Maximum Irony, the US, WikiLeaks, and Press Freedom

Straightwood offered a wry comment on a discussion of WikiLeaks at Crooked Timber. Unesco is holding World Press Freedom Day in early May of next year. The US Department of State will be hosting it in Washington. Here, I kid you not, is a paragraph from the press release:

The theme for next year’s commemoration will be 21st Century Media: New Frontiers, New Barriers. The United States places technology and innovation at the forefront of its diplomatic and development efforts. New media has empowered citizens around the world to report on their circumstances, express opinions on world events, and exchange information in environments sometimes hostile to such exercises of individuals’ right to freedom of expression. At the same time, we are concerned about the determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and to restrict the free flow of information. We mark events such as World Press Freedom Day in the context of our enduring commitment to support and expand press freedom and the free flow of information in this digital age.

Leaks of the Times

Now that the webtubes are leaking, I’ve been wondering how The New York Times will react when its internal deliberations are leaked, not to mention its confidential communications with governments, corporations, NGOs and, above all, with the Secret Council of Rulers, Oligarchs, Hegemons, Fat Cats and Big Cheeses. No, I don’t actually know that WikiLeaks is about to blow a gasket on the Grey Lady. I’ve got no confidential information, nor even intimations of such.

I’m just thinking.

We know that much of the leak-worthy information they’ve got is from the info-sumps of private corporations. We’ve been promised a major bank early next year – rumor suggests the Bank of America. Do they have info-bilge on a major media organization? The Walt Disney Company is the largest, with News Corporation, Time Warner, and Viacom behind it (see the Wikipedia article on media ownership). Considered as a money machine, the New York Times Company isn’t in that league, But its flagship property, The New York Times, prides itself on being ‘the paper of record.’

Well, who chooses the record? Who's spinning the platter?

It’s not you and me, that’s for sure.

If WikiLeaks, or a clone, were to release Times-Confidential into the web, would the Grey Lady cover it? She’d have to, no? Would she cover it straight? Could she afford not to? Who’d she being playing to? The hands that crank the platter, or those who listen to the music? What happens if people stop listening? Then the crank won’t turn news into profits, will it?

Leaks R Us

I’ve been doing some more thinking about WikiLeaks. Nothing rigorous or systematic. I’m afraid if I attempted that I’d only be drawn deeper into incomprehension about this Brave New World in which we live. I know, I've been reading, for the past 50 years or more pundits have been proclaiming a brave new world, one built on tech and computers and communications. Did they foresee that one day we’d all get offers of big bucks from Nigerians writing a new brand of English? Or digital viruses crawling the net and bringing it down?

Or WikiLeaks?

Of course, it’s not about Assange, or even his close associates. I'm sure that the Secret Council of Rulers, Oligarchs, Hegemons, Fat Cats, and Big Cheeses would like to believe it's all and only just One Charismatic Aussie. If that were true, then stopping the leaks would be a simple matter of figuring out just the right legal strategy. That strategy would allow local authorities to act on Interpol’s DefCon Red and pack Assange off to Sweden.

And so they put his picture on the front of Forbes. Forbes “Capitalist Tool” Magazine. It's Him, there He is. The Evil Demiurge. I wonder what old man Forbes would have thought, he with the Harleys and leathers and his crew of jolly bikers?

But hey, Forbes got the interview, so they get to draw the page-views, newsstand sales, and subscriptions. And those get them the revenue. I wonder if they’ve gotten a Wall Street quant to work out a model that gives them the trade-offs between putting Assange the White Hair out there to draw traffic and solidifying his status as Knight of Transparency in the 21st Century?

Remember the scene in Spartacus when all the slaves raised their arms and proclaimed “I am Spartacus”? How’s that going to work out when Assange is put on trial for whatever they can pin on him? Rape is serious, more serious than the tax evasion that got Al Capone. But how’s that trial going to play when there are a million Assanges in cyberspace, each itching to spill the dirt on some company or government agency?

I am Assange!

I am Assange!

I am Assange!

I am Assange!

. . . . . . .  

WikiLeaks: Is the genie out of the bottle forever?

Forbes reports:

Early next year, Julian Assange says, a major American bank will suddenly find itself turned inside out. Tens of thousands of its internal documents will be exposed on Wikileaks.org with no polite requests for executives’ response or other forewarnings. The data dump will lay bare the finance firm’s secrets on the Web for every customer, every competitor, every regulator to examine and pass judgment on.

It seems that half the material now in WikiLeaks’ possession is about private corporations, not governments.

The question, then, becomes: Is anything secret? Even as private individuals worry about Facebook providing their information to advertisers and about Google tracking their moves, employees of governments and corporations are sending information to WikiLeaks. Perhaps Julian Assange will be arrested somewhere and extradited to Sweden. Perhaps not. If so, will WikiLeaks survive? If not, does that really matter? Will some other organization emerge from the web as a distribution point?

Can the genie be put back in the bottle?

Here’s the conclusion of an essay by Aaron Bady that’s been getting a bit of buzz recently:

According to his essay, Julian Assange is trying to do something else. Because we all basically know that the US state — like all states — is basically doing a lot of basically shady things basically all the time, simply revealing the specific ways they are doing these shady things will not be, in and of itself, a necessarily good thing. In some cases, it may be a bad thing, and in many cases, the provisional good it may do will be limited in scope. The question for an ethical human being — and Assange always emphasizes his ethics — has to be the question of what exposing secrets will actually accomplish, what good it will do, what better state of affairs it will bring about. And whether you buy his argument or not, Assange has a clearly articulated vision for how Wikileaks’ activities will “carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity,” a strategy for how exposing secrets will ultimately impede the production of future secrets. The point of Wikileaks — as Assange argues — is simply to make Wikileaks unnecessary.