Of Petulant Emperors and Shredded Clothes

Western political elites obfuscate, lie and bluster — and when the veil of secrecy is lifted, they try to kill the messenger.

‘Never waste a good crisis” used to be the catchphrase of the Obama team in the run-up to the presidential election. In that spirit, let us see what we can learn from official reactions to the WikiLeaks revelations.

The most obvious lesson is that it represents the first really sustained confrontation between the established order and the culture of the internet. There have been skirmishes before, but this is the real thing.

And as the backlash unfolds — first with deniable attacks on internet service providers hosting WikiLeaks, later with companies like Amazon and eBay and PayPal suddenly “discovering” that their terms and conditions preclude them from offering services to WikiLeaks, and then with the U.S. government attempting to intimidate Columbia students posting updates about WikiLeaks on Facebook — the intolerance of the old order is emerging from the rosy mist in which it has hitherto been obscured. The response has been vicious, co-ordinated and potentially comprehensive, and it contains hard lessons for everyone who cares about democracy and about the future of the net.

Irony

There is a delicious irony in the fact that it is now the so-called liberal democracies that are clamouring to shut WikiLeaks down.

Consider, for instance, how the views of the U.S. administration have changed in just a year. On January 21, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a landmark speech about internet freedom, in Washington DC, which many people welcomed and most interpreted as a rebuke to China for its alleged cyberattack on Google. “Information has never been so free,” declared Clinton. “Even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.”

She went on to relate how, during his visit to China in November 2009, Barack Obama had “defended the right of people to freely access information, and said that the more freely information flows the stronger societies become. He spoke about how access to information helps citizens to hold their governments accountable, generates new ideas, and encourages creativity.” Given what we now know, that Clinton speech reads like a satirical masterpiece.

One thing that might explain the official hysteria about the revelations is the way they expose how political elites in western democracies have been deceiving their electorates.

What it makes clear

The leaks make it abundantly clear not just that the U.S.-Anglo-European adventure in Afghanistan is doomed but, more important, that the American, British and other North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) governments privately admit that too.

The problem is that they cannot face their electorates — who also happen to be the taxpayers funding this folly — and tell them this. The leaked dispatches from the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan provide vivid confirmation that the Karzai regime is as corrupt and incompetent as the South Vietnamese regime in Saigon was when the U.S. was propping it up in the 1970s. And they also make it clear that the U.S. is as much a captive of that regime as it was in Vietnam.

The WikiLeaks revelations expose the extent to which the U.S. and its allies see no real prospect of turning Afghanistan into a viable state, let alone a functioning democracy. They show that there is no light at the end of this tunnel. But the political establishments in Washington, London and Brussels cannot bring themselves to admit this.

Afghanistan is, in that sense, a quagmire in the same way that Vietnam was. The only differences are that the war is now being fought by non-conscripted troops and we are not carpet-bombing civilians.

The attack of WikiLeaks also ought to be a wake-up call for anyone who has rosy fantasies about whose side cloud computing providers are on. These are firms like Google, Flickr, Facebook, Myspace and Amazon which host your blog or store your data on their servers somewhere on the internet, or which enable you to rent “virtual” computers — again located somewhere on the net. The terms and conditions under which they provide both “free” and paid-for services will always give them grounds for dropping your content if they deem it in their interests to do so. The moral is that you should not put your faith in cloud computing — one day it will rain on your parade.

Look at the case of Amazon, which dropped WikiLeaks from its Elastic Compute Cloud the moment the going got rough. It seems that Joe Lieberman, a U.S. senator who suffers from a terminal case of hubris, harassed the company over the matter. Later Lieberman declared grandly that he would be “asking Amazon about the extent of its relationship with WikiLeaks and what it and other web service providers will do in the future to ensure that their services are not used to distribute stolen, classified information”. This led the New Yorker's Amy Davidson to ask whether “Lieberman feels that he, or any senator, can call in the company running the New Yorker's printing presses when we are preparing a story that includes leaked classified material, and tell it to stop us”.

‘Western system hollowed out'

What WikiLeaks is really exposing is the extent to which the western democratic system has been hollowed out. In the last decade its political elites have been shown to be incompetent (Ireland, the U.S. and U.K. in not regulating banks); corrupt (all governments in relation to the arms trade); or recklessly militaristic (the U.S. and U.K. in Iraq). And yet nowhere have they been called to account in any effective way. Instead they have obfuscated, lied or blustered their way through. And when, finally, the veil of secrecy is lifted, their reflex reaction is to kill the messenger.

As Simon Jenkins put it recently in the Guardian, “Disclosure is messy and tests moral and legal boundaries. It is often irresponsible and usually embarrassing. But it is all that is left when regulation does nothing, politicians are cowed, lawyers fall silent and audit is polluted. Accountability can only default to disclosure.” What we are hearing from the enraged officialdom of our democracies is mostly the petulant screaming of emperors whose clothes have been shredded by the net.

Which brings us back to the larger significance of this controversy. The political elites of western democracies have discovered that the internet can be a thorn not just in the side of authoritarian regimes, but in their sides too. It has been comical watching them and their agencies stomp about the net like maddened, half-blind giants trying to whack a mole. It has been deeply worrying to watch terrified internet companies — with the exception of Twitter, so far — bending to their will.

But politicians now face an agonising dilemma. The old, mole-whacking approach won't work. WikiLeaks does not depend only on web technology. Thousands of copies of those secret cables — and probably of much else besides — are out there, distributed by peer-to-peer technologies like BitTorrent. Our rulers have a choice to make: either they learn to live in a WikiLeakable world, with all that implies in terms of their future behaviour; or they shut down the internet. Over to them.— © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2010

Keywords: WikiLeaks, cablegate, U.S. secret cables, internet, Amazon, ePay, PayPal, social networking sites

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LINKS
Guardian's coverage on U.S. embassy cable leak
TOPICS
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internet
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social networking

world wide web

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COMMENTS:
I beg to differ! I haven't spent much time on Wikileaks, what the US does, doesn't affect me in a DIRECT way. What surprises me is the way the bloggers and commentators (B&C) have been trashing the US Govt. Do they B&C really think it makes sense to reveal all Government strategies to every taxpayer. They are classified documents for a reason! http://www.potofthots.com/2010/12/i-beg-to-differ.html
from: Joe
Posted on: Dec 8, 2010 at 11:59 IST

They're going to shut down the internet. Already, in the US, the plan is to control content and distribution. The FCC has already declared that it has control over the internet, broadband radio and a host of other services. ICE shut down over 70 sites last week for "illegal" activity. Don't be so cavalier when you say "over to you".
from: RBM
Posted on: Dec 8, 2010 at 18:18 IST

Excellent article! Wikileaks serves as an important eyeopener for everyone, like the boy who asked about the emperor's clothes. Going after Assange is a classic shooting the messenger. America should refer to Voltaire's quote "I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend unto death your right to say it". Clearly US is not mature enough to grasp the concept of free speech. If you support free speech when it bashes others, you must be prepared to face the music band when it arrives at your own doorstep.
from: Haritha
Posted on: Dec 8, 2010 at 21:53 IST

'Democracy is direct self-government, over all the people, for all the people, by all the people.' Is there any room for secrecy there? We are not talking about leaking private e mails here!
from: roshi
Posted on: Dec 8, 2010 at 22:07 IST

The tone in which the diplomats talk to their home country and to the host country can be different. But the content should be the same. The question here is of truth. If the diplomats speak different things to different people, they are basically being dishonest. And this is government sponsored dishonesty. This is unacceptable in a civilized society. Every individual, especially the people who rule, is expected to be congruous in knowledge, intention, words and deeds. If this is violated at the higher levels, the society is insecure.
from: Gokulmuthu
Posted on: Dec 9, 2010 at 10:52 IST

Someone said that the latest WikiLeaks revelations are the 9/11 of diplomacy - and indeed they are. 9/11 turned the US into a police state, now the WikiLeaks mess is going to bring the Net under government control, too.
from: Diego Shiavon
Posted on: Dec 9, 2010 at 14:00 IST

More than the practices of the wikileaks freedom about open journalism and publishing anything,I don't think any government can openly publish every information. If the author is criticising US govt about how it is euphemistically it is covering Afghanistan or why it invaded Iraq, I am fine with it. But, just that expecting that there should not be any information that is not classified and to be kept secret with the Govt may not be fair.
from: Bhoga
Posted on: Dec 9, 2010 at 15:20 IST

An interesting 'tweet' for thought: "If Julian Assange was in China doing the same thing, the West would have called him a dissident and given him a Nobel prize." How true!! The most recent Nobel peace prize to a Chinese dissident just goes to proves the double standards of western nations.
from: prodigy
Posted on: Dec 9, 2010 at 23:52 IST