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The Man Who Spilled the Secrets
Sarah Ellison, Vanity Fair
The collaboration between WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the Web’s notorious information anarchist, and some of the world’s most respected news organizations began at The Guardian, a nearly 200-year-old British paper. What followed was a clash of civilizations—and ambitions—as Guardian editors and their colleagues at The New York Times and other media outlets struggled to corral a whistle-blowing stampede amid growing distrust and anger. With Assange detained in the U.K., the author reveals the story behind the headlines.
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… The Guardian wasn’t the only newspaper to work with WikiLeaks. … But The Guardian was the lead organization from the outset: it came up with the idea of a collaboration with WikiLeaks, and it made the arrangement work. That central role may seem odd to some. The Guardian is relatively small—it’s merely the 10th-largest national newspaper in Britain (behind The Times of London and The Daily Telegraph, and ahead of only The Independent). But it is aggressive and relentless, and performs on a global stage in a way that most bigger British newspapers simply do not.
The paper has come a long way from the old Manchester Guardian, which, as a former editor, Peter Preston, remembers, was read by “a bluff, Presbyterian, gum-boot-wearing do-gooder.” There are still many of those, but they’re reading alongside a younger, internationally minded audience attracted by The Guardian’s left-leaning politics and its influential Web site, which vies for the largest audience of any news site in Britain. And it’s not just Britain: two-thirds of the guardian.co.uk’s readers live elsewhere.
… The Guardian, like other media outlets, would come to see Assange as someone to be handled with kid gloves, or perhaps latex ones—too alluring to ignore, too tainted to unequivocally embrace. Assange would come to see the mainstream media as a tool to be used and discarded, and at all times treated with suspicion. Whatever the differences, the results have been extraordinary. Given the range, depth, and accuracy of the leaks, the collaboration has produced by any standard one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years. While the leaks haven’t produced a single standout headline that rises above the rest—perhaps because the avalanche of headlines has simply been overwhelming—the texture, context, and detail of the WikiLeaks stories have changed the way people think about how the world is run.
(February 2011 issue)
Wiki Rehab
Evgeny Morozov, The New Republic
How to save Julian Assange’s movement from itself.
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… Regardless of what happens to Assange, Wikileaks has the potential to catalyze a worldwide campaign that could do for the Internet what the Greens did for the environment in the 1970s: start a much-needed conversation about the potentially corrosive impact of corporate interests on the public good, a conversation that may eventually coalesce into a broader political movement. Ironically, it’s not what Assange did, but what American companies and politicians did in response to the publication of the cables, that has given thousands of geeks a cogent alternative vision for the future of the Internet.
At the very heart of that vision lies the desire to ensure that the kind of problems that have plagued Wikileaks’s online presence since the publication of the diplomatic cables are never repeated in the future. It’s an impressive list of difficulties: Access to the Wikileaks.org domain was disrupted after its domain provider got cold feet; Amazon famously booted Wikileaks off its servers; PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard cut their ties to Wikileaks as well, significantly hampering its ability to raise donations.
… While some of the companies that targeted Wikileaks were subject to direct political pressure from American politicians, others seem to have volunteered—a decision that must have been easy to make given all the Wikileaks-bashing in Congress. Wikileaks survived these betrayals; but the myth that today’s Internet is the best of all possible worlds didn’t.
That the Internet is heavily dominated by for-profit companies, and therefore subject to influence from governments, is not a ground-breaking discovery. Who Controls the Internet?—the 2006 book by Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu—made a very reasonable argument that as long as most Internet activities depend on for-profit intermediaries, governments would be able to indirectly establish control over cyberspace by pressuring these middlemen.
Until Cablegate, this situation, while theoretically problematic, was something that most geeks accepted as some kind of necessary evil inherent to capitalism. It seemed unlikely that Amazon or PayPal would bow down to pressure from the governments of Vietnam, Azerbaijan, or Tunisia (the moral resolve of Facebook and Google, which had ads to sell in these very markets, was a different case). Likewise, it seemed unlikely that democratic governments would want to bully the intermediaries rather than pursue their grievances via the legal system.
… What Wikileaks has revealed is that that it doesn’t take all that much pressure (or even controversy) to force Internet intermediaries to drop clients that are not on Hillary Clinton’s Christmas card mailing list. Thus, one way to ensure that the next Wikileaks is not mistreated by its business partners is to minimize the power of intermediaries and, preferably, make them immune to political and financial pressure. This objective, as much as the desire to boost transparency and reduce government secrecy, is what presently unites many of Assange’s technology-savvy supporters. And such geeky efforts to remake the Internet are likely to pay off in the long run even if Wikileaks’s transparency drive falters.
… As we are likely to discover in the course of the next few months, Wikileaks is only as good as its last leak—and it’s unlikely that it will run into another Bradley Manning any time soon. The fight for transparency is an important one—but it’s probably better served by many of the regional Wikileaks clones that have recently hit the Internet or the more transparent and decentralized model of the soon-to-launch OpenLeaks. Assange has already made his big point about government secrecy. Now he should use his cult-like status in the tech community to campaign for something else instead.
Evgeny Morozov is a visiting scholar at Stanford University and a fellow at the New America Foundation. His new book is The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom.
(7 January 2011)
Tweeting Away the Time
Ralph Nader, Common Dreams
The start of the New Year is a good time to talk about Time. About this, we can all agree—there are only twenty four hours in a day. Zillions of companies and persons want a piece of that time from us in order to make money. But that supply of Time is not expandable. Unlike other supplies in the marketplace, this one has no give beyond twenty four hours a day.
Note the massive increase in commercial requests for our time in return for our dollars—directly or indirectly—compared to 60 years ago. Instead of three television networks bidding for our time in order to sell advertising, there are over 100 channels on any cable system. There are ever more radio stations, more online blogs and websites, more video games, more music. In 1950, there were no cell phones, no iPhones, no Blackberries, no e-mails, no text messaging, no apps, no E-books, no faxes. Entertainment fare is now 24/7 and expanding rapidly on the Internet.
But there are still only twenty four hours per day. What are these merchants expecting of the consumers’ time? Squeezing more into less time as attention spans shorten, for one.
… When our time feels overwhelmed and the marketers are banging on our doors for more time claims, what time is there left for necessary solitude, for family and other socializing, for kids playing outside instead of being addicted to indoor screens, even at dinner, for, excuse the words, reflection and contemplation?
It comes down to whether we have any time from our absorption into virtual reality to engage reality, including civil and political realities. A Society whose people do not show up for public meetings, hearings, protests and even local folklore events is a society that is cannibalizing its democracy, its critical sense of community purpose.
Take back some of those discretionary hours from the marketers and electronic entertainers. Devote them to shaping the future for you and your children.
Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His most recent book – and first novel – is, Only The Super-Rich Can Save Us. His most recent work of non-fiction is The Seventeen Traditions.
(4 January 2011)
