WIKILEAKS BACKGROUND
MELISSA DE ZWART: The impact of WikiLeaks on global politics and the reporting of news cannot be overstated. A platform born from the capacity of the internet to facilitate large scale and anonymous transfers of data, it has enabled whistleblowing on a scale unimaginable and practically impossible in the days of photocopiers and typewriters. It has challenged governments and media organisations alike, revealing corruption within national governments and banks, the under-resourcing of troops on the front line, US embassy diplomatic secrets, membership lists of various secret and not so secret organisations, as well as more mundane matters, such as Sarah Palin's emails. However, this work has come at great personal cost. At the time of filming, Julia Assange, the founder, spokesperson, and guiding inspiration of WikiLeaks remains in exile in a tiny room in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London where he's been since June, 2012. Assange is resisting extradition to Sweden, where he's wanted for questioning with respect to sexual assault charges, on the basis that he fears extradition to the US where there are multiple grand jury indictments pending against him with respect to the leaks published by WikiLeaks. Assange has been the object of death threats and calls for his assassination as an enemy combatant and a high-tech terrorist. Chelsea Manning, formally US Army Private First Class Bradley Manning, is serving a 35-year prison sentence for her role in leaking classified documents published by the WikiLeaks platform. On 30 July 2013, former Private First Class Manning was found guilty of multiple offences under the Espionage Act -- the first time that a whistleblower had been convicted in the US under espionage laws. At the time of the leaks, Manning, then 21 years old, was stationed in Iraq. By her own admission, Manning simply copied the classified files onto a CD she'd taken into the room for that purpose, and took it with her when she left. Manning was arrested in May 2010 following disclosures made to former hacker, Adrian Lamo, regarding the leaks. The court-martial was told that Manning was working in an atmosphere of lax security, with passwords being left beside computers on post-it notes and computers containing confidential material being used for computer games and personal reasons. These revelations have resulted in large-scale revisions to data sharing and security clearance arrangements, which had been put in place post 9-11. Part of the criticisms of Manning's actions must therefore be directed at a system that resulted in such a simple, but significant disclosure of its supposed secrets. This theme of accountability and transparency of government actions will be returned to in the following weeks of the course. So Manning was found guilty of wrongfully and wantonly causing publication of intelligence belonging to the United States on the internet, knowing that the intelligence would be accessible to the enemy to the prejudice of the good order and discipline in the armed forces, or of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces. 'Wanton publication' is a concept previously unknown in the modern media context. The amount of data copied by Manning may have been vast, but this was simply a reflection of the amount of data that is being collected, hosted, and notably shared by the US government in this case, but of course, more generally, as we know post-Snowden, by governments worldwide, explaining why it was available on a computer accessible by Manning in Iraq in the first place. In making the disclosures, Manning was clearly motivated by conscience, rather than any hope of personal reward or advancement. In fact, to suggest that such disclosures were wanton, either on the basis of scale or subject matter is to overlook the fact that digital technology and network connection by their very nature facilitate the creation and dissemination of big data.
ASSANGE'S MOTIVATION
MELISSA DE ZWART: According to Assange's own description, WikiLeaks was created from an intersection between a passion for freedom and transparency, and an extensive understanding of computer networks. Assange had grown up as a hacker, a story colourfully portrayed in Suelette Dreyfus' book Underground on which Assange is listed as a researcher, and also later revealed as the hacker, Mendax, featured in the book. Inevitably, these excursions as a young hacker had led to brushes with the law, but also the development of a sense of the global power of the internet. This hacker culture clearly underpins the early incarnations of WikiLeaks. In some early writing of Assange's on his own blog, he explores the concept of power as a network and a conspiracy. His mission in founding WikiLeaks was, at least in part, aimed at breaking up the strength of the conspiracy. "Authoritarian power knows how to strengthen itself through conspiracy, but it came to seem natural to me, logical indeed, that resistance would grow in direct proportion to how much people understood the conspiracy". "I am not talking about conspiracy in the sense of secret, one-off cover ups, the ramblings of tinfoil-hat-wearing weirdos. I'm talking about systemic conspiracy, the habitual modus operandi for governments who prefer to do everything in secret. Information would set us free. And computer science, as a form of maths, would be our aid in revealing political relationships." Assange then asserts that the power of the conspiracy can be reduced by disrupting information flow, and by disrupting and throttling links. "A conspiracy sufficiently engaged in this manner is no longer able to comprehend its environment and plan robust action." And this disruption comes in the forms of leaks and transparency. When this power of exploiting network vulnerabilities is combined with political purposes, hacking becomes "hacktivism". It is therefore notable that in these essays, Assange also explicitly refers to regime change and the need to replace bad governance. "This recognition of bad governance is placed in the context of an encouragement to act against it, asserting that those who witness an unjust act and do not act become a party to that injustice." Thus the actions of WikiLeaks may be better understood in the context of the great battle for internet freedom, the core preoccupation of hacktivism. In a lengthy essay published in The Monthly magazine in 2011, Robert Manne analyses Julian Assange's motivations through the lens of cypherpunk philosophy. He explains, "at the core of the cypherpunk philosophy was the belief that the great question of politics in the age of the internet was whether the state would strangle individual freedom and privacy through its capacity for electronic surveillance or whether autonomous individuals would eventually undermine and even destroy the state through the deployment of electronic weapons newly at hand." Of course, both WikiLeaks and Assange have evolved since these early publications, and they may not necessarily reflect Assange's later motivations. However, they are useful in understanding the broad context of the activities and philosophies underpinning WikiLeaks and should therefore be considered. In particular, the strong emphasis on openness and transparency is a fundamental meme of internet pioneers; therefore criticisms of its actions may more appropriately be directed at a system that resulted in such massive disclosure of its supposed secrets. In his more recent writings, Assange has been concerned with matters of information, and hence power, asymmetry. And in particular with the role that encryption can play in redressing this imbalance. In his co-authored book, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, Julian Assange makes what he terms a call to cryptographic arms. "The world is not sliding, but galloping into a new transnational dystopia. This development has not been properly recognised outside of national security circles. It has been hidden by secrecy, complexity and scale. The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to civilization." It is useful to recall that Assange is writing here pre-Snowden. Noting the argument that WikiLeaks represents a balancing factor in the face of mass government and corporate surveillance, he observes that it is merely a shadow of a shadow in the face of the enormous volume of user data being collected daily by governments and platform providers such as Google, Facebook, and Apple. Any belief that a single whistleblowing platform can combat this power is misguided. The only tool useful in this context is encryption, without which the internet will merge global humanity into one giant grid of mass surveillance and mass control. This message is strongly echoed by NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, who is the subject of the next module.
BLOCKING WIKILEAKS
MELISSA DE ZWART: WikiLeaks, as the wiki part of the name implies, was originally envisaged by Assange as a place where anyone could post material anonymously. That material could then be read, commented upon, and in particular, verified by others. However, it quickly moved away from this model of publication, partly because people are more used to consuming news passively and do not generally want a crowd sourced production, and also due to the important nature of the material WikiLeaks was receiving. Assange was becoming concerned that matters of national importance were not being picked up by broader news media and given the importance and analysis they deserved. For example, he was particularly appalled by media indifference to stories of corruption in Kenya, despite the assassination of two human rights lawyers involved in investigating extrajudicial murders. As the volume of leaks increased, WikiLeaks quickly had to adapt and take on the role of editor itself or to share this role with mainstream media. This explains, in part, Assange's own personal transformation from being a conduit for whistleblowers, to seeing himself as a journalist and editor. It also explains the need for WikiLeaks to experiment with a variety of associations with mainstream news organisations. These relationships have resulted in major changes to whistleblowing and media laws in a variety of jurisdictions, many of which have made it harder for journalists to rely upon whistleblowing sources. The relationship between journalist and whistleblower source is becoming more complex in the internet era. The release of documents by WikiLeaks commenced in December 2006 with the publication of a letter relating to the Islamic government of Somalia. This was followed in 2007 with the publication of the Guantanamo Bay Manual, which covered the treatment and management of the detainees detailing matters of psychological torture and interrogation techniques. In January 2008, WikiLeaks published hundreds of documents relating to massive tax evasion facilitated through the Swiss bank, Julius Baer. This publication provoked legal action from the bank, including a temporary injunction granted against WikiLeaks in a California court, as well as generating a huge amount of publicity for the nascent whistleblower site. The bank subsequently dropped further legal action when the injunction was lifted. 2008 also saw the publication of Scientology handbooks, American fraternity handbooks, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's emails, and the membership list of the British National Party. 2009 witnessed the publication of a number of reports and messages, including the pager messages from 9/11. Following a period offline in late 2009, when it was shut down by an injunction against Dynadot, who directed the WikiLeaks.org domain to the European servers of WikiLeaks, 2010 was to witness a series of major publications, including the video Collateral Murder. Unlike the rest of WikiLeaks' releases to that time, Collateral Murder represented the first attempt by WikiLeaks to produce a major independent journalistic piece. This 17-minute video is an edited version of 39 minutes of footage filmed from the cockpit of a US Army Apache helicopter in Iraq. It shows a group of Iraqis talking with two Reuters employees. And then the helicopter opens fire on the group, killing several people, including the Reuters employees. An Iraqi man taking his children to school is also shot and killed when he stops to render assistance. The emotional and inflammatory nature of this video attracted a great deal of press and public attention, and represented a new development for WikiLeaks as a content provider. The Afghanistan war logs were released in July, 2010, with the Iraq war logs following in October, 2010, and the US embassy diplomatic cables in November. The Afghan war logs comprised the US military's own logs of combat between 2004 and 2009, detailing matters such as requisitions for equipment. The Iraqi logs detailed field reports from the Iraq conflict, including details of civilian casualties and reports of torture by the Iraqi military and police. These publications clearly attracted the ire of the US government, which felt that it was being targeted by WikiLeaks. Initially having disregarded the online platform, the publication of the embassy cables appears to have been the final straw in the tolerance of the US government, which commenced a multi-prong attack on WikiLeaks, Assange, and others associated with the platform. In 2010, WikiLeaks' activities were effectively brought to an abrupt halt by the actions known as the banking blockade. Amazon stopped hosting WikiLeaks on the 1st of December, 2010, claiming that WikiLeaks was in breach of its terms of service in a number of ways, particularly with respect to its rights to own or control hosted content. Ironically WikiLeaks had been prompted to move to the Amazon cloud hosting service due to the large-scale denial of service attacks it had been experiencing from pro-government activists following the publication of the embassy cables. Encouraged by various US politicians, other businesses began to follow suit. Every DNS withdrew its service on the 2nd of December, 2010, making it impossible to access the WikiLeaks website by redirecting its domain name. PayPal severed its payment facility for WikiLeaks donations on the 3rd of December, 2010, saying, "PayPal has permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to a violation of the PayPal acceptable use policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate, or instruct others to engage in illegal activity. We've notified the account holder of this action." This position was reviewed and reinforced in a statement from PayPal's general counsel on 7 December 2010. Also on 7 December 2010, Visa and MasterCard stopped processing payments to WikiLeaks. MasterCard's spokesperson told CNET, "MasterCard rules prohibit customers from directly or indirectly engaging in or facilitating any action that is illegal". Visa Europe justified its suspension of service on the grounds that it was investigating whether WikiLeaks contravened any Visa operating rules. The Bank of America discontinued its service to WikiLeaks on the 18th of December, stating that it was acting upon reasonable belief that WikiLeaks may be engaged in activities that are, amongst other things, inconsistent with our internal policies for processing payments. Apple removed the WikiLeaks app, not actually provided by WikiLeaks, from its app store on the 20th of December, 2010 on the grounds that the app violated the developer guidelines. Western Union placed WikiLeaks on its interdiction list on the 21st of December. WikiLeaks became effectively cut off from its key funding sources and was characterised as an outlaw institution. All of these actions were based on the service providers' claim that WikiLeaks had violated the terms of service, such as the PayPal example. WikiLeaks has stated that the banking blockade effectively starved it of income-- 95% of its revenue -- costing it tens of millions of pounds. And this led in 2011 to WikiLeaks suspending its publishing operations. Whilst WikiLeaks was able to restore service and resist all of these attempts to characterise its platform as unlawful, the damage had been done. It took several months to restore the platform and continue its work. Despite this, WikiLeaks continues to function as a whistleblowing platform and news organisation. Like Anonymous, another entity we will discuss this week, WikiLeaks is a true creation of the internet. It challenges government and traditional media models alike, providing a platform for large scale digital dissemination of leaks. Its underpinning philosophy is of openness and freedom of information, and yet Assange is also an advocate for personal privacy. In the next module we'll consider how these concepts are reconciled in Assange's vision of the internet.
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