12.10.10
WikiLeaks and Change (Or the Lack of It)
I have occasionally been asked — most notably this week — for opinion and context on hackers as a counterbalance to government and political power.
This week it was a couple journalists asking about Operation Payback and WikiLeaks as some manner of revolutionary change agent.
These types of questions go back a long way. I used to field them when editing the Crypt Newsletter, an old e-zine that covered the subculture of amateur virus-writers.
“This seems like another kind of culture war,” one fellow sent this week. “The hacks and hack nots. The powerless have found a way to overpower.”
Not quite.
Operation Payback did add to the hysteria surrounding WikiLeaks. It contributed to the mess without accomplishing anything other than the symbolism created by revenge in cyberspace.
And it did again prove how easy it is to have a group tantrum, one that always has the potential to inconvenience people.
However, in the short term, the WikiLeaks dumps have demonstrated the power of that agency is finite.
From my point of view, the reaction to WikiLeaks has pushed the US government into being more unreasonable and secretive. This appears to be part of its aim.
But it shows a naïve belief in an end point that’s favorable. Or the experience of one who hasn’t been living in the US and experiencing the way things are.
You can reveal many interior things about US government or corporate dealings today but even if the press writes about it for weeks, and politicians hold hearings, nothing happens.
The best and most obvious case is the worldwide financial meltdown.
“Inside Job,” Charles Ferguson’s documentary on it has played in Pasadena. And there is no more savage and incriminating an indictment of Wall Street and the US banking industry. Watching it makes the blood boil. In a system that wasn’t broken, such a story would be seen by a lot more people, not just those of us in southern California, San Francisco, NYC or Boston. It’s capability to inflame should stoke outrage and the picking up of pitchforks in Oklahoma, Nebraska — anywhere in the heartland.
But it just hasn’t happened.
And Ferguson’s movie is not the first to tell this story. Many have.
Everyone has already been shown — multiple times, very convincingly — that the bankers engaged in rigging and blew up the economy. And that the people running Goldman Sachs and their corporate rivals are criminal greedheads after everyone’s money.
So if WikiLeaks does another document dump, this time from — maybe — Bank of America, no matter what is revealed about our “ecosystem” of corruption, it’s blinkered to think that things will change. It has already been demonstrated, over and over, that Bank of America participated with other financial institutions in the running of a Ponzi scheme.
What happened after the WikiLeaks release of the helicopter attack video?
Nothing.
What happened after the Afghanistan war diary?
Along with the journalism that has been done on the global financial crisis, these things show us how power is, except for election time, totally insulated from consequences in the US in 2010.
WikiLeaks and Julian Assange can’t change that, probably no matter what material is released.
Does that mean it shouldn’t exist to do what it does? No, not at all!
You would say the same thing to the editors of newspapers who must now realize that despite investigative efforts and the placing of utterly damning material on the frontpage, the power to actually create meaningful change now is just about entirely out of reach.
It’s not an optimistic picture. WikiLeaks has not changed this.
So the idea that hackers can achieve a reversal is beamish.
At the time of underground e-zines years ago, hackers were frequently alleged to be capable of turning the tables on the establishment or government enemies of the moment. And although they can strike at people, companies and agencies, it just never worked out that way.
However, as much reported revenge, which is what this is about, it has always had symbolic value in the domain.
As for instigators of societal change, or protest in the US, the only group that has had any impact has been the Tea Party. And while it is profoundly anti-government, it is the very opposite of WikiLeaks.
Consider this rubbish from William Kristol at the Weekly Standard:
The criminal and anti-American enterprise WikiLeaks said in a Twitter message this morning that it was under a “distributed denial of service attack,” a method often used by hackers to slow or bring down websites. If this is the U.S. government at work, good for our civil servants. If this is patriotic citizens taking matters into their own hands—even better. The original Tea Party was a grassroots citizens’ effort. If Tea Party-inspired Americans—and freedom-loving hackers around the world—can act effectively in cyberspace against today’s threats to our liberties and well-being, and to the liberties and well-being of others —that’s something to be applauded. Indeed, it’s community activism one can believe in.
“Freedom-loving hackers of the world, unite!” is Kristol’s subhed. It’s to laugh.
“Govt Response to Wikileaks Said to Cause More Damage,” was the title of a post at Secrecy blog today.
What followed was a lament from an anonymous employee of the Department of Homeland Security.
“It has even been suggested that if it is discovered that we have accessed a classified Wikileaks cable on our personal computers, that will be a security violation,” the person writes.
There has been no sign of leadership from any Administration official who would stand up and say: “National security classification is a means, and not an end in itself. What any reader in the world can discover is no longer a national security secret. We should not pretend otherwise.???