Patrice Riemens on Tue, 15 Jul 2014 21:40:26 +0200 (CEST) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
<nettime> Ippolita Collective, In the Facebook Aquarium Part Two, |
Ippolita Collective, In the Facebook Aquarium Part Two . . . . . . . . . . NB. Three corrections made to previous installment(s): influent >> influential also, everywhere: monicker >> moniker Pirate Partiet documentation: from Wikisource, not Wikipedia (note 56). . . . . . . . . . . The Wikileaks Fracas: senseless challenge - or sensible defiance? (section #7) Just as with The Pirate Bay, the Wikileaks affair is still in the unfolding stage. And, in so far as we have to do with a spectacle here, a (spectacular indeed) turn of events is always on the cards. Yet, next to everything that has been written about Wikileaks displays a disturbing lack of critical analysis. One hardly finds anything beyond mundane standpoints of the 'Like/ Don't Like' variety. Left-wing groups, especially in Europe, generally take Wikileaks for a champion of the oppressed daring to go against corrupt governments. The logic here is once more borrowed from the battlefield: my enemy's foes are my allies. Seen from the viewpoint of governments, or of those taking a patriotic and/or conservative position, Wikileaks is perceived as a project threatening the international diplomatic intercourse. It endangers the lives of soldiers of 'the forces of good' engaged in peace keeping operations / the war against terrorism and 'the forces of evil', and also saps the reputation of the institutions of constitutional government. We, every thing else notwithstanding, do consider Wikileaks - granted, in an ambiguous fashion - to be part and parcel of the libertarian galaxy. So let's go quickly through the facts (as known): Wikileaks, the site, started in 2006, publishes restricted, confidential, secret (official) documents. Till 2010 it used the same interface as Wikipedia [i.e. a Wiki -transl] and claims itself to be a spot where dangerous documents may be dropped in an anonymous fashion. The site itself then makes such documents public, after a checking process. In the beginning of Wikileaks, dropping documents on the site was neither risk-less nor very anonymous, and it was in a later phase only that the Wikileaks team rigged itself with relatively secure systems. The site won acclaims from the international press in 2007, by which time Julian Assange proclaimed himself editor-in-chief. Assange, born 1971, is an Australian hacker, and his technical competence is outstanding; many of his contribution to a range of (free software) coding projects are highly original [58]. He was condemned in Australia for what federal institutions deemed to be crimes (but his prison sentence was commuted in a fine). Julian Assange made the front-page of newspapers worldwide in November 2010 and thereafter, when Wikileaks published a throve of secret (but not top-secret) diplomatic documents (/'cablegate'/), exposing misdeeds of governments, but principally those of the US Government. It is not so much the content of documents published on Wikileaks that is problematic. It is preferable that news circulates, rather than be censored. But both aims and methods of Wikileaks come dangerously close to those of Facebook. The idea is to achieve the radical transparency project, (but now) at the level of governments: expose the wrongs of big, bad governments, and be on the lookout for the sins of the powerful just like we do with our 'friends'. Millions of secret documents are then dished out to the general public, provoking a phenomenon of mass voyeurism which in its turn begets mass indifference. We are confronted with shocking, shocking revelations: wars turn out to be not intended to export democracy, but instead to get a stranglehold on the sources of oil, uranium, and to secure access to precious earth resources, all this with world domination as ultimate aim. Truly shocking, however, may rather be the realization that public opinion has become accustomed to believe without further ado such mendacious slogans as "the war for freedom against the axis of evil". Julian Assange is the public face of the white knight hackers, profiling themselves as the guardian priests of a liberating technology, and who are willing to defy the system even at the cost of their own freedom. Of course, some contradictions remain, but (the most important is that) it is all for our best will. The most obvious contradictions is that this battle for transparency demands a semi-secret, un-transparant organization, run by an occult hierarchy with equally occult funding, and with a single public leader, a charismatic figurehead able to attract the attention of television cameras and prepared to engage in broadcasted duels with the planet's presidents and other big leaders, all this in prime time media warfare. There is no mediation possible, no work to be done, no commitment to be shown. There is one single and only truth, the one that speaks from the documents made available to us by Wikileaks' supreme, liberating technology. Yet, as we have shown in the case of Big Data, having a massive amount of data at your disposal oppresses rather than liberate people, stirring up more often than not a feeling of impotence, and making them think the whole issue is hopeless. And besides, corruption, violence and news about weird behavior (of the powerful) are hardly surprising for anyone not totally blind to the world around her. On top of this, the ways of Wikileaks appear quite unsuitable to different contexts of information censorship. Attacking the United States while being protected under the (constitutional) liberties granted by European social democracies like Sweden, with the support of libertarian extremists opposed to any form of government, and that of big Western newspapers, is indubitably far easier than to confront, inside their own territories and without the support of any political or media-based entity, dictatorships like China, or Burma, or North Corea, or Cuba, or Iran, or Syria, or Bielorussia [59]. A structure like Wikileaks is simply inconceivable in modern authoritarian regimes, for the simple reason that such regimes exercise an increasingly effective control on network infrastructures, as well as on the access to the same. And even in the case a look alike of Wikileaks would happen, authoritarian governments have many options at their disposal to manipulate public opinion and get rid of dissidents without dirtying their hands. Reading Evgeny Morozov provides a wealth of details on how these mechanisms operate. In Russia for instance, a country that tolerates digital piracy to a stunning extent (probably a fun way to be anti-western and anti-american), young consultants to the regime have mastered the art of directing the /emotions/ of the populace, using exactly the same manipulative techniques as american /spin doctors/: purpose-created blogs, fat headlines in the newspapers, entire social networks devoted to pro-regime counter-information, and to slandering and vilifying dissidents - with verbal intimidation often foretelling physical aggression. In China we have the 'Fifty Cents Party", a moniker referring to the money allegedly paid for each post supporting the government. Armies of bloggers in the sold of the state busy themselves with tweaking Wikipedia entries, and generally with boosting traffic and pro-regime background noise, drowning the already feeble opposition voices in the process. Saudi Arab princes regularly hire IT experts to watch the net and fetter out informations deemed harmful to the regime, and delay, delete, or discredit these. Within the 'international community', states behave exactly like individuals when it comes to their on-line profile: they do their best to spot weak points and identify embarrassing behavior among their peers, while trying to hide their own from view and extolling their achievements without any critical restraint. It is both absurd and demagogic to think that using (Wikileaks-type) denunciation to impose transparency would really help democratic dialogue. Authoritarian and democratic regimes alike benefit from transparency - but only applied to their own citizen. The one who screens the hardest about the other's dark behavior wins. (to be continued) Next time: back to Wikileaks . . . . . . . . . . [58] Probably his most interesting contribution was Rubberhose, a hidden encryption program he developed together with other hackers. Rubberhose, which is no longer up to standards, provided deniability of the existence of a part of a harddrive storing encrypted data. Since decryption is basically only a matter of computing power, at least in theory, hiding the existence of encrypted data itself is a smart stratagem which enhance considerably the safeness of data. The technique is called steganography, meaning the concealment of what one wants to keep secret's very existence. It is useful to know that the technique was specifically devised to safeguard human-right activists operating in dictatorships. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubberhose_(file_system) [59] see Geert Lovink, Patrice Riemens. 'Twelve Theses on Wikileaks", /Eurozine Magazine/, 2010: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010-12-07-lovinkriemens-en.html ----------------------------- Translated by Patrice Riemens This translation project is supported and facilitated by: The Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/portal/) The Antenna Foundation, Nijmegen (http://www.antenna.nl - Dutch site) (http://www.antenna.nl/indexeng.html - english site under construction) Casa Nostra, Vogogna-Ossola, Italy # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org