Wikileaks has today released what is reportedly a fairly obvious list of facilities that the US considers to be of strategic importance. Which to me raises the question of what purpose the leak serves. Wikileaks presents itself as serving public interest, but what public interest is there in releasing the sort of list that anyone who was interested in could probably produce on their own? As observed over at Harry’s place it’s not exactly a major security issue, but it’s not exactly helpful – either for the security forces or on the grounds of public interest. With some past leaks the public interest angle is obvious, but the positive benefit of this leak is harder to see, except maybe to save some conspiracy theorists and rival spooks a few hours work.
When looking at the recent leaks in particular it’s worth remembering the early mission statement of WikiLeaks:
“Our primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to people of all regions who wish to reveal unethical behaviour in their governments and corporations.”
This list of facilities is hardly unethical, the other days leak of cables didn’t seem to cover much if anything unethical (though there were some exceptions) and again nothing much that a moments thought wouldn’t cause a reaction of “No shit Sherlock!”. The leaking of the cables no doubt did cause some embarrassment and will make life more awkward at diplomatic talks, just as freinds betraying confidences would make things more awkward next time you go to the pub. Wikileaks are obviously being selective in what they leak which means one has to wonder what their objective is, are all the leaks coming only from the US or is that they are only interested in publishing US material. Perhaps Wikileaks agenda is merely to garner publicity for Wikileaks and feed into a martyr/hero complex, but as soon as we accept that we are getting a select feed of documents based on an unknown criteria we have to ask what the agenda is – in the same way we should question a government press release or article in the MSM. We should possibly also question the motives behind those leaking the information and what other agendas those leaks might serve. As soon as we deal with this sort of information we have to filter it through the murky and complex lenses of the intelligence services (Wikileaks could after all be being used as the modern equivalent of operation mincemeat).
However and it is a large however the visible and public reaction to these seemingly not terribly serious leaks is quite informative for the rest of us and highlights what might be brought to bear on other uncomfortable sites (though again of course if as the state you wanted to add legitimacy to a leaks site to make it more believable you would have to go all out to shut it down knowing you’d fail). So regardless of the motives of the sites invovled it’s worth looking at their weapons and how to react to them, as we’re still in the early rounds of this particular struggle, and the MSM globally is paying attention. the attacks on Wikileaks are multi pronged and are problems we’re all vulnerable to, to greater or lesser extents, if the state so chooses.
- It’s sources of funding have been reduced by Paypal dropping them
- Amazon reportedly bowed to pressure and dropped them from the cloud
- Twitter seem to be censoring discussion of them
- Students are being warned not to talk about them “lest it affect their career prospects“
- The founder of Wikileaks is facing revived and misreported criminal charges
And that’s just the easily recounted issues, and whilst many of the actions are being carried out by private companies and as long as they’re not breaking their contract it’s their choice, but it should make us aware of how vulnerable our networks are to the actions of a small number of “key service providers”.
The fight back to respond to some of these issues has been impressive and again can be used by anyone the state might take a dislike to. There are now:
- A large number of public mirrors
(Do you back up your log and save important articles from other blogs?) - Large numbers of alternative DNS records
- And instruction on how to mirror the site anonymously on a mobile phone
All of which helps to render the actions of the state futile, assuming they actually want Wikileaks shut down rather than say just discredited.
For me Wikileaks isn’t the poster child I’d like for fighting the battle for free speech on the internet, and I do question their motives, but the battle they’re fighting could one day be the battle we’re all fighting (especially if the actions of WikiLeaks provides the excuse the powers that be want to lock down the internet for all of us). However it is the battle we have and if we don’t test our defences and develop our strategies now then when we need them and a better cause comes along we’ll be firmly on the back foot. As the Daily Mash so wonderfully puts it:
JUST BECAUSE WE’RE CRUSHING WIKILEAKS, IT DOESN’T MEAN YOU’RE NEXT, SAY GOVERNMENTS
