Eccentric Flower:201012/More Leakage

The amount of anger I've been feeling over this whole WikiLeaks/Assange thing over the past couple of days surprises me. Some of it may just be timing; for the past three days or so I've been getting to work in an absolutely nasty mood, the kind of mood where I want to go start a physical or verbal fight just so I can brutalize someone else. I don't like that mood, but I haven't yet been able to figure out the proximal cause to get rid of it! I can't find anything obvious - I mean, I'm not especially stressed, sleeping badly, or any of those sorts of things. Dunno.

Anyway, on this WikiLeaks business. I think one of the things upsetting me out of proportion to the actual event is that, while cognitive disconnects with my friends and peers are always bad (when I don't agree with you it makes me feel like an alien), when I find that the gap is because I am the less cynical person, that's so mind-boggling that it knocks me for a loop. I mean, y'all are never supposed to be more cynical than me on any topic. I have a reputation to uphold.

But it seems that some of you really are. I posted at Dan Lyke's place yesterday (note that there's more than one thread on this over there and I've been active in several):

It occurred to me last night, though, as I was lying in bed, that there's a second layer here.

Because what I am doing is passing judgement. I'm saying, "I approve of Assange exposing the US goverment on topic X, but I do not approve of him exposing the US government on topic Y." I'm saying, from my Rhadamanthine seat which no one appointed me to, "This is okay; this is not okay." And I realized last night that

1) this may inspire the response from some, "Well, who the hell put you in charge of moral judgement?" and

2) some of you feel that no one can reasonably be in charge of that judgement, and that therefore the standards of disclosure must be all or nothing.

When I consider the matter more calmly, it strikes me that I really don't want to discard WikiLeaks entirely. I do think it has its uses. The problem is that I am so upset by this particular use of it - which I think was unnecessary and malicious, unlike some of its other more worthy exposés - that for a while there I was tempted to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I wouldn't mind at all if Assange and his merry men showed better judgement about what to expose and what not to ("better judgement," of course, meaning "agreeing more with mine"), but I admit grudgingly that to shut down this organ completely would be a mistake.

And, frankly, it would be ineffective. Several commentators have noted - and I agree fully - that the genie is out of the bottle now; if WikiLeaks went away tomorrow, something else, possibly something else worse, would immediately assume the same function. The real solution to keeping Assange from getting his sweaty little hands on things he shouldn't be allowed to expose is to lock them up more tightly. I happen to think that's a transient solution at best, because the hackers always win the information wars. But that doesn't mean the US shouldn't try to lock up their memos a little better. I still think it is utterly valid that diplomatic communications stay secret, nor does it necessarily indicate that the diplomats are up to no good.

A larger issue here is that I do not find myself sitting easily with information-freedom advocates, and this is merely the most inflammatory and recent of a long string of examples why. It amazes me that the sort of people, among my peers, who advocate total information transparency for governments and institutions, even to the point of being detrimental/destructive to their operations, also tend to be the sort of people who believe in near-total privacy for personal information, who would be pleased if web sites collected absolutely no permanent information on their users of any kind, et cetera.

What this implies is that these people - and here we get back to the cynicism part - feel their institutions are not to be trusted under any circumstances, that they can always be relied upon to screw the populace whenever possible if unchecked, that the deck is stacked in all directions against us common folk. And I'm simply not sure I buy that.

Oh, I agree with the cynics to a point. I don't think one should be naive. Your personal information is a bargaining chip in the information economy, possibly the only one you have; you should not give it away unless you get something good for it in exchange. I don't think government should operate without a watchdog mechanism of some kind and I agree the ones we have in this country are largely compromised/ineffectual. I don't assume corporations ever consider the well-being of anything but their profit/loss statement. I am not a fool.

But I don't impute malice to these institutions unless it is specifically proven - as I said in the quote above. I believe corporations exist to make money, but that doesn't intrinsically make them evil; their motivations are well-understood and can be checked very easily if one has the political will to. (Our government, alas, frequently does not.) You can always tell which way a corporation will jump; it'll be the way that gets them the best return for the least expenditure.

I believe our government is incompetent and largely in the hands of morons. But malicious? Not so much. Even the politicians you most hate generally answer to the people who elected them; if they are saying something horrible, they tend to be doing it because it is something they believe their voters want to hear from them. Politicians pander to their electoral base compulsively, or they don't remain politicians for long. (There are some exceptions. If Joe Lieberman really does echo the sentiments of the people who keep sending him back to office in Connecticut, then there are some people in CT who need to be ushered off the planet - but I don't think he actually does represent CT very well anymore, which makes me wonder how he gets reelected.)

The most important thing to take away from all this is that this is a sign of how the battlefield is changing. The physical war in Iran which I believe we are too intelligent to ever fight, and the physical war in North Korea which we may not be able to avoid fighting, may turn out to be the last major on-the-ground battles that the United States ever gets involved in, or threatens to get involved in. The war now is elsewhere; it is fought with information, fought for control of information, and it is fought largely electronically.

It's a battle that involves you too, because right now it is being fought to see who gets to control access to the information lifelines you depend on, and how. This is why you should not turn off your brain when you see net-neutrality discussions, because they're important. The corporations have already determined that "he who controls the pipeline controls the world," and unfortunately they're correct. Look at this week's news stories about Comcast and Netflix - or look at Amazon's truly shameful behavior vis-a-vis this WikiLeaks thing. (That's right. I did not approve of Assange's behavior in this, but as I said in late comments to the previous entry, I approve of Amazon's far less.)

Some of our potential adversaries on the international front understand that the battle has moved. China, for example. Whatever you may want to say about them, they know perfectly well the importance of controlling and suppressing the flow of electronic information. They're not very good at it, but one thing about China is that they do learn from their mistakes (even when they don't admit it).

The United States government has, till now, been pretty backward about accepting the importance of this electronic battlefield. If Assange's stunt increases their awareness of this issue - if it causes them to sit up and take notice - then I will have been wrong about Assange and I will stand corrected: He will have accomplished something useful with his loose-cannonery after all.