What a Leak?

Wikileaks -- The theory, the practice and the hindsight.

"In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win." Or will it? (adapted from Rupert Murdoch, 1958)

The first question I asked myself was “At the personal level Julian Assange received death threats, assassination calls, hints at attempt of extradition and at an organizational level Wikileaks suffered withdrawal of DNS services, Amazon’s server space, and followed up by Paypal, Mastercard & Visa’s withdrawal of their online payment gateways for Wikileaks. Europe calls him a rapist for over a week, while Sweden rather leisurely confirms that the charges aren’t for a Rape but for something called ‘Sex by Surprise’, which not just the world is unaware of, but rest of the Europe declared to have not understood properly. (We’d later see that even Swedish law doesn’t make it very clear!) What drives someone to pursue something like Wikileaks, so passionately, and unnervingly despite all the negativity that shrouds him?

There are two threads to this story

1. Julian Assange

2. Wikileaks

I’d like to run parallel paths from here, first describing what each entity means to the world as it stands today, and then the conspiracy behind them. It would be a nice attempt by me if I’d have successfully tingled myself (or the reader) by drawing the right connections by the end of this prose.

First a brief account of both Assange and Wikileaks, as described on the Wikipedia page of Julian Assange (accessed on 12^th December 2010, 3 AM IST), and also mildly edited to add other relevant content from credible sources.

Julian Paul Assange (born 3 July 1971) is an Australian journalist, publisher, and Internet activist. He is best known as the spokesperson and editor in chief for WikiLeaks, a whistleblower website. Before working with the website, he was a computer programmer and hacker.He has lived in several countries, and has made occasional public appearances to speak about freedom of the press, censorship, and investigative journalism.

Assange founded the WikiLeaks website in 2006 and serves on its advisory board. He has been involved in publishing material about extrajudicial killings in Kenya, for which he won the 2009 Amnesty International Media Award. He has also published material about toxic waste dumping in Africa, Church of Scientology manuals, Guantanamo Bay procedures, and banks such as Kaupthing and Julius Baer. In 2010, he published classified details about United States involvement in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Then, on 28 November 2010, WikiLeaks and its five media partners began publishing secret U.S. diplomatic cables. The White House calls Assange's actions reckless and dangerous.

For his work with WikiLeaks, Assange received the 2008 Economist Freedom of Expression Award and the 2010 Sam Adams Award. Utne Reader named him as one of the "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World". In 2010, New Statesman ranked Assange number 23 among the "The World's 50 Most Influential Figures".

On 30 November 2010, at the request of the International Public Prosecution Office in Gothenburg, Sweden, Interpol placed Assange on its red notice list of wanted persons; he was wanted for questioning about alleged sexual offenses, and voluntarily submitted to the London Metropolitan Police Service on 7 December 2010. Assange denies the accusations made against him.

Interpol has issued an arrest warrant for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange for "sex crimes". Everyone assumed it was for rape. But it turns out it was for violating an obscure Swedish law against having sex without a condom. In the past, Assange has dismissed the allegations, stating on Twitter: "The charges are without basis and their issue at this moment is deeply disturbing." Last week Stephens [Assange’s Lawyer] added: "This appears to be a persecution and a prosecution. It is highly irregular and unusual for the Swedish authorities to issue [an Interpol] red notice in the teeth of the undisputed fact that Mr Assange has agreed to meet voluntarily to answer the prosecutor's questions."

Admirably clear, and something everybody already knows perhaps.

The idea behind Wikileaks has been primarily conceived by Julian Assange himself, evidenced by him registering a domain named leaks.org, as early as in 1999. Often termed ‘the whistleblower’ website, Wikileaks, was formed in 2006 in an attempt to disclose all the secretive diplomatic cables the team had already instituted in their investigations. That year, Assange set out the philosophy behind WikiLeaks: "To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not."

The informed reader might have observed that his definition of a conspiracy is also somewhat different. It is not used in the usual sense of people sitting in a room and plotting a crime or deception. In assange’s view, a conspiracy is possible in which no person in the conspiracy was aware that they were part of the conspiracy. If you still find it complicated you must read the below references.

In his 2006 article on ‘Conspiracy vs Governance’, he wrote:

“Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce resistance. Hence these plans are concealed by successful authoritarian powers. This is enough to define their behavior as conspiratorial.”

This phenomenon can be clearly illustrated with a recent example. Suppose that the leader of an Arab country wants the United States to take strong action against Iran. If the Arab leader’s people knew he took such a radical position there would be strongly vetted political blowback and resistance (and possible political risk for him), hence he conducts his discussions with the United States in secret. Almost unknowingly, he has become part of a conspiracy.

Assange’s actual ideas are so theoretically sound & profound (starting from first principles), that they are not within an average readers’ reach. I consider myself an average reader, and it took me three days of reading and re-reading a lot of articles (roughly over 100) written either by Assange or media or philosophers around the world to reach to my current state. [As I write this, I haven’t slept for more than 3 hrs in the last 30 hrs.]

So I’d advise you to skip his original work. But if you can understand, or are further curious after reading the above quoted paragraph and the following explanation, do continue to read his original article still available on the web.

The next obvious question is “Why are such conspiracies harmful?”

The real harm is seen when the conspiracy become extremely powerful, because whatever the intentions of the individuals within the network, the network itself is optimized for its own success, and not for the benefit of those outside of the network. Again, this is not by design, it is just an emergent property of such systems that they function in this way. Someone who has been involved in graphical models or network theory can readily vouch of this, and I do. I’d take a further step and try to explain it in terms of Page rank like algorithm of google, which a much larger audience might be aware of. [Meaning: those who understood this part, can skip to next paragraph.] Let us say we all have webpages, and say we are all interconnected in some form on our social graph, say similar to our Facebook social graph. But our webpages, are a little different, to rank them high on google, if just one credible source, say an eminent blogger or an academic mentions my website on his page, while none of yours has such priviledge, my page would be ranked higher. In hindsight, if I have linked say fellow blogger Sundeep Kota’s webpage in the Bloggers’ section, and then linked Praveen Bysani’s webpage in colleagues’ link he would also draw some weightage from me which probably came from some higher authority. Now the point of concern here is, I also worked a lot with Vijay Bharat and him not being connected in this network doesn’t do him any good for he lost the leverage. I never intended any harm or benefit to anybody, it just happened that it benefitted Sundeep & Praveen while it went against Vijay. [For clarity, my webpage currently does not have links to any of Sundeep, Praveen or Vijay.]

In another 2006 manuscript titled ‘State and Terrorist Conspiracies’ Assange says “How can we reduce the ability of a conspiracy to act?…We can split the conspiracy, reduce or eliminating important communication between a few high weight links or many low weight links.”

Which means even if the network survives it may be forced to split into parts, in which case the network becomes powerless. Though it still exists and is still a valid conspiracy, it now reduces to a weaker conspiracy.

On his blogpost titled ‘The Nonlinear Effects of Leaks on Unjust Systems of Governance’ dated December 21, 2006 he wrote “The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive "secrecy tax") and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption.”

And added “Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.”

In simpler terms, leaks make it harder for the conspiracy to deal its very business and that is all to the good.

Now the major media banter we have seen in the last week. Just to add perspective.

First, the highlights, to all those who have no idea what Wikileaks exposed so far.

I’d recommend everybody to go through this 2.5 minute Video, to be informed of the leaks by Wikileaks on a lighter [comic] tone.

And those who believe in the written word must read this.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/8070253/Wikileaks-10-greatest-stories.html

Now the story of what happened during last week, and how it unfolded.

Apparently, the US believes it can catch hold of Julian Assange under espionage act, that is, on charges of spying. Fortunately, they probably didn’t realize that Assange is not an US national and the espionage act doesn’t apply to him. Even worse, “the due process clause rules out prosecuting WikiLeaks' founder – a non-US citizen – for extraterritorial offences”.

Some sources consider Julian Assange to be the most dangerous person alive on earth; ironically that tone resembles what Agent Smith tells Neo about Morpheus in “The Matrix”. There is an increasing following of Julian Assange on the open web, and the recent supported provided by the online hacker community Anonymous is a telling tale. Perhaps, it is also worth mentioning that Noam Chomsky and Peter Singer, both wearing their philosopher’s hat signed an open letter to the Prime Minister of Australia urging the government to condemn calls for Australian citizen and Wikileaks founder to be assassinated.

For the unaware junta, Peter Singer is an Australian philosopher and Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, who is most well known for his involvement in the creation of the animal rights movement. Noam Chomsky, who has authored more than 150 books on political theory, linguistics, and philosophy, is a Professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"The materials—we should understand—and the Pentagon Papers is another case in point—that one of the major reasons for government secrecy is to protect the government from its own population," Chomsky said in an interview with the Democracy Now's Amy Goodman. "In the Pentagon Papers, for example, there was one volume, the negotiations volume, which might have had bearing on ongoing activities, and Dan Ellsberg withheld that. That came out a little bit later."

The Pentagon Papers were a collection of top-secret Department of Defense documents on the history of the United States' involvement in Vietnam that were leaked by Daniel Ellsberg.

"But if you look at the Papers themselves, there are things that Americans should have known that the government didn’t want them to know," he continued. "And as far as I can tell, from what I’ve seen here, pretty much the same is true. In fact, the current leaks are—what I’ve seen, at least—primarily interesting because of what they tell us about how the diplomatic service works."

Few hours before his arrest in UK, over the supposed unknown/unlabled sex charges (which is another story of course), The Australian released Julian Assange’s message to the world aptly titled “Don’t shoot the messenger for revealing uncomfortable truths”

Some excerpts

In 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide's The News, wrote: "In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win."

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. The British tried to shut him up but Keith Murdoch would not be silenced and his efforts led to the termination of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.

Nearly a century later, WikiLeaks is also fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public.

…

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 original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately?

Democratic societies need a strong media and WikiLeaks is part of that media. The media helps keep government honest. WikiLeaks has revealed some hard truths about the Iraq and Afghan wars, and broken stories about corporate corruption.

People have said I am anti-war: for the record, I am not. Sometimes nations need to go to war, and there are just wars. But there is nothing more wrong than a government lying to its people about those wars, then asking these same citizens to put their lives and their taxes on the line for those lies. If a war is justified, then tell the truth and the people will decide whether to support it.

Finally, come to think of it what is it for wikileaks? A win or a loss, or just another day?

Time’s had an excellent piece, excerpted here and a link to the source follows.

When WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's voluntary surrender to the British authorities might have put an end to the crisis created by the Internet provocateur's dissemination of tens of thousands of state secrets. But in the upside-down world of transnational crowdsourcing unleashed by WikiLeaks, in which thousands of activists around the globe can be rallied to defend and extend its work, Assange's arrest is a win, not a loss, for his organization.

The asymmetrical info war initiated by the WikiLeaks dump of diplomatic cables is all about spectacle — the more Assange is set up by world powers, the more powerful his own movement becomes. "The field of battle is WikiLeaks," wrote John Perry Barlow, a former Grateful Dead lyricist and founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the First Amendment advocacy group, in a message to his followers. "You are the troops." WikiLeaks admiringly forwarded the post to 300,000 of its own followers. As the U.S. and other governments attempted to close down WikiLeaks over the past week, those "troops" have fought back. And so far, it doesn't look like much of a contest.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2035817,00.html#ixzz17yEM3AEp

Meanwhile, if people are wondering would Wikileaks be suppressed and all the leaked (and unleaked) information taken into custody. This is 2010, and it is nearly impossible to do so. Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan makes a nice attempt to inform why technically the suppression is not possible, in his article here. http://searchengineland.com/why-wikileaks-will-never-be-closed-58226

A better more theoretically sound argument can be seen here: http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/article931445.ece

Now, before you complain, I also have here a sample cable here attached. Enjoy it, for not just the political mystery but for the poetic delight it tried to generate.

http://www.ding.net/wikileaks/234867.txt

Excerpt here:

1. (S/NF) Summary: We're no strangers to love. You know the rules and so do I. A full commitment's what I'm thinking of. You wouldn't get this from any other guy.I just wanna tell you how I'm feeling. Gotta make you understand.

2. (C/NF) Chorus: Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and desert you.Never gonna make you cry, never gonna say goodbye, never gonna tell a lie and hurt you.

3. (S/NF) We've known each other for so long Your heart's been aching but You're too shy to say it

Inside we both know what's been going on We know the game and we're gonna play it

And if you ask me how I'm feeling Don't tell me you're too blind to see

4. (C/NF) Chorus: Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and desert you.Never gonna make you cry, never gonna say goodbye, never gonna tell a lie and hurt you.

And really finally, this article says why Wikileaks is good, even for America. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/wikileaks-editorial/

There are too many interesting articles, cables, editorials and speeches that I’m tempted to dump here, but I’d restrain myself from doing so for the sake of brevity. The only aspect of Julian Assange I have not discussed in this post is his apparent sexual encounters with those two Swedish women and the reported ‘sexual crimes’ that they charge on him. I explicitly tried to avoid that part of the story because I find that very funny and do not want to spoil the mood of this article which is on a rather serious and factual tone. I’d reserve the sex charges for another post, maybe.

If I give so much positive response to wikileaks I’d be called biased and I can’t live with such a connotation. I do have my apprehensions about some things wikileaks’ leaks. A couple of points here:

1. On a theoretical note, is it necessarily the case that the conspiracy can’t act to the benefit of others? Arab leaders are conspiring with the United States to defeat Iran’s nuclear program, but isn’t this a good thing? No, I don’t have an answer to it.
2. To what extent is Wikileaks itself a conspiracy? To this end, are there good conspiracies and bad conspiracies? Should we distinguish between conspiracies of the powerful and conspiracies of those who seek to level the playing field? At what point would a network like Wikileaks become too powerful?

These ideas of course aren’t just mine, and have been well thought over during preceding weeks. In the end, of course, the idea of this post was not to give a positive dossier about Assanage or Wikileaks, it was supposed to be just an enlightenment or food for thought to all those who argued on facebook, twitter and chats, without ever reading any single decent article on what exactly is going on.

You are in the information age folks, wake up! And wake up to the inconvenient truth!

PS: I respect intelligent debates (by anybody) in comments, but intelligent is the 'keyword'. Please give respect, and take it from the rest.