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The WikiLeak case in indeed a watershed IG event, in the manner the US
gov has exercised extra-legal authority, using its political and
economic might in a rather comprehensive manner, to control global
traffic flows on the Internet. <br>
<br>
Will IGC want to issue a statement on this?<br>
<br>
This goes to the heart of matter of why a due global process of law,
informed by sound political frameworks, including those of human
rights, is urgently required. The same process would be the place for
redress in case of arbitrary controls, as exercised in the present case.<br>
<br>
If this case does not prove the importance and urgency of this issue,
perhaps nothing ever will. Also a good opportunity for IGC to go beyond
just making process related statements, which often attract the cynical
judgment that these views/ statements are rather self serving with
unclear connections to real substantive global IG issues.<br>
<br>
Parminder <br>
<br>
<br>
Michael Gurstein wrote:
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<h1><font size="4">Live with the WikiLeakable world or shut down the
net. It's your choice</font></h1>
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<div dir="ltr" class="OutlookMessageHeader" align="left" lang="en-us">here
it is: <a moz-do-not-send="true"
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 face="Arial" size="2"> ---------------------------------------------------- </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
moz-do-not-send="true" 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
moz-do-not-send="true"
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 moz-do-not-send="true"
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
moz-do-not-send="true" 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
moz-do-not-send="true" 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 moz-do-not-send="true"
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 moz-do-not-send="true"
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>
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