Liberating Spaces

On February 15, 2011 Hillary Clinton, US Secretary of State, delivered his second speech on Internet Freedom or “Internet Rights & Wrongs: Choices and Challenges in a Networked World“. This the first part of a personal analysis of her speech. One, how to fit Wikileaks into a briefcase.

Hillary Clinton:

Fundamentally, the WikiLeaks incident began with an act of theft. Government documents were stolen, just the same as if they had been smuggled out in a briefcase.”

Well, no. It is not the same. The obvious: you don’t need a briefcase to smuggle digital information, that’s the beauty of it. Yes, this sounds so bloody stupid/obvious/clear, but it actually points to an important truth (remember: truth always hides behind obviousness and paradox): information is not “briefcasable” anymore, that is, it flows, it cannot be kept in a drawer or in anything physically encaged. It can be copied and recopied with no cost. The support where information is recorded has changed, the cost of distributing information has changed with it, basically it has dropped to nearly nothing. Therefore, in terms of physical and cognitive effort, disclosing the diplomatic cables is something that anybody could have done, you just need a slight motivational push to do it. This brings the action of doing it to a different level: it’s freaking easy.

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Writing this in the free ING internet gate area (all airports should have one!) in Warsaw’s Frederic Chopin Airport to fly through Riga to Stockholm, to visit the person who took this picture in Montmatre, Paris on January 2, 2011. Finally, I have some spare time to post it!

Funny way of showing how the Wikileaks affair has touched upon a very important issue for all of us: our right to know what governments are doing with our money, our people and to others aka freedom of information…

…and yes, you guessed it, she is Swedish, what it makes the picture even more amusing…the picture was surely taken with a big smile in her face…this post is written with a corresponding one

This internet our last channel to connect to the mark.
No rhetorical questions at last:
If we lose this frequency we’ll be left in the dark.

In the WikiRebels (previous post), an excellent documentary on Wikileaks and Julian Assange, an interesting figure has called my attention: Christian Whiton. Not because he is brilliant, or particularly original, quite for the opposite. He happens to represent what’s wrong with our current system: “we, the citizens, do not need to know what elites governing our societies are doing with our resources, and sometimes with our lives, to defend the so-called ‘national interest’”.

So according to what this person represents, “elites” (aka “a few people using their power on us”) are legitimated to hide from us what they do for the sake of a supposed national ethos they represent. We have no right to know they participation, either by knowing, permitting or even using, in Shell’s control of Nigeria. We have no right to know that Pfizer ‘used dirty tricks to avoid clinical trial payout‘ in Nigeria. We have no right to know that public officials, aka diplomats, work basically for the interests of big (and wealthy) private companies (e.g. Visa and Mastercard) with taxpayer’s money.

No, we don’t have this right, because they work for the national interest. The same national interest that has bailed out for millions and millions the financial crooks that live in the top of the tall buildings overlooking us. The same national interest that is pushing more and more people into marginalisation by cutting social expenditure, increasing indirect taxation and reducing corporate taxes. The same national interest that brought us to a deadly invasion (Iraq), a lost war (Afghanistan) and protects trade of weapons that kill innocent people by the thousands every day.

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Dear Sirs,

A few days ago, you froze Wikileaks account in a blatant attack against freedom of expression and information. You accused this organization/movement of illegal activities, while no court in no country has accused Wikileaks of such activities yet. Where is the presumption of innocence? The guarantees that we, who think we live in a democratic country, want to preserve? By freezing Wikileaks funds, you attacked all citizens that care about our freedoms.

Therefore, I do not wish to have any relation with your organization.

Best regards,
Alejandro Ribó

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“The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops.” – John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation

The first infowar has started. Wikileaks’s disclosures of confidential documents from the Pentagon and the State Department have triggered an aggressive reaction from those sources that want to keep us ignorant of their manipulations of societies, public opinions, governments >> us. In only a few days, Wikileaks’s .org domain has been cancelled, Amazon has closed Wikileaks’s web space and Paypal has frozen Wikileaks’s account. These actions are not only against Wikileaks. These are all attacks on all of us. They are attempts of stopping us of getting the information that’s ours, information that concerns all of us.

How a government, how a company can be legitimated to stop me of knowing that a foreign government is manipulating the justice system of my country to stop my fellow citizens to get justice for the murder of an honest man, a professional journalist, a brother, a son? How can we let them stop us from knowing that a foreign country is blackmailing my government to pass a law written by its big media companies? How do we allow them to stop anybody from knowing the injustices, the blackmail, the conspirations that elites are playing on all of us? Before we could have an excuse: we couldn’t be certain. Now there is no excuse. We shall not let them.

This is not a conventional war. It’s wage in the physical and in the virtual world. The infowarriors are not professional soldiers trained to kill, but citizens, like you and me, who can use their resources at hand to wage war on those that have manipulated us for so long. A war in which our principal weapon is information. Anybody, anyone who knows something, even the tiniest particle of information, has a weapon that can help one side or the other. Your eyes, your ears, your camera, your phone, your computer are your weapons. If you know something, share it. Alone it’s worthless, connected it’s powerful.

Their power is centralised. It comes from concentrating together economic and coercive resources. If the centre is gone, their power is gone. Our power is distributed. It comes from the networks we form. It comes from the spontaneous aggregation of the grains of our small actions. It comes from our capacity to act unexpectedly and strongly, and be quickly gone, letting our target confused, not knowing from where we came from. It comes from having millions of heads, and millions of bodies. We have what we need. If we want, we can.

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I remember very well the first (and only) time I met Julian Assange. It was November 21, 2009 in Barcelona during the first Personal Democracy Forum – Europe. Already then I was very interested in new technologies, transparency, freedom of information and disclosure and, therefore, on what Wikileaks was doing. At that time, Wikileaks was in a difficult period due to lack of funds.

A passionate and friendly Julian told me about their plans to enter into partnership with big media companies (El País, The Guardian, Le Monde and NYT) to provide them a source of money and, also, a bigger platform for their leaks. He also told me that they were sitting on very sensitive stuff that needed the right platform of diffusion…this was November 2009. One year later, Wikileaks is changing world politics.

From all what I read about cablegate, the latest Wikileaks’s publication, Aaron Bady’s piece on “Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy” is among the best. It is a commentary on early Assange’s writings on conspiracies, secrecy and the power of new technologies to open them. As zungzung says

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Dear Sirs,

Due to the position taken by Amazon.com inc. in relation to the hosting of Wikileaks.org on Amazon Web Services (http://aws.amazon.com/message/65348/), I would like to close without revocation and with immediate effect my account on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

In your public message, your argue that :

“…[Amazon Web Services] have terms of service that must be followed. WikiLeaks was not following them [...] 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.” It’s clear that WikiLeaks doesn’t own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content. Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren’t putting innocent people in jeopardy.”

I challenge these arguments:

1. Information published by Wikileaks is not owned (or controlled) by a specific person or organization, but it’s the property of all citizens, for it was produced using public resources under public function. Wikileaks or any other organization has the right, I would even say the obligation, to make public its content.

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