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I know everyone and their goddamn mother has been mouthing off about julian assange and wikileaks and so on but this is a blog so, well, you know, every day is repost day!
Its been completely fascinating to watch this thing in action. The flailing desperation with which the governments of the world have responded with has been at times hilarious and frightening. The fact that this whole thing went completely non-sequiter immediately after the story broke seem to have escaped notice by the media. I dont need to retell the story here but lets remember, at least for a moment. A private in the US army leaks a shit ton of documents to some website hosted by some angry austrailian, i.e. julian assange. In response the US government, in part with support but also through coercion from foreign governments, does everything it can to coerce several US based companies to do everything they can to harass and attack assanges website on which theses documents where leaked. Now, I really cannot fathom this. First off, shutting down donations to wikileaks does nothing to mitigate any documents that may of been leaked and may be leaked in the future. Wikileaks is a name alone. Julian assange is a messenger. This army private could of leaked the documents dozens of ways, he could of torrented them, set up his own blog, mailed them out to newspapers around the world, sold them to the iranians, dozens of ways. But he, in his infinite wisdom, passes them to assange. Where is the outrage about this? Assange is vilified and accused of terrorism and whatever else but all he did was host the documents. The private in question "stole" them (dont even get me started on this semantic game of "stolen"). And the private is subject to whatever kind of justice the military meets out. Is he a terrorist? Is he seeking the destruction of the US government? Is he staging a kind of protest? It is rumored he is gay and this is some kind of payback for "dont ask dont tell". Why isnt sarah palin dragging his name through the mud? Why isnt he the center of our media scrutiny? Assange is quite specifically not important to the story, he is only the medium.
I am struck by the incredible fear the governments of the world have shown in reaction to assange. It is not the leaks they fear in this case. They where, by all admissions, more or less harmless. And it is not the insecurity of state secrets. Ive heard nothing about any kind of reforms within the military to stop this sort of thing from happening. It is at assange solely that they fire back. They seems enraged not at any actual consequence of the leaks but at the existential threat that this kind of free proliferation of information poses. It occurs to me that this kind of threat was the same kind that saddam hussain and iraq posed before our second war there. It was not so much any physical threat but the existential threat that drove us to war. The notion that no one man should have all that power. The power to laugh in the face of the most powerful nations of the world and air their (occasionally hilarious) dirty laundry. Seriously though, these leaks are inconsequential jokes compared to the pentagon papers of the vietnam era. The pentagon papers where a substantive intelligent critique of US foreign policy and the war effort. These wiki leaks are just masterclass trolling by comparison. And yet such as in all good comedy, the kernel of truth at the heart of the joke cuts deeper than any other measured and reasoned critique. The problem for the ruling aristocracy is not that these leaks (and information of this type) will destabilize or destroy a government but ever worse, that they bear witness to the falsity of the dominant ideologies and images these ruling powers promote. Moammar kadafi isnt a james bond villain, he is just some twat etc etc. Spy on your fellow citizens in the wal-mart parking lot but in the name of all that is good and holy dont scrutinize us. Foreign policy is not a reasoned game of titanic seriousness and importance, but instead, it is revealed to be just old ladies gossiping in the hair salon. We tuned in expecting charlie rose and got TMZ.
After these leaks we had the counter attack. Presumably political pressure was put on amazon to drop wiki leaks from servers they owned. Pay pal blocked donations to the site. Visa blocked credit card charges going to the site. This might be understandable (almost) if doing these things actually forwarded national security or stopped these "secret" documents from being leaked but even this transparent ploy is shown to be just that. Blocking wikileaks donations wont do shit. The internet is forever. There is a law of diminishing returns at work on the internet. The harder you try to clamp down on the free communication of information, the less return you get on your investment. Assange has not even been charged with anything, because he has done nothing illegal.
After these blocks and political coercions then came of course, anonymous. Full admission on my part, ive done quite a bit of internet. I saw the threads about operation payback and just ignored them. Raids have become so common I dont even care about them. I figured if they really pulled off ddosing VISA id hear about it on the news and if not I didnt really care. So low and behold a day or two later katie couric is going off about "INTERNET ANARCHIST HACKTIVISTS ARE ATTACKING VISA AND PAYPAL!". "Well fuck the little faggots pulled it off" I thought. The ensuing cacophony of inane obfuscation however really fucking blew me away. Some how it came out that assange was "trying to destroy the US government" (or some such) and "anonymous" ddosing VISA was somehow the same "thing". The paranoid shitstorm fallout from this literally is making me sick, hold up, pull the car over
ahem.
So then the last few days ive seen every idiot talking head on the news spouting off about how internet anarchists are laying just beyond the margin ready to attack. As they said in Batman: The Dark Night "some people just want to watch the world burn". More like waiting at the margin ready to subject you to invasive TSA screening procedures . . . anyway. Never mind the fact that these people obviously dont have any clue what they are talking about, this is always my assumption anyway. But at this point they are missing an absolutely critical point. This is not hacktivism. Its activism. These are not attacks. These are protests. This is about freedom of speech and the notion of net neutrality, not bringing down the government or anarchism or some other masturbatory fantasy they have while they sit in their ivory towers. Incidentally, isnt it always funny how the people at the top of the food chain fantasize about falling to the bottom while the people at the bottom fantasize about climbing to the top? Calling this "anarchism" or whatever other nonsense enables them to simply deny that the ideologies of the people making these protests might have some validity. They deny that any ideology exists at all to this behavior. If they actually questioned why someone might be protesting the government violating notions of free speech, if they had any notion of what net neutrality is and, by extension, if they had any idea what the internet was, they would be required to engage in the kind of introspective self criticism which would obviate the need for the protest in the first place.
Moreover, no consideration is given to assange and why he may or may not of leaked what he did. No consideration is given to the army private and why he may or may not of "stole" these documents. No consideration is given to the (apparently) incredible insecurity of US military secrets. Instead the interest is with defacing the ideology of those who are opposed to your own ideology. Julian assange "hates america" and this alone is enough deny him the freedoms that would be protected for any news paper or media outlet in the US.
