Wikileaks tests internet freedom

Wik­ileaks bugs me because I don’t know whether to con­demn or praise what it has done with the recent release of diplo­matic communications.

Get­ting some context

To recap, wik­ileaks, a Swedish orga­ni­za­tion led by Julian Assange, an Aus­tralian cit­i­zen, got its hands on roughly 250,000 pages of com­mu­ni­ca­tions between Amer­i­can diplo­mats and other gov­ern­ment. The mate­ri­als were acquired in the same ille­gal fash­ion as things like the Pen­ta­gon papers, infor­ma­tion about Water­gate, or Valerie Plame’s ties to the CIA, but the reac­tion could not have been more different.

In the case of the Pen­ta­gon papers, the US gov­ern­ment went through the tra­di­tional legal chan­nels to try to stop pub­li­ca­tion and lost. In the case of Water­gate, Deep Throat, the gov­ern­ment infor­ma­tion was spilled the beans on the inner work­ing of the White House, was left untouched. And in the Plame affair, the only indicted per­son found his sen­tence com­muted by the President.

A strong reaction

How­ever, in the case of Wik­ileaks, Julian Assange, an Aus­tralian cit­i­zen, has been called a US trai­tor despite the fact that he’s not a US cit­i­zen. He’s also landed on an Inter­pol list over alle­ga­tion that he did not use a con­dom dur­ing sex, a vio­la­tion of Swedish law.

Mean­while, Ama­zon booted Wik­ileaks off its host­ing ser­vices, Pay­pal stopped pro­vid­ing dona­tion ser­vices to Wik­ileaks, and EveryDNS stopped pro­vid­ing web address­ing ser­vices for wikileaks.org. Effec­tively, there seems to have been a con­certed effort to keep Wik­ileaks offline by any means nec­es­sary. At the cur­rent time, the site has moved to a new address in Switzer­land: wikileaks.ch

Exam­in­ing the reaction

To be hon­est, I haven’t read any of the papers wik­ileaks. In fact, I wasn’t pay­ing much atten­tion to them even as the cables were released. I thought the leak was inter­est­ing but since it was based on doc­u­ments that were old and not clas­si­fied top secret, I fig­ured that it prob­a­bly was mostly gos­sip (as some­one who trav­elled a fair amount, I ended up spend­ing a fair amount of time around diplo­matic folks and it seems that this type of gos­sip was always in the background).

And, based on most of the report­ing, it turned out that yes, indeed, it was mostly gos­sip about pow­er­ful peo­ple. There were a few rev­e­la­tions about some of the cross-country nego­ti­a­tions (eg. Saudi push­ing the US to bomb Iran) but, for the most part, noth­ing there that any­one in diplo­matic cir­cle would not be aware off.

What was there, though, was the fact that such gos­sip exists and thus, it kind of pierced the appear­ance that diplo­macy is based on com­plex assess­ments and stud­ies. It destroyed the myth of the diplo­mat as some­one who put their own opin­ion aside and based their deci­sion on facts. And that, to most of the peo­ple diplo­matic cir­cle, was quite embarrassing.

In and of itself, that wasn’t enough to war­rant my inter­est though. What changed my view, and the rea­son I decided to devote this week’s entry to Wik­ileaks is the fact that the inter­net indus­try, tra­di­tion­ally a space where lib­er­tar­i­an­ism seem to fos­ter, seemed to act dif­fer­ently this time.

Out of step with past reactions

While many dig­er­atis have come out in the defense of hack­ers, copy­right pirates, and other free speech hedge cases, the online reac­tion seemed to now be mov­ing the other way. Ama­zon, for exam­ple, has been a sup­porter of the EFF in the past.

Mean­while, David Ule­vitch, the founder of Dyn­DNS, was pro­filed by the New York Times in 2007 and the fol­low­ing was an inter­est­ing take-away from the arti­cle:

Mr. Ule­vitch shies away from the idea that OpenDNS is part of the com­puter secu­rity mar­ket, which so far has grown to bil­lions of dol­lars in rev­enue while doing lit­tle to stem the tide of mal­ware that now per­vades the Internet.

“I don’t want to be seen as a secu­rity com­pany,” he said. “They live off the bad guys.”

Then, there was also the case of Pay­pal, which was ini­tially founded with a lib­er­tar­ian ethos and the goal to cre­ate an alter­nate cur­rency not dom­i­nated by any gov­ern­ment. A 2005 Rea­son mag­a­zine arti­cle lamented some of the depar­ture and reminded peo­ple of the history:

Thiel and Levchin had hoped Pay­Pal would grow to become an extra-governmental sys­tem of cur­rency, some­thing rem­i­nis­cent of the world described in Neal Stephenson’s novel Crypto­nom­i­con, in which pro­gram­mers use encryp­tion to cre­ate an off­shore data haven free from gov­ern­ment control.

But those all points to pre-existing sit­u­a­tion that would jus­tify why all those orga­ni­za­tion would sup­port Wik­ileaks over the last 4 years (accord­ing to Wikipedia, it was founded in 2006). It also would explain why all those orga­ni­za­tions sup­ported Wik­ileaks when it pub­lished the Stan­dard Oper­at­ing Pro­ce­dures for Guan­tanamo Bay in 2007, a set of doc­u­ments it clearly didn’t own. And the same crowd also seemed OK with Wik­ileaks dis­trib­ut­ing screen­shots from Sarah Palin’s email mail­box in 2008. When, in 2009, thou­sands of emails related to cli­mate research were dis­trib­uted again through Wik­ileaks, there didn’t seem to be an issue to host them. And when 500,000 pri­vate text mes­sages sent and received dur­ing the 9/11 dis­as­ter were released through wik­ileaks, there wasn’t much controversy.

In fact, all those doc­u­ments were released BEFORE wik­ileaks even joined Ama­zon as a host and wik­ileaks moved that con­tent to the Ama­zon cloud because it was look­ing for a more hack-proof host provider (at the time, though, they did not move the ille­gally acquired Iraq war doc­u­ments they were dis­trib­ut­ing to Amazon).

So the fact that Wik­ileak is a host of doc­u­ments that they didn’t own is hardly news. It is, really, at the core of their exis­tence and mis­sion. The trove of data they had was move to Ama­zon and it made news in tech cir­cles that they were mov­ing that way. Yet Ama­zon didn’t do a thing about it until this week, when they finally gave them the boot, saying:

WS does not pre-screen its cus­tomers, but it does have terms of ser­vice that must be fol­lowed. Wik­iLeaks was not fol­low­ing them. There were sev­eral parts they were vio­lat­ing. For exam­ple, our terms of ser­vice state that “you rep­re­sent and war­rant that you own or oth­er­wise con­trol all of the rights to the con­tent… that use of the con­tent you sup­ply does not vio­late this pol­icy and will not cause injury to any per­son or entity.”

Under Amazon’s own terms, the doc­u­ments that wik­ileaks was post­ing when it first came to Ama­zon could be con­strued as “caus­ing injury to per­son and entity.” Leaks inher­ently do so and it has been a tenet of good jour­nal­ism that leaks can cause injuries. I am sure that some of the doc­u­men­taries Net­flix is dis­trib­ut­ing over the Ama­zon plat­form do cause injury to a per­son or entity (as jour­nal­ism, good doc­u­men­tary mak­ing can reveal truths that can be inju­ri­ous to cer­tain par­ties) and yet I am not see­ing Ama­zon ask­ing Net­flix to move off its cloud.

So the ques­tion, for any­one with cloud-based offer­ings now is what to do. If you are a pub­lisher of any con­tent, do you run servers in the cloud and aug­ment them with your own infra­struc­ture so con­tent that may be deemed too hot to han­dle can be moved to servers oth­ers than the cloud ones?

A per­spec­tive from the courts

Wik­ileaks, to a large extent, is a case that has been 13 years in the mak­ing. In 1997, with ACLU vs. Reno, The United States Supreme Court estab­lished the broad­est right to free speech on the inter­net, by includ­ing the fol­low­ing text in their decision:

As a mat­ter of con­sti­tu­tional tra­di­tion, in the absence of evi­dence to the con­trary, we pre­sume that gov­ern­men­tal reg­u­la­tion of the con­tent of speech is more likely to inter­fere with the free exchange of ideas than to encour­age it. The inter­est in encour­ag­ing free­dom of expres­sion in a demo­c­ra­tic soci­ety out­weighs any the­o­ret­i­cal but unproven ben­e­fit of censorship.

Oppo­nents of wik­ileaks ought to con­sider those words. In that deci­sion, the court basi­cally extended first amend­ment sup­port to con­tent on the inter­net. For the unaware, the first amend­ment to the US con­sti­tu­tion reads as fol­lows (the empha­sis is mine):

Con­gress shall make no law respect­ing an estab­lish­ment of reli­gion, or pro­hibit­ing the free exer­cise thereof; or abridg­ing the free­dom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the peo­ple peace­ably to assem­ble, and to peti­tion the Gov­ern­ment for a redress of grievances.

But in the brave new world of cloud com­put­ing and the mod­ern inter­net, it doesn’t seem to be abuse by the gov­ern­ment that we have to fear but rather abuse by pri­vate enti­ties, who seem to set the bar at a much higher level. And that seems to be a very wor­ri­some trend.

The news challenge

Good jour­nal­ism some­times puts enti­ties and indi­vid­u­als at risk in order to ensure that our soci­ety as a whole is aware of what is being done in our name. How­ever, it often makes us squirm because it exposes things that are often dis­agree­able. But often, the only way to cor­rect mis­takes by our gov­ern­ment is to air them in pub­lic. In the august word of Louis Bran­deis, “Sun­light is said to be the best of dis­in­fec­tants; elec­tric light the most effi­cient police­man”. In a way, Wik­ileaks is walk­ing in Bran­deis foot­steps and reveal­ing to us all that there are no secrets, only infor­ma­tion you don’t yet have and in the process, it forc­ing all of us to think hard about what we want jour­nal­ism to look like in the 21st century.