Is Julian Assange a Transparency Activist Par Excellence or an Anarchist “Minister of Chaos”?
"WikiLeaks
is really one of the very few, if not the only group, effectively
putting fear into the hearts of the world’s most powerful and corrupt
people, and that’s why they deserve, I think, enthusiastic support from
anyone who truly believes in transparency, notwithstanding what might be
valid, though relatively trivial, criticisms…" – Glenn Greenwald
Love him or hate him, Julian Assange has become the face of the global movement for government and corporate
transparency. Through WikiLeaks, Assange has, arguably, helped
release more classified information than the rest of the entire world
press combined. Assange says this reveals the "perilous state of the
rest of the media" and rightly asks how a team as small as his could
accomplish such a feat in just four years of existence. WikiLeaks has
hit all the bases – the media, governments, and corporations are all
scrambling to address the consequences of the leaks. Beyond the damage
control and the dirty tricks, a radical and fundamental shift in the
balance of power is underway. Let’s just say that folks aren’t calling
Assange an anarchist for nothing.
But what is the rationale behind WikiLeaks, its methods, its goals?
Don’t expect an answer from the media. The reasons behind the project
have long been overlooked by the mainstream press, captivated as it is
with its own sensationalistic ‘hit pieces’ on Assange month after month
and its alarmist or just plain misguided attempts to explain how and why
WikiLeaks presumes to “open governments” as only it can.
The Empire has no clothes
From WikiLeaks, we have learned the truth about who's dropping whose bombs, the Afghan Vice President who ripped off $52 million dollars from Allah knows where (see the leaked cable for yourself),
the US military’s helicopter attack on civilians and journalists,
government-backed torture, the uncounted murders of thousands of Iraqi
and Afghan people, and even what every country secretly wants
for Christmas. We have it on video, on paper, and it’s all over the
all-mighty Internet. Thanks to WikiLeaks and fellow whistleblowers, we
don’t just have the truth about these horrors, we now have the proof of
them.
Wikileaks is the outcome of much theorizing on the part of Assange and his
colleagues and is one of the boldest experiments in opening governments
and creating transparency in the world, ever. It’s
also one of the most anarchic and prescient. Assange himself has
described a cohesive framework for understanding the purpose of
WikiLeaks. And while you might want to grab a cup of coffee before
diving into reading his essays, his writing doesn’t demand that you also
grab a dictionary, or a wiktionary, to decipher it.
Assange begins his essay “State and Terrorist Conspiracies” by defining the
efforts of authoritarian regimes to conceal their plans as
conspiratorial.
He argues: “Authoritarian regimes give rise to forces which oppose them by
pushing against the individual and collective will to freedom, truth
and self realization. Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once
discovered, induce resistance. Hence these plans are concealed by
successful authoritarian powers. This is enough to define their behavior
as conspiratorial.” And who are the conspirators in these
conspiratorial regimes? They are the government officials, bureaucrats,
agents, and employees who regularly keep their decision-making processes
and plans from the public. They often rely on secrecy to ensure the
smooth functioning of their departments, offices, and agencies and to
maintain their positions of power and influence.
You won’t find a list of specific regimes that Assange deems conspiratorial in his essay.
It is enough for him to describe their patterns and to develop
frameworks that further our understanding. Whether we think that it is
justified or not, states like the US rely on secrecy in order to
function, a characteristic shared with authoritarian regimes. Assange
theorizes that the way to effectively undermine conspiratorial behavior
is to prevent or impede the ability of a regime’s personnel to
communicate, to conspire, with one another. If a government cannot
communicate internally, it cannot longer function normally.
Assange visualizes conspiratorial communication networks in the same way we imagine computer networks or transit maps.
There are hubs, servers, stations, connections, etc. Hubs of major importance
are those in which many connections are made. Huge freeways allow a lot
of travelers to pass rapidly through an area and smaller roads allow
slower, less frequent travel. Some roads, if impeded, inconvenience
millions immediately. The 405 in Los Angeles, for example. Other roads
may be blocked with landslides that no one notices for days
Firat take some nails (“conspirators”) and hammer them into a board at
random. Then take twine (“communication”) and loop it from nail to nail
without breaking. Call the twine connecting two nails a link…
Information flows from conspirator to conspirator. Not every conspirator
trusts or knows every other conspirator even though all are connected…
Important information flows frequently through some links, trivial
information through others…
Seen through Assange’s eyes, conspiracy and secrecy are part of the everyday activities of most governments.
His visualization of conspiracy allows us to see it as a practice, an
organization, and a communications system. In other words, we begin to
see conspiracy in its true, more practical, form rather than imagining
it in its bizarre incarnations in B movies. It also allows us to
theorize new ways in which conspiracy can be undermined. To paraphrase
Assange, dismantling conspiratorial networks can be accomplished by
splitting, reducing or eliminating communication either between a few
important links, or by targeting many links of lesser importance. The
traditional ways of cutting a conspiracy’s links Assange cites are
physical, often violent, and usually targeted at individuals.
“Traditional attacks on conspiratorial power groupings, such as
assassination, have cut… links by killing, kidnapping, blackmailing or
otherwise marginalizing or isolating some of the conspirators,” he
writes. Now, those methods are all a bit messy, just a tad inhumane, and
a whole lot of illegal.
In the information age, Assange argues that we have new technologies that
can give us new tools and new methods for “preventing or reducing
important communication between authoritarian conspirators.” To this end, WikiLeaks
exploits the functional dependence on communications technologies and
conspiratorial networks that many governments have developed in order to
oppose their authoritarian exercise of power. WikiLeaks forces regimes
to realize that they cannot control the flow of information, not about
their own activities and communications and not about anything else. So
the message from WikiLeaks is simply: open, or be opened.
Many leaks, different types, many lies, different gripes
By publishing leaks as different as the “Collateral Murder” video
(released in April 2010; shows US military firing on and killing 15
civilians, including two journalists with camera equipment from the
comfort of their helicopter in Iraq) and the more recent data dump of
250,000 diplomatic cables, WikiLeaks has befuddled, and angered, as much
as it has enlightened.
Co-founder of Students for a Democratic Society and sociologist Todd Gitlin, among
others, has argued that Assange’s project is no match for Daniel
Ellsberg’s great deed of releasing the Pentagon Papers, which
revealed that the US secretly bombed Cambodia, raided North Vietnam,
and that at least four administrations lied about all that and more.
Gitlin sings Ellsberg’s praises, but denounces Assange as “a minister of
chaos.” (I should aspire to as fancy a title; I’ve been thinking that
“blogger” doesn’t really do me justice anyhow.)
Gitlin contrasts Ellsberg’s publishing of “a historical book—a more or less
coherent, linear, systematic study of decision-making during the Vietnam
war” with WikiLeaks’ latest release of thousands of diplomatic cables,
what he calls an “indiscriminate” data dump. For one thing, to compare
just these two examples is misleading – WikiLeaks has released a variety
of leaks ranging from video of a specific atrocity to mass data dumps.
Gitlin is cherry-picking to support his argument. In addition, WikiLeaks
doesn’t simply release everything submitted through its electronic
drop-box. And it is not the first to publish what it receives. There are
major newspapers around the world for that.
For someone who describes himself as “agnostic” about the “damage” of the
latest leaks, Gitlin seems awfully presumptuous about the overall impact
WikiLeaks. More importantly, he (dis)misses the whole point of the
project. Gitlin fails to understand that WikiLeaks is not just
interested in exposing a single atrocity or revealing a specific
scandal. WikiLeaks’ latest release is not even focused on war, though we
still have two to choose from unfortunately.
Rather WikiLeaks seems to be attempting what Assange spelled out in his essay –
to undermine the links among conspiring networks of authoritarian
states, to render the secret communications of those states vulnerable,
to cause an implosion or a slowdown of state networks, and ultimately,
to “radically shift regime behavior.”
The bug in the state’s system feeds on its dependence on secrecy and the
communications technologies, protocols, and practices it uses to
preserve that secrecy. Leaks create an atmosphere of paranoia among
state officials and personnel. Assange theorizes that when an
authoritarian regime’s attempt to maintain secrecy comes under serious
attack, when enough of its links become vulnerable, the regime will
contract in fear. Governments will be forced to change their behavior
because a strong check is acting to balance their power. All that said,
it is too soon for anyone, including Todd Gitlin, to tell, whether
WikiLeaks will accomplish its goals.
Maybe Gitlin is not so concerned with Assange and WikiLeaks, maybe he’s just
cranky about a young generation that doesn’t agree with his own politics
and tactics. How else could he be so dismissive about the impact of
WikiLeaks? And what of his contempt for what he thinks that Assange
represents? He writes, “Assange is not just a random leaker. Credit him
with a theory. It’s his generation’s anarchism—the kind that wears a
black mask, values disruption as action, and thinks it imperative to
obstruct the workings of international meetings.” Gitlin argues that to
“value” WikiLeaks’ project of undermining the conspiratorial power of
the state is to “insist that the state is illegitimate.” Well, excuse my generation
if we’re tired of being lied to. Sorry if we’re still a little pissed
about the US government bailing out the same banks that dealt us the
mortgage crisis. (Can’t wait for next years’ release of leaked corporate docs,
by the way.) My generation tends to get a bit upset when we get locked
out of important meetings that help decide the future of our planet…
and, yes, sometimes we think it’s better to shut those corruptible
meetings down.
again, Assange is not attempting to address one problem, or expose one
scandal, but to show the problems with the forms of governance that he
opposes as an advocate of transparency. Gitlin rightly describes
Ellsberg’s release as “a great democratic act that helped clarify for
the American public how its leaders had misled it for years.” WikiLeaks
intends to make it difficult, if not impossible, for governments to
mislead their citizens in the first place.
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