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<H1><FONT size=4>Live with the WikiLeakable world or shut down the net. It's
your choice</FONT></H1></DIV></DIV></DIV></FONT></DIV>
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<DIV dir=ltr lang=en-us class=OutlookMessageHeader align=left>here it is: <A
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/dec/06/western-democracies-must-live-with-leaks">http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/dec/06/western-democracies-must-live-with-leaks</A> <BR><BR><SPAN
class=771101902-09122010><FONT size=2
face=Arial> ---------------------------------------------------- </FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<P>'Never waste a good crisis" used to be the catchphrase of the Obama team in
the runup to the presidential election. In that spirit, let us see what we can
learn from official reactions to the <A title="Guardian: US embassy cables"
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/the-us-embassy-cables">WikiLeaks
revelations</A>.</P>
<P>The most obvious lesson is that it represents the first really sustained
confrontation between the established order and the culture of the internet.
There have been skirmishes before, but this is the real thing.</P>
<P>And as the backlash unfolds – first with deniable <A
title="Guardian: WikiLeaks website pulled by Amazon after US political
pressure"
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-website-cables-servers-amazon">attacks
on internet service providers hosting WikiLeaks</A>, later with companies like
Amazon and eBay and <A
title="BBC:
PayPal cuts Wikileaks access for donations"
href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11917891">PayPal</A> suddenly
"discovering" that their terms and conditions preclude them from offering
services to WikiLeaks, and then with the US government attempting to intimidate
Columbia students posting updates about WikiLeaks on Facebook – the intolerance
of the old order is emerging from the rosy mist in which it has hitherto been
obscured. The response has been vicious, co-ordinated and potentially
comprehensive, and it contains hard lessons for everyone who cares about
democracy and about the future of the net.</P>
<P>There is a delicious irony in the fact that it is now the so-called liberal
democracies that are clamouring to shut WikiLeaks down.</P>
<P>Consider, for instance, how the views of the US administration have changed
in just a year. On 21 January, secretary of state Hillary Clinton made a
landmark speech about internet freedom, in Washington DC, which many people
welcomed and most interpreted as a rebuke to China for its alleged cyberattack
on Google. "Information has never been so free," declared Clinton. "Even in
authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new
facts and making governments more accountable."</P>
<P>She went on to relate how, during his visit to China in November 2009, Barack
Obama had "defended the right of people to freely access information, and said
that the more freely information flows the stronger societies become. He spoke
about how access to information helps citizens to hold their governments
accountable, generates new ideas, and encourages creativity." Given what we now
know, that Clinton speech reads like a satirical masterpiece.</P>
<P>One thing that might explain the official hysteria about the revelations
is the way they expose how political elites in western democracies have
been deceiving their electorates.</P>
<P>The leaks make it abundantly clear not just that the US-Anglo-European
adventure in Afghanistan is doomed but, more important, that the American,
British and other Nato governments privately admit that too.</P>
<P>The problem is that they cannot face their electorates – who also happen to
be the taxpayers funding this folly – and tell them this. The leaked dispatches
from the US ambassador to Afghanistan provide vivid confirmation that the Karzai
regime is as corrupt and incompetent as the South Vietnamese regime in Saigon
was when the US was propping it up in the 1970s. And they also make it clear
that the US is as much a captive of that regime as it was in Vietnam.</P>
<P>The WikiLeaks revelations expose the extent to which the US and its allies
see no real prospect of turning Afghanistan into a viable state, let alone a
functioning democracy. They show that there is no light at the end of this
tunnel. But the political establishments in Washington, London and Brussels
cannot bring themselves to admit this.</P>
<P>Afghanistan is, in that sense, a quagmire in the same way that Vietnam was.
The only differences are that the war is now being fought by non-conscripted
troops and we are not carpet-bombing civilians.</P>
<P>The attack of WikiLeaks also ought to be a wake-up call for anyone who has
rosy fantasies about whose side cloud computing providers are on. These are
firms like Google, Flickr, Facebook, Myspace and Amazon which host your blog or
store your data on their servers somewhere on the internet, or which enable you
to rent "virtual" computers – again located somewhere on the net. The terms and
conditions under which they provide both "free" and paid-for services will
always give them grounds for dropping your content if they deem it in their
interests to do so. The moral is that you should not put your faith in cloud
computing – one day it will rain on your parade.</P>
<P>Look at the case of Amazon, which dropped WikiLeaks from its <A
title="Wikipedia: Elastic Compute Cloud"
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Elastic_Compute_Cloud">Elastic Compute
Cloud</A> the moment the going got rough. It seems that Joe Lieberman, a US
senator who suffers from a terminal case of hubris, harassed the company over
the matter. Later Lieberman declared grandly that he would be "asking Amazon
about the extent of its relationship with WikiLeaks and what it and other web
service providers will do in the future to ensure that their services are not
used to distribute stolen, classified information". This led the New Yorker's <A
title="New Yorker: Banishing WikiLeaks?"
href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2010/12/banishing-wikileaks.html">Amy
Davidson to ask</A> whether "Lieberman feels that he, or any senator, can call
in the company running the New Yorker's printing presses when we are preparing a
story that includes leaked classified material, and tell it to stop
us".</P>
<P>What WikiLeaks is really exposing is the extent to which the western
democratic system has been hollowed out. In the last decade its political elites
have been shown to be incompetent (Ireland, the US and UK in not regulating
banks); corrupt (all governments in relation to the arms trade); or recklessly
militaristic (the US and UK in Iraq). And yet nowhere have they been called to
account in any effective way. Instead they have obfuscated, lied or blustered
their way through. And when, finally, the veil of secrecy is lifted, their
reflex reaction is to kill the messenger.</P>
<P>As <A
title="Guardian: In this World Cup sewer, we reptiles of British
journalism hold our heads high"
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/02/world-cup-british-journalism-wikileaks">Simon
Jenkins put it recently</A> in the Guardian, "Disclosure is messy and tests
moral and legal boundaries. It is often irresponsible and usually embarrassing.
But it is all that is left when regulation does nothing, politicians are cowed,
lawyers fall silent and audit is polluted. Accountability can only default to
disclosure." What we are hearing from the enraged officialdom of our democracies
is mostly the petulant screaming of emperors whose clothes have been shredded by
the net.</P>
<P>Which brings us back to the larger significance of this controversy. The
political elites of western democracies have discovered that the internet can be
a thorn not just in the side of authoritarian regimes, but in their sides too.
It has been comical watching them and their agencies stomp about the net like
maddened, half-blind giants trying to whack a mole. It has been deeply worrying
to watch terrified internet companies – with the exception of Twitter, so far –
bending to their will.</P>
<P>But politicians now face an agonising dilemma. The old, mole-whacking
approach won't work. WikiLeaks does not depend only on web technology. Thousands
of copies of those secret cables – and probably of much else besides – are out
there, distributed by peer-to-peer technologies like <A
title="Wikipedia: BitTorrent"
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_%28protocol%29">BitTorrent</A>.
Our rulers have a choice to make: either they learn to live in a WikiLeakable
world, with all that implies in terms of their future behaviour; or they shut
down the internet. Over to them.</P></BODY></HTML>