NEO•GRIOT

December 22nd, 2010robinbloor

“An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.”  Victor Hugo

There is much agitation about Wikileaks on the chattering channels in the US and elsewhere. The politicians are up in arms, many commentators are aghast and the legal eagles are pontificating. The press is having a field day, at least as regards the stories it can publish from leaked material. But all of them seem to be missing the import of what is happening.

History is on the march.

There’s a strong analogy in this with the Diet of Worms and the doomed attempt by Pope Leo X to silence Martin Luther.

Let’s eliminate some of the noise that is currently clogging the air.

• The Julian Assange extradition to Sweden is almost irrelevant. It is generally perceived as an attempt to harass Assange and all it has done is provide him with a dramatic stage upon which to perform. The only relevant element in this is the fact that it has become global news.
• The extradition of Julian Assange to the US will possibly make his life uncomfortable, but it will provide him with an even more powerful public stage. If it doesn’t happen the US government will be perceived as weak. If it happens it is unlikely to result in his conviction. If there’s no conviction it will be a victory for Assange and if he’s convicted, it will be an even greater victory for what he represents. For the US government, in terms of perception; it’s lose-lose-lose.
• Julian Assange’s only importance is that of figurehead. If he’s pulled down from that position, by any event at all, whether it’s accidental, a conspiracy or the result of a legitimate recourse to law, it will not stop what has now started any more than finding Luther guilty at The Diet of Worms stopped the genesis of the Protestant movement.

The Battle That Was Lost

There was a brief attempt by the US government and its allies to try to close Wikileaks down. If we think of this as an information war, then the first battle in the war ended in a terrible defeat for the US. Here’s how it went:

• Wikileaks was hit by denial of service attacks. It quickly acquired enough mirrors to become invulnerable.
• Commercial power was brought through PayPal, Visa and Mastercard to try to deny donations. This back-fired. There can be very little doubt that more money flowed to Wikileaks because of the use of that commercial weapon, and anyway it wasn’t fully effective. To stop such donations you’d need the co-operation of nearly every bank in the world.
• Technical infrastructure power was brought to bear, with Amazon ejecting Wikileaks from their servers and EveryDNS revoking Wikileaks DNS registration. It wasn’t hard for Wikileaks to find another DNS and all that the Amazon gesture achieved was brand damage for Amazon.

Anything short of closing Wikileaks down was defeat, and the US government went down to defeat in days. It was difficult, of course. The US Government needed, for political reasons, to be seen to be doing something, so it did a few ineffective things. Maybe more could be done.

The Lutheran Current

In war, if you don’t have a clear understanding of what victory amounts to, you are in trouble. It is tempting to suggest that the US government is in deep trouble for that reason alone. However, it’s a mistake to see the US government as a specific side in this war. This is an info war and info wars take place between power structures not countries. It’s the US power structure, not the US itself, that currently has a side in this war. Info wars are, by their very nature, civil wars between groups of citizens that live under the aegis of a given information control structure. One side wished to conserve it, while the other wishes to change it.

Martin Luther triggered an info war. On one side were power structures that were based on controlling information in the way that it had been traditionally controlled. On the other side were revolutionaries who believed that those power structures needed to be replaced and information made more freely available than before. The initial battle was over the Bible. The Roman Catholic Church in Europe controlled the Bible. When printing presses appeared its control was weakened. The Gutenburg Press began business in 1450, the Diet of Worms was 70 years later in 1521.

Following The Diet of Worms, Pope Leo X issued a “fatwa” proclaiming it legal to kill Luther, but Luther simply retired to Wartburg Castle at Eisenach where he lived incognito, but also protected, translating the Bible into German. And of course, Luther wasn’t alone in translating the Bible. Others began to do the same. The Catholic Church not only lost its monopoly on the Bible, it also lost control of which language it was published in.

Nowadays, this doesn’t sound as big a deal as it really was. At the time the Bible was regarded as the foundation of truth and knowledge. Very few other books existed; just the Greek classics of Plato, Aristotle and others. Those too were held in very high esteem.

Without the Protestant movement, Henry VIII of England would probably not have dared to rebel against Rome and set up his own protestant Church of England. Much later the English monarch, Charles I would be beheaded by the protestant Oliver Cromwell. Europe quickly divided between Protestant and Catholic countries, and the monarchies were gradually replaced either by democratic republics or democracies that relegated their monarchs to figurehead roles. The Diet of Worms had momentous consequences.

A War On Two Fronts

The US power structure cannot behave like the Soviet Union once did. It cannot roll into Prague with columns of tanks and install a different government by fiat. The Prague they seek to conquer is a virtual super-hydra. Strike it down and a hundred identical mirrors rise up from nowhere. Even if you destroy it entirely, other virtual Pragues will no doubt be established.

The infowar is now being fought on two fronts.

1. The first front is the media itself, both old and new.
2. The second front is the information technology that enables it.

In the Media

The ranks of the leaker-friendly side in this war are quickly growing in number. Many professional journalists have stood up in Australia to protest their government’s poor protection of Assange, its own citizen – and the public seems to be on its side. Similarly a whole host of UK journalists have stood shoulder to shoulder with Assange. Only in the US, where the press has become remarkably docile, is there a shortage of Wikileaks support in the main stream media, but this will change if the first amendment becomes the heart of the debate – and it probably will.

Wikileaks is spawning imitators quickly. At the last count there were 7 infoleaks sites; BalkanLeaks in the Balkans, BrusselsLeaks in Belgium, Indoleaks in Indonesia, Rospil in Russia, Tunileaks in Tunisia, Open Leaks (a splinter from Wikileaks) and Wikileaks itself. Most of these sites have mushroomed up in the past few weeks. There will be more.

It is likely that the idea of stealing information and leaking it “as a public duty” has become viral. The number of actual leaks is likely to increase. And this could spell disaster for any organization, government or otherwise, that has inadequate information security and also has something to hide. Information security was never a big area of investment for most organizations and it clearly wasn’t a priority for the US Army. Many more embarrassing leaks will occur from many places before any real semblance of information security is common.

The tide seems to be running with Wikileaks. There are details in this that ought to worry the US government if it is seeking to preserve any semblance of the status quo.

• President Obama promised openness in government but never delivered. Now he’s hoist by his own petard. The US government now needs to get to grips with the issue of transparency or to simply declare transparency to be undesirable.
• Except for within-the-beltway-political-leaks, nobody leaks information to the US media any more. The US media is no longer trusted, because Wikileaks and organizations of that ilk are a “safer and sexier” place to leak to. Additionally, the US media appears to have lost the taste for investigative journalism.
• The US media’s business models are failing. They are beginning to look like dinosaurs.
• The US government is not the only target. Other governments are targets too. So are many large companies. The US indignation right now is because of the content of the diplomatic cables. But how will the US government handle the leaking of, say, banking information that indicates some fraud, or any corporate information that demonstrates back-door collusion with government or between other governments. Trying to shoot the messenger will not work well with those types of leak.

Information Technology

The attempt to close down Wikileaks revealed genuine areas of vulnerability for Wikileaks and any other operation that wants to operate with impunity:

• The DNS structure itself
• Payment systems
• Service providers (like Amazon)
• Physical location

The very idea that US government can control the Internet for its own ends is worrying to many people, not necessarily because of the present situation, but because of situations that may arise in the future.

The natural reaction is to create a secure virtual infrastructure that makes such action impossible. This is probably achievable with a series of technical innovations. (Whether it is will determine the course of history) The innovations would include:

• A DNS based on peer-to-peer technology (which would be impossible to close by closing any node)
• Physical mesh networks (so that it would be very difficult to disconnect any individual node).
• Regularly encrypted traffic
• Peer-to-peer payment systems (circumventing major clearing operations like Visa and Mastercard)
• Cloud services (like EC2) that are anonymized

It would also require some minimal legal protection for such systems. That, in turn, requires a government that will champion the kind of freedom that Wikileaks seeks. Whether such a a government will step forward is hard to know, but if any, Iceland is probably the candidate.

We will probably see such innovations come to pass – provoked by the current confrontation.

It’s A Far Wider Conflict Than You Imagine

The infowar is real, but the protagonists are not as I have thus far described them. The US may be sore right now with Wikileaks, but this is about power structures. The US government is merely one of the power structures that is under the threat of “looser transparency” Almost all governments are under the same threat. Corporations that base their business models on corruption and extreme lobbying are also under threat. It may even be that the current world economic systems (national currencies and the world banking system) will be challenged.

The last great info war was enabled by the introduction of printing. It gave rise to a whole host of effects that were unpredictable at the time, but logical in retrospect. Its revolutionary nature was not appreciated at all at the time. However the following consequences can be laid at its door:

The schism in the Roman Church, the fall of the monarchies of Europe, the rise of democracy; the introduction of paper money, modern banking, insurance, limited companies, stock markets and other financial markets and much greater international trade; the birth of newspapers, literacy, the publishing industry and universal education.

This infowar did not begin with Julian Assange and Wikileaks, it began with Tim Berners Lee.

The previous infowar did not begin with Martin Luther and his Ninety-Five Theses, it began with Johannes Gutenberg.

Ultimately, it seems inevitable that other power structures will be drawn into battles in this war: the governments of China, Russia and Iran, for example.

>via: http://www.thevirtualcircle.com/2010/12/wikileaks-this-is-just-the-beginning/