WIKILEAKS, JULIAN ASSANGE, AND THE DARK SIDE OF INTERNET FREEDOM
The Christian Science Monitor
December 7, 2010 Tuesday
Evgeny Morozov discusses the implications of WikiLeaks on open vs.
closed societies, the paradox of attacking state power, and the future
of Internet privacy.
Evgeny Morozov, a visiting scholar at Stanford University, is the
author of “The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World.” He
spoke with Global Viewpoint Network editor Nathan Gardels on Monday,
December 6 about the implications of WikiLeaks.
Assange’s main target: government power
Nathan Gardels: The most recent Wikileaks cache is not your father’s
Pentagon Papers.
Like a neutron bomb of the information age, it has indiscriminately
destroyed good diplomacy and duplicity alike across a broad spectrum
of political cultures.Should there be limits to the kind of extreme
glasnost represented by WikiLeaks? If so, by what criteria do we
responsibly draw them?
Evgeny Morozov: The more I learn about Julian Assange’s philosophy,
the more I come to believe that he is not really rooting to destroy
secrecy or make transparency the primary good in social relations. His
is a fairly conventional – even if a bit odd – political quest for
“justice.”
As far as I can understand Mr. Assange’s theory – and I don’t think
that it’s terribly coherent or well thought-out- he believes that
one way to achieve justice is to minimize the power of governments
to do things that their citizens do not know of and may not approve
of if they do.
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There is nothing in this theory that heralds the end of secrecy
across the entire social spectrum: Citizens, at least nominally, are
entitled to go about their own business; it’s the government that is
the main target.
Here we mustn’t forget that Assange made a name for himself in
computer circles by being one of the key developers of a software
application that helped users – and particularly human rights activists
in authoritarian regimes – to encrypt and protect their data from
the eyes of the authorities. So I don’t think that Assange opposes
“secrecy” altogether; for him, it’s really all about keeping the
government in check.
Frankly, I don’t know to what extent he had a chance to really come
up with a theory about the role that secrecy plays in international
relations and diplomacy.
Even if had read all the cables, he would need to know the world
much more intimately than the CIA to really assess the impact of
the planned release. For example, it’s very tough to predict whether
such files would trigger a war in the Caucasus without knowing the
politics of Armenia and Azerbaijan….
So while we can continue trying to understand the limits of
“publicness” in diplomacy, I am not sure that Assange would disagree
with us on any of this. It just so happens that he has a vision for
changing the world and he believes that, if implemented, this vision
might dwarf all these current harms to diplomacy.
Only if we, or he himself, knew his theoretical template of a
totally free information society could we then draw limits on what
is acceptable or not.
Geopolitical fallout
Gardels: What is the likely geopolitical outcome down the road from
this latest WikiLeaks episode?
Will it pit not only more closed societies against open societies,
but also open societies with secrets against the extreme glasnostics –
a kind of three-tiered clash of information cultures?
In the end, will it make closed societies more open and open societies
more closed? Or, will it make everyone more closed?
Morozov: I think it will be intelligence gathering – and especially
intelligence sharing – rather than diplomacy per se that would suffer
the most. The reason why the current batch of cables got released in
the first place was lax security; with a few million people having
access to these files, it’s really surprising that it took so many
years for someone like [alleged leaker] Bradley Manning to actually
release them to Assange. But this could have happened even before
WikiLeaks took off the ground a few years ago; these cables may
have just been sent to the Guardian or El Pais directly. So in all
likelihood we’ll see a more granular approach to setting permissions as
to who gets access to what kind of data. Ambassadors will keep talking.
This, however, is not the most interesting geopolitical aspect to the
WikiLeaks story. What I found most interesting in the 10 or so days
since the files were released was the pressure that various American
and some European politicians tried to exert on various Internet
intermediaries that were offering their services to WikiLeaks. Some
of those efforts paid off – with Amazon and PayPal dropping WikiLeaks
as a client. This, of course, looks very suspicious to many computer
geeks, who are already often very suspicious of governments.
What I think might happen is that WikiLeaks and Julian Assange in
particular would emerge as leaders of a new political “geek” movement
that would be built on the principles of absolute “Internet freedom,”
transparency, very permissive copyright law, and so on. This movement
has already been brewing globally – especially in Europe, where
various local cells of the Pirate Party have proved remarkably strong.
It’s quite possible that the “hunt for WikiLeaks” would further
radicalize young people and make them join the fight for the “Free
Internet,” however they choose to interpret.
This may be wonderful news – especially if they renounce violence
and start participating in mainstream politics instead, thus becoming
something of a digital equivalent to the Green Movement in Europe. The
other option, alas, is far less amenable: It’s possible that if Assange
is really treated badly and unjustly by the authorities – and possibly
even tried like a “terrorist” as some prominent US politicians have
suggested – this would nudge the movement toward violent forms of
resistance. Given that many of these people are tech-literate and that
more and more of our public infrastructure is digital, this could be a
significant impediment to the growth of the global economy: Just think
of the potential losses if Visa and MasterCard cannot process online
payments because of some mysterious cyberattacks on their servers.
Whichever way things go, I think it’s pretty obvious that the US
government’s ability to use the Internet to accomplish anything on
its foreign policy agenda has been severely damaged.
The rather aggressive manner in which pundits and politicians in
Washington have reacted to the release of the cables would make many
otherwise staunch supporters of the “Internet freedom” policy to
reconsider their attitudes toward the US.
I don’t know about the likely impact on Russia, China, and some other
states that some like to call “closed.” The reason why the cables
made so much noise in America is because everyone expects America to
behave – and it has the nominally free press and the vibrant civil
society that allow Assange’s accusations to stay in the game for at
least a week. I don’t think that this would necessarily be the case
in Russia, where both the media and the civil society are tightly
controlled by the Kremlin (and the Internet might soon be, too),
while everyone’s expectations of government corruption are already
so high that few cables could worsen it.
Also, as we have seen in the Middle East, many governments have no
qualms about blocking access to WikiLeaks and preventing their media
from covering the story; it’s hard to say whether it’s as much of a
salient issue with the elites in China as it is with the elites in
the US. In short, it’s the democratic states that are going to suffer
the most from WikiLeaks-style forced transparency.
Internet freedom: Careful what you wish for
Gardels: How does the US pursuit of Assange stack up with the view
[Secretary of State] Hillary [Rodham] Clinton espoused a year ago
at the Newseum in Washington that Internet freedom is our “national
brand”?
Morozov: It’s inconceivable that on its one-year anniversary Hillary
Clinton would be able to deliver a speech on Internet Freedom as
pompous and starry-eyed as she did in January 2010. I never believed
that Clinton actually very much pondered the implications and the
assumptions implicit in her stance on “Internet freedom.”
The reality is that even before WikiLeaks, the focus of the domestic
Internet debate was all about demanding more control of it – whether
it’s to track Internet pirates or cyberterrorists or cyber-bullies.
However, in the context of foreign policy, the debate is somehow
always about “Internet freedom” and opposing the greater Internet
control by the likes of China and Iran – all of it as if these other
governments are somehow doing something that America itself is not
doing in the domestic context.
Some of this may simply have to do with the widespread Western
tendency to glamorize the Internet in authoritarian countries – and
especially Internet users – many of whom are often imagined as some
kind of digital equivalents of Andrei Sakharkov, when they are just
regular blokes streaming kinky videos from YouTube.
The WikiLeaks saga has brought many of these contradictions into
sharper context, but they were already clearly visible before. Before
he achieved fame, Assange was already surrounded by some very, very
smart technologists – and now he has many more admirers in the tech
world. To the extent to which Clinton’s Internet freedom agenda relies
on their coding skills and brains to produce effective anti-censorship
tools that can work in Iran and China, I think it’s in the State
Department’s best interest not to make the kind of irresponsible and
aggressive statements they have been making about Assange until now.
Personally, I don’t think that the Internet should be treated like some
sacred cow that should defy all regulation. All of this will become
clear to politicians (and hopefully even to some geek activists) once
the next genocide in some remote third-world country is perpetrated
by folks armed with GPS-equipped smartphones that also enable them
to listen to incendiary messages on the local radio. I’m sure that
this would be the moment when many decision-makers would regret not
having some kind of a “kill switch” over the Internet.
Maybe this won’t happen – and maybe a “kill switch” is impossible;
or maybe it would undermine human progress so much that the genocide
is a risk we would be forced to accept. But I do think that it’s
an important debate that needs to be had rather than be settled in
some talk of the absolute universal principle of Internet freedom, as
for example Bernard Kouchner did when he was French foreign minister
last year.
Openness vs. privacy
Gardels: Finally, when speaking of limits on information, do you see
a conceptual link with the controversy swirling around Facebook for,
as some charge, peddling private information under the mantle of
social networking?
Morozov: Well, there is a great irony in the fact that the very same
people who so loudly demand open governments are often also the ones
who value their privacy and hate to be tracked, even if tracking is
relatively innocuous. It is really no consolation to anyone that the
power of groups like WikiLeaks to challenge the state is increasingly
matched by the power of the state to keep track of what its citizens
are doing, either by gathering all of this data on their own or by
simply contracting out to a myriad of small and nimble data-mining
agencies.
The latter option bothers me especially because it’s far less monitored
or understood by the public: We all get scared when we find out that
the government knows what we browse online – but we are far less
concerned about some private company knowing this. The question we
rarely ask is: Why assume that the government won’t simply purchase
this data from the private sector rather than compile on its own?
This only proves that the Internet can have both an empowering a
disempowering effect on democratization – often even simultaneously. I
am not sure if Assange and his associates actually grasp the fact that
the only effective way to rein in the excesses of Facebook and Google
when it comes to data protection is to have a strong government that
can act decisively and autonomously. It’s also possible, of course,
to simply find enough leaks about both companies and ruin them by
disclosing their financial statements a quarter too early – but this
won’t be a very responsible move. What is still not clear to me is how
exactly WikiLeaks would be able to reconcile the need for a strong
state to defend citizens’ privacy with their desire to minimize the
power of the state by weakening its ability to profit from secrecy.
From: A. Papazian