Sunday 12 December 2010

Wikileaks

"And thus making even the banal gossip-like ruminations of functionaries and statesmen public is far more damaging than it might seem as it undermines the very ability to form informal yet secure relationships. By forcing the state to lock down their internal modes of communication, making them less accessible to everyone, not just Julian Assange, Wikileaks deals a more profound blow to states than a half century of earnest pro-liberty pamphleteers and people in good faith trying to work the system to roll back western panoptic regulatory statism."
PdH puts the significance of Julian Assange's organization into context. Two questions:
  1. Will Wikileaks keep leaking, or will the States find new ways to securely disseminate information across their networks?
  2. What bets are being made - perhaps even right now - on how to run non-secretive businesses and other organizations?
Admission of error: the real significance of the first major Wikileaks story went right over my head.

Later...

That second question of mine above is premature. So many of the shocks are going to depend upon who leaks what, when and whether Wikileaks decides to publish or not. Following the discussions elsewhere, a common feature is outrage at the apparent selectivity of leaked information, with the leaking of operational military information being a particularly good example of that. However, here is the money-quote from the essay by Assange which no doubt prompted PdH's argument:
"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. 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."
Non-linearity (my emphasis). In aggregation, Wikileaks may become both a random sledgehammer and a seemingly selectively applied feather-duster. Or a seemingly selectively applied sledgehammer and a random feather-duster. 'Endivio R' makes a broadly compatible point in comment 66 on that Samizdata thread:
"I think that each leak, depending on its source, content and consequences, should be treated as a separate issue..."
Meanwhile, just look at how many mirror sites for Wikileaks there are now in the event that Wikileaks should have to switch servers.

Later, still...

'Seerak' in comment 69 of that Samizdata thread answers the second aspect of my first question in the negative:
"Look for potential gutting of FOI laws. Watch as the State becomes more and more of a black box, becoming more opaque to the oversight of the people, ever the less accountable -- and more difficult to constrain -- all under color of "security". Establishing networks for "confluence of interests" outside the reach of such as Julian Assange is trivial, and that will happen."
I am not at all sure that Assange's thesis will be proved correct, but I don't know nearly enough myself to refute it, let alone dismiss it out of hand like this guy does - yet is he justified in doing so?

An even later 'later'...

David Friedman flags up David Brin's "The Transparent Society" in tying up the Wikileaks case with the use of cell-phone video cameras against U.S. cops:
"...incidents where police officers made the mistake of misbehaving when someone had a video camera—more recently a cell phone—pointed at them. Thinking about the WikiLeaks case, it occurred to me that it was a further development in the same direction... In that sense, what we are seeing is an early stage of the transparent society."
Well at least I think I may have got my writing mojo back...

5 comments:

  1. LOL, love the closing comment.

    You know, it's something when leaked information becomes "news." Suddenly--or perhaps not so suddenly--all news seems to have become tabloid b.s.

    Screw Wikileaks. It's all speculation on shit we already knew, as Jack Nicholson said, deep down in places we don't like to talk about at parties, long, long ago. . . .

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  2. Nathan, have you read Assange's essay or been following the discussions? That you may have already known some of the leaked information is quite beside the point.

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  3. Read some of the Wikileaks docs, but not the essay to which you are referring. Could you point me in the right direction? Would love to check it out.

    What I meant in my post was that you and I both know the state--any state--is up to no good. Wikileaks and their content doesn't shock me. Therefore, I don't put as much stress on their significance. Some of my classmates are shocked, but I'm not. It has more to do with what I understand about the state, not a state.

    Do post the link to the essay; would enjoy a look. . . .

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  4. Here is the essay (pdf): http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf with the money quote being this bit:

    "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.

    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.


    However, the discussion has moved on a bit. There was some good criticism on the Samizdata thread, with points raised against the selectivity of Wikileaks as a publishing organization given their Tranzi-left objectives. As I said in my post above, what they choose to publish and what not to publish may be decisive in whether Wikileaks effectively disrupts State networks or not.

    There have been other criticisms. One was that Wikileaks is simply one side of the Leftist tactic to enable regulatory control over the internet; make a mess, then get the government to come in and clean up the mess with new legislation. Another point was that Wikileaks may in fact be nothing more than an elaborate con operation trying to make some cash (but I have my doubts about this).

    At any rate Wikileaks has made enemies, and that means there will be scope for 'competition', i.e. for other people to come in and do what Wikileaks does now but better - by which I mean publish in accord with different political objectives to those of Julian Assange.

    On that note, an organization called "Cryptome" (who you might notice, hosted Julian Assange's essay above) have been doing essentially the same sort of thing as Wikileaks since 1996! And those guys are especially pissed off - they are leaking info about Wikileaks now.

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  5. Thanks, Mike. I've currently got several irons in the fire so to speak, but I'll do my best to get to the pdf file in a timely fashion. Many thanks.~

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