With every day, with every passing hour, the power of the state mobilises against WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, its titular leader.
The inner processes of statecraft have never been so completely exposed as they have been in the last week. The nation state has been revealed as some sort of long-running and unintentionally-comic soap opera. She doesn’t like him; he doesn’t like them; they don’t like any of us! Oh, and she’s been scouting around for DNA samples and your credit card number. You know, just in case.
None of it is very pretty, all of it is embarrassing, and the embarrassment extends well beyond the state actors - who are, after all, paid to lie and dissemble, this being one of the primary functions of any government - to the complicit and compliant news media, think tanks and all the other camp followers deeply invested in the preservation of the status quo. Formerly quiet seas are now roiling, while everyone with any authority everywhere is doing everything they can to close the gaps in the smooth functioning of power. They want all of this to disappear and be forgotten. For things to be as if WikiLeaks never was.
Meanwhile, the diplomatic cables slowly dribble out, a feed that makes last year’s MP expenses scandal in the UK seem like amateur theatre, an unpractised warm-up before the main event. Even the Afghan and Iraq war logs, released by WikiLeaks earlier this year, didn’t hold this kind of fascination. Nor did they attract this kind of upset. Every politician everywhere - from Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton to Vladimir Putin to Julia Gillard has felt compelled to express their strong and almost visceral anger. But to what? Only some diplomatic gossip.
Has Earth become a sort of amplified Facebook, where an in-crowd of Heathers, horrified, suddenly finds its bitchy secrets posted on a public forum? Is that what we’ve been reduced to? Or is that what we’ve been like all along? That could be the source of the anger. We now know that power politics and statecraft reduce to a few pithy lines referring to how much Berlusconi sleeps in the company of nubile young women and speculations about whether Medvedev really enjoys wearing the Robin costume.
It’s this triviality which has angered those in power. The mythology of power - that leaders are somehow more substantial, their concerns more elevated and lofty than us mere mortals, who must not question their motives - that mythology has been definitively busted. This is the final terminus of aristocracy; a process that began on July 14, 1789 came to a conclusive end on November 28, 2010. The new aristocracies of democracy have been smashed, trundled off to the guillotine of the internet, and beheaded.
Of course, the state isn’t going to take its own destruction lying down. Nothing is ever that simple. And so, over the last week we’ve been able to watch the systematic dismantling of WikiLeaks. First came the condemnation, then, hot on the heels of the shouts of ‘off with his head’ for ‘traitor’ Julian Assange, came the technical attacks, each one designed to amputate one part of the body of the organisation.
First up, that old favourite, the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which involves harnessing tens of thousands of hacked PCs (perhaps yours, or your mom’s, or your daughter’s) to broadcast tens of millions of faux requests for information to WikiLeaks’ computers. This did manage to bring WikiLeaks to its knees (surprising for an organisation believed to be rather paranoid about security), so WikiLeaks moved to a backup server, purchasing computing resources from Amazon, which runs a ‘cloud’ of hundreds of thousands of computers available for rent. Amazon, paranoid about customer reliability, easily fended off the DDoS attacks, but came under another kind of pressure. US Senator Joe Lieberman told Amazon to cut WikiLeaks off, and within a few hours Amazon had suddenly realised that WikiLeaks violated their Terms of Service, kicking them off Amazon’s systems.
You know what Terms of Service are? They are the too-long agreements you always accept and click through on a website, or when you install some software, etc. In the fine print of that agreement any service provider will always be able to find some reason, somewhere, for terminating the service, charging you a fee, or - well, pretty much whatever they like. It’s the legal cudgel that companies use to have their way with you. Do you reckon that every other Amazon customer complies with its Terms of Service? If you do, I have a bridge you might be interested in.
More:
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/41846.html