As The World Wikileaks: Abstracts From The Blast Shack

Bruce Sterling is an award winning science fiction author and a founder of the cyberpunk literary movement. He is a self admitted hacker and authors a blog, “Beyond the Basics” on Wired.com.

When asked for his opinion regarding Wikileaks, Bruce Sterling beautifully paints a narrative of the Wikileaks saga as well as the events which precede it. The story opens with an idea written by Timothy May in 1992, “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto,” which “was all about anonymity, and encryption, and the Internet, and all about how wacky data-obsessed subversives could get up to all kinds of globalized mischief without any fear of repercussion from the blinkered authorities.” May then describes “BlackNet,” the State’s fictional response to combat the above initiative.

By Brett Mullins

May’s idea of transparency verses suppression transcends time as it is representative today of Wikileaks and the NSA. “The NSA is the very antithesis of transparency, and accountability, and free elections, and free expression, and separation of powers — in other words, the NSA is a kind of giant, grown-up, anti-Wikileaks.“ The duality of the situation is quite apparent as “the NSA is the world’s most public unknown secret agency,” while “Wikileaks has been the world’s most blatant, most publicly praised, encrypted underground site.”

As we broach the scale of the Wikileaks saga, “every weirdo involved immediately becomes a larger-than-life figure.” Bradley Manning, the “hacker in uniform” who provided the diplomatic cables, “was a bored, resentful, lower-echelon guy in a dead end, who discovered some awesome capacities in his system that his bosses never knew it had.”

When compared to Manning, Julian Assange is a stark contrast in so far that “Assange has carefully built this role for himself... with all the minute concentration of some geek assembling a Rubik’s Cube.”
Above all else, Manning and Assange are both hackers.  This is to say that, while they are both dissidents, they are motivated by forces other than political advantage.  Assange, for example, cares not about what country his organization has information on, but how many documents they are able to leak. This is illustrated by the release of documents concerning Kenya.

This has created a “godawful mess” in regards to diplomatic relations.  Diplomats “personify nations, and nations are brutal, savage, feral entities.” As a result of this, diplomats often find themselves faced with jeopardous situations hiding only behind “discretion;... when diplomats tell foreigners what they really think, war results.”

“US diplomats used to know what to do with dissidents in other nations. If they were communists they got briskly repressed, but if they had anything like a free-market outlook, then US diplomats had a whole arsenal of gentle and supportive measures; Radio Free Europe, publication in the West, awards, foreign travel, flattery, moral support; discreet things, in a word, but exceedingly useful things.”  

While the US has Manning locked away in a military prision, Assange remains at large. However, “it’s not just about him and the burning urge to punish him; it’s about the public risks to the reputation of the USA.” The NSA and other information gathering agencies function to intercept data from other nations for their host nation’s consumption. The irony of the situation presents itself as “if Assange had happened to out the cable-library of some outlaw pariah state, say, Paraguay or North Korea, the US State Department would be heaping lilies at his feet.”

“The world has lousy diplomacy now.” Even before the release of the cables, as a result of the occupations in the Middle East, in addition to mounting tensions elsewhere in the world, nations were not able “to coherently tackle heroin, hydrogen bombs, global warming and financial collapse.” The truth is: “this is gonna get worse before it gets better, and it’s gonna get worse for a long time. Like leaks in a house where the pipes froze.”

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Comments

[warren]

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