[governance] Tangential - Taibbi> Wikileaks Was Just a Preview: We're Headed for an Even Bigger Showdown Over Secrets

[Riaz K Tayob]

the coming extinction of the Kantian enlightened individual, one of the 
bases of the US constitution... of course some are of the opinion this 
has happened already...?


  Wikileaks Was Just a Preview: We're Headed for an Even Bigger Showdown
  Over Secrets

POSTED: March 22, 10:53 AM ET


Bradley Manning
U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning
Alex Wong/Getty Images

I went yesterday to a screening of /We Steal Secrets/, Oscar-winning 
director Alex Gibney's brilliant new documentary about Wikileaks. The 
movie is beautiful and profound, an incredible story that's about many 
things all at once, including the incredible Shakespearean narrative 
that is the life of Julian Assange, a free-information radical who has 
become an uncompromising guarder of secrets.

I'll do a full review in a few months, when /We Steal Secrets 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfbsKbivmY0> /comes out, but I bring it 
up now because the whole issue of secrets and how we keep them is 
increasingly in the news, to the point where I think we're headed for a 
major confrontation between the government and the public over the 
issue, one bigger in scale than even the Wikileaks episode.

We've seen the battle lines forming for years now. It's increasingly 
clear that governments, major corporations, banks, universities and 
other such bodies view the defense of their secrets as a desperate 
matter of institutional survival, so much so that the state has gone to 
extraordinary lengths to punish and/or threaten to punish anyone who so 
much as tiptoes across the informational line.

This is true not only in the case of Wikileaks -- and especially the 
real//subject of Gibney's film, Private Bradley Manning, who in an 
incredible act of institutional vengeance is being charged with aiding 
the enemy (among other crimes) and could, theoretically, receive a death 
sentence 
<http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CDIQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.guardian.co.uk%2Fworld%2F2011%2Fmar%2F03%2Fbradley-manning-may-face-death-penalty&ei=zEdMUbeAIMen4APU-4DgAQ&usg=AFQjCNFEfqS0zlcfCbhqQnUsXn6iYSApOw&sig2=pN7A58jmg-Fhoe9OSgMfZQ&bvm=bv.44158598,d.dmg>.

Did the Mainstream Media Fail Bradley Manning? 
<http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/did-the-mainstream-media-fail-bradley-manning-20130301>

There's also the horrific case of Aaron Swartz 
<http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-brilliant-life-and-tragic-death-of-aaron-swartz-20130215>, 
a genius who helped create the technology behind Reddit at the age of 
14, who earlier this year hanged himself after the government threatened 
him with 35 years in jail for downloading a bunch of academic documents 
from an MIT server. Then there's the case of Sergey Aleynikov 
<http://newsandinsight.thomsonreuters.com/Legal/News/2012/09_-_September/Ex-Goldman_programmer_rejects_plea_deal_with_NY_-_lawyer/>, 
the Russian computer programmer who allegedly stole the High-Frequency 
Trading program belonging to Goldman, Sachs (Aleynikov worked at 
Goldman), a program which prosecutors in open court admitted could, "in 
the wrong hands," be used to "manipulate markets."

Aleynikov spent a year in jail awaiting trial, was convicted, had his 
sentence overturned, was freed, and has since been re-arrested by a 
government seemingly determined to make an example out of him.

The Brilliant Life and Tragic Death of Aaron Swartz 
<http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-brilliant-life-and-tragic-death-of-aaron-swartz-20130215>

And most recently, there's the Matthew Keys case, in which a Reuters 
social media editor was charged by the government with conspiring with 
the hacker group Anonymous to alter a /Los Angeles Times /headline in 
December 2010. The change in the headline? It ended up reading 
<http://www.usnews.com/news/technology/articles/2013/03/16/social-media-editor-charged-in-hacking-conspiracy>, 
"Pressure Builds in House to Elect CHIPPY 1337," Chippy being the name 
of another hacker group accused of defacing a video game publisher's 
website.

Keys is charged with crimes that carry up to 25 years in prison, 
although the likelihood is that he'd face far less than that if 
convicted. Still, it seems like an insane amount of pressure to apply, 
given the other types of crimes (of, say, the HSBC variety) where stiff 
sentences haven't even been threatened, much less imposed.

A common thread runs through all of these cases. On the one hand, the 
motivations for these information-stealers seem extremely diverse: You 
have people who appear to be primarily motivated by traditional 
whistleblower concerns (Manning, who never sought money and was 
obviously initially moved by the moral horror aroused by the material he 
was seeing, falls into that category for me), you have the merely 
mischievous (the Keys case seems to fall in this area), there are those 
who either claim to be or actually are free-information ideologues 
(Assange and Swartz seem more in this realm), and then there are other 
cases where the motive might have been money (Aleynikov, who was 
allegedly leaving Goldman to join a rival trading startup, might be 
among those).

But in all//of these cases, the government pursued maximum punishments 
and generally took zero-tolerance approaches to plea negotiations. These 
prosecutions reflected an obvious institutional terror of letting the 
public see the sausage-factory locked behind the closed doors not only 
of the state, but of banks and universities and other such institutional 
pillars of society. As Gibney pointed out in his movie, this is a 
/Wizard of Oz/ moment, where we are being warned not to look behind the 
curtain.

What will we find out? We already know that our armies mass-murder women 
and children 
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/8082605/Wikileaks-Civilians-gunned-down-at-checkpoints.html> 
in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, that our soldiers joke about 
smoldering bodies <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0> from the 
safety of gunships, that some of our closest diplomatic allies 
<http://wikileaks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/01/13/wikileaks_and_the_tunisia_protests> 
starve and repress their own citizens, and we may even have gotten a 
glimpse or two of a banking system that uses computerized insider 
trading programs 
<http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=axYw_ykTBokE> to 
steal from everyone who has an IRA or a mutual fund or any stock at all 
by manipulating markets like the NYSE.

These fervent, desperate prosecutions suggest that there's more 
awfulness under there, things that are worse, and there is a 
determination to not let us see what those things are. Most recently, 
we've seen that determination in the furor over Barack Obama's drone 
assassination program and the so-called "kill list" that is associated 
with it.

Weeks ago, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul -- whom I've previously railed 
against as one of the biggest self-aggrandizing jackasses in politics -- 
pulled a widely-derided but, I think, absolutely righteous Frank Capra 
act 
<http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-rand-pauls-filibuster-matters-20130307> 
on the Senate floor, executing a one-man filibuster of Obama's CIA 
nominee, John Brennan.

Paul had been mortified when he received a letter from Eric Holder 
refusing to rule out drone strikes on American soil 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/us/politics/brennan-vote-by-senate-intelligence-panel.html> 
in "extraordinary" circumstances like a 9/11 or a Pearl Harbor. Paul 
refused to yield until he extracted a guarantee that no American could 
be assassinated by a drone on American soil without first being charged 
with a crime.

He got his guarantee, but the way the thing is written doesn't fill one 
with anything like confidence. Eric Holder's letter to Paul 
<http://www.paul.senate.gov/files/documents/WhiteHouseLetter.pdf> reads 
like the legal disclaimer on a pack of unfiltered cigarettes:

    Dear Senator Paul,

    It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional
    question: "Does the president have the additional authority to use a
    weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on
    American soil?" The answer is no.

    Sincerely,

    Eric Holder

You could drive a convoy of tanker trucks through the loopholes in that 
letter. Not to worry, though, this past week, word has come out via 
Congress -- the White House won't tell us anything -- that no Americans 
<http://www.nationaljournal.com/nationalsecurity/how-many-americans-are-on-the-kill-list-zero-20130320> 
are on its infamous kill list. The /National Journal/'s report on this 
story offered a similarly comical sort of non-reassurance:

    The White House has wrapped its kill list in secrecy and already the
    United States has killed four Americans in drone strikes. Only one
    of them, senior al-Qaida operative Anwar al-Awlaki, was the intended
    target, according to U.S. officials. The others -- including
    Awlaki's teenage son -- were collateral damage, killed because they
    were too near a person being targeted.

    But no more Americans are in line for such killings -- at least not
    yet. "There is no list where Americans are on the list," House
    Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers told National Journal. Still, he
    suggested, that could change.

"There is no list where Americans are on the list" -- even the language 
used here sounds like a cheap Orwell knockoff (although, to be fair, so 
does /V for Vendetta/, which has unfortunately provided the model for 
the modern protest aesthetic 
<http://images4.alphacoders.com/798/79894.jpg>). It's not an accident 
that so much of this story is starting to sound like farce. The idea 
that we have to beg and plead and pull Capra-esque stunts in the Senate 
just to find out whether or not our government has "asserted the legal 
authority" (this preposterous phrase is beginning to leak into news 
coverage with alarming regularity) to kill U.S. citizens on U.S. soil 
without trial would be laughable, were it not for the obvious fact that 
such lines are in danger of really being crossed, if they haven't been 
crossed already.

This morning, an Emory University law professor named Mary Dudziak wrote 
an op-ed in the /Times/ 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/22/opinion/obamas-nixonian-precedent.html?ref=opinion&_r=0>//in 
which she pointed out several disturbing aspects to the drone-attack 
policy. It's bad enough, she writes, that the Obama administration is 
considering moving the program from the CIA to the Defense Department. 
(Which, Dudziak notes, "would do nothing to confer legitimacy to the 
drone strikes. The legitimacy problem comes from the secrecy itself --- 
not which entity secretly does the killing.") It's even worse that the 
administration is citing Nixon's infamous bombing of Cambodia as part of 
its legal precedent.

But beyond that, Obama's lawyers used bad information in their white 
paper 
<http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/020413_DOJ_White_Paper.pdf>:

    On Page 4 of the unclassified 16-page "white paper," Justice
    Department lawyers tried to refute the argument that international
    law does not support extending armed conflict outside a battlefield.
    They cited as historical authority a speech given May 28, 1970, by
    John R. Stevenson, then the top lawyer for the State Department,
    following the United States' invasion of Cambodia.

    Since 1965, "the territory of Cambodia has been used by North
    Vietnam as a base of military operations," he told the New York City
    Bar Association. "It long ago reached a level that would have
    justified us in taking appropriate measures of self-defense on the
    territory of Cambodia. However, except for scattered instances of
    returning fire across the border, we refrained until April from
    taking such action in Cambodia."

But, Dudziak notes, there is a catch:

    In fact, Nixon had begun his secret bombing of Cambodia more than a
    year earlier. (It is not clear whether Mr. Stevenson knew this.) So
    the Obama administration's lawyers have cited a statement that was
    patently false.

Now, this "white paper" of Obama's is already of dubious legality at 
best. The idea that the President can simply write a paper expanding 
presidential power into extralegal assassination without asking the 
explicit permission of, well, somebody, anyway, is absurd from the 
start. Now you add to that the complication of the paper being based in 
part on some half-assed, hastily-cobbled-together, factually lacking 
precedent, and the Obama drone-attack rationale becomes like all 
rationales of blunt-force, repressive power ever written -- plainly 
ridiculous, the stuff of bad comedy, like the Russian military 
superpower invading tiny South Ossetia cloaked in hysterical claims of 
self-defense.

Why Rand Paul's Filibuster Matters 
<http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-rand-pauls-filibuster-matters-20130307>

The Wikileaks episode was just an early preview of the inevitable 
confrontation between the citizens of the industrialized world and the 
giant, increasingly secretive bureaucracies that support them. As some 
of Gibney's interview subjects point out in his movie, the experts in 
this field, the people who worked on information security in the 
Pentagon and the CIA, have known for a long time that the day would come 
when all of our digitized secrets would spill out somewhere.

But the secret-keepers got lucky with Wikileaks. They successfully 
turned the story into one about Julian Assange and his personal 
failings, and headed off the confrontation with the major news 
organizations that were, for a time, his allies.

But that was just a temporary reprieve. The secrets are out there and 
everyone from hackers to journalists to U.S. senators are digging in 
search of them. Sooner or later, there's going to be a pitched battle, 
one where the state won't be able to peel off one lone Julian Assange or 
Bradley Manning and batter him into nothingness. Next time around, it'll 
be a Pentagon Papers-style constitutional crisis, where the public's 
legitimate right to know will be pitted head-to-head with presidents, 
generals and CEOs.

My suspicion is that this story will turn out to be less of a simplistic 
narrative about Orwellian repression than a mortifying journey of 
self-discovery. There are all sorts of things we both know and don't 
know about the processes that keep our society running. We know children 
in Asia are being beaten to keep our sneakers and furniture cheap, we 
know our access to oil and other raw materials is being secured only by 
the cooperation of corrupt and vicious dictators, and we've also known 
for a while now that the anti-terror program they say we need to keep 
our airports and reservoirs safe involves mass campaigns of extralegal 
detention and assassination.

We haven't had to openly ratify any of these policies because the 
secret-keepers have done us the favor of making these awful moral 
choices for us.

But the stink is rising to the surface. It's all coming out. And when it 
isn't Julian Assange the next time but /The New York Times, Der Spiegel 
/and /The Guardian /standing in the line of fire, the state will 
probably lose, just as it lost in the Pentagon Papers case, because 
those organizations will be careful to only publish materials clearly in 
the public interest -- there's no conceivable legal justification for 
keeping us from knowing the policies of our own country (although 
stranger things have happened).

When that happens, we'll be left standing face-to-face with the reality 
of how our state functions. Do we want to do that? We still haven't 
taken a very close look at even the Bradley Manning material, and my 
guess is because we just don't want to. There were thousands of outrages 
in those files, any one of which would have a caused a My-Lai-style 
uproar decades ago.

Did you hear the one about how American troops murdered four women and 
five children 
<http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/08/31/122789/wikileaks-iraqi-children-in-us.html> 
in Iraq in 2006, including a woman over 70 and an infant under five 
months old, with all the kids under five? All of them were handcuffed 
and shot in the head. We later called in an airstrike to cover it up, 
apparently. But it barely registered a blip on the American consciousness.

What if it we're forced to look at all of this for real next time, and 
what if it turns out we can't accept it? What if murder and corruption 
is what's holding it all together? I personally don't believe that's 
true -- I believe it all needs to come out and we need to rethink 
everything together, and we can find a less totally evil way of living 
-- but this is going to be the implicit argument from the secret-keeping 
side when this inevitable confrontation comes. They will say to us, in 
essence, "It's the only way. And you don't want to know." And a lot of 
us won't.

It's fascinating, profound stuff. We don't want to know, but 
increasingly it seems we can't not know, either. Sooner or later, 
something is going to have to give.


      Related

  * The New Political Prisoners: Leakers, Hackers and Activists
    <http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/lists/the-new-political-prisoners-leakers-hackers-and-activists-20130301>



Read more: 
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/wikileaks-was-just-a-preview-were-headed-for-an-even-bigger-showdown-over-secrets-20130322#ixzz2OjFzexaU 

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