Wikileaks

Wikileaks = site for open government whistle-blowing

URL = http://www.wikileaks.org

See also: Wikipedia article

Description

1.

From the Washington Post (copied via the Cooperation Commons mailing list, source URL not known)

"Wikileaks.org is a Web-based way for people with damning, potentially helpful or just plain embarrassing government documents to make them public without leaving fingerprints. Modeled on the participatory, online encyclopedia Wikipedia, the site is expected to go live within the next two months.

Organizer James Chen said that while its creators tried to keep the site under wraps until its launch, Google references to it have soared in recent days from about eight to more than 20,000.

"Wikileaks is becoming, as planned, although unexpectedly early, an international movement of people who facilitate ethical leaking and open government," he said.

The site, whose FAQs are written in flowery dissident-ese -- "What conscience cannot contain, and institutional secrecy unjustly conceals, Wikileaks can broadcast to the world" -- targets regimes in Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but not exclusively. It was founded and partially funded, organizers say, by dissidents, mathematicians and technologists from China, the United States, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa. The site relies on a worldwide web of volunteers and contributors to post and vet the information, and dodge any efforts to shut it down. To protect document donors and the site itself, Wikileaks uses its own coded software combined with, for the techies out there, modified versions of Freenet and PGP."

2. From a profile by Raffi Khatchadourian in the June 7, 2010 issue of The New Yorker:

"Assange is an international trafficker, of sorts. He and his colleagues collect documents and imagery that governments and other institutions regard as confidential and publish them on a Web site called WikiLeaks.org. Since it went online, three and a half years ago, the site has published an extensive catalogue of secret material, ranging from the Standard Operating Procedures at Camp Delta, in Guantánamo Bay, and the “Climategate” e-mails from the University of East Anglia, in England, to the contents of Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo account. The catalogue is especially remarkable because WikiLeaks is not quite an organization; it is better described as a media insurgency. It has no paid staff, no copiers, no desks, no office. Assange does not even have a home. He travels from country to country, staying with supporters, or friends of friends—as he once put it to me, “I’m living in airports these days.” He is the operation’s prime mover, and it is fair to say that WikiLeaks exists wherever he does. At the same time, hundreds of volunteers from around the world help maintain the Web site’s complicated infrastructure; many participate in small ways, and between three and five people dedicate themselves to it full time. Key members are known only by initials—M, for instance—even deep within WikiLeaks, where communications are conducted by encrypted online chat services. The secretiveness stems from the belief that a populist intelligence operation with virtually no resources, designed to publicize information that powerful institutions do not want public, will have serious adversaries." (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian)

Discussion

An extensive critique of Wikileaks editorial policy by Jon Garfunkel of Civilities at http://civilities.net/Wikileaks

Wikileaks' Place in the New Networked News Ecology

Felix Stalder:

1.

"WikiLeaks is one of the defining stories of the internet, which means by now, one of the defining stories of the present, period. At least four large-scale trends which permeate our societies as a whole are fused here into an explosive mixture whose fall-out is far from clear. First is a change in the materiality of communication. Communication becomes more extensive, more recorded, and the records become more mobile. Second is a crisis of institutions, particularly in western democracies, where moralistic rhetoric and the ugliness of daily practice are diverging ever more at the very moment when institutional personnel are being encouraged to think more for themselves. Third is the rise of new actors, 'super-empowered' individuals, capable of intervening into historical developments at a systemic level. Finally, fourth is a structural transformation of the public sphere (through media consolidation at one pole, and the explosion of non-institutional publishers at the other), to an extent that rivals the one described by Habermas with the rise of mass media at the turn of the 20th century."

2. The Super-Empowered Individual

"There is a vast amount of infrastructure - transportation, communication, financing, production - openly available that, until recently, was only accessible to very large organisations. It now takes relatively little - a few dedicated, knowledgeable people - to connect these pieces into a powerful platform from which to act. Military strategists have been talking about 'super-empowered individuals' by which they mean someone who

is autonomously capable of creating a cascading event, [...] a 'system perturbation'; a disruption of system function and invalidation of existing rule sets to at least the national but more likely the global scale. The key requirements to become 'superempowered' are comprehension of a complex system's connectivty and operation; access to critical network hubs; possession of a force that can be leveraged against the structure of the system and a willingness to use it.

There are a number real weaknesses to this concept, not least that it has thus far been exclusively applied to terrorism and that it reduces structural dynamics to individual actions. Nevertheless, it can be useful insofar as it highlights how complex, networked systems which might be generally relatively stable, posses critical nodes ('systempunkt' in the strange parlance of military strategists) which in case of failure that can cause cascading effects through the entire systems.2 It also highlights how individuals, or more likely, small groups, can affect these systems disproportionately if they manage to interfere with these critical nodes. Thus, individuals, supported by small, networked organisations, can now intervene in social dynamics at a systemic level, for the better or worse.

This picture fits WikiLeaks, organised around one charismatic individual, very well. It is both its strength and its weakness. Its strength because it has been able to trigger large-scale events quickly and cheaply. If WikiLeaks had required multi-million dollar investment upfront, it would not have been able to get off the ground. Yet, it is also its key weakness, since it remains so strongly centred around a single person. Many of the issues that are typical of small groups organised by a charismatic leader seem to affect WikiLeaks as well, such as authoritarianism, lack of internal procedure, dangers of burnout and internal and external attacks on the credibility of that single person (if not worse). Such charismatic leadership is often unstable and one must suspect that all of the issues - positive because of the super-empowerment, as well as negative because of the pressures baring down on it - are multiplied to an unprecedented scale in the case of WikiLeaks and its leader, Julian Assange. It's hard to imagine how this can be sustainable." (http://remix.openflows.com/node/149)

Six Anti-Theses on WikiLeaks

Following "Twelve theses on WikiLeaks" by Geert Lovink & Patrice Riemens

By the "Faculty of the College of Ontopoetic Machines":

1. Wikileaks exposes the slippery moralism of global capital.

"The corporate abdication of non-discrimination prefigures more scrutiny of online activity. Visa, Amazon, Mastercard, Tableau, PayPal, PostFinance, and EveryDNS: each severed their relationship with one or more aspects of the WikiLeaks organization due to technicalities. None were served with legal documents requiring that they stop supporting "illegal" activity; rather, some caved due to vague public and private requests by functionaries within US government offices. Yet, these business have no moral qualms as to provide similar services to the Ku Klux clan, homophobic sites and just about anything else. As to the decision to cut Wikileaks off they justified their actions via the legalese of their Terms of Service (ToS) or Acceptable Use Policy (AUP), contracts that we all accept as the necessary evil of using free services online. AUPs, once the interest of legal scholars or small actors who fell afoul of them, now become the prime means for ending of services to the undesirable. (Recall, for example, Facebooks' threat of legal action against the seppukoo project. This is a refrain that continues to haunt the online space; however it was never seen with such vehemence as with WikiLeaks.) Yet in a truism, this does not only eliminate the possibility of online activity, for the actions of Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal prevent the flow of electronic currency to WikiLeaks, requiring the organization to ask for either bank transfers (that are prohibitively expensive for people in the US) or paper money orders sent to a physical address. These actions by financial institutions foreground the linkage between online activities and their real reliance on forms of money that are still tied to large corporations. As well, the use of contractual language to engage in corporate censorship enables what is prohibited by US Constitutional guarantees, among other legal safeguards elsewhere in the world. Given the tiered nature of the internet---in that a hosting provider purchases bandwidth from a separate company, that probably purchases DNS service from a separate company---means that any activity can be forced offline by any intermediary if found to be in violation of the ToS. While you may have legal recourse via a civil suit, such an undertaking is oftentimes impossible due to the legal costs involved and the vastly unequal power differential.

2. Wikileaks draws on the tense affair between the antiauthoritarian ethos of hacker culture and the authoritarian logic of capital, also known as neoliberalism.

WikiLeaks found a characteristically computational way around their hosting problems, drawing on an unorganized group of volunteers to provide mirrors of the site (http://wikileaks.ch/mirrors.html). This strategy of providing mirrors for content hearkens back to 1990s internet culture, where the practice of setting up FTP mirrors was commonplace (hacker culture itself is situated in the 1940s, see Steven Levy). Mirroring mitigates the impact of corporate censorship somewhat, but is likely to be impractical on a large scale in the long-term, especially for all of the worthwhile projects that can be removed by intermediaries. Nevertheless, this example of mirroring is an interesting case of hackers relaxing their security mindset for what they perceive as a greater good. Setting up a WikiLeaks mirror requires the administrator to allow a member of WikiLeaks remote access to their server in order to upload new files as needed; this is made possible using public-key encryption techniques, the focus of much hacker attention in the 1990s. Usually system administrators would never open their servers for unknown people to upload files. But there seems to be a belief here that the sysadmins of WikiLeaks, whomever they are, will not abuse their power and will only upload what they say they will upload. There is something here that deserves greater scrutiny, especially in light of what Mathieu O'Neil calls "hacker charismatic authority". Most studies consider this as a form of authority _over_ people; in this case, however, the authority is exercised _amongst_ sysadmins, enabling them to open their machines to the unknown WikiLeaks administrators.

3. Wikileaks shows that any system is vulnerable to infiltration.

WikiLeaks is highly collaborative, and not only as a result of the recent mirroring activity. Indeed, the project is only possible due to their collaboration with the individuals and groups providing the content to be leaked. Throughout the recent consternation over "Cablegate", the hundreds, if not thousands, of other people who have put their lives on the line to pass documents to WikiLeaks have unfortunately been forgotten, Bradley Manning excluded. To ignore these people is to make a grave analytical error. Be thankful that we do not know their names, for if we did, they would be in immediate danger.

4. Wikileaks demonstrates that the human 'factor' is the weak spot of networks.

The "Cablegate" release also shows the importance of having collaborators within governmental and military institutions. If we assume that Manning is the source of the diplomatic and military cables---and this has not been proven yet---then we can see how individuals within these organizations are disgusted with the conduct of the war. This is of a piece with other projects such as Iraq Veterans Against the War and the War Veteran's Book Project that aim to present the personal side of the present conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan as a way of organizing public outrage. Do not discount the power of solidarity with disgruntled soldiers. We only have to recall the Abril Revolution in 1974 in Portugal, where the military supported the peaceful transition from the Salazar dictatorship, to understand how important it is to have military forces on one's side. Recall as well that the main technical tool used to anonymize submissions to WikiLeaks, Tor (The Onion Router), came out of a US Naval Research Laboratory project to protect clandestine activities overseas. In fact, members of the military are some of the most vocal opponents of current attempts in the US to require person-level attribution of data packets online.

5. WikiLeaks is a classic example of using media as a tool for de-dehumanizing.

The actions of Anonymous on the websites of Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, PostFinance, and others are in a lineage with the FloodNet by the Electronic Disturbance Theater. While many mainstream media sources see these as "attacks", others, such as the editors of The Guardian, realize them to be "non-violent action or civil disobedience". We do not want to discount how easy it is for the media and authorities to misconstrue these actions as illegal denial of service attacks, as a 16-year old Dutch teenager is finding out right now, or as the EDT and b.a.n.g. lab found out earlier this year. Nevertheless, we are seeing a certain maturation of this technique as acceptable to others outside of the net.art community.

Furthermore, the deliberation process of Anonymous prefigures future forms of activist collaboration online, subject to the caveats mentioned above. Discussions happened across a diversity of networked media, both old and new (IRC, Twitter, Blogspot, PiratePad, etc.). Orderly discussion under the control of a leader was not the norm, as individuals simultaneously put forth their own suggestions to have them edited into or out of existence. As Gabriella Coleman wrote in her analysis of their planning, they appeared to be "seasoned political activists", not simply "script-kiddies" as they are described by both the mainstream media and other hacker organizations such as 2600. Maybe there is something those of us interested in new forms of organization can learn from these predominantly 16-24-year olds.

6. Wikileaks suggests an understanding of a notion of networks as media assemblages.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the recent Wikileaks phenomenon has to do with what it portends for future networked tendencies. Given what we stated in anti-thesis 1, we ought to pay more attention to the movement of information outside of Internet-based networks. There is a tendency to conflate network sharing of data with the Internet proper, but this is not a necessary condition. Indeed, there are multitudinous methods of arranging networks of humans and things that do not rely on corporate or government controlled conduits for the passage of bits. Consider, for example, the host of artistic projects in this space just from the past couple of years: netless, Feral Trade, deadswap, Dead Drops, Fluid Nexus, Autonet, etc. These projects rely on assemblages of humans and infrastructure in motion. And, they rely in part on a prior agreement among participants with respect to protocols to follow. This is already at work in the Wikileaks project with respect to their main members. Only they know who they are; we are in the dark, and rightly so. This is an application of Hakim Bey's concept of Immediatism, updated to take into account a certain mongrel of immediate contact and networked activities.

Additionally, the projects just mentioned foreground a certain notion of slowness that works to counteract the notions of "information overload". If data transport relies on the motion of humans from one location to another, this will require a particular patience, producing a form of slowness. Nevertheless, this should not be understood as a pastoral call as voiced by certain proponents of, for example, the Slow Food Movement. Rather it is a way to reinvigorate thought and practice regarding human-scale machinic assemblages. What remains is the difficult and challenging work of producing long-term, permanent ad-hoc networks." (nettime december 2010)