Wikileaks: Our Weapon Shop of Isher
Posted by Kevin Carson on Jul 30, 2010 in Commentary • 12 commentsIf it were up to me, TV news stories on Wikileaks’ release of Afghanistan war documents would have used the opening strains of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” as a lead-in. This is arguably the biggest story in the war for human freedom in the past decade.
It’s common in the United States to praise soldiers for “defending our freedom.” But as Obama’s reaction to the Wikileaks story demonstrates, the most effective defenders of freedom are more likely to be condemned by governments for “putting the lives of Americans at risk” and “threatening our national security.” (Never mind that starting the stinking war in the first place put quite a few American lives at risk.)
I cover the defenders of freedom in this column, primarily those involved in the networked world, on a regular basis. They include the Falun Gong, the world leaders in proxy server technology, who share their technical know-how with dissidents all over the world. They include the torrent sites all over the world, which wage war on the increasingly totalitarian copyright lockdown the proprietary content industries would like to put us under. Anonymous freedom fighters swarm the websites of government censors and the Copyright Nazis at the RIAA and MPAA with denial-of-service attacks.
And now this. It’s too bad the Nobel Peace Prize went to a bloody-handed guy who’s waging two wars, instead of to people like Julian Assange and Bradley Manning who’ve weakened his ability to fight them.
It’s impossible to overstate just how big this is. This is a giant leap forward for the kind of networked resistance I constantly advocate in this column: Not lobbying or begging the state for permission, but bypassing it and treating it as irrelevant. This is a monumental contribution to the ability of free people to organize the kind of society they want here and now, below the state’s radar and beyond the reach of its enforcement apparatus.
The importance of the event itself — a publication of leaked documents on the scale of The Pentagon Papers — is hard to exaggerate. But more important is the significance of Wikileaks itself, and of this as a milestone in its development.
One of the most powerful weapons against the power of the state and its allied corporations is what the Wobblies call “open-mouth sabotage,” backed up and reinforced by the Streisand Effect (a term Techdirt editor Mike Masnick’s coined for the inability of old-style bureaucratic hierarchies to suppress embarrassing information online, and the counterproductive results when they attempt to do so). States, corporations and other authoritarian bureaucracies, like cockroaches, don’t like having the kitchen light turned on.
And make no mistake: This is the Streisand Effect on steroids. Assange has created a highly visible vehicle for publicizing leaked documents from states and corporations and other authoritarian entities all over the world — and removed it beyond the power of states to shut down. As Jay Rosen says (Press Think, July 26), “Wikileaks is organized so that if the crackdown comes in one country, the servers can be switched on in another. This is meant to put it beyond the reach of any government or legal system.”
Someday soon a file-sharing operation like The Pirate Bay will adopt a similar worldwide infrastructure beyond anyone’s ability to shut down. And then encrypted e-currencies. And then … And then … Well, to quote Cat Stevens, I’ve been smiling lately, thinking of the good things to come.
C4SS (c4ss.org) Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.
Hell yeah! I'm looking forward to it.
By the way, who are these "wobblies" you keep referring to? I keep thinking of jelly-like creatures.
Bleicke: "wobblies" = members of the Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW. Nickname supposedly came from someone mispronouncing the initials.
[...] Read this article: Wikileaks: Our Weapon Shop of Ishtar [...]
Shouldn't "Ishtar" be "Isher"?
Bleicke: B-psycho beat me to it. The history of the I.W.W. is well worth digging into. It was founded in Chicago in 1905 at what was called "the Continental Congress of the working class," attended by representatives of both major socialist parties and all the major radical unions, as well as figures like Mother Jones. Their direct action tactics in the workplace are legendary, but their organizing techniques (which owed a lot to the Salvation Army) were also remarkable.
Roderick: Dammit! Now that's embarrassing.
Kevin, I agree with your views on Wikileaks. However, I think that one way or another, Wikileaks will probably get shut down because of the enormous threat it poses worldwide (my understanding is that it exposes a lot more than western dirty laundry). Politicians can jail people, wave its arms and scream like a child about "national security" all it likes. The problem for the corporate state is that copycat sites are likely to spring up, and like music sharing (Napster anyone?), it's proliferation is literally uncontrollable.
As I see it, Wikileaks can’t be shut down. They have several mirror servers all over the world in different jurisdictions, at least that’s what they claim. Iceland is giving them journalistic immunity or what it’s called. So it should be pretty hard to take down.
Remember, these guys are hackers. Assange has hacked a NASA space shuttle launch.
Julian Assange posts an insurance policy.
http://www.antemedius.com/content/wikileaks-posts…
I'd bet some butt cheeks in the corridors of power squeezed so tight that a greasy string wouldn't slide out if pulled by a monster truck!
LOL!!!!!!!!!
Judge Napolitano on Freedom Watch also interviewed Assange and defended his actions in disclosing the information that he did.
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2010/08/01/justin-rai…
You know that had to piss off the Fox News flag wavers!
Kevin previously argued (very well I might add) that in a freed market, the actions of the voluntary market and voluntary citizen action could alert the public and aid the individual public to self regulate the market players with voluntary market choices. Assange IMO is very much making Kevin's point and hats off to Kevin and Julian in keeping the Freed Market in both idea and action alive.
This glass of tea is for you Kevin! I would salute with a beer but I'm just not much of a drinker.
"Crush the Bastards!"
Thanks, mac. I’m gonna have a beer to celebrate that “Insurance” story.
As for the Pentagon proposing to combat Wikileaks by detecting and firing leakers, well, that sounds like a great idea! I guess the fact that they haven’t been doing that so far has nothing to do with their inability to carry out the threat — they just didn’t feel like doing it until now.
In one of Ken MacLeod’s stories — Cosmonaut Keep, I think — a dissident group manages to decrypt and expose all internal government communications in the world, which leads to a period of turmoil.
And this sort of thing seems to be a recurring theme.
Another story, whose author I forget, concerned a time-scope invention that could watch events at any time and place in 3-D. The first project was a documentary movie based on actual recorded footage of the life of Alexander the Great (there was no sound, but dialogue was recreated and dubbed in based on the observations of lip-readers who knew the ancient languages). The second project was a WWI documentary with detailed footage of what all the leaders of Europe were actually saying in the cabinet rooms. Needless to say, contemporary governments were all bent out of shape about the possibility that what they’d done last week was open to the same treatment.
The Wobblies — i.e., the IWW — still exist, though they have damn few organized shops these days.
As for WikiLeaks, frankly, how do we know this story is true? How do we know if all, or any, of the memorandums (dum-dums?) are authentic? Obama & Co. should have kept their stupid mouths shut until they knew if the story was true, one way or another.
This wouldn't be the first time that the media have gone howling off after a story that they *wanted* to be true, without doing their homework. Did anybody notice that both the US army and the Red Cross investigated the Abu Ghraib story, and found that *none* of those famous photos had been taken there? Yet the media, which had made such a ballyhoo about the photos, didn't mention that little fact.
What the Abu Ghraib hoax would have shown our various enemies is that the American media is incredibly gullible. It wouldn't surprise me if this whole WikiLeaks story was deliberately concocted and "leaked" by the Arabs. After all, CoIntelPro wasn't invented whole cloth by the FBI.
–Leslie <
[...] I wrote my last column on Wikileaks (“Wikileaks: Our Weapon Shop of Isher,” C4SS, July 30), I didn’t expect to do a follow-up. But this seems to be shaping [...]
This is controlled leak. When The Afghan War Diary is simultaneously given to reporters from The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel, and the US government only “strongly condemns” it means that they’re willingly letting you read something that would never have gone public if it was important, secret or in the nature of harming the agenda of the US foreign policy