The obligatory Wikileaks post
Dec. 13th, 2010 02:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drwex"Obligatory" in the sense that it's been gnawing at my brain for a while and maybe writing it out will stop things. Nobody's obliged to read this.
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feste_sylvain, with whom I disagree on about 75% of political things, hits several nails on the head in his post on this topic: http://feste-sylvain.livejournal.com/321065.html
Like him, I was originally taken in by mis-reporting of the allegations against Assange. I still retain hope that Assange is not guilty because it will be a significant strike against things I believe in if one of the major spokesfaces for that thing is a criminal. But other spokesfaces will emerge if Assange is indeed guilty of these or other crimes. Assange would hardly be the first egotist who thought his star status put him above the law or entitled him to mistreat people, particularly women.
But I didn't come here to talk about the stories we've read. I've come to talk about the stories we haven't read. Bear with me a moment while I recite things I think are well-known. The cables published by Wikileaks were at best low-level secrets. Many are marked "no foreigners" or similar, meaning that any US citizen can read them. That would be me, and probably most of you. Also, these cables were put on a network for view by at least hundreds of thousands of people. So, um, why haven't we seen them before?
Why, not to put too fine a point on it, haven't The New York Times and its supposedly investigative reporting colleagues been doing their goddamned jobs? If there is a story here - in Berlusconi's coziness with Putin, or in Clinton (or her subordinates) breaking the law by ordering US diplomats to spy on the UN, or whatever - why the hell isn't that a news story? Why aren't the news organizations covering these stories, reporting on them, and digging up these materials themselves? Why does it have to be amateurs telling us this? And if it's things we already knew, then what's the big deal? If it's things we didn't know but should have, why didn't we know?
The list of reprehensible characters in this story is long - Assange, if he's guilty; Amazon, for cowardice; Lieberman, for fascistic grandstanding; the DDOSers on both sides who are trying to silence speech they don't like, or use enforced silence as a punishment for actions they don't like. And certainly the Powers That Be deserve a large public shaming for having the temerity to pretend that we work for them instead of the other way around. And again, this is a story that is not appearing in the media.
Why? My theory is that the media have collapsed. If they were collapsing before, I think the Iraq War was the implosion point. We were led into a trillion-dollar war on a pack of lies. It's possible that even the then-Secretary of State was lied to. Certainly that's what he claims now. There were no WMD. Saddam never posed a danger to anyone other than his neighbors. There were no links to Al Quaeda nor to the events of 9/11/2001. Those were lies. Those lies were told over and over in various forms and the media machine that ought to have been exposing them as lies instead became a propaganda machine. Today we look back 50 years and wonder how the Nazis turned their media into a propaganda machine; I hope I live the 50 more years it will take for a backward look to see how clearly we fell into this trap.
And now, having fallen into the trap, having imploded their core function even as their normal methods of delivery evolved out from under them, the media - the investigative traditional media - are pathetic hollow shells, and when they are shown to be such by a massive dump of information they should have been reporting their natural reaction is to distort, to obfuscate, to mis-report and mis-direct. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? That was supposed to be you guys, and you failed, miserably. Again.
I have been unable to dig up the section from Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus trilogy in which he goes through the logic of how having secrets makes us less secure, as a society. But the gist of it is this: Once you have secrets you have to protect them, and you have to assume the other guy has them so you have to do things to discover those secrets. Likewise you assume that the other guys are doing the same, or worse, to discover YOUR secrets. And what you are doing to discover their secrets is itself a secret, as is what they are doing to discover yours. And so on, and so on. You start building up whole apparati to keep and protect those secrets and you distrust your own citizens. The more secrets you have the less secure you are because you have so much more to lose and must do so many counter-security things to protect those secrets. Axiomatically, without free communication you do not have freedom; democracy, as a society, is based on this. The more secrets we have, the less democratic we are overall. (*)
Wikileaks, and its ilk, do not mean "the end of diplomacy" as some idiots have bleated. It's just a more public acknowledgment that people judge each other, and say things about each other, and do illegal things. We all know this, and if we are adults we don't turn a blind eye to it. Not, mind you, that I think our society is particularly adult-like these days. But if we are not behaving in an adult manner then it is someone's job to call attention to that fact and not to be clownish cheerleaders for the process. Again, I look at the vacuum where once we had a fourth estate and wonder what will emerge to take its place.
ETA: No, I don't believe Assange/Wikileaks are journalists. Journalists develop stories and get them published, with the help of various technologies and infrastructures. There are no developed stories in the Wikileaks data dump. Instead it's raw; we don't know when reading a given cable whether it was sent and followed up, sent and laughed at, sent and the author summarily fired for being a dolt, or whatever. Treating the raw data in these cables as if it was fact, or journalism, is itself a Class A error. This is source material, from which stories ought to be developed. It's no more journalism than an array of strings is a program.
(*) a footnote here on the 'clear and present danger' idea. There are situations in which revealing information will lead to direct harm to an individual; for example, one wants to protect the name of a confidential informant against a criminal gang. I'm not arguing that such things should not be kept secret; I'm pointing out that having secrets makes us LESS secure as a society, which I found to be a counter-intuitive notion when I first encountered it.
feste_sylvain, with whom I disagree on about 75% of political things, hits several nails on the head in his post on this topic: http://feste-sylvain.livejournal.com/321065.htmlLike him, I was originally taken in by mis-reporting of the allegations against Assange. I still retain hope that Assange is not guilty because it will be a significant strike against things I believe in if one of the major spokesfaces for that thing is a criminal. But other spokesfaces will emerge if Assange is indeed guilty of these or other crimes. Assange would hardly be the first egotist who thought his star status put him above the law or entitled him to mistreat people, particularly women.
But I didn't come here to talk about the stories we've read. I've come to talk about the stories we haven't read. Bear with me a moment while I recite things I think are well-known. The cables published by Wikileaks were at best low-level secrets. Many are marked "no foreigners" or similar, meaning that any US citizen can read them. That would be me, and probably most of you. Also, these cables were put on a network for view by at least hundreds of thousands of people. So, um, why haven't we seen them before?
Why, not to put too fine a point on it, haven't The New York Times and its supposedly investigative reporting colleagues been doing their goddamned jobs? If there is a story here - in Berlusconi's coziness with Putin, or in Clinton (or her subordinates) breaking the law by ordering US diplomats to spy on the UN, or whatever - why the hell isn't that a news story? Why aren't the news organizations covering these stories, reporting on them, and digging up these materials themselves? Why does it have to be amateurs telling us this? And if it's things we already knew, then what's the big deal? If it's things we didn't know but should have, why didn't we know?
The list of reprehensible characters in this story is long - Assange, if he's guilty; Amazon, for cowardice; Lieberman, for fascistic grandstanding; the DDOSers on both sides who are trying to silence speech they don't like, or use enforced silence as a punishment for actions they don't like. And certainly the Powers That Be deserve a large public shaming for having the temerity to pretend that we work for them instead of the other way around. And again, this is a story that is not appearing in the media.
Why? My theory is that the media have collapsed. If they were collapsing before, I think the Iraq War was the implosion point. We were led into a trillion-dollar war on a pack of lies. It's possible that even the then-Secretary of State was lied to. Certainly that's what he claims now. There were no WMD. Saddam never posed a danger to anyone other than his neighbors. There were no links to Al Quaeda nor to the events of 9/11/2001. Those were lies. Those lies were told over and over in various forms and the media machine that ought to have been exposing them as lies instead became a propaganda machine. Today we look back 50 years and wonder how the Nazis turned their media into a propaganda machine; I hope I live the 50 more years it will take for a backward look to see how clearly we fell into this trap.
And now, having fallen into the trap, having imploded their core function even as their normal methods of delivery evolved out from under them, the media - the investigative traditional media - are pathetic hollow shells, and when they are shown to be such by a massive dump of information they should have been reporting their natural reaction is to distort, to obfuscate, to mis-report and mis-direct. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? That was supposed to be you guys, and you failed, miserably. Again.
I have been unable to dig up the section from Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus trilogy in which he goes through the logic of how having secrets makes us less secure, as a society. But the gist of it is this: Once you have secrets you have to protect them, and you have to assume the other guy has them so you have to do things to discover those secrets. Likewise you assume that the other guys are doing the same, or worse, to discover YOUR secrets. And what you are doing to discover their secrets is itself a secret, as is what they are doing to discover yours. And so on, and so on. You start building up whole apparati to keep and protect those secrets and you distrust your own citizens. The more secrets you have the less secure you are because you have so much more to lose and must do so many counter-security things to protect those secrets. Axiomatically, without free communication you do not have freedom; democracy, as a society, is based on this. The more secrets we have, the less democratic we are overall. (*)
Wikileaks, and its ilk, do not mean "the end of diplomacy" as some idiots have bleated. It's just a more public acknowledgment that people judge each other, and say things about each other, and do illegal things. We all know this, and if we are adults we don't turn a blind eye to it. Not, mind you, that I think our society is particularly adult-like these days. But if we are not behaving in an adult manner then it is someone's job to call attention to that fact and not to be clownish cheerleaders for the process. Again, I look at the vacuum where once we had a fourth estate and wonder what will emerge to take its place.
ETA: No, I don't believe Assange/Wikileaks are journalists. Journalists develop stories and get them published, with the help of various technologies and infrastructures. There are no developed stories in the Wikileaks data dump. Instead it's raw; we don't know when reading a given cable whether it was sent and followed up, sent and laughed at, sent and the author summarily fired for being a dolt, or whatever. Treating the raw data in these cables as if it was fact, or journalism, is itself a Class A error. This is source material, from which stories ought to be developed. It's no more journalism than an array of strings is a program.
(*) a footnote here on the 'clear and present danger' idea. There are situations in which revealing information will lead to direct harm to an individual; for example, one wants to protect the name of a confidential informant against a criminal gang. I'm not arguing that such things should not be kept secret; I'm pointing out that having secrets makes us LESS secure as a society, which I found to be a counter-intuitive notion when I first encountered it.
