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

[Mawaki Chango]

+1

On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 9:01 AM, Riaz K Tayob <riaz.tayob at gmail.com> wrote:

>    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
>
>    [image: 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
> Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter<http://ec.tynt.com/b/rw?id=bbJxak64Kr4kEzacwqm_6l&u=rollingstone>| RollingStone
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>
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