty secret (which can never be unearthed); it is also true that anything known about Berlusconi or Merkel’s character is essentially an empty secret, a secret without a secret, because it’s public domain. But to actually reveal, as WikiLeaks has done, that Hillary Clinton’s secrets were empty secrets amounts to taking away all her power. WikiLeaks didn’t do any harm to Sarkozy or Merkel, but did irreparable damage to Clinton and Obama.
Technology now advances crabwise
What will be the consequences of this wound inflicted on a very mighty power? It’s obvious that in future, states won’t be able to put any restricted information on line anymore: that would be tantamount to posting it on a street corner. But it is equally clear that, given today’s technologies, it is pointless to hope to have confidential dealings over the phone. Nothing is easier than finding out whether a head of state flew in or out or contacted one of his counterparts. So how can privy matters be conducted in future? Now I know that for the time being, my forecast is still science fiction and therefore fantastic, but I can’t help imagining state agents riding discreetly in stagecoaches along untrackable routes, bearing only memorised messages or, at most, the occasional document concealed in the heel of a shoe. Only a single copy thereof will be kept – in locked drawers. Ultimately, the attempted Watergate break-in was less successful than WikiLeaks. I once had occasion to observe that technology now advances crabwise, i.e. backwards. A century after the wireless telegraph revolutionised communications, the Internet has re-established a telegraph that runs on (telephone) wires. (Analog) video cassettes enabled film buffs to peruse a movie frame by frame, by fast-forwarding and rewinding to lay bare all the secrets of the editing process, but (digital) CDs now only allow us quantum leaps from one chapter to another. High-speed trains take us from Rome to Milan in three hours, but flying there, if you include transfers to and from the airports, takes three and a half hours. So it wouldn’t be extraordinary if politics and communications technologies were to revert to the horse-drawn carriage.
One last observation: In days of yore, the press would try to figure out what was hatching sub rosa inside the embassies. Nowadays, it’s the embassies that are asking the press for the inside story.
Students warned: Read WikiLeaks and you’re out of a government job
Graduate students at US universities are being warned not to read or post links to WikiLeaks documents, or they could be denied work with the US government.
Several news reports suggest the State Department has been warning university departments that students could fail security screening if they are seen to discuss or post links to WikiLeaks documents on social networking sites. The US government considers the leaked material to be classified, even after public release.
AboveTheLaw.com has obtained a letter from the career development dean of the Boston University School of Law warning students to stay away from WikiLeaks material.
"The documents released during the past few months through Wikileaks are still considered classified documents. [A State Department official] recommends that you DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter. Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government," the letter stated...
Several news reports suggest the State Department has been warning university departments that students could fail security screening if they are seen to discuss or post links to WikiLeaks documents on social networking sites. The US government considers the leaked material to be classified, even after public release.
AboveTheLaw.com has obtained a letter from the career development dean of the Boston University School of Law warning students to stay away from WikiLeaks material.
Today I received information about Wikileaks that I want to pass on to you. This is most relevant if you are going to apply for or have already applied for federal government positions. Two big factors in hiring for many federal government positions are determining if the applicants have good judgment and if they know how to deal with confidential/classified information. The documents released by Wikileaks remain classified; thus, reading them, passing them on, commenting on them may be seen as a violation of Executive Order 13526, Classified National Security Information. See Section 5.5 (Sanctions).DemocracyNow's Amy Goodman obtained a copy of a similar letter sent by the office of career services at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs.
For many federal government jobs, applicants must obtain security clearances. There are various levels of security checks, but all federal positions require background checks. As part of such checks, social media may be researched to see what you are up to, so DO NOT post links to the documents or make comments on any social media sites. Moreover, polygraphs are conducted for the highest levels of security clearance.
I have not yet heard any fallout about specific individuals, but we wanted to give you this take on the situation.
Maura Kelly
Assistant Dean for Career Development and Public Service
"The documents released during the past few months through Wikileaks are still considered classified documents. [A State Department official] recommends that you DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter. Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government," the letter stated...
Continue reading
Daniel Tencer @'RawStory'
Explosive Wiki Rudd cable
Mr Rudd also told Mrs Clinton during a March 24, 2009, meeting in Washington that China was ''paranoid'' about both Taiwan and Tibet and that his ambitious plan for an Asia-Pacific Community was intended to blunt Chinese influence in the region.
It also reveals Mr Rudd offered Australian special forces to fight in Pakistan once an agreement could be made with Islamabad.
The cable details a 75-minute lunch Mr Rudd held as prime minister with Mrs Clinton shortly after she was appointed US Secretary of State in the Obama administration.
Signed ''CLINTON'' and classified ''confidential'', it is the first of the Wikileaks cables so far released that includes a substantive report on Australia.
The unprecedented disclosure of such a frank exchange between top political leaders is bound to complicate Australia's diplomatic ties in the region, especially with Beijing.
At the lunch, Mrs Clinton confided in Mr Rudd about America's fears about China's rapid economic rise and Beijing's multibillion-dollar store of US debt, asking Mr Rudd: ''How do you deal toughly with your banker?''
In a wide-ranging conversation with Mrs Clinton on global hot spots, Mr Rudd:
■ Described himself as ''a brutal realist on China'' and said Australian intelligence agencies kept a close watch on China's military expansion.
■ Said the goal must be to integrate China into the international community, ''while also preparing to deploy force if everything goes wrong.''
■ Characterised Chinese leaders as ''sub-rational and deeply emotional'' in their reactions to Taiwan, the breakaway nation Beijing continues to claim sovereignty over.
■ Said the planned build-up of Australia's navy - later revealed in the May 2009 Defence White Paper to include a dozen attack submarines - was ''a response to China's growing ability to project force''.
■ Sought Mrs Clinton's advice on how to deal with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, whom she labelled the ''behind-the-scenes puppeteer''.
■ Agreed any success in the Afghanistan war would unravel if Pakistan then fell apart - and that Islamabad must be turned away from its ''obsessive focus'' on India.
■ Discussed ways to bring China to the table in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The disclosures in the cable, posted online by Britain's Guardian newspaper, will complicate Mr Rudd's already testy personal links with China after his reported reference to Chinese negotiators as ''rat f--kers'' during the Copenhagen climate change conference.
Mr Rudd also offered Mrs Clinton a candid assessment of the Chinese leadership, drawing a disparaging contrast between China's President Hu Jintao and his predecessor, saying Mr Hu ''is no Jiang Zemin''.
Mr Rudd said no one person dominated in China's opaque leadership circle but Vice-President Xi Jinping - who this year visited Australia and met Mr Rudd - might use family ties to rise to the top.
Mr Rudd also waded into the sensitive issue of Tibet, telling Mrs Clinton he had urged China to strike a deal with the Dalai Lama for autonomy in Tibet - and while he saw little prospect for success, asked Mrs Clinton to use her stature to have ''a quiet conversation'' to push the idea with Beijing's leaders.
On his Asia-Pacific Community proposal - a surprise initiative launched early in his time as prime minister - Mr Rudd explained the goal was to curb China's dominance in regional diplomatic institutions.
He said he wanted to ensure this did not result in ''an Asia without the United States''.
Mrs Clinton has since publicly praised the Mandarin-speaking Mr Rudd for his advice on China and credited him for the US decision earlier this year to join the East Asia Summit.
Mr Rudd is in the Middle East and a spokeswoman said he did not have any comment.
Attorney-General Robert McClelland yesterday would not answer questions from The Age on damage to Australia's ties with China or the role of Australian special forces in Pakistan.
He said in a statement : ''The government has made it clear it has no intention to provide commentary on the content of US classified documents.''
From the cable, Mr Rudd appears eager to impress on Mrs Clinton his knowledge of international affairs, promising to send her copies of his April 2008 speech at Peking University and a draft journal article on his Asia-Pacific Community plan.
That article was subsequently rejected for publication by the prestigious US journal Foreign Affairs.
Daniel Flitton @'The Age'
The Blueprint
With every day, with every passing hour, the power of the state mobilizes against Wikileaks and Julian Assange, its titular leader. The inner processes of statecraft have never been so completely exposed as they have been in the last week. The nation state has been revealed as some sort of long-running and unintentionally comic soap opera. She doesn’t like him; he doesn’t like them; they don’t like any of us! Oh, and she’s been scouting around for DNA samples and your credit card number. You know, just in case.
None of it is very pretty, all of it is embarrassing, and the embarrassment extends well beyond the state actors – who are, after all, paid to lie and dissemble, this being one of the primary functions of any government – to the complicit and compliant news media, think tanks and all the other camp followers deeply invested in the preservation of the status quo. Formerly quiet seas are now roiling, while everyone with any authority everywhere is doing everything they can to close the gaps in the smooth functioning of power. They want all of this to disappear and be forgotten. For things to be as if Wikileaks never was.
Meanwhile, the diplomatic cables slowly dribble out, a feed that makes last year’s MP expenses scandal in the UK seem like amateur theatre, an unpracticed warm-up before the main event. Even the Afghan and Iraq war logs, released by Wikileaks earlier this year, didn’t hold this kind of fascination. Nor did they attract this kind of upset. Every politican everywhere – from Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton to Vladimir Putin to Julia Gillard has felt compelled to express their strong and almost visceral anger. But to what? Only some diplomatic gossip.
Has Earth become a sort of amplified Facebook, where an in-crowd of Heathers, horrified, suddenly finds its bitchy secrets posted on a public forum? Is that what we’ve been reduced to? Or is that what we’ve been like all along? That could be the source of the anger. We now know that power politics and statecraft reduce to a few pithy lines referring to how much Berlusconi sleeps in the company of nubile young women and speculations about whether Medvedev really enjoys wearing the Robin costume.
It’s this triviality which has angered those in power. The mythology of power – that leaders are somehow more substantial, their concerns more elevated and lofty than us mere mortals, who must not question their motives – that mythology has been definitively busted. This is the final terminus of aristocracy; a process that began on 14 July 1789 came to a conclusive end on 28 November 2010. The new aristocracies of democracy have been smashed, trundled off to the guillotine of the Internet, and beheaded.
Of course, the state isn’t going to take its own destruction lying down. Nothing is ever that simple. And so, over the last week we’ve been able to watch the systematic dismantling of Wikileaks. First came the condemnation, then, hot on the heels of the shouts of ‘off with his head!’ for ‘traitor’ Julian Assange, came the technical attacks, each one designed to amputate one part of the body of the organization.
First up, that old favorite, the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which involves harnessing tens of thousands of hacked PCs (perhaps yours, or your mom’s, or your daughter’s) to broadcast tens of millions of faux requests for information to Wikileaks’ computers. This did manage to bring Wikileaks to its knees (surprising for an organization believed to be rather paranoid about security), so Wikileaks moved to a backup server, purchasing computing resources from Amazon, which runs a ‘cloud’ of hundreds of thousands of computers available for rent. Amazon, paranoid about customer reliability, easily fended off the DDoS attacks, but came under another kind of pressure. US Senator Joe Lieberman told Amazon to cut Wikileaks off, and within a few hours Amazon had suddenly realized that Wikileaks violated their Terms of Service, kicking them off Amazon’s systems.
You know what Terms of Service are? They are the too-long agreements you always accept and click through on a Website, or when you install some software, etc. In the fine print of that agreement any service provider will always be able to find some reason, somewhere, for terminating the service, charging you a fee, or – well, pretty much whatever they like. It’s the legal cudgel that companies use to have their way with you. Do your reckon that every other Amazon customer complies with its Terms of Service? If you do, I have a bridge you might be interested in.
At that point, Assange & Co. could have moved the server anywhere willing to host them – and Switzerland had offered. But the company that hosts Wikileaks’ DNS record – everyDNS.com – suddenly realized that Wikileaks was in violation of its terms of service, and it too, cut Wikileaks off. This was a more serious blow. DNS, or Domain Name Service, is the magic that translates a domain name like markpesce.com or nytimes.com into a number that represents a particular computer on the Internet. Without someone handling that translation, no one could find wikileaks.org. You would be able to type the name into your web browser, but that’s as far as you’d get.
So Wikileaks.org went down, but Wikileaks.ch (the Swiss version) came online moments later, and now there are hundreds of other sites which are all mirroring the content on the original Wikileaks site. It’s a little bit harder to find Wikileaks now – but not terrifically difficult. Score one for Assange, who – if the news media are to be believed – is just about to be taken into custody by the UK police, serving a Swedish arrest warrant.
Finally, just a few hours ago, the masterstroke. Wikileaks is financed by contributions made by individuals and organizations. (Disclosure: I’m almost certain I donated $50 to Wikileaks in 2008.) These contributions have been handled (principally) by the now-ubiquitous PayPal, the financial services arm of Internet auction giant eBay. Once again, the fine folks at PayPal had a look at their Terms of Service (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) and – oh, look! those bad awful folks at Wikileaks are in violation of our terms! Let’s cut them off from their money!
Wikileaks has undoubtedly received a lot of contributions over the last few days. As PayPal never turns funds over immediately, there’s an implication that PayPal is holding onto a considerable sum of Wikileaks’ donations, while that shutdown makes it much more difficult to to ‘pass the hat’ and collect additional funds to keep the operation running. Checkmate.
A few months ago I wrote about how confused I was by Julian Assange’s actions. Why would anyone taking on the state so directly become such a public figure? It made no sense to me. Now I see the plan. And it’s awesome.
You see, this is the first time anything like Wikileaks has been attempted. Yes, there have been leaks prior to this, but never before have hyperdistribution and cryptoanarchism come to the service of the whistleblower. This is a new thing, and as well thought out as Wikileaks might be, it isn’t perfect. How could it be? It’s untried, and untested. Or was. Now that contact with the enemy has been made – the state with all its powers – it has become clear where Wikileaks has been found wanting. Wikileaks needs a distributed network of servers that are too broad and too diffuse to be attacked. Wikileaks needs an alternative to the Domain Name Service. And Wikileaks needs a funding mechanism which can not be choked off by the actions of any other actor.
We’ve been here before. This is 1999, the company is Napster, and the angry party is the recording industry. It took them a while to strangle the beast, but they did finally manage to choke all the life out of it – for all the good it did them. Within days after the death of Napster, Gnutella came around, and righted all the wrongs of Napster: decentralized where Napster was centralized; pervasive and increasingly invisible. Gnutella created the ‘darknet’ for filesharing which has permanently crippled the recording and film industries. The failure of Napster was the blueprint for Gnutella.
In exactly the same way – note for note – the failures of Wikileaks provide the blueprint for the systems which will follow it, and which will permanently leave the state and its actors neutered. Assange must know this – a teenage hacker would understand the lesson of Napster. Assange knows that someone had to get out in front and fail, before others could come along and succeed. We’re learning now, and to learn means to try and fail and try again.
This failure comes with a high cost. It’s likely that the Americans will eventually get their hands on Assange – a compliant Australian government has already made it clear that it will do nothing to thwart or even slow that request – and he’ll be charged with espionage, likely convicted, and sent to a US Federal Prison for many, many years. Assange gets to be the scapegoat, the pinup boy for a new kind of anarchism. But what he’s done can not be undone; this tear in the body politic will never truly heal.
Everything is different now. Everything feels more authentic. We can choose to embrace this authenticity, and use it to construct a new system of relations, one which does not rely on secrets and lies. A week ago that would have sounded utopian, now it’s just facing facts. I’m hopeful. For the first time in my life I see the possibility for change on a scale beyond the personal. Assange has brought out the radical hiding inside me, the one always afraid to show his face. I think I’m not alone.
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