Debunking The 'Wikileaks Puts Lives In Danger In Zimbabwe' Myth

from the political-operative dept

While Wikileaks critics keep claiming that the site has "put lives in danger," it's never been able to back up those statements. Even Defense Secretary Robert Gates has admitted those claims (some of which he made early on) were not true. So it wasn't much of a surprise to see Wikileaks critics jump on the claims that the site had set back democracy in Zimbabwe, and potentially put one of the country's political leaders, Morgan Tsvangirai (an opponent to long-time leader Robert Mugabe, who effectively destroyed the Zimbabwe economy), in danger.

The issue is a US diplomatic cable revealing what Tsvangirai had told the Americans about Mugabe. The country's attorney general, who was appointed by Mugabe, quickly began an "investigation," suggesting that Tsvangirai was guilty of treason, and Mugabe has used the incident to attack Tsvangirai, which could lead to an abandonment of the already shaky coalition government, leading Mugabe to seize back more complete control.

There's no doubt that the situation in Zimbabwe is not great, but the anger towards Wikileaks is quite misplaced. The strongest article on the subject, which many people have been passing around, was published in The Guardian, by James Richardson, and blasts Wikileaks and Julian Assange for all the "damage" done in Zimbabwe.

The only problem? It wasn't Wikileaks who originally published that cable. It was The Guardian itself, who not only published the document prior to Wikileaks, but also admits that it, not Wikileaks or Assange, chose which cables to publish and when. It did alert Wikileaks to what it was going to publish, but the release and publication of this document was done by The Guardian -- the very same publication that Richardson then used to slam Wikileaks for supposedly being the one to create the problems in Zimbabwe. Oops.

Of course, Richardson is not a reporter. He's a well-connected political operative in the US, with ties to politicians who have been attacking Wikileaks. He ran online communications for the RNC during John McCain's presidential campaign. So it's pretty clear that there are ulterior motives in bashing Wikileaks, but it's quite ironic that he chose The Guardian as his publication of choice to do so, since they're actually the ones that broke the particular story. Will Richardson now write a similar piece suggesting The Guardian has blood on its hands?

Even more to the point is an analysis by Charles Homans, at Foreign Policy magazine, who notes that Mugabe has had it in for Tsvangirai for years anyway -- and that "Tsvangirai has been variously arrested, beaten, tortured, thrown from a 10th-floor window, and involved in a suspicious collision with a truck that claimed his wife's life" in just the last decade or so. The idea that this one leak is what really created problems in Zimbabwe is laughable. Mugabe has been plotting against this guy for ages, and would use any possible excuse to attack him again. The problem here is not Wikileaks. It's not The Guardian. It's an unstable country with a man in Robert Mugabe who likes to crush any political opposition. To try to pin that all on Wikileaks is beyond misleading and desperate. It's just plain deceitful.

Filed Under: myths, wikileaks, zimbabwe
Companies: wikileaks

Why One Newspaper Agreed To Publish Leaked Cables: The Incompetence Of Governments

from the too-many-secrets dept

While many are attacking Wikileaks and the release of State Department cables, Jay Rosen points us to the explanation by Spanish newspaper El Pais as to why it published the leaks. While the whole thing is worth reading, I think the point in the first two paragraphs is particularly salient. Governments insist that they need secrecy to protect the public, but it appears that neither point there is true. The government hasn't done a very good job protecting the public, and what's most telling and revealing about these documents is that the government doesn't need much of the "secrecy" it requests. So publishing these documents highlights the very basic lie of that bargain: "you allow us to act in secrecy, and we'll protect you." In reality, neither part appears to be true. Here's the full explanation:

Cynics will argue that none of what we have learned from WikiLeaks differs from the usual way in which high-level international politics is conducted, and that without diplomatic secrets, the world would be even less manageable and more dangerous for everyone. Political classes on both sides of the Atlantic convey a simple message that is tailored to their advantage: trust us, don't try to reveal our secrets; in exchange, we offer you security.

But just how much security do they really offer in exchange for this moral blackmail? Little or none, since we face the sad paradox that this is the same political elite that was incapable of properly supervising the international financial system, whose implosion triggered the biggest crisis since 1929, ruining entire countries and condemning millions of workers to unemployment and poverty. These are the same people responsible for the deteriorating quality of life of their populations, the uncertain future of the euro, the lack of a viable European project and the global governance crisis that has gripped the world in recent years, and which elites in Washington and Brussels are not oblivious to. I doubt that keeping embassy secrets under wraps is any kind of guarantee of better diplomacy or that such an approach offers us better answers to the problems we face.

The incompetence of Western governments, and their inability to deal with the economic crisis, climate change, corruption, or the illegal war in Iraq and other countries has been eloquently exposed in recent years. Now, thanks to WikiLeaks, we also know that our leaders are all too aware of their shameful fallibility, and that it is only thanks to the inertia of the machinery of power that they have been able to fulfill their democratic responsibility and answer to the electorate.

The powerful machinery of state is designed to suppress the flow of truth and to keep secrets secret. We have seen in recent weeks how that machine has been put into action to try to limit the damage caused by the WikiLeaks revelations.

Given the damage they have suffered at the hands of WikiLeaks, it is not hard to see why the United States and other Western governments have been unable to resist the temptation of focusing attention on Julian Assange. He seems an easy enough target, and so they have sought to question his motivation and the way that WikiLeaks works. They have also sought to question why five major news organizations with prestigious international reputations agreed to collaborate with Assange and his organization. These are reasonable questions, and they have all been answered satisfactorily over the last four weeks, despite the pressure put on us by government, and worse still, by many of our colleagues in the media.

Filed Under: governments, secrecy, wikileaks
Companies: wikileaks

New Congressional Leadership Prioritizes Wikileaks Investigation

from the how-about-not-covering-up-stuff? dept

We had high hopes after a recent Congressional hearing about Wikileaks, which appeared to focus more on the problem of overly secretive government rather than just blaming Wikileaks, that perhaps the US wouldn't go too far in its overreaction to the site. However, with a new leadership taking over Congress this week, apparently they've decided to prioritize investigating Wikileaks and are making the whole thing political, suggesting that the Justice Department has been "too slow and too weak" in dealing with the site. Rep. Darrell Issa, who is heading the "oversight committee," claims that the US government must do something about Wikileaks or "the world is laughing at this paper tiger we've become."

That makes no sense. So far, nearly all of the international response we've seen about Wikileaks has been focused on just how incredibly hypocritical the US has been in its response -- promoting freedom of the press and a free internet elsewhere, but then freaking out about Wikileaks at home. Pushing a politically motivated attack on Wikileaks will just make this issue worse in the eyes of the international community and seems unlikely to benefit the US in any way. If the world is laughing at the US over anything, it's about its childish and counterproductive response to Wikileaks, demonstrated specifically by Darrell Issa's statements and prioritization of Wikileaks as an issue.

If anything should be prioritized, it should be a review of why the government is being so overly secretive on matters where it should not be.

Filed Under: darrell issa, investigation, politics, wikileaks
Companies: wikileaks

Wikileaks Reveals That The US Won't Comply With Treaty Obligations Concerning Investigations Into CIA Rendition

from the moral-high-ground? dept

This is hardly a surprise, but it's increasingly being confirmed by the various State Department cable leaks that the US Justice Department is failing to comply with its treaty obligations with other countries in their investigations into US (mainly CIA) "rendition" operations, where they take people captured elsewhere and find some place to torture them. Related to this, of course, is that US diplomats worked overtime to suppress any investigations, and put strong diplomatic pressure on countries not to investigate. And yet, some still did, and the US simply refused to cooperate, despite requirements under various treaties. This is, of course, nothing new. The US has a history of ignoring treaties when it doesn't like what they say. This is seriously going to come back to haunt the US. It's amazing how upset the US gets when others ignore treaty provisions, but it does the same all too often.

Filed Under: cia, rendition, treaties, wikileaks
Companies: wikileaks

Why Does The Myth Persist That Wikileaks Is Indiscriminately Leaking Thousands Of Documents?

from the check-your-facts dept

A few weeks ago, we called out the fact that many in the press continued to falsely report that Wikileaks had indiscriminately released all 250,000+ State Department cables that it had in its possession. In fact, this was the key claim that many have used to condemn Wikileaks and to suggest that it's neither a journalistic entity nor a whistleblowing entity. The problem is, this is false. To date, Wikileaks has only dribbled out approximately 2,000 of the cables and nearly every one has been in conjunction with various mainstream publications and do include redactions of sensitive info.

NPR just got around to correcting the error, even though many of its "hosts, reporters and guests have incorrectly said or implied that WikiLeaks recently has disclosed or released roughly 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables."

And yet the myth persists. It's quite amazing, for example, that the Wall Street Journal allowed famed First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams to publish this attack on Wikileaks as being "different" than Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (a case for which Abrams represented the NY Times). The crux of the "differences" that Abrams highlights is the fact that Ellsberg withheld four out of 47 volumes of the Pentagon Papers, to be published at a later date, and then says:

Can anyone doubt that he would have made those four volumes public on WikiLeaks regardless of their sensitivity? Or that he would have paid not even the slightest heed to the possibility that they might seriously compromise efforts to bring a speedier end to the war?

As Jack Shafer deftly points out over at Slate, why, yes, it's quite easy to doubt that assertion of Abrams, since Wikileaks has so far withheld much more than Ellsberg did. As Shafer notes:

Perhaps because Abrams listens to too much NPR or doesn't read the New York Times very closely, he's under the misconception that WikiLeaks has published all 251,287 U.S. diplomatic cables it claims to possess. It hasn't, as NPR noted in a correction yesterday. WikiLeaks has released just 1,942 cables, which makes Assange's ratio of released-documents to withheld-documents much, much smaller than Ellsberg's. By that measure, Abrams should regard Assange as a more conscientious leaker than Ellsberg, not less conscientious.

Abrams' other reasons for slamming Wikileaks seem self-contradictory. He complains about the "harm" that these leaks will do, while at the same time insisting many of the documents shouldn't be released because they show no wrongdoing. Again, Shafer debunks this thoroughly:

Does he mean to imply that publishing state secrets can be defended only if they catch the government murdering, stealing, kidnapping innocents, fouling pristine rivers, or betraying allies? It may startle Abrams to learn that the diplomatic process has always been treated as news. Any of the cables now in the news would have made a splash had they been leaked in the conventional, non-WikiLeaks fashion.

There are plenty of legitimate reasons to dislike Wikileaks. The organization clearly has some serious issues and there are lots of reasonable questions concerning Julian Assange's leadership and focus. But it's really quite amazing how frequently the major media sources out there are attacking Wikileaks based on flat out false statements.

Filed Under: fact checking, floyd abrams, pentagon papers, whistleblowing, wikileaks
Companies: wikileaks

Wikileaks, Intermediary Chokepoints And The Dissent Tax

from the getting-past-the-choke-points dept

We already posted Glyn Moody's response to Jaron Lanier's critique of Wikileaks, but I also wanted to point to and discuss an excellent rebuttal/debunking to Lanier's piece by professor Zeynep Tufecki, who notes that, contrary to Lanier's claims, Wikileaks hasn't exposed "the hazards of nerd supremacy," but rather the "dissent tax." The dissent tax is a great way to summarize the point I've been trying to make about how Wikileaks has really exposed corporate intermediaries who are too centralized. In Tufecki's explanation, the "cost" of avoiding those intermediaries is the dissent tax:

What the Wikileaks furor shows us is that a dissent tax is emerging on the Internet. As a dissident content provider, you might have to fight your DNS provider. You might need to fund large-scale hosting resources while others can use similar capacity on commercial servers for a few hundred dollars a year. Fund-raising infrastructure that is open to pretty much everyone else, including the KKK, may not be available. This does not mean that Wikileaks cannot get hosted, as it is already well-known and big, but what about smaller, less-famous, less established, less well-off efforts? Will they even get off the ground?

These developments should alarm every concerned citizen, even those who are thoroughly disgusted by Wikileaks. This is the issue that the Wikileaks furor has exposed, not nerd ideology. This is the story and likely will be more important than the release of diplomatic cables (which were already available to millions of people) through major newspapers after scrutiny by journalists. This question will stay with us even if Wikileaks dissolves, and Julian Assange is never heard from again.

This does such a nice job of summarizing the point I'd been trying (and probably failing) to make over the past few weeks that it's worth reading again. Of course, the real question is what happens next. And what we're seeing is that the response is for a lot of smart people to start looking at all these chokepoints that have created that dissent tax, and look for ways to route around them, and build more distributed, more censor-proof infrastructure pieces, such that any such dissent taxes in the future will be minimized.

Filed Under: centralization, chokepoints, decentralized, dissent tax, intermediaries, wikileaks

NY Times Finally Speaks Out Against Financial Firms Blocking Wikileaks

from the took-'em-long-enough dept

One of the more annoying things about watching the major news publications discussing the Wikileaks controversy is how infrequently they seem to realize that many of the attacks they themselves have been directing (or redirecting) at Wikileaks could come back to haunt them as well, as many could apply to them when they do things such as publish information about leaked documents. In fact, just last week, we wondered how come all those financial firms (including Visa, MasterCards, Bank of America and Paypal) were not cutting off the NY Times after it revealed military secrets. It appears that some folks on the NY Times editorial board have realized the same thing and published an editorial condemning the decision to cut off Wikileaks by these financial firms:

[A] bank's ability to block payments to a legal entity raises a troubling prospect. A handful of big banks could potentially bar any organization they disliked from the payments system, essentially cutting them off from the world economy...

[...] Still, there are troubling questions. The decisions to bar the organization came after its founder, Julian Assange, said that next year it will release data revealing corruption in the financial industry. In 2009, Mr. Assange said that WikiLeaks had the hard drive of a Bank of America executive.

What would happen if a clutch of big banks decided that a particularly irksome blogger or other organization was "too risky"? What if they decided -- one by one -- to shut down financial access to a newspaper that was about to reveal irksome truths about their operations?

That said, part of the editorial is a bit worrisome, as it seems to be suggesting that banks themselves should not be able to decide who they can and cannot work with, and that since they are "not too unlike other public utilities," perhaps they should be regulated, in the same way that a telco cannot refuse to provide phone or internet service to an operation who it does not like. I'm not sure that's necessarily the lesson we should be taking from this, however. The larger lesson is more about the lack of real competition in the space, where a very small number of intermediaries are effectively able to block off much of the money supply. That's the real problem. The answer should be to encourage greater competition in the space, such that if a few firms decide to cut off a service, it doesn't really matter, since there are many others to step in and help in their place.

Filed Under: ny times, wikileaks
Companies: ny times, wikileaks

Jaron Lanier's Virtual Reality: Secrecy Is Good Because Secrecy Is Necessary

from the head-in-the-virtual-sand dept

There is now a well-established class of writers about the digital world, whom I fondly dub the Old Curmudgeons. Basically, they agree, things are getting worse all the time -- this modern online nonsense is bad for us and will give us all fallen arches or something. Leading exponents of this view include Nicholas Carr, Andrew Keen and Jaron Lanier.

I think Mr. Lanier is the most interesting of these, because he has a solid technical background and has been creative in the digital sphere for a long time. That makes his Savonarola-like denunciations of the same particularly striking.

Against that background, it was perhaps inevitable that he would weigh in on the Wikileaks business -- and equally inevitable what his line would be, as his title makes clear: "The Hazards of Nerd Supremacy: The Case of WikiLeaks".

If I had several hours to spare, I might try to go through it addressing his various arguments, from those which amount to unsubstantiated assertions about "the ideology that drives a lot of the online world," to ad-hominem sniping (for example, "we didn't necessarily get to know where Mr. Assange was at a given moment" -- maybe because he is doing things a lot of governments and organisations don't like and so discretion is the better part of valour), to outright misapprehension ("Wikileaks isn't really a "wiki," but it is designed to look and feel like the Wikipedia" -- er, well, no actually, it doesn't look like it in the slightest), and to various straw men: "What if we come to be able to read each other's thoughts? Then there would be no thoughts. Your head has to be different from mine if you are to be a person with something to say to me." As far as I am aware, nobody is calling for mandatory telepathy.

But I'd rather examine Lanier's peroration, because I think it exposes the fundamental flaw in his indubitably entertaining essay:

Anarchy and dictatorship are entwined in eternal resonance. One never exists for long without turning to the other, and then back again. The only way out is structure, also known as democracy.

We sanction secretive spheres in order to have our civilian sphere. We furthermore structure democracy so that the secretive spheres are contained and accountable to the civilian sphere, though that's not easy.

There is certainly an ever-present danger of betrayal. Too much power can accrue to those we have sanctioned to hold confidences, and thus we find that keeping a democracy alive is hard, imperfect, and infuriating work.

The flip side of responsibly held secrets, however, is trust. A perfectly open world, without secrets, would be a world without the need for trust, and therefore a world without trust. What a sad sterile place that would be: A perfect world for machines.

What the Wikileaks cables show is precisely that those sanctioned "secretive spheres" are not currently accountable to the civilian sphere. They show all of the shady deals made in backrooms, the outright lies told to the public to keep us quiet, and the connivance with big business to ensure that profit comes before ethics.

Lanier's logic seems to be that everything's fine and the revelations of Wikileaks will only mess things up. And until Wikileaks' revelations, people might have gone along with that analysis, since that was the story that governments were feeding us. But in the wake of Wikileaks, that is simply not a tenable position: as the words of diplomats delineate time and again, everything is not fine and the social pact of accepting those "secretive spheres" in return for a responsible use of the advantage they bring has been broken.

I would love it to be the case that Lanier's analysis were true and in some scaled-up, digitised version of Athenian democracy we could have a responsible wielding of state powers, with secrecy applied wisely and justly. But Wikileaks has confirmed what many have suspected, but have hitherto been unable to prove: that politicians use secrecy to hide their continual and continuing breaches of the trust we placed in them.

Until they change in the light of what Wikileaks is showing, we cannot trust them as we did before. And the more they -- and their defenders, however well intentioned -- deny the situation revealed by their own words through Wikileaks and try to stop us from seeing it, by hook or by crook, the longer that is likely to take and the messier it will be.

And given that proven record of abuse, when they do finally change we will need more transparency about what they are doing -- but not total transparency, which is neither feasible nor necessary -- to make sure that they are not falling back into their bad, old ways under the convenient, comforting cover of secrecy.

Cross posted from Open...

Filed Under: jaron lanier, secrecy, wikileaks
Companies: wikileaks

Leaked Cable Shows That ACTA Secrecy Is Way Beyond Normal

from the didn't-we-say-that? dept

As more and more attention was paid to the ridiculous level of secrecy concerning the ACTA negotiators last year, a bunch of ACTA supporters tried to claim that the level of secrecy (such as calling it a state secret involving national security) was perfectly normal for such agreements. A year ago, we went through a rather detailed explanation of how similar negotiations were much more open. The response we heard was that we were wrong and that this was "entirely normal." Turns out, even the diplomats involved knew this was bunk. One of the latest cable leaks from Wikileaks shows an Italian diplomat complaining to a US official about the level of secrecy involved in ACTA, noting that it's much higher than normal and that it makes it more difficult to get stuff done:

The level of confidentiality in these ACTA negotiations has been set at a higher level than is customary for non-security agreements. According to Mazza, it is impossible for member states to conduct necessary consultations with IPR stakeholders and legislatures under this level of confidentiality.

Can't wait to see defenders of ACTA secrecy try to backtrack their claims that the secrecy level was perfectly normal.

Separately, this particular cable shows some of the problems with the USTR's annual Special 301 report in which it makes up a list of who's been naughty and who's been nice when it comes to intellectual property issues -- based not on evidence, but almost entirely on entertainment industry and pharma industry say so. The Italian official complained to the US that Italy had been working hard to crack down on infringement in Italy, but the USTR slammed them anyway and made no mention of all of the efforts they'd already put towards pushing through changes that Hollywood (via the State Department) was demanding. The Italian official was worried that this would actually lead to a setback, as Italian government officials wondered why they should bother if the USTR was just going to slam them no matter what they did.

Of course, none of this is a surprise. The same points about both the Special 301 process and ACTA secrecy were made by many folks, including us at Techdirt, and every time we did, supporters mocked us for "crying wolf" and making stuff up. Yet, now, it turns out that the points many folks were raising were also being stated by government officials.

Filed Under: acta, italy, secrecy, sweden, wikileaks
Companies: wikileaks

Now Random Webhosts Are Demanding Wikileaks Mirrors Be Taken Down Over Possibility Of DDoS?

from the weak-sauce dept

With all the attempts by corporations to distance themselves from Wikileaks -- often claiming dubious legal issues or terms of use violations that don't seem to really exist -- the EFF is pointing out that one of the (many, many) Wikileaks mirror sites was told by his hosting company he had to remove it or he'd lose his account. The reasoning was quite bizarre. The host claimed that its upstream provider was worried about potential DDoS attacks:

Recently we heard from a user who mirrored the Cablegate documents on his website. His hosting provider SiteGround suspended his account, claiming that he "severely" violated the SiteGround Terms of Use and Acceptable Use Policy. SiteGround explained that it had gotten a complaint from an upstream provider, SoftLayer, and had taken action "in order to prevent any further issues caused by the illegal activity."

SiteGround told the user that he would need to update his antivirus measures and get rid of the folder containing the Wikileaks cables to re-enable his account. When the user asked why it was necessary to remove the Wikileaks folder, SiteGround sent him to SoftLayer. The user asked SoftLayer about the problem, but the company refused to discuss it with him because he isn't a SoftLayer customer. Finally, SiteGround told the user that SoftLayer wanted the mirror taken down because it was worried about the potential for distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks. When the user pointed out that no attack had actually happened, and that this rationale could let the company use hypothetical future events to take down any site, SiteGround said that it was suspending the account because a future DDOS attack might violate its terms of use.

Taking down a site because it might possibly be subject to a DDoS attack in the future? How does that make sense? We were confused enough when EveryDNS claimed that getting hit by a DDoS violated its terms of service, but its even more confusing to think that the remote possibility that at some date in the future you might get hit by a DDoS is a terms of service violation.

Separately, I was quite surprised to see SoftLayer's name as being involved here, because I'm aware of other situations in which SoftLayer has been protective of customer rights and not prone to act rashly. So I'm curious if this was a miscommunication or if something else happened.

Filed Under: ddos, hosting, mirrors, wikileaks
Companies: siteground, softlayer