9 ms·

Excellent analysis of Assange's Wikileaks motivations (from the horse's mouth)

179 points by RickHull 16y ago

CWuestefeld 16y ago
tl;dr version (and it is quite long). I've copied out what I think are the key bits, the following is all quoted: He begins by positing that conspiracy and authoritarianism go hand in hand, arguing that since authoritarianism produces resistance to itself -- to the extent that its authoritarianism becomes generally known -- it can only continue to exist and function by preventing its intentions (the authorship of its authority?) from being generally known. It inevitably becomes, he argues, a conspiracy ... the most effective way to attack this kind of organization would be to make "leaks" a fundamental part of the conspiracy’s information environment. Which is why the point is not that particular leaks are specifically effective. Wikileaks does not leak something like the Collateral Murder video as a way of putting an end to that particular military tactic; that would be to target a specific leg of the hydra even as it grows two more. Instead, the idea is that increasing the porousness of the conspiracy’s information system will impede its functioning, that the conspiracy will turn against itself in self-defense, clamping down on its own information flows in ways that will then impede its own cognitive function. You destroy the conspiracy, in other words, by making it so paranoid of itself that it can no longer conspire ... The leak, in other words, is only the catalyst for the desired counter-overreaction; Wikileaks wants to provoke the conspiracy into turning off its own brain in response to the threat. As it tries to plug its own holes and find the leakers, he reasons, its component elements will de-synchronize from and turn against each other, de-link from the central processing network, and come undone. ... he quotes Theodore Roosevelt’s words from his 1912 Progressive party presidential platform as the epigraph to the first essay; Roosevelt realized a hundred years ago that "Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people," and it was true, then too, that "To destroy this invisible government, to befoul this unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of statesmanship."
- sudont 16y ago
  It's a good strategy, as long as the US doesn't become as autocratic as the Nazis or Viet Cong (correct?). Then, plugging leaks becomes hanging their corpses as a warning. Peaceful protests only work against peaceful regimes.
  - ryoshu 16y ago
    There have already been calls from prominent US politicians to declare WikiLeaks a terrorist organization. Predator drone strikes are how the US deals with terrorists.
    - steveklabnik 16y ago
      Palin: > [Julian] is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands. His past posting of classified documents revealed the identity of more than 100 Afghan sources to the Taliban. Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders?
      - deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
    - alexqgb 16y ago
      Most terrorists aren't sitting on huge piles of sensitive material set to be released en masse in the event of sudden, unplanned death.
- DanielBMarkham 16y ago
  I don't want to get into a detailed analysis of the piece -- I only had time to skim it. But am I to understand that I (and the rest of the American people) have paid tens of billions of dollars, had multiple elections, politically demonstrated and pleaded to Congressmen, to have a State Department that Assange doesn't feel should keep secrets, so he dumps the embassy cables? If a single actor can take it on himself to do all of that, then why am I wasting my time choosing who to vote for, paying taxes, and debating with my fellow citizens what the correct policy on "X" might be? Seems like I should just take it on myself -- after careful analysis of course -- that Assange is a danger to my representative form of government and I should go shoot him (I mean this completely rhetorically, by the way. I in no way support violence against anybody) The problem here is believing your own bullshit, as they say on the streets. Or put nicer, coming up with a line of reasoning that you (and perhaps others) deem to be the "correct" one, and then imposing it on the rest of us against our will. Democracies don't work by doing the right or correct thing. They work by the consent of the governed. If Assange takes away my illusion of having some say in the governing of my state, then he's effectively attacking the social contract. I just can't see how this plays out very well.
lmkg 16y ago
It's a pretty good analysis, and Assange seems to have put a lot of thought into it. However, he's making an assumption that I think is unfounded, which is treating the concentration of political power as monolithic. If you assume that an organization is concerned about the power of the organization, then I think he's correct in his logic that authoritarianism leads to conspiracy and communication is important to having power. However, if you assume that most members of an organization are concerned with personal power rather than the power of the organization, then the importance of communication goes down sharply, as the only coordination is opportunistic. A bureaucracy, as opposed to a dictatorship, is quite content without having goals, coordination, or communication[1], and can expand its authority based entirely on the mission creep of lower-level individuals within it. How valuable the disruption of communication is in fighting a "regime" depends on how you model that regime. And, of course, in practice you will find that reality is some bizarre chimera of any group of models. My intuition is that Congress (plus lobbyists) act more like a decentralized bureaucracy, executive administrations act more like dictatorships that fight against each other for territory, and that the closest things we find to Assange's "banal conspiracies" are small, ad-hoc, opportunistic alignment of objectives, much smaller, less powerful, and less stable than the government as a whole. [1] In fact, lack of coordination could help a bureaucracy grow by fostering redundancy.
- CWuestefeld 16y ago
  That's a really interesting question. Can it be that the perceived "neo-con" or "Liberal" machines are really emergent behavior based solely (or predominantly) on independent, opportunistic agents? I don't know the answer to that, but it's interesting to ponder.
  - _delirium 16y ago
    That's one thing I think is worth rescuing from classical Marxism (ignoring the political prescriptions that the Marxists added on top). The "historical materialist" view that history is largely emergent behavior of structural elements like economic relations, not the result of either "great men" or conscious conspiracies, or some preordained macro-scale order, is still pretty relevant imo. (It's actually out of favor in contemporary Marxist thought, oddly enough, which has gone more in the direction of analyzing the role of culture, hegemony, etc., following Gramsci. Perhaps some non-Marxists will have to revive the historical-materialist approach. Jared Diamond's work is sort of in that direction.)
cavilling_elite 16y ago
The question I have (and I will start the linked pdf tonight) is if unjust systems are nonlinearly hit vs. just systems in the event of a leak. What happens if the new communication or propaganda tools start a copy cat organization to "leak" their own agenda. It might work both ways: complete openness and complete falseness.
- T_S_ 16y ago
  Not sure if this is what you meant, but real transparency requires verification. If leaks are commonplace then "plants" will be too. All sorts of meta-games to play as well.
- jdp23 16y ago
  it's a great question. my intuition is yes at the first level: control of information is a key technique for many powerful unjust systems. it's a good point though that the same kind of power could also make unjust systems better at "false flag" attacks. certainly food for thought.
  - lhnz 16y ago
    That would take a lot of organization. Also, what if their operations were leaked invalidating their previous lies?
    - jdp23 16y ago
      agreed it would take a lot of organization. this is the conspiracy we're talking about though, they're good at stuff like that! > what if their operations were leaked invalidating their previous lies? their goal with this strategy is to devalue leaked information, so this would potentially work to their advantage moving forward. "you can't trust any of this leaked data. don't you know there's a secret bipartisan private/public conspiracy spending $5B a year to corrupt the data?" at some point it gets complex enough that everybody's head explodes
paulgerhardt 16y ago
As a side note, can we go easy on the appeals to emotion in headlines on Hacker News? Yes, this article is good; yes, some robots are incredible; as far as titles go though, it's a distasteful use of rhetoric.
- RickHull 16y ago
  For what it's worth, I completely agree with your sentiment, and I felt a pang of regret when I reviewed my submission later. If I could rewrite the title now, I would call it "In-depth, insightful" rather than "Excellent".
  - TGJ 16y ago
    Even those are just opinionated adjectives designed to get noticed and voted.
    - RickHull 16y ago
      They are designed to be descriptive and informative (hrmph!). I applaud the article I submitted. Let there be no doubt.
      - alexqgb 16y ago
        It's a great article. And your use of 'excellent' was warranted, because the article is, well, excellent. Even folks who don't agree with it have to admit that it frames the issue (as Assange sees it) with genuine clarity. In all the hype surrounding Wikileaks, this was the first mention I'd seen of what Assange actually said about his intentions.
  - alexqgb 16y ago
    Since when is 'excellent' an emotion?
joshes 16y ago
> These leaks are not specifically about the war(s) at all, and most seem to simply be a broad swath of the everyday normal secrets that a security state keeps from all but its most trusted hundreds of thousands of people who have the right clearance. Which is the point: Assange is completely right that our government has conspiratorial functions. What else would you call the fact that a small percentage of our governing class governs and acts in our name according to information which is freely shared amongst them but which cannot be shared amongst their constituency? And we all probably knew that this was more or less the case; anyone who was surprised that our embassies are doing dirty, secretive, and disingenuous political work as a matter of course is naïve. But Assange is not trying to produce a journalistic scandal which will then provoke red-faced government reforms or something, precisely because no one is all that scandalized by such things any more. Instead, he is trying to strangle the links that make the conspiracy possible, to expose the necessary porousness of the American state’s conspiratorial network in hopes that the security state will then try to shrink its computational network in response, thereby making itself dumber and slower and smaller. A long quote, yes, but I could not think of a way to shorten it without severely hindering its meaning. This is a perfectly articulated description of how I initially felt about cable release. Wikileaks (and necessarily, at this point, Assange) is not trying to reveal a huge scandal, to embarrass or to destroy connections. If one or more of those things happen then so be it. The goal is to reveal, to expose the standard type and content of information that is traded like currency amongst the few who govern the very many. The leak is an attempt at provoking forced honesty; if Wikileaks exposes a vast amount of cables enough times, the veil and shroud of secrecy that governments use as a personal cloak will continue to shrink and shrivel until it is non-functional. And voila! Now governments can no longer act in complete isolation from its people and governments such as that of the United States, which promise to be of and for the people, are forced to live up to that promise, out in the open. If you force the government into that situation harshly and fully enough, eventually it has no choice but to act that way. And finally it can be held accountable for its actions, positive or negative. In short, the goal with all of these leaks is first and foremost to poke and prod through the secrecy and conspiracy until there is a large enough hole for the public to be able to view what its own government is doing on its behalf. Whether or not you feel that this is morally or ethically correct is up to you; this is just my take on the rationale.
gasull 16y ago
Any political system with secrecy evolves into authoritarianism. Why shouldn't it? Secrecy ensures politicians/bureaucrats won't be accountable. When did we start thinking that we can have democracy and freedom without accountability? It isn't about conspiracy theories. It's just common sense that some people will abuse their power if they can't be held accountable.
- billybob 16y ago
  Agreed, mostly. But without SOME secrecy, a government can't function. Imagine if the US became 100% transparent. You could listen to the president's phone calls, watch military strategy in real time, etc. Unless the government's enemies (its proper ones - criminals, opposing armies, etc) were likewise transparent, which they wouldn't be, Uncle Sam would basically be doomed to be beaten by them. Like if only one poker player had to show his cards in a game - he'd lose. Just saying there are limits to the good that transparency can do.
yoyar 16y ago
Assange is poking at the illusion of democracy and it makes people damn uncomfortable as far as I can see. I think most people know that they are ruled by rulers and that the idea of the state as benefactor is dead, but to admit it is another thing for most. They will fight very hard to retain the comfort of the illusion. And the state will act to retain it also, by any means necessary.
smokeyj 16y ago
As a citizen I like to remain ignorant to the dealings done on my behalf. I think it's sinful for Julian, or anyone else to seek information that isn't blessed by the State - and anyone seeking knowledge that is not sanctified by my Representatives is unacceptable. Now I'm going to stick my head in the sand because I hate learning about facts.
- dkarl 16y ago
  Replace "citizen" with "president" and you've stated actual U.S. policy (as represented in movies and novels, anyway.) The Iranian nuclear scientists who were assassinated on their way to work recently -- if we (the U.S.) killed them, Obama will never know about it. If, on the other hand, some other country did it without our help, the CIA might share that information with him.
dkarl 16y ago
With respect to the potential for popular opposition to government policy, I think he drastically overestimates the impact of exposure and drastically underestimates a "conspiracy"'s need for secrecy. Perhaps if he paid more attention to domestic U.S. politics, he would see that the standard response to revelations like this is boredom and disinterest. Did Abu Ghraib morally discredit the Iraq war with U.S. voters? No, the ones who still supported the war found it easy to shrug off an isolated incident caused by bad apples. Did it shock any Iraq War supporters to discover that the guys who pushed the Iraq War in 2002 and 2003 had already been looking for ways to sell another war against Saddam Hussein for almost a decade before to 9/11, and that their motivations had nothing to do with terrorism? No, people who had listened to the arguments and made up their minds to support the war did not care about the motivations of the obscure policy wonks advising politicians in Washington. Anyone expecting the public to be shocked and outraged by a revelation ought to temper their hopes by reminding themselves how much publicly available information they find extremely shocking, and how different the typical voter's response to that information is.
- v21 16y ago
  He's not aiming to change the behaviour of the people, he's aiming to change the behaviour of the policy wonks. He's aiming to make them either more open, and therefore far less exclusive. Or he's aiming to have their communications be much more difficult to achieve. Either way, the power of the state over the people is lessened. It doesn't matter that no-one cares about the contents, it only matters that the state cares that people don't see the contents. This is a very different motivation than journalists have.
  - dkarl 16y ago
    I think the state would rather keep their communications secret, but in the event that they cannot, they will continue business as usual rather than change what they talk about. Really, what is the effect of transparency? So what if Russia knows we don't consider them a democratic country, so what if Iran knows that the Arab states want to see Iran isolated and neutralized? These are open secrets. Like a sex tape of a man having sex with his wife, they're embarrassing not because they're news but because they're supposed to be kept private. Nobody is surprised that a man has sex with his wife, and nobody is surprised that the Arab states are adversaries of Iran. If secrecy becomes impossible, as Assange desires, will Arab states stop calling for the U.S. to be aggressive with Iran? Will the United States start believing in Russian democracy? Will American policy wonks stop openly discussing with each other what reasons might persuade the public to support policies that they support for other, less popular reasons? Well, if every human being on earth suddenly had X-ray vision, would people stop having sex for fear of their neighbors seeing? Of course not. Life goes on.
Maro 16y ago
I have not followed all the previous Wikileaks, but I definitely disagree with this latest one. I don't see what purpose is served by releasing internals memos about what some diplomat located in Germany thinks about certain German politicians. There's nothing evil in having a negative opinion about German politicians and communicating it to your boss. The People certainly don't need to know such micro level details. OTOH it does harm your diplomatic relations. - This is kinda like somebody hacking your Gmail account and releasing all your work emails to your startup's investors, because, after all, they're your investors, they deserve to know what's going on?
danielschonfeld 16y ago
If anyone is interested here is the full PDF that is quoted throughout this article dubbed "State and Terrorist Conspiracies": http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf
joe_the_user 16y ago
I'd say it's a mistake to either reduce Wikileaks to Assange or reduce the leak-dynamic to Wikileaks. Technology has made leaking very easy. Someone is going to do it. There are many justifications you could come up with, someone will use one of them. Leaking, for example, seems inherently easier than file sharing and that hasn't stopped for a while now.
ENOTTY 16y ago
I'm interpreting this article to say Assange's goal is to decrease the effectiveness of the conspiracy (eg, US government function) by killing off information flows within the conspiracy. If that is so, then I really fear a world with Assange as the head of Wikileaks. One of the major reasons why the government failed to prevent the 9/11 plot was because nobody had all the information in one place so that they could connect the dots. The 9/11 Commission recommended that different parts of the government increase the amount of information they share with each other. (Indeed, the State Department posting certain cables onto SIPRNET that was the source of this leak was part of the response to that recommendation.) If Assange's actions induce a return to the world of stovepiping, then the future might not be so rosy. Then I guess my only question is why does he want a world like this? Will society be better off in this kind of world?
gfodor 16y ago
Someone in another thread put it best: when did I vote for Julian Assange? Who is he accountable to? Where are his secrets?
gcb 16y ago
funny how for years all that [USA being an authoritarian conspiracy] was even promoted as the "correct" action in sci action movies. how many times the hero agrees not to disclose some alien invasion or something as to not create mass panic and help the government act in the dark and so saves the day?
known 16y ago
As Michael Caine said in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Knight_%28film%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Knight_%28film%29 "Some people would enjoy seeing the world burn"

179 points by RickHull 16y ago

tl;dr version (and it is quite long). I've copied out what I think are the key bits, the following is all quoted: He begins by positing that conspiracy and authoritarianism go hand in hand, arguing that since authoritarianism produces resistance to itself -- to the extent that its authoritarianism becomes generally known -- it can only continue to exist and function by preventing its intentions (the authorship of its authority?) from being generally known. It inevitably becomes, he argues, a conspiracy ... the most effective way to attack this kind of organization would be to make "leaks" a fundamental part of the conspiracy’s information environment. Which is why the point is not that particular leaks are specifically effective. Wikileaks does not leak something like the Collateral Murder video as a way of putting an end to that particular military tactic; that would be to target a specific leg of the hydra even as it grows two more. Instead, the idea is that increasing the porousness of the conspiracy’s information system will impede its functioning, that the conspiracy will turn against itself in self-defense, clamping down on its own information flows in ways that will then impede its own cognitive function. You destroy the conspiracy, in other words, by making it so paranoid of itself that it can no longer conspire ... The leak, in other words, is only the catalyst for the desired counter-overreaction; Wikileaks wants to provoke the conspiracy into turning off its own brain in response to the threat. As it tries to plug its own holes and find the leakers, he reasons, its component elements will de-synchronize from and turn against each other, de-link from the central processing network, and come undone. ... he quotes Theodore Roosevelt’s words from his 1912 Progressive party presidential platform as the epigraph to the first essay; Roosevelt realized a hundred years ago that "Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people," and it was true, then too, that "To destroy this invisible government, to befoul this unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of statesmanship."

sudont 16y ago
It's a good strategy, as long as the US doesn't become as autocratic as the Nazis or Viet Cong (correct?). Then, plugging leaks becomes hanging their corpses as a warning. Peaceful protests only work against peaceful regimes.
- ryoshu 16y ago
  There have already been calls from prominent US politicians to declare WikiLeaks a terrorist organization. Predator drone strikes are how the US deals with terrorists.
  - steveklabnik 16y ago
    Palin: > [Julian] is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands. His past posting of classified documents revealed the identity of more than 100 Afghan sources to the Taliban. Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders?
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
  - alexqgb 16y ago
    Most terrorists aren't sitting on huge piles of sensitive material set to be released en masse in the event of sudden, unplanned death.
DanielBMarkham 16y ago
I don't want to get into a detailed analysis of the piece -- I only had time to skim it. But am I to understand that I (and the rest of the American people) have paid tens of billions of dollars, had multiple elections, politically demonstrated and pleaded to Congressmen, to have a State Department that Assange doesn't feel should keep secrets, so he dumps the embassy cables? If a single actor can take it on himself to do all of that, then why am I wasting my time choosing who to vote for, paying taxes, and debating with my fellow citizens what the correct policy on "X" might be? Seems like I should just take it on myself -- after careful analysis of course -- that Assange is a danger to my representative form of government and I should go shoot him (I mean this completely rhetorically, by the way. I in no way support violence against anybody) The problem here is believing your own bullshit, as they say on the streets. Or put nicer, coming up with a line of reasoning that you (and perhaps others) deem to be the "correct" one, and then imposing it on the rest of us against our will. Democracies don't work by doing the right or correct thing. They work by the consent of the governed. If Assange takes away my illusion of having some say in the governing of my state, then he's effectively attacking the social contract. I just can't see how this plays out very well.

lmkg 16y ago

It's a pretty good analysis, and Assange seems to have put a lot of thought into it. However, he's making an assumption that I think is unfounded, which is treating the concentration of political power as monolithic. If you assume that an organization is concerned about the power of the organization, then I think he's correct in his logic that authoritarianism leads to conspiracy and communication is important to having power. However, if you assume that most members of an organization are concerned with personal power rather than the power of the organization, then the importance of communication goes down sharply, as the only coordination is opportunistic. A bureaucracy, as opposed to a dictatorship, is quite content without having goals, coordination, or communication[1], and can expand its authority based entirely on the mission creep of lower-level individuals within it. How valuable the disruption of communication is in fighting a "regime" depends on how you model that regime. And, of course, in practice you will find that reality is some bizarre chimera of any group of models. My intuition is that Congress (plus lobbyists) act more like a decentralized bureaucracy, executive administrations act more like dictatorships that fight against each other for territory, and that the closest things we find to Assange's "banal conspiracies" are small, ad-hoc, opportunistic alignment of objectives, much smaller, less powerful, and less stable than the government as a whole. [1] In fact, lack of coordination could help a bureaucracy grow by fostering redundancy.

CWuestefeld 16y ago
That's a really interesting question. Can it be that the perceived "neo-con" or "Liberal" machines are really emergent behavior based solely (or predominantly) on independent, opportunistic agents? I don't know the answer to that, but it's interesting to ponder.
- _delirium 16y ago
  That's one thing I think is worth rescuing from classical Marxism (ignoring the political prescriptions that the Marxists added on top). The "historical materialist" view that history is largely emergent behavior of structural elements like economic relations, not the result of either "great men" or conscious conspiracies, or some preordained macro-scale order, is still pretty relevant imo. (It's actually out of favor in contemporary Marxist thought, oddly enough, which has gone more in the direction of analyzing the role of culture, hegemony, etc., following Gramsci. Perhaps some non-Marxists will have to revive the historical-materialist approach. Jared Diamond's work is sort of in that direction.)

cavilling_elite 16y ago

The question I have (and I will start the linked pdf tonight) is if unjust systems are nonlinearly hit vs. just systems in the event of a leak. What happens if the new communication or propaganda tools start a copy cat organization to "leak" their own agenda. It might work both ways: complete openness and complete falseness.

T_S_ 16y ago
Not sure if this is what you meant, but real transparency requires verification. If leaks are commonplace then "plants" will be too. All sorts of meta-games to play as well.
jdp23 16y ago
it's a great question. my intuition is yes at the first level: control of information is a key technique for many powerful unjust systems. it's a good point though that the same kind of power could also make unjust systems better at "false flag" attacks. certainly food for thought.
- lhnz 16y ago
  That would take a lot of organization. Also, what if their operations were leaked invalidating their previous lies?
  - jdp23 16y ago
    agreed it would take a lot of organization. this is the conspiracy we're talking about though, they're good at stuff like that! > what if their operations were leaked invalidating their previous lies? their goal with this strategy is to devalue leaked information, so this would potentially work to their advantage moving forward. "you can't trust any of this leaked data. don't you know there's a secret bipartisan private/public conspiracy spending $5B a year to corrupt the data?" at some point it gets complex enough that everybody's head explodes

paulgerhardt 16y ago

As a side note, can we go easy on the appeals to emotion in headlines on Hacker News? Yes, this article is good; yes, some robots are incredible; as far as titles go though, it's a distasteful use of rhetoric.

RickHull 16y ago
For what it's worth, I completely agree with your sentiment, and I felt a pang of regret when I reviewed my submission later. If I could rewrite the title now, I would call it "In-depth, insightful" rather than "Excellent".
- TGJ 16y ago
  Even those are just opinionated adjectives designed to get noticed and voted.
  - RickHull 16y ago
    They are designed to be descriptive and informative (hrmph!). I applaud the article I submitted. Let there be no doubt.
    - alexqgb 16y ago
      It's a great article. And your use of 'excellent' was warranted, because the article is, well, excellent. Even folks who don't agree with it have to admit that it frames the issue (as Assange sees it) with genuine clarity. In all the hype surrounding Wikileaks, this was the first mention I'd seen of what Assange actually said about his intentions.
- alexqgb 16y ago
  Since when is 'excellent' an emotion?

joshes 16y ago

> These leaks are not specifically about the war(s) at all, and most seem to simply be a broad swath of the everyday normal secrets that a security state keeps from all but its most trusted hundreds of thousands of people who have the right clearance. Which is the point: Assange is completely right that our government has conspiratorial functions. What else would you call the fact that a small percentage of our governing class governs and acts in our name according to information which is freely shared amongst them but which cannot be shared amongst their constituency? And we all probably knew that this was more or less the case; anyone who was surprised that our embassies are doing dirty, secretive, and disingenuous political work as a matter of course is naïve. But Assange is not trying to produce a journalistic scandal which will then provoke red-faced government reforms or something, precisely because no one is all that scandalized by such things any more. Instead, he is trying to strangle the links that make the conspiracy possible, to expose the necessary porousness of the American state’s conspiratorial network in hopes that the security state will then try to shrink its computational network in response, thereby making itself dumber and slower and smaller. A long quote, yes, but I could not think of a way to shorten it without severely hindering its meaning. This is a perfectly articulated description of how I initially felt about cable release. Wikileaks (and necessarily, at this point, Assange) is not trying to reveal a huge scandal, to embarrass or to destroy connections. If one or more of those things happen then so be it. The goal is to reveal, to expose the standard type and content of information that is traded like currency amongst the few who govern the very many. The leak is an attempt at provoking forced honesty; if Wikileaks exposes a vast amount of cables enough times, the veil and shroud of secrecy that governments use as a personal cloak will continue to shrink and shrivel until it is non-functional. And voila! Now governments can no longer act in complete isolation from its people and governments such as that of the United States, which promise to be of and for the people, are forced to live up to that promise, out in the open. If you force the government into that situation harshly and fully enough, eventually it has no choice but to act that way. And finally it can be held accountable for its actions, positive or negative. In short, the goal with all of these leaks is first and foremost to poke and prod through the secrecy and conspiracy until there is a large enough hole for the public to be able to view what its own government is doing on its behalf. Whether or not you feel that this is morally or ethically correct is up to you; this is just my take on the rationale.

gasull 16y ago

Any political system with secrecy evolves into authoritarianism. Why shouldn't it? Secrecy ensures politicians/bureaucrats won't be accountable. When did we start thinking that we can have democracy and freedom without accountability? It isn't about conspiracy theories. It's just common sense that some people will abuse their power if they can't be held accountable.

billybob 16y ago
Agreed, mostly. But without SOME secrecy, a government can't function. Imagine if the US became 100% transparent. You could listen to the president's phone calls, watch military strategy in real time, etc. Unless the government's enemies (its proper ones - criminals, opposing armies, etc) were likewise transparent, which they wouldn't be, Uncle Sam would basically be doomed to be beaten by them. Like if only one poker player had to show his cards in a game - he'd lose. Just saying there are limits to the good that transparency can do.

yoyar 16y ago

Assange is poking at the illusion of democracy and it makes people damn uncomfortable as far as I can see. I think most people know that they are ruled by rulers and that the idea of the state as benefactor is dead, but to admit it is another thing for most. They will fight very hard to retain the comfort of the illusion. And the state will act to retain it also, by any means necessary.

smokeyj 16y ago

As a citizen I like to remain ignorant to the dealings done on my behalf. I think it's sinful for Julian, or anyone else to seek information that isn't blessed by the State - and anyone seeking knowledge that is not sanctified by my Representatives is unacceptable. Now I'm going to stick my head in the sand because I hate learning about facts.

dkarl 16y ago
Replace "citizen" with "president" and you've stated actual U.S. policy (as represented in movies and novels, anyway.) The Iranian nuclear scientists who were assassinated on their way to work recently -- if we (the U.S.) killed them, Obama will never know about it. If, on the other hand, some other country did it without our help, the CIA might share that information with him.

dkarl 16y ago

With respect to the potential for popular opposition to government policy, I think he drastically overestimates the impact of exposure and drastically underestimates a "conspiracy"'s need for secrecy. Perhaps if he paid more attention to domestic U.S. politics, he would see that the standard response to revelations like this is boredom and disinterest. Did Abu Ghraib morally discredit the Iraq war with U.S. voters? No, the ones who still supported the war found it easy to shrug off an isolated incident caused by bad apples. Did it shock any Iraq War supporters to discover that the guys who pushed the Iraq War in 2002 and 2003 had already been looking for ways to sell another war against Saddam Hussein for almost a decade before to 9/11, and that their motivations had nothing to do with terrorism? No, people who had listened to the arguments and made up their minds to support the war did not care about the motivations of the obscure policy wonks advising politicians in Washington. Anyone expecting the public to be shocked and outraged by a revelation ought to temper their hopes by reminding themselves how much publicly available information they find extremely shocking, and how different the typical voter's response to that information is.

v21 16y ago
He's not aiming to change the behaviour of the people, he's aiming to change the behaviour of the policy wonks. He's aiming to make them either more open, and therefore far less exclusive. Or he's aiming to have their communications be much more difficult to achieve. Either way, the power of the state over the people is lessened. It doesn't matter that no-one cares about the contents, it only matters that the state cares that people don't see the contents. This is a very different motivation than journalists have.
- dkarl 16y ago
  I think the state would rather keep their communications secret, but in the event that they cannot, they will continue business as usual rather than change what they talk about. Really, what is the effect of transparency? So what if Russia knows we don't consider them a democratic country, so what if Iran knows that the Arab states want to see Iran isolated and neutralized? These are open secrets. Like a sex tape of a man having sex with his wife, they're embarrassing not because they're news but because they're supposed to be kept private. Nobody is surprised that a man has sex with his wife, and nobody is surprised that the Arab states are adversaries of Iran. If secrecy becomes impossible, as Assange desires, will Arab states stop calling for the U.S. to be aggressive with Iran? Will the United States start believing in Russian democracy? Will American policy wonks stop openly discussing with each other what reasons might persuade the public to support policies that they support for other, less popular reasons? Well, if every human being on earth suddenly had X-ray vision, would people stop having sex for fear of their neighbors seeing? Of course not. Life goes on.

Maro 16y ago

I have not followed all the previous Wikileaks, but I definitely disagree with this latest one. I don't see what purpose is served by releasing internals memos about what some diplomat located in Germany thinks about certain German politicians. There's nothing evil in having a negative opinion about German politicians and communicating it to your boss. The People certainly don't need to know such micro level details. OTOH it does harm your diplomatic relations. - This is kinda like somebody hacking your Gmail account and releasing all your work emails to your startup's investors, because, after all, they're your investors, they deserve to know what's going on?

danielschonfeld 16y ago

If anyone is interested here is the full PDF that is quoted throughout this article dubbed "State and Terrorist Conspiracies": http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf

joe_the_user 16y ago

I'd say it's a mistake to either reduce Wikileaks to Assange or reduce the leak-dynamic to Wikileaks. Technology has made leaking very easy. Someone is going to do it. There are many justifications you could come up with, someone will use one of them. Leaking, for example, seems inherently easier than file sharing and that hasn't stopped for a while now.

ENOTTY 16y ago

I'm interpreting this article to say Assange's goal is to decrease the effectiveness of the conspiracy (eg, US government function) by killing off information flows within the conspiracy. If that is so, then I really fear a world with Assange as the head of Wikileaks. One of the major reasons why the government failed to prevent the 9/11 plot was because nobody had all the information in one place so that they could connect the dots. The 9/11 Commission recommended that different parts of the government increase the amount of information they share with each other. (Indeed, the State Department posting certain cables onto SIPRNET that was the source of this leak was part of the response to that recommendation.) If Assange's actions induce a return to the world of stovepiping, then the future might not be so rosy. Then I guess my only question is why does he want a world like this? Will society be better off in this kind of world?

gfodor 16y ago

Someone in another thread put it best: when did I vote for Julian Assange? Who is he accountable to? Where are his secrets?

gcb 16y ago

funny how for years all that [USA being an authoritarian conspiracy] was even promoted as the "correct" action in sci action movies. how many times the hero agrees not to disclose some alien invasion or something as to not create mass panic and help the government act in the dark and so saves the day?

known 16y ago

As Michael Caine said in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Knight_%28film%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Knight_%28film%29 "Some people would enjoy seeing the world burn"