WikiLeaks Reveals Aaron Swartz May Have Been A Source: Wise Move?

WikiLeaks currently finds itself in a difficult position. Funds are trickling in because of a questionable financial blockade against it, and Julian Assange is stuck in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. So it's understandable that it should want to take every opportunity to remind people that it is still around and keen to continue publishing highly-sensitive documents in a confidential fashion. But I do wonder if this series of tweets disclosing that Aaron Swartz was involved with WikiLeaks is the best way of doing that: 

On Techdirt.

Bulgarian Banks Try To Silence Web Site That Called Them 'Bad Apples'

Whatever your views on the value of Wikileaks, one of its useful side-effects has been the appearance of other sites that have tried to do a similar job of calling the powerful to account using leaked information, but at a more local level. One of the most successful of these is BalkanLeaks, created by the Bulgarian investigative journalists Atanas Tchobanov and Assen Yordanov. In fact, it's been rather too successful for some, and is now on the receiving end of some legal threats, as a column in Forbes explains: 

On Techdirt.

Estonia Next In Line To Receive US 'Encouragement' To Adopt Harsher Anti-Piracy Laws

Numerous Wikileaks cables have highlighted the pressure that the US has brought to bear on several foreign governments behind closed doors in an attempt to get the latter to pass maximalist copyright laws. But it's worth noting that plenty of arm twisting takes place openly. Here, for example, is a letter (pdf) from the American Chamber of Commerce in Estonia addressed to the Minister of Justice, and the Minister of Economic Affairs and Communications of that country: 

On Techdirt.

The Great Copyright Conspiracy Laid Bare

My last post might have seemed slightly over the top - and indeed was meant to be.  After all, it's not as if the US really wants to subvert the entire edifice of European civil liberties simply to sell a few more albums and films, is it?

Well, those cables have delivered again, and suggested that is *precisely* what is going on here:

Among the treasure troves of recently released WikiLeaks cables, we find one whose significance has bypassed Swedish media. In short: every law proposal, every ordinance, and every governmental report hostile to the net, youth, and civil liberties here in Sweden in recent years have been commissioned by the US government and industry interests.

I can understand that the significance has been missed, because it takes a whole lot of knowledge in this domain to recognize the topics discussed. When you do, however, you realize that the cable lists orders for the Swedish Government to implement a series of measures that significantly weakens Sweden’s competitive advantage in the IT field against the US. We had concluded this was the case, but had believed things had come from a large number of different sources. That was wrong. It was all coordinated, and the Swedish Government had received a checklist to tick off. The Government is described in the cables as “fully on board”.

Since 2006, the Pirate Party has claimed that traffic data retention (trafikdatalagring), the expansion of police powers (polismetodutredningen), the law proposal that attempted to introduce Three Strikes (Renforsutredningen), the political trial against and persecution of The Pirate Bay, the new rights for the copyright industry to get subscriber data from ISPs (Ipred) — a power that even the Police don’t have — and the general wiretapping law (FRA-lagen) all have been part of a greater whole, a whole controlled by American interests. It has sounded quite a bit like Conspiracies ’R’ Us. Nutjobby. We have said that the American government is pushing for a systematic dismantlement of civil liberties in Europe and elsewhere to not risk the dominance of American industry interests, in particular in the area of copyright and patent monopolies.

But all of a sudden, there it was, in black on white.

It's a long post, from the indefatigable Rick Falkvinge, but I really urge you to read it, because it lays out in extraordinary detail how the US has pushed Sweden to meet six demands that will be all-too-familiar to readers of this blog:

1. Adopt “Three Strikes” making it possible to disconnect prople from the internet without a trial (“injunctive relief“), and implement the IPRED directive in a way that the copyright industry can get internet subscriber identities behind IP addresses (which was not mandatory, my note).
2. Prosecute to the fullest extent the owners of The Pirate Bay. (This doesn’t really need translation, except that it’s very noteworthy that the executive branch is ordered to interfere with the work of the judicial one, which is illegal in Sweden too.)
3. Transfer scarce police resources from investigating real crimes and devote them to safeguarding American monopolistic interests against ordinary citizens.
4. Take large-scale initiatives against people sharing music, movies and porn.
5.  Make it possible for the copyright industry to sue people (“pursue new civil remedies“) with a minimum of hassle.
6. Abolish the messenger immunity, making Internet Service Providers liable for copyright monopoly infractions happening in their wires, and force them to interfere with the traffic.

That is, the US has been driving the entire copyright legislation programme for Sweden.   And it would be remarkable if it had not made exactly the same demands to every other European country - indeed, we know from previous leaks that it has, at least for some of them.

In the face of this incontrovertible evidence that European governments have been abjectly serving the US government and copyright industries, not their own electorates, we must make sure that they are forced to explain this almost unbelievable betrayal of the political system that elected them, and must not allow them to pretend that nothing has happened, and that it is business as usual.

It would be nice to think that this final flood of cables from Wikileaks will clean Europe's Augean stables of all this stinking political manure, but I'm not holding my breath - just my nose....

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Why Did Wikileaks Fail New Zealand?

As I noted elsewhere, we now know that the US played a major role in pushing for tougher copyright regimes in Canada, Spain and Sweden. It seems that we must add New Zealand to the list of countries that were nobbled:

As you may recall, back in 2008, New Zealand politicians tried to sneak through a three strikes law, that would kick people offline based on accusations (not convictions) of infringement. A few months later, mainly due to massive public outcry, the government scrapped those plans and actually promised a complete rethink of copyright laws.

In a cable just after New Zealand decided to scrap the proposed law, the US embassy noted that it made it clear a new 3 strikes law needed to be put in place as soon as possible and saying that the US can help them write the new law.

...

The cables turned up a few other interesting tidbits from a bit further back, including the fact that a program -- run by the Recording Industry Association New Zealand (RIANZ) to set up a website and get people to snitch on their friends, reporting them as infringers -- was funded by the US government. Yes, the US government handed half a million dollars (New Zealand dollars) to the recording industry to get people to turn in their friends for copying music. Lovely.

Now, this is all pretty shameful stuff; but what makes it doubly so is the fact that New Zealand has recently passed precisely the kind of anti-consumer, pro-industry legislation that the US was demanding.

But consider what might have happened had these same cables surfaced *before* that crucial vote: doesn't it seem likely that quite a few New Zealand MPs would have been revolted by the massive US interference in their internal affairs? Might not enough have voted against the legislation to cause it to fall?

Maybe that wouldn't have happened, but given even the slight possibility, I have to ask why on earth Wikileaks held off publishing these cables that provided such crucial insights into what was going on behind the scenes?

Was this out of some new-found reluctance to influence the unfolding politics of a country? Given Wikileaks' track record, that hardly seems likely. Sadly, this looks more like a case of pure incompetence - only noticing what hugely important materials they had when it was too late for them to have much effect; or maybe - perhaps even worse - they just didn't care what happened in such a far-off land....

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In defence of hackers and open source

One of the reasons that I regard the rise of WikiLeaks as such a key event is that it is throwing an interesting light on so many areas – many of them unexpected. That includes the ethics of hackers and the world of open source.

On The H Open.

The Final Acts of ACTA

Although the current excitement over the gradual release of the Wikileaks documents is justified in that it concerns what is undoubtedly an important development for the future of the Internet, it has rather overshadowed another area where crucial decisions are being made: the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). In fact, ACTA finally seems to be nearing the end of its slow and painful crawl through the secret negotiation process that only recently we have been allowed glimpses of. And the more we learn, the more troublesome it is.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Jaron Lanier's Virtual Reality

There is now a well-established class of writers about the digital world whom I fondly dub the Old Curmudgeons. Basically, they agree, things there are getting worse all the time; this modern online nonsense is bad for us, and will give us all fallen arches or something. Leading exponents of this view include Nicholas Carr, Andrew Keen and Jaron Lanier.

I think Mr Lanier is the most interesting of these, because he has a solid technical background and has been creative in the digital sphere a long time. That makes his Savonarola-like denunciations of the same particularly striking.

Against that background, it was perhaps inevitable that he would weigh in on the Wikileaks business – and equally inevitable what his line would be, as his title makes clear: “The Hazards of Nerd Supremacy: The Case of WikiLeaks”.

If I had several hours to spare, I might try to go through it addressing his various arguments, many of which amount to unsubtantiated assertions about “The ideology that drives a lot of the online world”; ad-hominem sniping (for example, “we didn't necessarily get to know where Mr. Assange was at a given moment” - maybe because he is doing things a lot of governments and organisations don't like, and so discretion is the better part of valour); outright misapprehension (“Wikileaks isn't really a "wiki," but it is designed to look and feel like the Wikipedia” - er, well, no actually, it doesn't look like it in the slightest); and various straw men: “What if we come to be able to read each other's thoughts? Then there would be no thoughts. Your head has to be different from mine if you are to be a person with something to say to me” - as far as I am aware, nobody is calling for mandatory telepathy.

But I'd rather examine Lanier's peroration, because I think it exposes the fundamental flaw in his indubitably entertaining essay:

Anarchy and dictatorship are entwined in eternal resonance. One never exists for long without turning to the other, and then back again. The only way out is structure, also known as democracy.

We sanction secretive spheres in order to have our civilian sphere. We furthermore structure democracy so that the secretive spheres are contained and accountable to the civilian sphere, though that's not easy.

There is certainly an ever-present danger of betrayal. Too much power can accrue to those we have sanctioned to hold confidences, and thus we find that keeping a democracy alive is hard, imperfect, and infuriating work.

The flip side of responsibly held secrets, however, is trust. A perfectly open world, without secrets, would be a world without the need for trust, and therefore a world without trust. What a sad sterile place that would be:A perfect world for machines.

What the Wikileaks cables show is precisely that those sanctioned “secretive spheres” are not currently accountable to the civilian sphere. They show all the shady deals made in backrooms, the outright lies told to the public to keep us quiet, the connivance with big business to ensure that profit comes before ethics.

Lanier's logic seems to be that everything's fine and the revelations of Wikileaks will only mess things up. And until Wikileaks' revelations, people might have gone along with that analysis, since that was the story that governments were feeding us. But in the wake of Wikileaks, that is simply not a tenable position: as the words of diplomats delineate time and again, everything is not fine, and the social pact of accepting those “secretive spheres” in return for a responsible use of the advantage they bring has been broken.

I would love it to be the case that Lanier's analysis were true, and in some scaled-up, digitised version of Athenian democracy we could have a responsible wielding of state powers, with secrecy applied wisely and justly. But Wikileaks has confirmed what many have suspected, but hitherto been unable to prove: that politicians use secrecy to hide their continual and continuing breaches of the trust we placed in them.

Until they change in the light of what Wikileaks is showing, we cannot trust them as we did before. And the more they – and their defenders, however well intentioned – deny the situation revealed by their own words through Wikileaks, and try to stop us seeing it, by hook or by crook, the longer that is likely to take, and the messier it will be.

And given that proven record of abuse, when they do finally change we will need more transparency about what they are doing – but not *total* transparency, which is neither feasible nor necessary – to make sure that they are not falling back into their bad old ways under the convenient, comforting cover of secrecy.

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Lessons from WikiLeaks: Decentralise, Decentralise, Decentralise

Whether or not Wikileaks turns out to be a watershed in politics, there's another question of more immediate interest to the open source world: can the latter learn a key lesson from the measures taken against the Wikileaks operation?

These have included booting it off Amazon's servers and stopping donations through MasterCard, Visa or PayPal. That this happened without warning serves as a timely reminder that such centralized services have absolute and largely arbitrary power over their users.

On The H Open.

Things Fall Apart; the Centre Cannot Hold

One of the many fascinating aspects of the Wikileaks #cablegate saga is that, unusually, computer technology plays a central rather than peripheral role in all this. And not just any old computer technology, but specifically aspects that are key to the open source world.

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Limits to Openness

Unless you live in certain countries or read certain newspapers, you will have been deluged over the last few days with “revelations” from those US diplomatic cables that have been released by Wikileaks (if you somehow missed all this fun, try this excellent “Wikileaks Cablegate Roundup”.)

On Open Enterprise blog.

Wikileaks: the Web Watches and Waits

It's clearly still far too early to attempt to assess the impact of Wikileaks' latest mega-leak, this time of US secret cables, which is certainly a biggie:

The full set consists of 251,287 documents, comprising 261,276,536 words (seven times the size of "The Iraq War Logs", the world's previously largest classified information release).

The cables cover from 28th December 1966 to 28th February 2010 and originate from 274 embassies, consulates and diplomatic missions.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Transparency is in WikiLeaks' DNA

It is somewhat ironic that the man behind WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, is not a fan of being in the spotlight; and therefore perhaps poetic justice that he is increasingly the focus of in-depth profiles. The best one so far has just appeared in The New Yorker, and includes this memorable description:

WikiLeaks receives about thirty submissions a day, and typically posts the ones it deems credible in their raw, unedited state, with commentary alongside. Assange told me, “I want to set up a new standard: ‘scientific journalism.’ If you publish a paper on DNA, you are required, by all the good biological journals, to submit the data that has informed your research—the idea being that people will replicate it, check it, verify it. So this is something that needs to be done for journalism as well. There is an immediate power imbalance, in that readers are unable to verify what they are being told, and that leads to abuse.” Because Assange publishes his source material, he believes that WikiLeaks is free to offer its analysis, no matter how speculative.

I'm sure Sir John Sulston had no idea how far his idea of openness would be taken when he drew up the Bermuda Principles....

Australia Edges Us Towards the Digital Dark Ages

Last week, on my opendotdotdot blog, I was praising the Australian government for its moves to open up its data. I was rapidly – and rightly – taken to task in the comments for failing to mention that government's efforts to impose direct, low-level censorship on the country's Internet feed.

Although I was aware of these moves, I wasn't quite up to date on their progress. It seems that things have moved far and fast...

On Open Enterprise blog.

Mandelson's Power to Censor the Net

I and many others have already noted that the proposed Digital Economy Bill gives far too many sweeping powers to the government. According to this detailed analysis, looks like there's one more clause to worry about:

What is the problem with clause 11 that I am getting so alarmed about it? It amends the Communications Act 2003 to insert a new section 124H which would, if passed, give sweeping powers to the Secretary of State. It begins:

(1) The Secretary of State may at any time by order impose a technical obligation on internet service providers if the Secretary of State considers it appropriate in view of—

Pausing there. Note that this says nothing at all about copyright infringement. For example the power could be used to:

* order ISP's to block any web page found on the Internet Watch Foundation's list
* block specific undesireable sites (such as wikileaks)
* block specific kinds of traffic or protocols, such as any form of peer-to-peer
* throttle the bandwidth for particular kinds of serivce or to or from particular websites.

In short, pretty much anything.

And how might that be used?

The definition of a "technical obligation" and "technical measure" are inserted by clause 10:

A "technical obligation", in relation to an internet service provider, is an obligation for the provider to take a technical measure against particular subscribers to its service.

A "technical measure" is a measure that— (a) limits the speed or other capacity of the service provided to a subscriber; (b) prevents a subscriber from using the service to gain access to particular material, or limits such use; (c) suspends the service provided to a subscriber; or (d) limits the service provided to a subscriber in another way.

As you can see blocking wikileaks is simply a matter of applying a technical measure against all subscribers of any ISP.

Hidden away inside the Bill, there's unlimited - and arbitrary - censorship of any site the Secretary of State takes against:

Surely something must limit this power you ask? It seems not. The Secretary of State may make an order if "he considers it appropriate" in view of:

(a) an assessment carried out or steps taken by OFCOM under section 124G; or (b) any other consideration.

Where "any other consideration" could be anything. To their credit the Tories do seem to have realised that this particular alternative is overly permissive. Lord Howard of Rising and Lord de Mauley have proposed (in the first tranche of amendments proposed that the "or" be replaced by an "and".

What astonishes me is that there is no obligation for the Secretary of STate to even publish such an order, let alone subject it to the scrutiny of Parliament, yet he could fundamentally change the way the internet operates using it. Other orders made under other parts of the Bill will have to be made by statutory instrument and most will require Parliamentary approval. Not this one.

If this goes through, we are in deep trouble, people....

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Why, Actually, Are They Hiding ACTA?

One of the curious aspects of articles and posts about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is that it's all a kind of journalistic shadow-boxing. In the absence of the treaty text, everybody has been relying on leaks, and nudges and winks in the form of official FAQs and “summaries” to give them some clue as to its content....

On Open Enterprise blog.

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How to Save Investigative Journalism

There's increasing hand wringing over the fact that revenues at dead-tree newspapers are diving, leading to redundancies, and loss of the ability to conduct high-quality investigative journalism. At the same time, one of the best sources for investigative journalism, Wikileaks, is a bit short of dosh. Problem, meet solution: newspapers should fund Wikileaks.

Extreme Openness: the Rise of Wikileaks

There is a long journalistic tradition of looking back at the end of the year over the major events of the preceding 12 months - one that I have no intention of following. But I would like to point out an important development in the world of openness that has occurred over that time-span: the rise and rise of Wikileaks....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Wikileaks Tells It as It is

From a Wikileaks press release (not online as far as I can tell):

Wikileaks spokesman Jay Lim stated "The UK is increasingly viewed as medievil backwater with the worst speech protections in the Western world. We deplore the arrest of members of a registered political party for distributing what is clearly a political pamphlet supporting political policy positions."

"Medievil" just about sums it up....

We Have Nothing to Fear...

...but fear itself:

Americans' fear of a terrorism could create a mass outbreak of a psychosomatic illness -- even in absence of any real attack -- -- creating a fake epidemic that could overwhelm hospitals attempting to treat any real victims.

Adding to the confusion, the symptoms of a mass pyschogenic illness look much like symptoms of an anthrax attack, avian flu outbreak or chemical attack.

At least that's what the feds warned hospitals in a non-public 2006 communique recently published by the government sunshine site Wikileaks.

So not only does the so-called "war on terrorism" solve nothing, it creates its own problems.

Which is why the only *real* solution is not to be afraid....