The Blast Shack
We asked Bruce Sterling (who spoke at Webstock ’09) for his take on Wikileaks.
The Wikileaks Cablegate scandal is the most exciting and interesting hacker scandal ever. I rather commonly write about such things, and I’m surrounded by online acquaintances who take a burning interest in every little jot and tittle of this ongoing saga. So it’s going to take me a while to explain why this highly newsworthy event fills me with such a chilly, deadening sense of Edgar Allen Poe melancholia.
But it sure does.
Part of this dull, icy feeling, I think, must be the agonizing slowness with which this has happened. At last — at long last — the homemade nitroglycerin in the old cypherpunks blast shack has gone off. Those “cypherpunks,” of all people.
Way back in 1992, a brainy American hacker called Timothy C. May made up a sci-fi tinged idea that he called “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.” This exciting screed — I read it at the time, and boy was it ever cool — 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. If you were of a certain technoculture bent in the early 1990s, you had to love a thing like that.
As Tim blithely remarked to his fellow encryption enthusiasts, “The State will of course try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders, and fears of societal disintegration. Many of these concerns will be valid; crypto anarchy will allow national secrets to be traded freely,” and then Tim started getting really interesting. Later, May described an institution called “BlackNet” which might conceivably carry out these aims.
Nothing much ever happened with Tim May’s imaginary BlackNet. It was the kind of out-there concept that science fiction writers like to put in novels. Because BlackNet was clever, and fun to think about, and it made impossible things seem plausible, and it was fantastic and also quite titillating. So it was the kind of farfetched but provocative issue that ought to be properly raised within a sci-fi public discourse. Because, you know, that would allow plenty of time to contemplate the approaching trainwreck and perhaps do something practical about it.
Nobody did much of anything practical. For nigh on twenty long years, nothing happened with the BlackNet notion, for good or ill. Why? Because thinking hard and eagerly about encryption involves a certain mental composition which is alien to normal public life. Crypto guys — (and the cypherpunks were all crypto guys, mostly well-educated, mathematically gifted middle-aged guys in Silicon Valley careers) — are geeks. They’re harmless geeks, they’re not radical politicians or dashing international crime figures.
Cypherpunks were visionary Californians from the WIRED magazine circle. In their personal lives, they were as meek and low-key as any average code-cracking spook who works for the National Security Agency. These American spooks from Fort Meade are shy and retiring people, by their nature. In theory, the NSA could create every kind of flaming scandalous mayhem with their giant Echelon spy system — but in practice, they would much rather sit there gently reading other people’s email.
One minute’s thought would reveal that a vast, opaque electronic spy outfit like the National Security Agency is exceedingly dangerous to democracy. Really, it is. The NSA clearly violates all kinds of elementary principles of constitutional design. 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. And it always has been. And we’re used to that. We pay no mind.
The NSA, this crypto empire, is a long-lasting fact on the ground that we’ve all informally agreed not to get too concerned about. Even foreign victims of the NSA’s machinations can’t seem to get properly worked-up about its capacities and intrigues. The NSA has been around since 1947. It’s a little younger than the A-Bomb, and we don’t fuss much about that now, either.
The geeks who man the NSA don’t look much like Julian Assange, because they have college degrees, shorter haircuts, better health insurance and far fewer stamps in their passports. But the sources of their power are pretty much identical to his. They use computers and they get their mitts on info that doesn’t much wanna be free.
Every rare once in a while, the secretive and discreet NSA surfaces in public life and does something reprehensible, such as defeating American federal computer-security initiatives so that they can continue to eavesdrop at will. But the NSA never becomes any big flaming Wikileaks scandal. Why? Because, unlike their wannabe colleagues at Wikileaks, the apparatchiks of the NSA are not in the scandal business. They just placidly sit at the console, reading everybody’s diplomatic cables.
This is their function. The NSA is an eavesdropping outfit. Cracking the communications of other governments is its reason for being. The NSA are not unique entities in the shadows of our planet’s political landscape. Every organized government gives that a try. It’s a geopolitical fact, although it’s not too discreet to dwell on it.
You can walk to most any major embassy in any major city in the world, and you can see that it is festooned with wiry heaps of electronic spying equipment. Don’t take any pictures of the roofs of embassies, as they grace our public skylines. Guards will emerge to repress you.
Now, Tim May and his imaginary BlackNet were the sci-fi extrapolation version of the NSA. A sort of inside-out, hippiefied NSA. Crypto people were always keenly aware of the NSA, for the NSA were the people who harassed them for munitions violations and struggled to suppress their academic publications. Creating a BlackNet is like having a pet, desktop NSA. Except, that instead of being a vast, federally-supported nest of supercomputers under a hill in Maryland, it’s a creaky, homemade, zero-budget social-network site for disaffected geeks.
But who cared about that wild notion? Why would that amateurish effort ever matter to real-life people? It’s like comparing a mighty IBM mainframe to some cranky Apple computer made inside a California garage. Yes, it’s almost that hard to imagine.
So Wikileaks is a manifestation of something that has been growing all around us, for decades, with volcanic inexorability. The NSA is the world’s most public unknown secret agency. And for four years now, its twisted sister Wikileaks has been the world’s most blatant, most publicly praised, encrypted underground site.
Wikileaks is “underground” in the way that the NSA is “covert”; not because it’s inherently obscure, but because it’s discreetly not spoken about.
The NSA is “discreet,” so, somehow, people tolerate it. Wikileaks is “transparent,” like a cardboard blast shack full of kitchen-sink nitroglycerine in a vacant lot.
That is how we come to the dismal saga of Wikileaks and its ongoing Cablegate affair, which is a melancholy business, all in all. The scale of it is so big that every weirdo involved immediately becomes a larger-than-life figure. But they’re not innately heroic. They’re just living, mortal human beings, the kind of geeky, quirky, cyberculture loons that I run into every day. And man, are they ever going to pay.
Now we must contemplate Bradley Manning, because he was the first to immolate himself. Private Manning was a young American, a hacker-in-uniform, bored silly while doing scarcely necessary scutwork on a military computer system in Iraq. Private Manning had dozens of reasons for becoming what computer-security professionals call the “internal threat.”
His war made no sense on its face, because it was carried out in a headlong pursuit of imaginary engines of mass destruction. The military occupation of Iraq was endless. Manning, a tender-hearted geek, was overlooked and put-upon by his superiors. Although he worked around the clock, he had nothing of any particular military consequence to do.
It did not occur to his superiors that a bored soldier in a poorly secured computer system would download hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables. Because, well, why? They’re very boring. Soldiers never read them. The malefactor has no use for them. They’re not particularly secret. They’ve got nothing much to do with his war. He knows his way around the machinery, but Bradley Manning is not any kind of blackhat programming genius.
Instead, he’s very like Jerome Kerviel, that obscure French stock trader who stole 5 billion euros without making one dime for himself. Jerome Kerviel, just like Bradley Manning, 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. It makes so little sense to behave like Kerviel and Manning that their threat can’t be imagined. A weird hack like that is self-defeating, and it’s sure to bring terrible repercussions to the transgressor. But then the sad and sordid days grind on and on; and that blindly potent machinery is just sitting there. Sitting there, tempting the user.
Bradley Manning believes the sci-fi legendry of the underground. He thinks that he can leak a quarter of a million secret cables, protect himself with neat-o cryptography, and, magically, never be found out. So Manning does this, and at first he gets away with it, but, still possessed by the malaise that haunts his soul, he has to brag about his misdeed, and confess himself to a hacker confidante who immediately ships him to the authorities.
No hacker story is more common than this. The ingenuity poured into the machinery is meaningless. The personal connections are treacherous. Welcome to the real world.
So Private Manning, cypherpunk, is immediately toast.
No army can permit this kind of behavior and remain a functional army; so Manning is in solitary confinement and he is going to be court-martialled. With more political awareness, he might have made himself a public martyr to his conscience; but he lacks political awareness. He has only his black-hat hacker awareness, which is all about committing awesome voyeuristic acts of computer intrusion and imagining you can get away with that when it really matters to people.
The guy preferred his hacker identity to his sworn fidelity to the uniform of a superpower. The shear-forces there are beyond his comprehension.
The reason this upsets me is that I know so many people just like Bradley Manning. Because I used to meet and write about hackers, “crackers,” “darkside hackers,” “computer underground” types. They are a subculture, but once you get used to their many eccentricities, there is nothing particularly remote or mysterious or romantic about them. They are banal. Bradley Manning is a young, mildly brainy, unworldly American guy who probably would have been pretty much okay if he’d been left alone to skateboard, read comic books and listen to techno music.
Instead, Bradley had to leak all over the third rail. Through historical circumstance, he’s become a miserable symbolic point-man for a global war on terror. He doesn’t much deserve that role. He’s got about as much to do with the political aspects of his war as Monica Lewinsky did with the lasting sexual mania that afflicts the American Republic.
That is so dispiriting and ugly. As a novelist, I never think of Monica Lewinsky, that once-everyday young woman, without a sense of dread at the freakish, occult fate that overtook her. Imagine what it must be like, to wake up being her, to face the inevitability of being That Woman. Monica, too, transgressed in apparent safety and then she had the utter foolishness to brag to a lethal enemy, a trusted confidante who ran a tape machine and who brought her a mediated circus of hells. The titillation of that massive, shattering scandal has faded now. But think of the quotidian daily horror of being Monica Lewinsky, and that should take a bite from the soul.
Bradley Manning now shares that exciting, oh my God, Monica Lewinsky, tortured media-freak condition. This mild little nobody has become super-famous, and in his lonely military brig, screenless and without a computer, he’s strictly confined and, no doubt, he’s horribly bored. I don’t want to condone or condemn the acts of Bradley Manning. Because legions of people are gonna do that for me, until we’re all good and sick of it, and then some. I don’t have the heart to make this transgressor into some hockey-puck for an ideological struggle. I sit here and I gloomily contemplate his all-too-modern situation with a sense of Sartrean nausea.
Commonly, the authorities don’t much like to crush apple-cheeked white-guy hackers like Bradley Manning. It’s hard to charge hackers with crimes, even when they gleefully commit them, because it’s hard to find prosecutors and judges willing to bone up on the drudgery of understanding what they did. But they’ve pretty much got to make a purée out of this guy, because of massive pressure from the gravely embarrassed authorities. Even though Bradley lacks the look and feel of any conventional criminal; wrong race, wrong zipcode, wrong set of motives.
Bradley’s gonna become a “spy” whose “espionage” consisted of making the activities of a democratic government visible to its voting population. With the New York Times publishing the fruits of his misdeeds. Some set of American prosecutorial lawyers is confronting this crooked legal hairpin right now. I feel sorry for them.
Then there is Julian Assange, who is a pure-dye underground computer hacker. Julian doesn’t break into systems at the moment, but he’s not an “ex-hacker,” he’s the silver-plated real deal, the true avant-garde. Julian is a child of the underground hacker milieu, the digital-native as twenty-first century cypherpunk. As far as I can figure, Julian has never found any other line of work that bore any interest for him.
Through dint of years of cunning effort, Assange has worked himself into a position where his “computer crimes” are mainly political. They’re probably not even crimes. They are “leaks.” Leaks are nothing special. They are tidbits from the powerful that every journalist gets on occasion, like crumbs of fishfood on the top of the media tank.
Only, this time, thanks to Manning, Assange has brought in a massive truckload of media fishfood. It’s not just some titillating, scandalous, floating crumbs. There’s a quarter of a million of them. He’s become the one-man global McDonald’s of leaks.
Ever the detail-freak, Assange in fact hasn’t shipped all the cables he received from Manning. Instead, he cunningly encrypted the cables and distributed them worldwide to thousands of fellow-travellers. This stunt sounds technically impressive, although it isn’t. It’s pretty easy to do, and nobody but a cypherpunk would think that it made any big difference to anybody. It’s part and parcel of Assange’s other characteristic activities, such as his inability to pack books inside a box while leaving any empty space.
While others stare in awe at Assange’s many otherworldly aspects — his hairstyle, his neatness, his too-precise speech, his post-national life out of a laptop bag — I can recognize him as pure triple-A outsider geek. Man, I know a thousand modern weirdos like that, and every single one of them seems to be on my Twitter stream screaming support for Assange because they can recognize him as a brother and a class ally. They are in holy awe of him because, for the first time, their mostly-imaginary and lastingly resentful underclass has landed a serious blow in a public arena. Julian Assange has hacked a superpower.
He didn’t just insult the captain of the global football team; he put spycams in the locker room. He showed the striped-pants set without their pants. This a massively embarrassing act of technical voyeurism. It’s like Monica and her stains and kneepads, only even more so.
Now, I wish I could say that I feel some human pity for Julian Assange, in the way I do for the hapless, one-shot Bradley Manning, but I can’t possibly say that. Pity is not the right response, because Assange has carefully built this role for himself. He did it with all the minute concentration of some geek assembling a Rubik’s Cube.
In that regard, one’s hat should be off to him. He’s had forty years to learn what he was doing. He’s not some miserabilist semi-captive like the uniformed Bradley Manning. He’s a darkside player out to stick it to the Man. The guy has surrounded himself with the cream of the computer underground, wily old rascals like Rop Gonggrijp and the fearsome Teutonic minions of the Chaos Computer Club.
Assange has had many long, and no doubt insanely detailed, policy discussions with all his closest allies, about every aspect of his means, motives and opportunities. And he did what he did with fierce resolve.
Furthermore, and not as any accident, Assange has managed to alienate everyone who knew him best. All his friends think he’s nuts. I’m not too thrilled to see that happen. That’s not a great sign in a consciousness-raising, power-to-the-people, radical political-leader type. Most successful dissidents have serious people skills and are way into revolutionary camaraderie and a charismatic sense of righteousness. They’re into kissing babies, waving bloody shirts, and keeping hope alive. Not this chilly, eldritch guy. He’s a bright, good-looking man who — let’s face it — can’t get next to women without provoking clumsy havoc and a bitter and lasting resentment. That’s half the human race that’s beyond his comprehension there, and I rather surmise that, from his stern point of view, it was sure to be all their fault.
Assange was in prison for a while lately, and his best friend in the prison was his Mom. That seems rather typical of him. Obviously Julian knew he was going to prison; a child would know it. He’s been putting on his Solzhenitsyn clothes and combing his forelock for that role for ages now. I’m a little surprised that he didn’t have a more organized prison-support committee, because he’s a convicted computer criminal who’s been through this wringer before. Maybe he figures he’ll reap more glory if he’s martyred all alone.
I rather doubt the authorities are any happier to have him in prison. They pretty much gotta feed him into their legal wringer somehow, but a botched Assange show-trial could do colossal damage. There’s every likelihood that the guy could get off. He could walk into an American court and come out smelling of roses. It’s the kind of show-trial judo every repressive government fears.
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 superpower hypocrisy here is gonna be hard to bear. The USA loves to read other people’s diplomatic cables. They dote on doing it. 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. They’d be a little upset about his violation of the strict proprieties, but they’d also take keen satisfaction in the hilarious comeuppance of minor powers that shouldn’t be messing with computers, unlike the grandiose, high-tech USA.
Unfortunately for the US State Department, they clearly shouldn’t have been messing with computers, either. In setting up their SIPRnet, they were trying to grab the advantages of rapid, silo-free, networked communication while preserving the hierarchical proprieties of official confidentiality. That’s the real issue, that’s the big modern problem; national governments and global computer networks don’t mix any more. It’s like trying to eat a very private birthday cake while also distributing it. That scheme is just not working. And that failure has a face now, and that’s Julian Assange.
Assange didn’t liberate the dreadful secrets of North Korea, not because the North Koreans lack computers, but because that isn’t a cheap and easy thing that half-a-dozen zealots can do. But the principle of it, the logic of doing it, is the same. Everybody wants everybody else’s national government to leak. Every state wants to see the diplomatic cables of every other state. It will bend heaven and earth to get them. It’s just, that sacred activity is not supposed to be privatized, or, worse yet, made into the no-profit, shareable, have-at-it fodder for a network society, as if global diplomacy were so many mp3s. Now the US State Department has walked down the thorny road to hell that was first paved by the music industry. Rock and roll, baby.
Now, in strict point of fact, Assange didn’t blandly pirate the massive hoard of cables from the US State Department. Instead, he was busily “redacting” and minutely obeying the proprieties of his political cover in the major surviving paper dailies. Kind of a nifty feat of social-engineering there; but he’s like a poacher who machine-gunned a herd of wise old elephants and then went to the temple to assume the robes of a kosher butcher. That is a world-class hoax.
Assange is no more a “journalist” than he is a crypto mathematician. He’s a darkside hacker who is a self-appointed, self-anointed, self-educated global dissident. He’s a one-man Polish Solidarity, waiting for the population to accrete around his stirring propaganda of the deed. And they are accreting; not all of ’em, but, well, it doesn’t take all of them.
Julian Assange doesn’t want to be in power; he has no people skills at all, and nobody’s ever gonna make him President Vaclav Havel. He’s certainly not in it for the money, because he wouldn’t know what to do with the cash; he lives out of a backpack, and his daily routine is probably sixteen hours online. He’s not gonna get better Google searches by spending more on his banned MasterCard. I don’t even think Assange is all that big on ego; I know authors and architects, so I’ve seen much worse than Julian in that regard. He’s just what he is; he’s something we don’t yet have words for.
He’s a different, modern type of serious troublemaker. He’s certainly not a “terrorist,” because nobody is scared and no one got injured. He’s not a “spy,” because nobody spies by revealing the doings of a government to its own civil population. He is orthogonal. He’s asymmetrical. He panics people in power and he makes them look stupid. And I feel sorry for them. But sorrier for the rest of us.
Julian Assange’s extremely weird version of dissident “living in truth” doesn’t bear much relationship to the way that public life has ever been arranged. It does, however, align very closely to what we’ve done to ourselves by inventing and spreading the Internet. If the Internet was walking around in public, it would look and act a lot like Julian Assange. The Internet is about his age, and it doesn’t have any more care for the delicacies of profit, propriety and hierarchy than he does.
So Julian is heading for a modern legal netherworld, the slammer, the electronic parole cuff, whatever; you can bet there will be surveillance of some kind wherever he goes, to go along with the FREE ASSANGE stencils and xeroxed flyers that are gonna spring up in every coffee-bar, favela and university on the planet. A guy as personally hampered and sociopathic as Julian may in fact thrive in an inhuman situation like this. Unlike a lot of keyboard-hammering geeks, he’s a serious reader and a pretty good writer, with a jailhouse-lawyer facility for pointing out weaknesses in the logic of his opponents, and boy are they ever. Weak, that is. They are pathetically weak.
Diplomats have become weak in the way that musicians are weak. Musicians naturally want people to pay real money for music, but if you press them on it, they’ll sadly admit that they don’t buy any music themselves. Because, well, they’re in the business, so why should they? And the same goes for diplomats and discreet secrets.
The one grand certainty about the consumers of Cablegate is that diplomats are gonna be reading those stolen cables. Not hackers: diplomats. Hackers bore easily, and they won’t be able to stand the discourse of intelligent trained professionals discussing real-life foreign affairs.
American diplomats are gonna read those stolen cables, though, because they were supposed to read them anyway, even though they didn’t. Now, they’ve got to read them, with great care, because they might get blindsided otherwise by some wisecrack that they typed up years ago.
And, of course, every intelligence agency and every diplomat from every non-American agency on Earth is gonna fire up computers and pore over those things. To see what American diplomacy really thought about them, or to see if they were ignored (which is worse), and to see how the grownups ran what was basically a foreign-service news agency that the rest of us were always forbidden to see.
This stark fact makes them all into hackers. Yes, just like Julian. They’re all indebted to Julian for this grim thing that he did, and as they sit there hunched over their keyboards, drooling over their stolen goodies, they’re all, without exception, implicated in his doings. Assange is never gonna become a diplomat, but he’s arranged it so that diplomats henceforth are gonna be a whole lot more like Assange. They’ll behave just like him. They receive the goods just like he did, semi-surreptitiously. They may be wearing an ascot and striped pants, but they’ve got that hacker hunch in their necks and they’re staring into the glowing screen.
And I don’t much like that situation. It doesn’t make me feel better. I feel sorry for them and what it does to their values, to their self-esteem. If there’s one single watchword, one central virtue, of the diplomatic life, it’s “discretion.” Not “transparency.” Diplomatic discretion. Discretion is why diplomats do not say transparent things to foreigners. When diplomats tell foreigners what they really think, war results.
Diplomats are people who speak from nation to nation. They personify nations, and nations are brutal, savage, feral entities. Diplomats used to have something in the way of an international community, until the Americans decided to unilaterally abandon that in pursuit of Bradley Manning’s oil war. Now nations are so badly off that they can’t even get it together to coherently tackle heroin, hydrogen bombs, global warming and financial collapse. Not to mention the Internet.
The world has lousy diplomacy now. It’s dysfunctional. The world corps diplomatique are weak, really weak, and the US diplomatic corps, which used to be the senior and best-engineered outfit there, is rattling around bottled-up in blast-proofed bunkers. It’s scary how weak and useless they are.
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. Now they’re harassing Julian by turning those tools backwards.
For a US diplomat, Assange is like some digitized nightmare-reversal of a kindly Cold War analog dissident. He read the dissident playbook and he downloaded it as a textfile; but, in fact, Julian doesn’t care about the USA. It’s just another obnoxious national entity. He happens to be more or less Australian, and he’s no great enemy of America. If he’d had the chance to leak Australian cables he would have leapt on that with the alacrity he did on Kenya. Of course, when Assange did it to that meager little Kenya, all the grown-ups thought that was groovy; he had to hack a superpower in order to touch the third rail.
But the American diplomatic corps, and all it thinks it represents, is just collateral damage between Assange and his goal. He aspires to his transparent crypto-utopia in the way George Bush aspired to imaginary weapons of mass destruction. And the American diplomatic corps are so many Iraqis in that crusade. They’re the civilian casualties.
As a novelist, you gotta like the deep and dark irony here. As somebody attempting to live on a troubled world… I dunno. It makes one want to call up the Red Cross and volunteer to fund planetary tranquilizers.
I’ve met some American diplomats; not as many as I’ve met hackers, but a few. Like hackers, diplomats are very intelligent people; unlike hackers, they are not naturally sociopathic. Instead, they have to be trained that way in the national interest. I feel sorry for their plight. I can enter into the shame and bitterness that afflicts them now.
The cables that Assange leaked have, to date, generally revealed rather eloquent, linguistically gifted American functionaries with a keen sensitivity to the feelings of aliens. So it’s no wonder they were of dwindling relevance and their political masters paid no attention to their counsels. You don’t have to be a citizen of this wracked and threadbare superpower — (you might, for instance, be from New Zealand) — in order to sense the pervasive melancholy of an empire in decline. There’s a House of Usher feeling there. Too many prematurely buried bodies.
For diplomats, a massive computer leak is not the kind of sunlight that chases away corrupt misbehavior; it’s more like some dreadful shift in the planetary atmosphere that causes ultraviolet light to peel their skin away. They’re not gonna die from being sunburned in public without their pants on; Bill Clinton survived that ordeal, Silvio Berlusconi just survived it (again). No scandal lasts forever; people do get bored. Generally, you can just brazen it out and wait for the public to find a fresher outrage. Except.
It’s the damage to the institutions that is spooky and disheartening; after the Lewinsky eruption, every American politician lives in permanent terror of a sex-outing. That’s “transparency,” too; it’s the kind of ghastly sex-transparency that Julian himself is stuck crotch-deep in. The politics of personal destruction hasn’t made the Americans into a frank and erotically cheerful people. On the contrary, the US today is like some creepy house of incest divided against itself in a civil cold war. “Transparency” can have nasty aspects; obvious, yet denied; spoken, but spoken in whispers. Very Edgar Allen Poe.
That’s our condition. It’s a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel, but it’s not a comedy that the planet’s general cultural situation is so clearly getting worse. As I sit here moping over Julian Assange, I’d love to pretend that this is just me in a personal bad mood; in the way that befuddled American pundits like to pretend that Julian is some kind of unique, demonic figure. He isn’t. If he ever was, he sure as hell isn’t now, as “Indoleaks,” “Balkanleaks” and “Brusselsleaks” spring up like so many filesharing whackamoles. Of course the Internet bedroom legions see him, admire him, and aspire to be like him — and they will. How could they not?
Even though, as major political players go, Julian Assange seems remarkably deprived of sympathetic qualities. Most saintly leaders of the oppressed masses, most wannabe martyrs, are all keen to kiss-up to the public. But not our Julian; clearly, he doesn’t lack for lust and burning resentment, but that kind of gregarious, sweaty political tactility is beneath his dignity. He’s extremely intelligent, but, as a political, social and moral actor, he’s the kind of guy who gets depressed by the happiness of the stupid.
I don’t say these cruel things about Julian Assange because I feel distant from him, but, on the contrary, because I feel close to him. I don’t doubt the two of us would have a lot to talk about. I know hordes of men like him; it’s just that they are programmers, mathematicians, potheads and science fiction fans instead of fiercely committed guys who aspire to topple the international order and replace it with subversive wikipedians.
The chances of that ending well are about ten thousand to one. And I don’t doubt Assange knows that. This is the kind of guy who once wrote an encryption program called “Rubberhose,” because he had it figured that the cops would beat his password out of him, and he needed some code-based way to finesse his own human frailty. Hey, neat hack there, pal.
So, well, that’s the general situation with this particular scandal. I could go on about it, but I’m trying to pace myself. This knotty situation is not gonna “blow over,” because it’s been building since 1993 and maybe even 1947. “Transparency” and “discretion” are virtues, but they are virtues that clash. The international order and the global Internet are not best pals. They never were, and now that’s obvious.
The data held by states is gonna get easier to steal, not harder to steal; the Chinese are all over Indian computers, the Indians are all over Pakistani computers, and the Russian cybermafia is brazenly hosting wikileaks.info because that’s where the underground goes to the mattresses. It is a godawful mess. 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.
Well… every once in a while, a situation that’s one-in-a-thousand is met by a guy who is one in a million. It may be that Assange is, somehow, up to this situation. Maybe he’s gonna grow in stature by the massive trouble he has caused. Saints, martyrs, dissidents and freaks are always wild-cards, but sometimes they’re the only ones who can clear the general air. Sometimes they become the catalyst for historical events that somehow had to happen. They don’t have to be nice guys; that’s not the point. Julian Assange did this; he direly wanted it to happen. He planned it in nitpicky, obsessive detail. Here it is; a planetary hack.
I don’t have a lot of cheery hope to offer about his all-too-compelling gesture, but I dare to hope he’s everything he thinks he is, and much, much, more.
Bruce Sterling
Best insight on this issue I’ve read to date. Bravo!
Bruce creates some new white superheroes and villains for 21th Century…Impressive all of the players including Bruce..
stunning! you’ve nailed that ‘welling inevitability’ feeling that started on the bbs’s 20 years ago and has now brought us here…like a copy of phrack was breathed into life and is now doing interviews on TV 🙂 i do hope you consider writing a book when this is all over (!?)
Not a bad piece of fiction, though rather cookie-cutter in terms of characterisation.
Oh wait … you mean this is supposed to offer us a profile?
I have not read anywhere that Bradley Manning – or anyone else – hacked the diplomatic cables.
They are available for access by a ridiculously huge number of government employees. As other commentators point out – this episode further highlights the extreme over-classification of documents by the US government. A lot of information that should not be classified ends up being stamped confidental, or secret – in order for the bureaucracy to protect itself and to intimidate employees.
The author of this blog post seems more interested in the sort of celebrity journalism, spinning drama and creating villains and heroes out of imaginings and biases, that is one of the roots of our problems today with an ineffectual, co-opted, press.
How anyone can anyone believe they can credibly make statements on the psychology and profiles of individuals, as Bruce Sterling does so broadly in his writing, when it appears the depth of the writer’s knowledge is limited to some articles they’ve read on the subjects.
If Sterling actually knew Manning or Assange…
Stunning post by the former Pope-Emperor. I bow and kiss your ring Sir!
Bruce,
You’ve made one major mistake – you have assumed that Bradley Manning is the guilty party. As I wrote in Wikileaks and a Changing World there is no proof that Bradley Manning is responsible, other than Adrian Lamo’s statement. The problem with his statement is that he was talking to someone alleged to be manning via IM. There is no proof that the account actually belonged to Manning, or that if it did belong to Manning, that Manning was actually using it…
Just think. Cyberspace. Anonymity. Adrian Lamo couldn’t see Bradley Manning. It could have been you, or me on the other end of the IM chat instead of Manning, and Lamo would have no way to tell.
Now quite possibly it was Manning on the other end of the IM chat. While admitting what he did was stupid, people do stupid things all of the time.
The problem is that we have no proof. The U.S. Military may have proof, but we don’t. And even if the U.S. Military has proof, it may not hold up. As we both know, there’s lots of ways to fake things with electrons.
Wayne
The funny thing is, it’s not in any way a hack. It’s a leak. There is barely even a technical aspect to the entire story – except for distribution by Internet users.
You may be right about the emotional transference related to Assange that’s happening in geek culture, however. That’s incisive.
@Tony Agree. 1. no reports (thus far) confirming that Bradley was responsible for the latest leaks (he does seem to be responsible for leaks in March) 2. The author, I am sure, does not know anything about Assange & Manning.. other than ideas & summations from the media.
Brings to mind the Mule in Asimov`s Foundation Triligy…
The kind of energy we are ll waiting for but afraid of.
Bruce is a looking glass, as always.
Bruce Sterling is an amazing writer, his knowledge of this subject is quite accurate, and make for an interesting read. Yet there have been more questions raised that questions answered for about these documents. We truly are living in a digital age and history has taken a unique yet not unexpected turn, only time will tell if it will continue to be positive or turn to negative.
Wayne, I’m really not sure that it matters whether or not they have proof that Manning did it, or whether or not Manning actually did it. They need a scapegoat and they have Manning. They will find a way to make him fry (potentially literally), one way or the other.
Heck, he’s been in solitary for 6 months. As near as I can tell, there’s at least a 50% chance he’s already certifiably insane just from that.
And bravo, Bruce! Excellently written piece, as always, though the effect is of course, Poe-sian melancholia.
Kieran,
It does matter. At present he is alleged to have done this, but everyone is reporting it as a fact, and therefore damaging his reputation.
Again, he may be responsible, but you have no proof. For all we know, the Military arrested him, and tossed him in a cell, so that they could go after the real perpetrator quietly. If that is the case, he is being held illegally.
Wayne
I got thru about 80% of this and couldn’t find a single genuine insight amid the blather. Not the 1st time I’ve experienced this while reading Bruce Sterling…
Well written.
I accept that the military may need to keep secrets. War crimes are crimes, not secrets and there are no excuses for failure to expose them.
I do have a few thoughts about Manning.
The oath of the Marine Corps.
“I, XXXXXXXXXX, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies,
foreign and domestic;
that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same;
and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.”
I wonder how they justify much of what Manning exposed. Murder of civilians, torture, rape,the list goes on.
Clearly the first part of the oath takes precedence over following the orders of criminals in the second part.
The uniform code of military justice has been trashed by those giving orders like ‘ignore torture and abuse and just put in a report if you must….’
‘ignore the Geneva Convention and all that your proud fathers and grandfathers fought for….
I think we may come to realise that Manning did his duty after others failed in theirs.
Even in all your communication with hackers, it would appear that you don’t understand them completely, unfortunately.
We’re much more than a collective of “natural sociopaths” with the desire to tear down that which is organized. That’s anarchy. Without organization, we wouldn’t exist– we thrive on the exploitation of flawed organization of all sorts.
There’s also a faction of us who are quite politically aware. More aware than some journalists, more aware than some diplomats and even politicans, in fact. And we have, in fact, been pouring through the diplomatic cables with patience and clairvoyance.
Our best quality is that no one– not you, not profiles, not information-mining and certainly not the collective governments and journalists of the world– truly understands us or what motivates us. We perch on mountains, monitoring and maintaining the valleys in which you reside. Like stone gargoyles, we are patient, calculating and ready to protect when the time arises.
Like any collective of clairvoyantly powerful entities, there are good orientations and there are bad orientations. The issue, however, is that now both poles have a unifying enemy.
You’ve done a rather wonderful job laying down the completely fascinating situation that’s come up to this point, but sadly you show that you still don’t quite fully understand. You’re getting closer to the full picture, though. Keep trying, because we’re not going to help you put it together. 🙂
Excellent take on this diplomatic train wreck. As someone who once spent dreary Saturdays giving seminars in a bare office off Post Oak in Houston, on using PGP to the two or three people who showed up, I certainly wanted something like this to happen.
Maybe not so fervently now, but after 8 years of the shittiest US Presidency ever and with the current European Great White Freakout in full swing, I just can’t get exercised over the danger of it all.
But in an irony Poe would appreciate–and he had a wicked sense of humor–emptying America’s diplomatic bag out on the street is only Wikileaks’s goal du jour. Despite what Attorney General Holder hopes to prove, Wikileaks, let alone Assange, didn’t plan for it to happen, let alone collude with Manning. Wikileaks has already exposed Scientology’s copyrighted dogma, Sarah Palin’s emails and German bankers’ criminal activity. Next on the agenda is dirt from a Citibank exec’s hard drive.
And the media (and USAG) focus on Assange ignores the fact that Wikileaks has already given the boodle to Der Spiegel, El Pais and the Guardian, and it’s drawing attention from the rest of the group. (Speaking of which, Rop Gonggrijp is not one of them; he only helped out last spring and is busy getting in other kinds of trouble, campaigning against bent and bendable electronic voting machines.)
My, how you do go on. One thing I agreed with: “Assange has carefully built this role for himself. He did it with all the minute concentration of some geek assembling a Rubik’s Cube.”
Very good. But what about us, the public? Is there really a way to keep us in the dark about what is happening any more? Those diplomatic dispatches were probably already seen by every spy agency from every country with a spy agency before we saw them.
And our secrets? The web pages we browse, and the emails we write, the products we buy, the property we own, not a secret anymore the way I understand it.
Bottom line: No more secrets.
I like this and what Jaron Lanier had to say about the situation in the Atlantic the other day. Great read!
Awesome essay! Where are my wooden shoes? Oh, I threw them in the machine.
Wow. Dude. You spent that much time explaining how much better you are than Assange because… Why again?
You pretty much just sound old here. “I’ve seen this before. How droll.”
Maybe people support Assange because they think that reflexive secrecy from governments is bad. Maybe there are valid ideological discussions we could have instead of assuming that everyone involved is just trying to fluff their ego.
Assange is God at the moment!
BUT… There is nothing to prove the cables are all genuine, is there???
Bruce’s gloom is well justified.
When everyone on this planet can communicate with everyone else on this planet via the net, and there are no more secrets, what will anybody have anything meaningful to say?
I wonder why Mr. Sterling insists on repeatedly using the word “sociopath” in the manner of a person who does not at all know what the word actually means.
Apart from that, it was a rather good read!
Excellent read and intriguing writing style.
How I miss the sound of the Tui. (probably one of the best natural sounds in the world)
“When people fear their Government there is tyranny. When Government fear the people, there is liberty.” – Thomas Jefferson.
How will the Government fear the people if the people have no means of knowing what the government is doing and when is misbehaving? How does democracy works when the people are not informed?
The vote of an informed person weights the same as the vote of a misinformed person. When there are more misinformed than informed people. The result is a misinformed vote. Thus democracy ONLY works when the people are informed.
That was one hell of a read. Jean-Paul Satre indeed. “Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”
“I don’t say these cruel things about Julian Assange because I feel distant from him, but, on the contrary, because I feel close to him. I don’t doubt the two of us would have a lot to talk about. I know hordes of men like him; it’s just that they are programmers, mathematicians, potheads and science fiction fans instead of fiercely committed guys who aspire to topple the international order and replace it with subversive wikipedians.
The chances of that ending well are about ten thousand to one. And I don’t doubt Assange knows that. ”
As I was reading this piece, it occurred to me that the wide-ranging quality of it felt more like rumination (in a somewhat clinical sense) than anything else. When I got to the part above, I felt somewhat validated. The whole thing is shot through with a tenderness that, well, left me a little sadder–and I know nothing about the community or the people of which you speak.
Thank you for a lovely reflection on a story people seem hell-bent on stripping of its last vestiges of humanity.
”All his friends think he’s nuts.”
well, that simply isn’t true. He has huge support in countries that aspire to democratic ideals. His friends haven’t abandoned him & he isn’t a pariah. He’s a legend. I suspect Sterling despises him.
You know, there used to be a simple word for what people like Assange did. It was called journalism. You can try as hard as you want to to transform his journalistic actions into a cultural/personal phenomenon… but all Wikileaks is is a modern newspaper. That it does the work so many modern newspapers fail to do is a different issue; but in essence, you’re basically telling us about your problems with honest journalists who expose government crime.
Shame.
As per usual, Mr Sterling has a comprehensive vision and apt tongue when offering his long-sighed view of recent events.
There are so many zingers and lyrical gems in this essay, I predict that it will be referenced heavily for the next year at least.
Wow, superb, thank you for this. I don’t want to gush, but I’m not sure I can help it. This article reads like a ‘look back’ piece run in some prodigy level sci-fi journal a hundred years in the future. Prescient, insightful, the narrative structure is awesome, I now have a level of writing to which I can aspire, however impossible that may be.
…and your point is?
honestly, this reads like blather.
Brilliant assessment. I agree with several of the comments above: Assange is essentially a rouge journalist (and a hacker) and the things we must fear the most are opaque governments and agencies. Assange’s innovation may lead to a the US responding with draconian measures as both the left and the right seem to be more concerned with state secrets than they are with first amendment protections. They did, after all, pass the Patriot Act with almost no opposition. There is a dark side to protecting the status quo. It’s called public acceptance of tyranny.
Pretty effing brilliant analysis.jv
Man, that one argument is not only very tired, it misses the point-that the diplomats need secrecy, and discretion, because transparency and discretion don’t mix. They do. The easiest way to decide whether secrecy is needed, is to find out whether the secrecy hides intent to harm others, or not to harm others. All else runs along the lines of manners. In meeting a foreign individual/s, take care to learn what sets them off. But if you’re hiding some DU behind your back, or some corporation that wants to get in there and do some damage, then no.
I’m gonna go ahead and say ‘duh.’ And good on any diplomat who has to now read through a bazillion cables-hey, newsflash, to any ‘superpower’-behave. If a country isn’t behaving, they aren’t going to pay much attention to ‘the little things’. One has to slap ’em a bit, and let them know-when I said please don’t attack the other guy, or try and work some crappy con, I meant it. “When I say whoa, horse, I mean whoa!”
Have you ever read Utopia or Oblivion? Because that’s what’s happening right now. with a little bit of McLuhan thrown in. It isn’t about Assange. It isn’t about wikileaks. It’s about information/knowledge. which used to move very slowly, and used to be kept isolated from John Q. Public. And now, not only does that information now move very fast, but it’s no longer in the hands of a few elites. The problem with setting up a surveillance nation, or world, at this point, with cheap, easy to reproduce smart devices, is that they’re cheap, and easy to reproduce. Originally, in the panopticon styled state, the prisoners couldn’t see the jailers, and the jailers could see all the prisoners.
Not any more. Now the jailers are becoming visible. Oh, to be sure, this dying beast, this system of rule based on the old agricultural sun kings will take some time to die, and the ‘deep ones’, certain alphabet soup agencies, will seem to be unaffected. But there’s a machine instigated evolution happening right now, and nowt to be done about it except adapt, or die.
Observe Prince Andrew and his whining about short term planning, american wise, and how he and his cohort, when playing The Game, plan ahead for centuries. well, power to ya, idjit-you planned with what you know, back then. Times have changed.
It’s about knowledge, now moving very fast indeed, now bridging vast distances, physically and culturally, and how some aren’t quite letting go of the old ways. It’s about knowing who the hell is doing what, in one’s own name. It’s even simpler than that. Break down any human relations to two people. One is leading, the other may have chosen to follow the leader. And that person has every right to know what the alleged leader is doing. Cause following a liar and a con man is going to wind up with one result: the leader type dude gets all the goodies, and the other, gets screwed.
So damn straight, I, or that other guy, is going to be demanding transparency-he or she wants to know that the person is capable of something very, very simple: being honest, transparent, and capable of discretion. Arguing for umbrella secrecy should immediately arouse suspicions, because the decisions they make, directly affect you.
And hey, if you wish to be all depressed, because of this, well, hey, that’s how you’re gonna feel. Venting, of course, probably won’t have much of an impact on the ongoing evolution.
Absolutely brilliant post. Great reading, great language.
Really, Bruce? The spectacular secrets yet to come won’t overwhelm these sad little dribbles we’ve seen and make your hand-wringing absurd? You really believe that? Because if you’re right about the impact, you’re wrong about the outcome. What we see now is not the incoming wave but the water receding before the tsunami. I hope. The desperate outrage ginned up for the pathetic giggles of data arising from the diplomatic cables is much ado about almost nothing. By contrast, the shrugs about the horrors seen in the gun camera last summer belie the overwhelming import of that earlier leak. Oh what fun it is to titter over a little international gossip whilst gunners in the sky rip valiant fathers to shreds as their children watch. I must stop now before I curse at you, you jealous little worm.
Wait until assange get his mitts on something above top secret. That the stuff I want to read not this boring shit.
Subversive Wikipedians would kindly ask the U.S. Senate to restore the motion to call the previous question. Aaron Burr was wrong to remove it.
“I don’t have a lot of cheery hope to offer about his all-too-compelling gesture, but I dare to hope he’s everything he thinks he is, and much, much, more.” ….. Bruce Sterling
Who dares wins, Bruce, and your hope is well placed for there is so much more yet to come, and that which it tells will absolutely amaze …… and change lives forever.
Oh, and thanks for the edutaining read. It was most enjoyable.
You might like to consider now though, that there is a new breed of …… well, let us just call them ARGonauts with SMARTs who would be into Bigger Pictures and Great Intelligence Game Play, in the Reality of Live Operational Virtual Environments ……. for such is the MetaDataMorph which may best describe the Present Dynamic Future Leading Manifestation.
You obviously have no idea about the many facets of NSA and have a crooked stereotype of the people who work at NSA. In fact, NSA only plays a bit part in the inter-agency tangle that handles some of the things you write of.
You need much more research before writing on this subject.
“The geeks who man the NSA don’t look much like Julian Assange, because they have college degrees, shorter haircuts, better health insurance and far fewer stamps in their passports.”
A nitpick, but: Assange comes from a country with universal healthcare, and most of his travelling has been through countries with universal healthcare. So… his health insurance is probably better than almost anyone at the NSA.
Interesting, but it reads more like a piece of dramatization than actual analysis, and the repeated descriptions of “hackers” sound a bit too much like convenient stereotyping for me to be accepting of the descriptions of Assange and Manning given here.
This reads like a science fiction story. like a tabloid piece. I am disappoint.
So you’ll be sticking to non-fiction from here on out, then? I could read this stuff for days–and I intend to keep on thinking carefully about what it means.
When we identify too closely with our heroes, we can try to rewrite their flaws to be flaws we identify with and are sympathetic to, instead of seeing flaws that are much more alien and disturbing. It would be nice for all the geeks out there to say that Assange faces punishment by the powers that be for his geek activities. But what he was arrested for is a completely separate issue from his Wikileaks activities. No one has filed charges against him for his Wikileaks activities.
@ Mark Lambrych Says:
December 23rd, 2010 at 09:59 15
“Bruce Sterling is an amazing writer, his knowledge of this subject is quite accurate, and make for an interesting read. ”
Surely you jest. It’s quite apparent from his writing that he doesn’t know jack shit about this subject. There was no “hacking” involved in getting the material. From what we do know, the material was basically downloaded onto media by someone with legitimate access and nothing had to be “hacked” at all.
“when Assange did it that to meager little Kenya”
It’s either it, or that not both.
#corrections
Bill Schee says: ‘It’s quite apparent from his writing that he doesn’t know jack shit about this subject. There was no “hacking” involved in getting the material. From what we do know, the material was basically downloaded onto media by someone with legitimate access and nothing had to be “hacked” at all.’
I think it’s quite apparent that you have no idea what hacking is.
Saudi Arabia put pressure on the US to attack Iran. Other Arab allies also secretly agitated for military action against Tehran.
Washington is running a secret intelligence campaign targeted at the leadership of the United Nations, including the secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, and the permanent security council representatives from China, Russia, France and the UK.
Small teams of US special forces have been operating secretly inside Pakistan’s tribal areas, with Pakistani government approval. And the US concluded that Pakistani troops were responsible for a spate of extra-judicial killings in the Swat Valley and tribal belt, but decided not to comment publicly.
The US ambassador to Pakistan said the Pakistani army is covertly sponsoring four major militant groups, including the Afghan Taliban and the Mumbai attackers, Laskar-e-Taiba (LeT), and “no amount of money” will change the policy. Also, US diplomats discovered hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Pakistan earmarked for fighting Islamist militants was not used for that purpose.
The British government promised to protect US interests during the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war.
Russia is a “virtual mafia state” with rampant corruption and scant separation between the activities of the government and organised crime. Vladimir Putin is accused of amassing “illicit proceeds” from his time in office, which various sources allege are hidden overseas. And he was likely to have known about the operation in London to murder the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko, Washington’s top diplomat in Europe alleged.
British and US officials colluded to manoeuvre around a proposed ban on cluster bombs, allowing the US to keep the munitions on British territory, regardless of whether a treaty forbidding their use was implemented. Parliament was kept in the dark about the secret agreement, approved by then-foreign secretary David Miliband.
One of the biggest objectives at the US embassy in Madrid over the past seven years has been trying to get the criminal case dropped against three US soldiers accused of the killing of a Spanish television cameraman in Baghdad.
The British military was criticised for failing to establish security in Sangin by the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, and the US commander of Nato troops, according to diplomatic cables.
Rampant government corruption in Afghanistan is revealed by the cables, including an incident last year when the then vice-president, Ahmad Zia Massoud, was stopped and questioned in Dubai when he flew into the emirate with $52m in cash.
The British Foreign Office misled parliament over the plight of thousands of islanders who were expelled from their Indian Ocean homeland – the British colony of Diego Garcia – to make way for a large US military base
The US military has been charging its allies a 15% handling fee on hundreds of millions of dollars being raised internationally to build up the Afghan army.
Conservative party politicians promised before the election that they would run a “pro-American regime” and buy more arms from the US if they came to power.
The president of Yemen secretly offered US forces unrestricted access to his territory to conduct unilateral strikes against al-Qaida terrorist targets.
A potential “environmental disaster” was kept secret by the US last year when a large consignment of highly enriched uranium in Libya came close to cracking open and leaking radioactive material into the atmosphere.
Libya threatened UK with “dire reprisals” if the convicted Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, died in a Scottish prison.
Ann Pickard, Shell’s VP for sub-Saharan Africa, claimed in Oct 2009 that the oil giant had infiltrated all the main ministries of the Nigerian government.
Two British civil servants, Dr Richard Freer and Judith Gough, contradicted Gordon Brown’s statement on reduction of the Trident fleet in conversations with US embassy officials in London.
The US ambassador in Kampala sought assurances from the Ugandan government in December 2010 that it would consult the US before using American intelligence to commit war crimes in the conflict against the LRA.
The pharmaceutical giant Pfizer paid investigators to unearth corruption links to Nigeria’s attorney general in an attempt to persuade him to stop his legal action against a controversial drug trial involving children with meningitis.
The pope intervened personally to ensure the Vatican’s increased hostility towards Turkey joining the EU.
The Vatican refused to allow its officials to testify at Irish inquiry into clerical child abuse and was angered when they were summoned from Rome.
BP suffered a giant gas leak in Azerbaijan 18 months before the Gulf of Mexico disaster.
Azerbaijan accused BP of stealing $10bn of oil and using “mild blackmail” to secure rights to develop gas reserves in the Caspian Sea.
US energy company Chevron negotiated with Tehran about developing an oilfield despite tight US sanctions.
Speculation that Omar al-Bashir siphoned $9bn in oil money and deposited it in foreign accounts could fuel calls for his arrest
Do you honestly think that US taxpayers should not know this information? You Sir, are an arse!
corporations and governments lose site of the fact that creative is the least important, most important thing there is.
for fanatics, there will be questions such as:
whats on the Assange itunes playlist, does he publish that?
I imagine him playing a Dead Kennedys song like “Holiday in Cambodia” but I don’t know enough about him yet
and what will I ever know from hearsay since I don’t know him?
cyberpunks are cool. I know lots of those.
like any sort of scene, you get all types.
I’m not sure if he’s a good guy or a bad guy
he’s an interesting guy, the whole phenom is interesting
not sure if its good or bad
but sher is INTERESTING
Bradley Manning hasn’t even been charged, let alone convicted. Makes you wonder what else Bruce Sterling doesn’t understand.
Thanks for the great read, Bruce!
But is it just me or does there seem to be a “would” too many in:
“they would much would rather sit there gently reading other people’s email”
?
Good article. Refreshingly different.
“The chances of that ending well are about ten thousand to one”
Pessimistic, aren’t you? But what’s the alternative? Sit and do nothing in the seemingly ever growing Orwellian state of affairs, while the humans also head for eco-destruction buried under everests of lies and deceptions?
Surely best to make a stand like Assange and hope for the best. Staying positive will also give a greater chance of success.
As for “planetary tranquilizers” it seems that many humans have become so dumbed down by what’s happened in at least the last decades, that surely we don’t need any more?
Now IS the time for those rays of light and exposure, because as you seem to understand, the darkness is all around us. Lead on Mr Assange!
So when an NSA lackey is bored, does he intercept porn from other people’s email? /joke
It’s a fun read – to the point where I don’t mind disagreeing with a fair chunk of what is said especially in regard to the US Government having effective tools of diplomacy.
Sterling is short-sighted and lacking in morals and civic responsibility. The U.S. government and its corporate allies are criminals — criminals whose crimes need to be exposed to the world. Now that a few have been exposed, I want everyone to know about the rest.
Sorry, but just as there is a difference between Jules Verne and the men and women who actually took us to the moon, there is a difference between this author and the people who are actually doing the things that he describes in his books. And while Jules could not have met the men and women that made the moon landing possible, Bruce certainly has met the hackers. However, while Jules could understand the astronaut, the adventurer, since that makes a good story, he could not have understood what motivated the others. The scientists and engineers and secretaries and clerks that were the people that actually made it possible, it’s too mundane. Much the same as it is for Bruce. And he even knows this, when he’s describing what qualities the leaders of movements have, and he assures us that Julian has none of it. And he’s right, he doesn’t. But it’s a new age, and Julian does have what’s needed. It reminds me of a Hugo winning short story where a device that could end the world is created that can be built for cheap and powered by a 9v battery. Then it is patented and the patent is published and there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. Oops. Even though Bruce uses the device to tell his stories, he doesn’t understand the real people that make it happen nearly as well as he thinks he does. And the people that run the governments of the world don’t get it at all. As the old guard “nationalists” die off there will be less and less reaction to this kind of thing to the point where it’s happening so much most things are just lost in the noise. I’m younger than Bruce, but not by much, however I know this much that he doesn’t seem to, in a world where the population has grown up with Facebook/MySpace/etc there is not even the expectation of privacy or secrets. Get over it. People will again have to start actually being polite to one another, or they’ll be exposed for all to see.
Personally, I do not believe that information which is solely classified because it’s embarrassing to a government should be. I also believe that people that work for the government should be honor bound to report when crimes are being committed, and that supersedes ALL other directives. Until we reach that state we will not have grown into adults as a society. Right now governments behave as children without adults behave. Read Lord of the Flies.
To call this sort of writing speculative fiction may be a stretch. Blather seems most accurate. Fundamentally wrong-headed and comically presumptuous. Mr. Moonseed offers more realistic insight than Bruce Sterling.
p.s. and Mr. Sterling appears transparently jealous as he smugly paints caricatures of complex people and situations
Overall, this article seems to be good, but with one flaw permeating it. You write under the assumption that all hackers are “sociopathic”. In a society that is as pathological as ours, could not this behavior, especially in the case of Assange, be more comparable to the societal immune system, than a pathology?
Dear Bruce Sterling,
A well-written text on Assange that we will definitely mention in our journal, “Intelligence”. You should check-out the enraged reaction of Steven Aftergood, “Secrecy News”, Federation of American Scientists, to Assange as the villain of those “seriously” working against secrecy in the US system.
Our own work (since 1980 and well before the Internet) has tended to be on “open sources” and avoided stage-front attention but not the same problems — on another scale — as Assange and WikiLeaks. Nonetheless, what the latter have “proven” with leaks has been rather clearly announced by working over “open sources” (see “World Politics & ‘Parapolitics’ 2006: Computer-Assisted Text Analysis of International Media Headlines”, KM van Meter & M de Saint Leger, 2009, Harmattan, Paris). We now publishing “2007-2008 – THE END OF BUSH & THE RISE OF THE UN: LINK ANALYSIS OF WORLD MEDIA HEADLINES” (in Turkey, of all places), and moving on to “200ç-2010 – Obama’s First Two Years”, where, of course, Assange and WikiLeaks are very probably going to figure prominently.
Keep up your good work and Best regards,
Olivier Schmidt
“He’s a bright, good-looking man who — let’s face it — can’t get next to women without provoking clumsy havoc and a bitter and lasting resentment.”
How many women are you generalizing from, here?
Sterling’s piece has one glaring defect: he talks about the leak’s effects on US diplomats, and implies by juxtaposition that keeping US diplomats safe in their job is the best thing for what stability the world has.
He completely fails to note that these cables are big news in countries other than the US, as we see the actual smoking guns of our masters being craven fops. This is already having effects in Spain, for instance – where Wikileaks revealed the smoking gun of US pressure on Spain to crack down on the Internet, and the voters wouldn’t stand for it and just defeated the latest law to this effect because they are *pissed off*.
He still thinks it’s all about the US, and that keeping the US happy is the best thing to keep the world as stable as it is. He shows no awareness that that particular stability is not actually a great deal for anyone else.
interesting post, but way too long. and i have to wonder if the writer is jealous much? assange did a good thing. this is only the beginning. it will be effing HUGE. and it will change standard operational procedures all around the world. it’s about time the military and governments caught on to this internet thingee. transparency is good, not evil. The people want the truth. I am one of them, and I hope we get it.
The comparison with Kerveil does not hold.
1. His name is Kerviel
2. He did not discover some awesome capacity that his bosses did not know. He just faked his hedge. He went naked. 100% of risk under the disguise of 0% risk.
3. Kerviel had a monetary interest in this enterprise: His bonus.
Anyway, I love reading Sterling.
also, what’s all this psycho-analysis crap? is the author a trained psychiatrist? or is he oprah?
Cringeworthy.
The problem with this piece is that the words are so well-written.
Mr Sterling knows this and let it flow and flow and flow.
I have no idea of what the point of the article is.
It may be in there somewhere. I did look but couldn’t find it.
I agree with Stanley another others above — fun to read these ramblings, but where’s the point? Read any of the leaked cables — far more clearly written and to-the-point. 🙂
Very interesting and fun read. Perhaps you meant s/Vaclav Havel/Lech Walesa/?
There is some waffling at times but this is a long piece and had to be filled out in parts. Interesting to read though.
very interesting. and yet every paragraph drips with myopic statism. the entire world view colored by something which assange as professed to be out to destroy. it’s as if to you that could never be a valid exercise. perhaps others thing is *is* a valid exercise, but you wouldn’t know it. you might want to replace those spectacles.
@Dave: You made my day! “this is a long piece and had to be filled out in parts”.
What?
Paraguay? A pariah? Come on.
Two words:
Gavrilo Princip
Don’t know who that is? Look him up. Julian is just this century’s version of him, down to the “prove I’m a man by creating a strike against ‘The Power'” motivation and anarchic rationalization. In fact, to a large extent, you could substitute “Gavrilo” for “Julian” in the article above and it would still read true.
There are moments of brilliance in this analysis, but the thrust of it is off the mark somehow. It’s a well constructed fiction, entertaining for sure, but not exactly the reality of what’s happening. And it certainly reads like a novel.
Bit of rambling rant but an interesting read. There isn’t anything to be this depressed about though. This whole ordeal reminds me of a scifi story I once read (forget who it’s by) about a government that jealously guards access to a big unwieldy device that can look into the past. A spurned historian does some snooping and uncovers by accident that the device can be made into a small, cheap version that can look into the immediate past anywhere in the world. The devil out of its box, privacy is over.
This is what we are facing now with the internet. The world and society will adapt, the only real danger is if the powerful try to fight it and insist on breaking before bending and try to change reality to fit their preconceived notions. That’s what the Ancien Regime tried to do in France before the revolution and if the US tries to do it today we are in for a world of hurt and massive destabilization. But personally I think they haven’t the clout anymore to do this.
I think the point is “Poor, poor US diplomats”.
I think you’ve made the first codified chapter in the Julian Assange mythology. You’ve don’t a pretty fine job of it too!
Hey everybody, look how Clever I am! Admire my witty, bon mot analysis revealling that Assange et al actually excrete common feces and is therefore as base, venal and jaded as I am myself. Note how I have bleached from consideration annoying things like principles and ethics, right and justice. Marvel at my sophistic apologia for the conscience of fence-sitters in need of an excuse for doing nothing. Like you, dear reader, in my naiive youth I actually believed in and stood for Something. Now, I offer in a million words the pearls of wisom that disparage those who act and take risk. Whiners unite! Take your shoulders from the Wheel and dissipate.
@Robert McMaster: Brilliant, bravo!
One slight correction- the NSA was instituted in 1952, not 1947 (that was CIA). Otherwise, great article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency
Can’t see why this such a good piece of comment. It is much too long and too vague. Claiming on history and describing intelligent people as geeks, I cannot find myself in that approach. It’s too easy.
A good commentary should be medium long and very concrete, supported by real fact and no subjective suggestions.
Your comparison to the Lewinsky fiasco is just about the only thing sensible here. Manning is as much a “hacker” as Linda Tripp. There was no hack here at all, any more than downloading a movie torrent is a hack.
Trying to turn this minor bit of espionage into a black hat hacker story is pathetic link-baiting.
I am so weary of arguing about all of this on other sites, I HAVE to point out that everyone is missing the big story.
Julian Assange did at one point succumb to the temptation to commit a very grave crime. Against the wishes of everyone else at wikileaks he deliberately released the names of Afghanis who are working against the Taliban, putting their lives and those of their families and friends in grave danger.
When asked about this, he said that the it’s not his job to protect colaborators against retaliation for their “genuinely traitorous acts” and that Afghanis deserve to know who “the real traitors are.”
He is a snitch to an incredibly brutal totalitarian government, he has taken sides in a conflict against not only any hope of freedom, but against the will of the Afghani people who poll 80% against the Taliban.
I don’t know how many links I’m allowed per comment before I trigger a spam filter but here is a more detailed version I’ve posted before:
From the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/world/24assange.html?_r=4&hp :
“But now, WikiLeaks has been met with new doubts. Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders have joined the Pentagon in criticizing the organization for risking people’s lives by publishing war logs identifying Afghans working for the Americans or acting as informers.”
“A Taliban spokesman in Afghanistan using the pseudonym Zabiullah Mujahid said in a telephone interview that the Taliban had formed a nine-member ‘commission’ after the Afghan documents were posted ‘to find about people who are spying.’ He said the Taliban had a ‘wanted’ list of 1,800 Afghans and was comparing that with names WikiLeaks provided.”
“‘After the process is completed, our Taliban court will decide about such people,’ he said.”
“Mr. Assange defended posting unredacted documents, saying he balanced his decision ‘with the knowledge of the tremendous good and prevention of harm that is caused” by putting the information into the public domain. “There are no easy choices on the table for this organization,’ he said.”
Assange’s wikileaks college, Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir said that everyone in wikileaks begged Assange to redact the names but he refused. (I’ll look for the link to that for a later comment, but I’m only allowed two links per comment, if that).
Julian’s public response?
“He expressed some ambivalence about the need to protect Afghans who have helped the U.S. military. ‘We are not obligated to protect other people’s sources,’ including sources of ‘spy organizations or militaries,’ unless it is from ‘unjust retribution,’ he said, adding that the Afghan public ‘should know about’ people who have engaged in ‘genuinely traitorous’ acts.“
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/timblair/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/traitorous_acts/
To quote a commenter from a now deleted thread:
“So for Julian Assange, those Afghans who oppose the Taliban, over 80% of the electorate, as indicated by elections there are traitors. He is a supporter of and collaborator with a Taliban movement which has the support of only a tiny fraction of the Afghan people. He supports the overthrow of democracy, the subjugation of women, the execution of gays, and the subjugation of all other religions than (a certain strain of) Islam.:
Here is the article for Jonsdottir’s statement.
http://hurryupharry.org/2010/12/10/birgitta-jonsdottir-wikileaks-david-icke-and-neo-nazi-radio/
From an internally linked New York Times article:
“Several WikiLeaks colleagues say he [Assange] alone decided to release the Afghan documents without removing the names of Afghan intelligence sources for NATO troops. ‘We were very, very upset with that, and with the way he spoke about it afterwards,’ said Birgitta Jonsdottir, a core WikiLeaks volunteer and a member of Iceland’s Parliament. ‘If he could just focus on the important things he does, it would be better.'”
since i haven’t seen my extremely long comment here, I’m going to post it with fewer links. Maybe a spam filter ate it:
I am so weary of arguing about all of this on other sites, I HAVE to point out that everyone is missing the big story.
Julian Assange did at one point succumb to the temptation to commit a very grave crime. Against the wishes of everyone else at wikileaks he deliberately released the names of Afghanis who are working against the Taliban, putting their lives and those of their families and friends in grave danger.
When asked about this, he said that the it’s not his job to protect colaborators against retaliation for their “genuinely traitorous acts” and that Afghanis deserve to know who “the real traitors are.”
He is a snitch to an incredibly brutal totalitarian government, he has taken sides in a conflict against not only any hope of freedom, but against the will of the Afghani people who poll 80% against the Taliban.
Here is a more detailed version I’ve posted before:
From the New York Times (link elided to avoid spam filter) :
“But now, WikiLeaks has been met with new doubts. Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders have joined the Pentagon in criticizing the organization for risking people’s lives by publishing war logs identifying Afghans working for the Americans or acting as informers.”
“A Taliban spokesman in Afghanistan using the pseudonym Zabiullah Mujahid said in a telephone interview that the Taliban had formed a nine-member ‘commission’ after the Afghan documents were posted ‘to find about people who are spying.’ He said the Taliban had a ‘wanted’ list of 1,800 Afghans and was comparing that with names WikiLeaks provided.”
“‘After the process is completed, our Taliban court will decide about such people,’ he said.”
“Mr. Assange defended posting unredacted documents, saying he balanced his decision ‘with the knowledge of the tremendous good and prevention of harm that is caused” by putting the information into the public domain. “There are no easy choices on the table for this organization,’ he said.”
Assange’s wikileaks college, Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir said that everyone in wikileaks begged Assange to redact the names but he refused. (I’ll look for the link to that for a later comment, but I’m only allowed two links per comment, if that).
Julian’s public response?
“He expressed some ambivalence about the need to protect Afghans who have helped the U.S. military. ‘We are not obligated to protect other people’s sources,’ including sources of ‘spy organizations or militaries,’ unless it is from ‘unjust retribution,’ he said, adding that the Afghan public ‘should know about’ people who have engaged in ‘genuinely traitorous’ acts.“
(link elided to avoid spam filter)
To quote a commenter from a now deleted thread:
“So for Julian Assange, those Afghans who oppose the Taliban, over 80% of the electorate, as indicated by elections there are traitors. He is a supporter of and collaborator with a Taliban movement which has the support of only a tiny fraction of the Afghan people. He supports the overthrow of democracy, the subjugation of women, the execution of gays, and the subjugation of all other religions than (a certain strain of) Islam.:
Here is the article for Jonsdottir’s statement.
http://hurryupharry.org/2010/12/10/birgitta-jonsdottir-wikileaks-david-icke-and-neo-nazi-radio/
From an internally linked New York Times article:
“Several WikiLeaks colleagues say he [Assange] alone decided to release the Afghan documents without removing the names of Afghan intelligence sources for NATO troops. ‘We were very, very upset with that, and with the way he spoke about it afterwards,’ said Birgitta Jonsdottir, a core WikiLeaks volunteer and a member of Iceland’s Parliament. ‘If he could just focus on the important things he does, it would be better.'”
An analysis of Jaron Lanier’s take on Wikileaks:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/12/wikileaks-exposes-internets-dissent-tax-not-nerd-supremacy/68397/
A raging debate among feminists regarding reaction to
Assange’s arrest and its meaning:
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/12/20/naomi_wolf_vs_jaclyn_friedman_a
Two editorial quibbles:
The SIPRNET is not the State Department’s, but the DoD’s. State cables were accessible to Manning via the latter’s access to a DoD system. I would further assume that Manning wasn’t pulling them directly from a State Dept. database across the SIPRNET, but that some collection of State cables was also replicated in a DoD database of intelligence-related cables.
“…assembling a Rubik’s cube” is a poor metaphor here, even if you take that to mean “solving,” and not actually putting the physical pieces back together (which one has to do if one disassembles it to “solve” it the easy way… to mess with your friends’ heads, give one piece a twist when you put it back together, and it can’t be solved). But solving a Rubik’s cube is a pretty mindless, mechanical exercise once you know the formula.
I appreciate the piquant observations, but the best thing about this op-ed is mark’s comment (61). The piece itself smacks of uneasy melancholy emotional attachment to the curtain that hid the wiz- a natural response, but not brave.
p.s. I love much about the US- wonderful people, great traditions. I truly hope that the bloodhouds will be called off because I think the US, and the world, can emerge better from all this- see- there is an optimistic viewpoint available. In fact, The US could see this as an opportunity to undo the great damage done to public trust by the Bush admin, by letting the incident slide, by renewing their marriage vows to freedom as it were. What I wish more than anything is for democracies to live up to their ideals. What I fear more than anything, is the whole world reduced to this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/10/attacked-russian-journalist-convicted-defaming-official
The US needs to know that the world demands so much of it because we don’t wish to see the visionary dreams of its forefathers reduced to the blatant mockery of citizen’s rights that we see in dictatorships elsewhere
Article Fail….. to assign civilized need or relevancy to wikileaks by:
1) assuming this juvenile activist keyboard courage mentality can improve or save the world..it’s just a beta-male version of Code Pink, yet another group having a crisis of self-esteem.
2) the unenlightened mentionings, the cultural strata of geek’s haircuts and anecdotal history, perhaps from the dense haze of a weed parlor
3) cursory ramblings and suppositions of NSA on the same page as wikileaks…only can vault wikileaks
4) and the assumption that applied military force which assured a better genocide-free future for Kurds , was needless…and that progressives has convinced us the west cold rest safe with a tamed version of Saddam’s dementia rabidity….still spreading cruelty to his domestic subjects…yes “subjects” not citizens.
The proper WMD analogy:
If I go out to the mailbox to stop thieves from steeling mail in our neighborhood, and when I get there, I run into mail-box vandals instead, I dispose of the vandals, then the whole trip was worthless and conceived upon lies? Get a grip.
Only a moron has this kind of logic. Since the mid 90’s, the entire western (even some members of the old block) intel agencies were operating on a clear presence of WMD, this intel genre and culture regarding Iraq was established under democrats and confirmed in the early Bush admin. Then action was carried out under republicans. This is a case of envy. It’s just you wanted your lefty fire engines to put the fire out, no glory to conservative fire engines. The childish minds of the left.
Bruce Sterling has some knowledge of geek culture and a good writing style. However, this article is remarkably fact-free and has to lean heavily on a host of negative characterizations of Manning and Assange to make its argument.
The two main agents of Cablegate are simply set up as strawmen, then righteously pummelled in a rather desultory way.
How can he describe the NSA as “cracking the communications of other governments is its reason for being” then go on to describe the NSA’s harassing of domestic hackers without noticing the howling contradiction in “facts”? What level of clairvoyance has given him such insight into Manning’s motivations?
From my understanding of the case, Manning was primarily motivated by the famous video of an Apache gunship crew machine-gunning civilians and appearing to enjoy the experience. I believe it’s been considered good form since around the time of – um – Nuremberg, for military personnel to set aside military discipline when confronted with unsettling events like that. If you doubt my word – check in with Daniel Ellsberg and Ron Ridenhour.
How could the US military allow this to happen? Let’s check in with Lee Harvey Oswald – who used a similar position to collect data on U2 flights over the USSR despite the fact that his unit nickname was “Oswaldskovich”
I would suggest that Stirling’s work was an excellent novelization of the case if it weren’t for the fact that the main gist of the article is a simple – and mean-hearted – smear of the two main actors. It’s a shame to see such talent wasted on throwing shit.
This guy is supposed to be a Sci-Fi writer?
“I don’t even think Assange is all that big on ego; I know authors and architects, so I’ve seen much worse than Julian in that regard. He’s just what he is; he’s something we donâ’t yet have words for.”
You got a lot of words and value judgements for a man we “don’t even have words for”.
As Lao Tzu wrote, “He who knows doesn’t say, he who says doesn’t know”.
The author whines about poor Monica Lewinsky? How she “feels”?
Manning & ASSange should never have put their fingers on the detonator if they had no understanding of the “blast”. It is the height of irresponsibility to set in motion rumors or even truth without discretion.
Not all truth or lies or misinformation is due to all Americans and the world upon demand. Masquerading behind the “truth” ideal is specious and rather for intramural minds having no pedigree with morality.
Manning and ASSange are tampering with my security, the American people’s that is, out of their own insecurity. Novices and infants stirring the pot for attention just because they found the rattle in their boring cribs they shook it. This is the core malady and tool of the incorrigible and deranged…do anything to get attention. They had insufficient parenting.
If these mundane activists couldn’t stand the “attention” they are now getting, including poor onica….and who gives a crap about how they “feel”, (more focus group hug beta-male thought), here’s a little wisdom:
“Whenever you are to do a thing, though it can never be known but to yourself, ask yourself how you would act were the whole world looking at you, and act accordingly…Give up money, give up fame, give up science, give the earth itself and all it contains, rather than do an immoral act”.
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Peter Carr, Aug 19, 1785
Many thanx B.S & commentators. An “edutainng’ read indeed.
Have a great Christmahannukwanzadanstice folks.
Oh & “We won’t get fooled again…”
I liked this, reminded me of those text files from the 90’s.
Cant catch us all.
The comments are interesting too, its like a small survey of people on the internet these days, and very few of them appear to be from my time period.
Do you also share the internet culture of the 90’s or did you just do a really great bit of research for this?
Bruce STERLING may be an admirable Sci-Fi author to some, but we should emphasize that word “fiction”.
In this verbose commentary – focused upon Julian ASSANGE – and fellow traveller ‘cypher-punks’ – apparently designed as an “op-ed” column-inch earner, we readers can note that not one of his claims about Mr ASSANGE’s character or m.o., have been supported by references or other authoritative sources.
It would appear that Mr STERLING has fallen in love with his own (admittedly) mellifluent voice, but seems to have acquired no love for journalistic (or authorial) integrity.
Either that, or he has a long term illness of logorrhea.
STERLING -can- do better, he -should- do better, and we now -expect- him to do better !
I disagree with this statement on a lot of counts. But it is well written and gives a coherent gloomy outlook that ends on a strangely out of place upbeat note. Leaves you wondering what really to make of the rest of it. I will not hurt my little fingers trying to pry this open. Instead tip of hat to the author, even though we seem to disagree.
This well written statment is in complete agreement with my impressions. Hackers, free of government contol, will be regarded at some time in the future with the same awe and respect that we accord the Founding Fathers. They will free us of the chains of secrecy that the government and the establishment use daily to prevent us from exercising or rights as citizens of the United States.
Though Assange labels himself a “scientific journalist,” even his supporters would have to question his objectivity in reporting about America. He was quoted in The New York Times a couple of months ago as saying: “We have been attacked by the United States, so we are forced into a position where we must defend ourselves.”
Unfortunately Assange did an interview on TV here and came across as a real dick. ‘Why don’t you go to Sweden?’ ‘I don’t have to.’ Except you were keen enough on moving countries all the time before. He’s cut his hair short too.
Wow, some of the comments here, as critical as they are, possess the same sort of substance free quality they claim Sterling’s piece is guilty of. And then there are those who find merit in this free-form consideration of the uber-outsider, the ultimate brilliant geek who refuses to play it safe or by the rules.
In many ways, I think the dichotomy characterizes the dilemma that Julian Assange and WikiLeaks poses for thoughtful people who are trying to understand.
Sadly, though, it appears people jump at the chance to point, to accuse, to trash, and to dismiss. What a telling state of affairs.
I think the admirable ideals that Assange envisions–social justice, governmental accountability, and citizen empowerment are wasted on us all; we’re not up to separating wheat from chaff. What a shame.
At the most basic level this is about the power of the internet to disseminate digital files……be them mp3’s or a zipped archive of diplomatic cables……AND THAT THEY CAN BE GIVEN AWAY FOR FREE SINCE THEY’RE JUST A BUNCH OF 1’s and 0’s. These files are just virtual things without value or physical heft but they can destroy business models and more.
This was a good read, but Bruce lost me with his characterization of Manning.
The few bits of primary sources we have on Manning are from the Lama chat logs. Here’s what Manning says:
***
Lamo: what’s your endgame plan, then?. . .
Manning: well, it was forwarded to [WikiLeaks] – and god knows what happens now – hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms – if not, than [sic] we’re doomed – as a species – i will officially give up on the society we have if nothing happens – the reaction to the video gave me immense hope; CNN’s iReport was overwhelmed; Twitter exploded – people who saw, knew there was something wrong . . . Washington Post sat on the video… David Finkel acquired a copy while embedded out here. . . . – i want people to see the truth… regardless of who they are… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.
if i knew then, what i knew now – kind of thing, or maybe im just young, naive, and stupid . . . im hoping for the former – it cant be the latter – because if it is… were fucking screwed (as a society) – and i dont want to believe that we’re screwed.
—
Manning described the incident which first made him seriously question the U.S. Government: when he was instructed to work on the case of Iraqi “insurgents” who had been detained for distributing so-called “insurgent” literature which, when Manning had it translated, turned out to be nothing more than “a scholarly critique against PM Maliki”:
—
i had an interpreter read it for me… and when i found out that it was a benign political critique titled “Where did the money go?” and following the corruption trail within the PM’s cabinet… i immediately took that information and *ran* to the officer to explain what was going on… he didn’t want to hear any of it… he told me to shut up and explain how we could assist the FPs in finding *MORE* detainees…
i had always questioned the things worked, and investigated to find the truth… but that was a point where i was a *part* of something… i was actively involved in something that i was completely against…
***
His motivations are clear, straightforward. Nothing like the Bruce characterizes it.
I have not heard of Bruce Sterling before reading this overly long ramble. It seems that people who idolize Sterling for his sci-fi past are raving about this piece. Anyone who approaches it without that predisposition to consider it the work of a great thinker is likely to consider it a curious, and still overly long, ramble!
Sterling reads like an old man who wants people to consider him a sage and still current. However, his writing reveals just the opposite. Opinions are expressed either in ignorance of, or despite, the facts. Really, it’s just a lot of wanking that shows how out of touch is the writer with the issues and the reality of Wikileaks.
That’s one whole lot of blah, blah, blah. But impressive as well.
It reads like a stream of consciousness about a news event finally right up your geeky alley.
I was struck by how you finally got around to your man crush Julian. You can’t stop yourself, over and over again, from “describing” him, labeling him, inventing new and greater ways to lionize him.
Even declaring at one point “He’s just what he is; he’s something we don’t yet have words for.”
Then continue for another thousand words about what “Assange IS …”
We get it.
He’s great, a new hero.
Let’s hope it all works out and nobody gets hurt.
‘Hey, neat hack there, pal.’
Shit. Bruce, ‘pal’, you are jealous of Assange.
Rubberhose is the kind of tech many a writer would love to have invented for one of their ‘story’ characters, in the sense of giving it a name, outlining a basic algorithm, but not actually being able to code anything like it.
Instead, Assange invents and codes it in REAL LIFE.
Assange is THE HACKER – compared to a ‘hack’ writer like you.
‘I don’t say these cruel things about Julian Assange because I feel distant from him, but, on the contrary, because I feel close to him. I don’t doubt the two of us would have a lot to talk about. I know hordes of men like him; it’s just that they are programmers, mathematicians, potheads and science fiction fans instead of fiercely committed guys who aspire to topple the international order and replace it with subversive wikipedians.’
LOL!
You know lots of DREAMERS – NOT ‘doers’ – not REAL hackers.
After spending most of the article deriding Assange, telling us that all the hackers of the world follow you on Twitter, repeating 20 times or more that you know lots and lots of hackers, and what Assange did is quite easy/dull/sad/bad…
you can’t give the cake away without eating it…
because you want everyone to believe you are just like Assange.
You are NOTHING like the guy.
He’s the REAL CHARACTER – not some fictitious bullshit you or other writer could ever dream up.
This is the real beginning of Scifi happening, imperfectly as real like is, in front of your face – in ‘our time’ – and you are jealous you aren’t part of it, didn’t create/write it, and no matter how often you drop antiquated words like ‘cyberpunk, tell people that ‘you know hackers’, that this has all be thought of before… that Assange is ‘sociopath’ bla bla…
you are NO Assange.
You just proved, Bruce, that you are NO hacker.
You are a grumpy washed up hack and future left you behind.
Now please go back to your pity party for diplomats.
Poor them.
Don’t feel sorry for the truth tho’.
Because the crimes against humanity that Wikileaks has uncovered are finally getting into the open.
And if it hurts the feelings of writers like you that the world now knows about US Govt paid sex slavery and more BP oil spills and bank corruption – ooh, I feel sorry for you.
Hiding your head in a book, in your imaginary world of ‘cyberpunks’ should have prepared you for the future.
Instead you turn your back on THE cyberpunk of this new millennium – Assange who is giving everyone the tools to release information just as the punks of music opened up the creation of bands and spread of music to a new generation.
You are nothing like a punk, a hacker, or even a good writer these days – your lexicon dried up years ago – you secretly consider yourself part of an elite; visionaries, thinkers, et al who could see the future, put your guesses into hacked writing, and drag everyone along like a high priests.
That’s not the punk way.
And you are no punk, but an elitist failed dreamer.
Assange is the punk, and I doubt he would care to talk with you for a moment – because he’d see right through your arrogant ruse of being a ‘hacker’ or knowing any real ones, and detect instantly that your motivations are shallow and your impact on the world – minimal.
It is Assange, Wikileaks, and a new generation of information hackers who are writing the future now.
Not writers.
Writers are gone, and those that just survive are mostly elitist pretenders like you clinging on to the last vestige of fame for dreaming up what may have been but would never eventuate, keeping the gullible waiting for your last words, opinion and critique of the real world while protecting them from it like a Pied Piper.
Hackers are the new writers.
And you can’t hack it.
You miss the point behind Wiki leaks.It is about open society and conspiracy on everyday level.You are missing basic information that this grand hacking is about massive social change.Most people will don’t look for sun in hole on the ground.
tl;dr
Obviously Assange did it for the lulz…
Bruce, Assange jumped over a few hoops in
mid-December when he was granted bail in the U.K. over trumped-up and
alleged condom slippage charges filed
in Sweden on orders most likely of the United States’ CIA. Now he’s
got a book deal. The memoir — as yet untitled, but something long the
lines of ”HOW MY CONDOM BROKE AND OTHER TALES OF A TECHIE TERRORIST
” — will be published in the U.S. by the tony and trendy Knopf firm,
a division of Random House,while in the U.K. by Edinburgh-based
Canongate will do the trick.
Canongate publisher Jamie Byng confirmed the news via a leaked cable,
and said foreign rights are up for grabs.
Byng most likely set up the deal with Julian Assange for his memoirs,
working his contacts in the field to find and get Assange to agree to
the terms. Byng then likely asked agent Caroline Michel of the
U.K.-based literary
agency Fraser, Peters & Dunlop to be the go-between and set up the book
deal, which she did, signed, sealed and delivered on a snowy
afternoon. Agent Michel has had over 25 years experience in the media
industry, having previously run both Vintage at Random House and
Harper Press at HarperCollins. She was a member of the Booker Prize
Committee for six years.
Bruce Sterling does a major hatchet job on Pvt. Bradley Manning.
This is a shame because the truth is that few of us, including Sterling, known much about Manning or what his motives were. This doesn’t stop Sterling, however, from letting his imagination run wild. Sterling is, after all, a fiction writer, and that is what fiction writers do, no?
The problem is that Manning is not a fictional character from one of Sterling’s novels. He is a real flesh and blood human being, and as such should be accorded some modicum of dignity.
Perhaps an even more disturbing aspect of Sterling’s jeremiad is its dishonesty. For what little is known about Manning flies in the face of Sterling’s characterization of him. Manning “lacks political awareness,” Sterling tells us. “He has only his black-hat hacker awareness, which is all about committing awesome voyeuristic acts of computer intrusion and imagining you can get away with that when it really matters to people.” Manning is an “unworldly American guy who probably would have been pretty much okay if he’d been left alone to skateboard, read comic books and listen to techno music.” But this doesn’t go low enough for Sterling. He concludes by lumping Manning together in the same league as Monica Lewinsky:
Bradley Manning now shares that exciting, oh my God, Monica Lewinsky, tortured media-freak condition. This mild little nobody has become super-famous, and in his lonely military brig, screenless and without a computer, he’s strictly confined and, no doubt, he’s horribly bored.
Now compare Sterling’s characterization to the conversation Manning had with Lamo, the blogger who reported him to the authorities, as reported and discussed by Glenn Greenwald:
Lamo: what’s your endgame plan, then?. . .
Manning: well, it was forwarded to [WikiLeaks] – and god knows what happens now – hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms – if not, than [sic] we’re doomed – as a species – i will officially give up on the society we have if nothing happens – the reaction to the video gave me immense hope; CNN’s iReport was overwhelmed; Twitter exploded – people who saw, knew there was something wrong . . . Washington Post sat on the video… David Finkel acquired a copy while embedded out here. . . . – i want people to see the truth… regardless of who they are… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.
if i knew then, what i knew now – kind of thing, or maybe im just young, naive, and stupid . . . im hoping for the former – it cant be the latter – because if it is… were fucking screwed (as a society) – and i dont want to believe that we’re screwed.
Greenwald: Manning described the incident which first made him seriously question the U.S. Government: when he was instructed to work on the case of Iraqi “insurgents” who had been detained for distributing so-called “insurgent” literature which, when Manning had it translated, turned out to be nothing more than “a scholarly critique against PM Maliki”:
Manning: i had an interpreter read it for me… and when i found out that it was a benign political critique titled “Where did the money go?” and following the corruption trail within the PM’s cabinet… i immediately took that information and *ran* to the officer to explain what was going on… he didn’t want to hear any of it… he told me to shut up and explain how we could assist the FPs in finding *MORE* detainees…
i had always questioned the things worked, and investigated to find the truth… but that was a point where i was a *part* of something… i was actively involved in something that i was completely against…
Greenwald: And Manning explained why he never considered the thought of selling this classified information to a foreign nation for substantial profit or even just secretly transmitting it to foreign powers, as he easily could have done:
Manning: i mean what if i were someone more malicious- i could’ve sold to russia or china, and made bank?
Lamo: why didn’t you?
Manning: because it’s public data
Lamo: i mean, the cables
Manning: it belongs in the public domain -information should be free – it belongs in the public domain – because another state would just take advantage of the information… try and get some edge – if its out in the open… it should be a public good.
Greenwald: That’s a whistleblower in the purest and most noble form: discovering government secrets of criminal and corrupt acts and then publicizing them to the world not for profit, not to give other nations an edge, but to trigger “worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms.” Given how much Manning has been demonized — at the same time that he’s been rendered silent by the ban on his communication with any media — it’s worthwhile to keep all of that in mind.
But more than Sterling’s callousness, which derives from his inability to discern the difference between one of his fictional characters and a living human being, or his complete disregard for any truth, I think the thing that disturbs me most is his complete and total lack of judgment. “It’s the damage to the institutions that is spooky and disheartening,” Sterling says of the leaks, “after the Lewinsky eruption, every American politician lives in permanent terror of a sex-outing. That’s ‘transparency,’ too…”
So in Sterling’s mind, there is no difference between Clinton’s sexcapades and U.S. soldiers riding around and shooting innocent civilians from helicopters. These two events are of moral equivalence, and there’s no distinction between what has traditionally belonged in the private realm and what has belonged in the public realm.
Bruce Sterling may be a great novelist, a great artist. But this conveys no special moral insights. As Time art critic Robert Hughes said: “There is no generalizing about the moral effects of art, because it doesn’t seem to have any.”
this post was kinda cool – but it kinda sucks also.
1) one glaring error: saying that assange is not a journalist.
assange most certainly *is* a journalist. one of the best we’ve ever had.
as he reminds us in the video below, many journalists basically call up a source and ask “you got anything?”.
assange just converted the technology for that from “pull” to “push” – and made it totally anonymous. but being a hacker doesn’t mean he’s *not* a also journalist. it’s possible to be both you know.
he’s done a pretty good job coordinating the release of the biggest news scoop in history, working with the NYTimes, the Guardian, Spiegel, Le Monde, El Pais etc. in an age when many journalists have become mere stenographers for The Powers That Be, assange reminds us of what a journalist really does: he uncovers coverups, redacts the names of the innocent, and gets it published.
Exclusive Julian Assange Interview With Cenk Uygur (12/22/10)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL8g3vye4xo
by the way, the USGovt is trying to say that assange is *not* a journalist. way to play in the USGovt’s hands man – repeating their talking point.
2) another glaring error in this article: saying that assange has no social skills and that he’s a sociopath.
look at this clip where he calls some idiot “reporter” from ABCNews a “tabloid schmuck”:
Assange in respect for himself
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQriw-tiFBU
that’s just way cool social skills there. just like the way he handles himself masterfully in all his interviews – including upon just being released after a week in an uncomfortable jail cell.
the definition of a sociopath is someone who doesn’t care about other people. who cares more in the above clip – the shmuck from ABC who’s sucking up to power, repeating government talking points which are being used to kill hundreds of thousands of people – or the guy who’s standing up and calling bullshit for once?
and look at the numbers of likes/dislikes under those two videos: thousands of likes, dozens of dislikes. the (venerable, but probably jealous) hacker who wrote this article might get a clue: when the overwhelming majority of people people like you, it means you’ve got social skills.
3) the writer needs to learn the difference between “discretion” and “coverup”. what pfizer did in nigeria, what BP did with its earlier blowout, what the US did with Monsanto in Europe, the way the US was spying on UN personnel – suppressing this news isn’t “discretion” – it’s a coverup.
i know it hurts when a person from the same field as you way outdoes you – there’s an urge to downplay what they did.
assange is a better hacker than you, he’s a better journalist than you, and he’s got more social skills than you. get off your high-horse and deal with it.
The piece is to be interpreted in Freudian terms:
to be blunt, Assange has and will get more kinky-left, nerdy girl chinch than Sterling has ever seen, and it’s going to stay that way no matter how many years that Julian gets behind bars.
However, the point about musicians not paying for music (or beaver, for that matter) does ring true – please pay something for whatever gets you off and I guarantee there will be a lot more of it.
Beaver Madness (in all its diverse forms)
Assange will inspire a thousand Mannings to continually leak, but of course that is the boon not a curse. Power’s response to these threats make for good fiction and better scifi but to suggest that this is unusual in world history is a mistake.
“Furthermore, and not as any accident, Assange has managed to alienate everyone who knew him best,” well that may not bode well for being a dissident leader but it is the grist of all martyrs and saints. As is the fate of Manning and Assange tied to being “pulverized” for digestion for our infant population. All the same they will be used to further their goals without personal benefit. We don’t admire the human but rather the sacrifice.
Some typos in the essay:
extremely weird version of dissident “living in truth”
should be: i’ve got my head up my ass
and to see how the grownups ran what was basically a foreign-service news agency that the rest of us were always forbidden to see.
should be: mommy, mommy!
They’ll behave just like him.
should be: wtf am i talking about?
And I don’t much like that situation. It doesn’t make me feel better. I feel sorry for them and what it does to their values, to their self-esteem
should be: pass the crack pipe, i’m writing an “essay” for “the masses”
When diplomats tell foreigners what they really think, war results.
should be: …always, forever.
nations are brutal, savage, feral entities
should be: i am dog
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. Now they’re harassing Julian by turning those tools backwards.
should be: i grew up in the 50s
in order to touch the third rail
should be: i like the third rail
He aspires to his transparent crypto-utopia in the way George Bush aspired to imaginary weapons of mass destruction.
should be: in the way in the way in the way like totally in the way
As a novelist
should be: btw, did i mention, i write letters into words?
I’m not sure, after reading Serling’s article that I have any real idea of where he stands on the issue, other than it’s all very “messy.”
The one useful point made in the post appears as follows:
“…the real issue, that’s the big modern problem; national governments and global computer networks don’t mix any more.”
the cYes! Please also read, THE NATION 12/27, the editorial “In Defense of WikiLeaks” and Alexander Cockburn’s “Lessons From WikiLeaks.”
A long interesting post. While we are at it; I prepared archival of WikiLeaks cables here http://dazzlepod.com/cable/ which I hope will be useful for readers to easily catch up with the upcoming cables.
The site grants you access to all WikiLeaks cables in a nicely formatted table and search feature to look for cables based on your entered keywords.
You could also look up changes made to specific cables over time. This is possible as all cables hosted on the site are revision controlled.
http://gonzogeek.wordpress.com/2010/12/23/julian-assange-evolution-and-good-will-toward-men/
much sound and fury signifying nothing…
no, not manning, assange or wikileaks, but an arrogant, overly-successful writer who writes so wittily, but it is all about HIM and HIS perceptions, NOT WHAT IS…
fancy shmancy writerly crapola that misses the point of this episode by a mile; not to mention a really inhumane attitude, extreme presumptuousness, and ‘reasoning’ which values clever phrases over substance…
*and* the topper are the legions of fanbois who suck his dick on most of the posts… yuck
art guerrilla
aka ann archy
[email protected]
eof
I hate to say it but that was a rambling, arduous read.
Bruce, Julian now tells David Frost on Tv interview that he believes the two women accusing him were bamboozled, his word, by Swedish police and others into making the “charges” and possibily due to fear of the women that they had contracted a STD from him….. and that’s all there is to it….Julian said he is a gentleman and does not talk about his private sex life, and would never criticize the two women, but said they were USED by Swedish police….but he sees no vendetta by the women against him or any CIA plot……
New Julian Assange interview: One of the alleged sex crime victims
…22 Dec 2010 … Assange denies being an anarchist, admits a role
and benefit to institution, … friend that “she was bamboozled by
police and other people into this position … Julian Assange
interviewed by David Frost (youtube.com) …
http://www.reddit.com/…/new_julian_assange_interview_one_of_the_alleged/
Swedish police “bamboozled” women to file sex case: Assange
http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/frostovertheworld/2010/12/201012228384924314.html
LONDON: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, fighting a Swedish
extradition warrant, on Tuesday said he fears that he would not get
“natural justice” in Sweden where the police “bamboozled” two women to
accuse him of sexual assault.
This is a very interesting post but you’re off the mark in a lot of places.
Are you sure you know what a sociopath is? He’s not just a guy with asperger’s which is pretty much how you describe Assange. A sociopath has the rage issues of psychopath but higher social functioning and the ability to channel that rage into something indirectly but thoroughly destructive in the real world. They have no empathy for anyone but they can pretend to. The guys who ran Enron into the ground were sociopaths.
People with Asperger’s can’t pick up social cues well but if the situation is explained to them they do have empathy. They don’t express feelings well but they do have them.
People seem to get these “mad professor” types mixed up with truly cruel cold blooded criminals. Assange made sure that nobody dies. He is in a dangerous business and learns to adapt quickly to the dangers with each big leak. If he were a sociopath he wouldn’t give a fuck about who dies.
I find your cynicism throughout this post quite disturbing.
RE: mark’s list of “revelations”:
https://www.webstock.org.nz/blog/2010/the-blast-shack/#comment-2755
Dunno about y’all, but at least 80% of these revelations are things I could and would have told you a year ago – without the slightest access to diplomatic cables or official documents.
If Julian Assange or Private Manning are hackers, then your local car salesman is a mechanic.
Nice text, except from the overuse of ‘resentful’ and ‘resentment’.
What many people fail to see about Bruce’s article, is that it isn’t labeled as journalism, it is exactly what it claims to be; a feeling based article detailing how the media storm of the wikileaks affair has affected him both emotionally and professionally. It is a blog post… The destinction between blogging and news journalism is quite large.
Bruce, you need to meet the people that work and shop at Amoeba records or see the great documentary “I Need That Record”.
I know very few musicians that are NOT buying music, especially new and used vinyl. Get out more. Surely you must know the ST-37 band of collectors down there in Austin?
I find this article fascinating but far too pessimistic.
Assange is similar revolutionary to Shawn Fanning, although far more intentional. Fanning brought the music industry to its knees by creating the first peer-to-peer file sharing system. This wasn’t all that different than Wikileaks. It allowed people to “leak” copyrighted information to everyone else. It enraged very powerful groups by threatening their control over certain kinds of information.
Because of the radical nature of decentralized technology, a kid working in his uncles’s apartment in a couple months over the summer accidentally brought down a multi-billion dollar industry. Which never recovered.
It was one of the first triumphs of distributed decentralized networks over hierarchical monopolistic corporate control. As they are doing with Assange, the courts and the industry went after Napster and other P2P systems with the full weight of their legal and financial muscle. Yet every time they won a battle, they ended up further losing the war by causing their enemies to become more elusive.
P2P systems are a fact of life, and completely decentralized ones like Emule live on. In fact, this illustrated an important principle of the new era: that centralized hierarchies, no matter how rich and powerful, have little or no power over completely decentralized systems.
In a similar analogy to P2P, by clamping down and attempting to stamp out Wikileaks, it has only become far more decentralized.
http://www.multigesture.net/2010/12/09/visualizing-wikileaks-mirrors/
If they attempt to crucify Assange, it will only create 1000’s more Assange’s who won’t make his crucial mistake of becoming well known before establishing themselves in a physical safe haven.
Wikileaks brilliant insight was that leaks erode and deter ALL criminal conspiracies because they attack the faith of the conspirators that their actions will not end up on the front pages of the newspaper or featured in a blog in a few weeks or months.
Another brilliant realization was that leaks cause conspiratorial organizations to have to reduce communication within, adding more secrecy and shrinking circles of shared knowledge. This reduced internal communication by definition reduces the power of a criminal organization to function coherently.
http://rixstep.com/2/20101128,00.shtml
I think Bruce Sterling must have been having a bad day when he wrote this article. He is extremely critical of Assange’s person which is quite unfair. He should leave the personal attacks to FOX news. Assange is a soft-spoken, brilliant, ethical and very courageous individual. There’s no need to be cynical about him.
Here’s Assange on TED:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/julian_assange_why_the_world_needs_wikileaks.html
Bruce, cheer up! This is just the latest wave of the decentralization revolution. Like the others, it is unstoppable.
http://www.vancouversun.com/story_print.html?id=4023450
As an reflection of your feelings on recent events, this was a very good and entertaining read, though, after reading through all the comments, I realize that it’s a bit flawed, at least in terms of Manning’s characterization.
But actually, I’m quite appalled by most of the comments here. Most commenters weren’t apparently able to comprehend the article wholly, judging by the things they criticized about it yet weren’t there.
as far as i know the cables were just downloaded from the system. this is not hacking its just taking advantage of the incompetence of american security. the disparaging of individuals and accusations of wrong doing show prejudice, pre juris, that is trial by media before court. the lesson from wikileaks is not how the cables came about or who publishes them, it is in the record of the immense world wide criminal actions of america. arrogance assumes superiority but these cables show the lack of morals and perchance of illegality so readily taken at all oppurtunities by a rogue nation. it is obama that should be brought to justice at the hague for his war crimes. i await the guilty verdict and his execution.
how far have you fallen america?
Hi Bruce,
I found the link to your blog from a story on Huffpost. Wow. I think you put into words what I have felt brewing under the surface of my conscious mind:
What is this world we live in now, post-Wikileaks?
Who are Assange and Manning and who are who witness what they do?
And now that we know what we know and watch the US and other govt’s fumble to recover, (If they ever do.) What is the appropriate response of those of us who live in these countries?
Suddenly, there is an awful lot to think about.
Thank you a million times for bringing these questions to the surface.
Elizabeth Skewis
Did it ever occur to Mr. Sterling that maybe Julian Assange and Bradley Manning took huge risks to their lives and their freedoms against the most powerful government in world history- not out of some inflated sense of self-importance and egotism, but because they genuinely thought it was the right thing to do?
Apparently not. In Sterling’s eyes, Manning’s decision to expose the massacre of reporters in Bagdad and his concurrent decision to grant the public access to the inner workings of a purportedly democratic government which regularly commits and cover up crimes is nothing more than a “nobody”‘s attempt to alleviate boredom.
Meanwhile, Julian Assange’s decision to create the single most effective means of facilitating the exposure of government falsehoods since the creation of the 1st Amendment is seen, not as the principled stand of a man who knew full well that he would stand to lose everything but did so anyway for the benefit of the entire world, but rather the actions of a nihilistic “sociopath”.
That says a lot more about Sterling than it does about either Manning or Assange. To believe that the act of taking immense personal risks for what one believes to be a worthy cause is an act of selfish attention-grabbing rather than, just possibly, an act of extraordinary heroism in service to a noble cause is to demonstrate an utter indifference to the fate of mankind and one’s fellow men. If I ever met Bradley Manning, I would be proud to shake his hand. I wouldn’t trust Bruce Sterling to piss on me if I was on fire.
The ultimate effect of WikiLeaks is going to be the same as the effect of lawsuits on the Pharmaceutical industry.
Ever since lawyers were able to subpeona Merck for emails mentioning Vioxx, and use that to win lawsuits, Pharmaceutical firms have implemented scorched earth policies to automatically delete ALL information that is more than a few months old. Emails, interim lab tests — all gone without a trace.
WikiLeaks has demonstrated that all systems are now vulnerable, so governments will do the same thing: file, read, delete and purge. The only safe information will be that located between the user’s ears.
20 years from now we’ll be trying to prosecute war criminals, but will not be able to find any evidence of orders given to troops.
Bruce, it’s christmas and I feel the irrepressible urge to be truthful and blunt:
You don’t seem to know anything about Assange. Or Manning. Or the true nature of the communication channel Wikileaks is or might possibly be. And yet you spend, what, 30 pages to produce a conjecture bechamel gone horribly wrong?
Didn’t you learn to not believe everything the papers say when you were around 5 years old?
Sorry to here intrude a personal opinion in this worthy blog about STERLING, ASSANGE, MANNING, CORRUPT POLITICAL SYSTEMS, IMMORAL FINANCIAL ORGANISATIONS, DELINQUENT MEDIA, etc.
Permit me to compliment the owners of this web-page, particularly Charlie Bird, for hosting the interview with STERLING
The subsequent (if not consequent) blog of comments – some informed (some not), some generic (some egoistically irrelevant), comments with lashings of bile and even venom, pinnacle essays of civility and statesmanlike analysis, literate creativity, mindless drek … were all delightful.
What more could any New Age Renaissance person want for ?
I hope that this website has been multiply backed up on several servers,
world wide, & multiply hidden underneath several layers of PGP, etc.
The vast amount of corruption this (and other blogs) reveals, indicate that
the financial and political world, in all continents, is ruthless, vindictive, medacious, totally self serving, and probably heralds the real incarnate implementation of 1984 !
Too florid a comment ? Too ‘imaginative’ ? Too paranoid ?
Remember the “Precautionary Principle”.
Prepare as if the ‘worst’ is about to happen,
then relax, for you know that nothing more could have been done.
That is why we (ALL) take out insurance on stupidly low risk events, like car crashes, house fire and burglary, health care …
I salute & compliment all who have contributed to this blog.
And ruffle Charlie Bird’s ears for me.
What it made me think of is… what percentage of of their secrets is this latest release? 1% – or is that too high?
I just read this yesterday:
CIA launches task force to assess impact of U.S. cables’ exposure by WikiLeaks
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/21/AR2010122104599.html
Glad to see some of the focus about the NSA and its secretive role in our lives.
Had a few issues with it: He says Manning was the one who done all the work ‘hacking’ these documents then a few paragraphs later says that Assange hacked a super power which to me seems rather contradictory.
Bruce seems to try and label Assange as just another hacker when it’s obvious he’s spent an entire life working towards a goal to get to a position where he is now so in this sense he’s still one of a kind.
Also the suggestion of musicians not buying music themselves, can we get some factual evidence on this?
It lacked any real insight and I felt the entire piece spent it’s time contradicting the majority of what it has already said.
It is hard to believe that this rambling screed is written by the writer of so many of my favorite books. I can only hope he was extremely drunk or high at the time to have written such a profusion of embarrassingly ignorant drivel.
I have noticed that women will become more ambitious to topple a man’s status as it elevates. Men will also try to take status from each other and from women.
Men and women may use sex or feelings to humiliate each other for status, while men will fight each other physically and intellectually to compete for status.
The outcome of a particular exchange is determined not just by those who are trying to rob each other of status, but also by the opinions of the peanut gallery.
Julian Assange has earned his status. Now these cranky, dried-out, neurotic neo-feminists are trying to mug him in broad daylight.
They will fail because they’re not intelligent enough to do anything but to drag him down with insults. They cannot prove anything, and their credibility is lacking.
Nice story about hackers, and cyberpunks, and undeground guys, and spies, but maybe you should use fictional characters instead of making your story based on real people and settings and and adding a bit of your hacker wannabe emotions. But sure, you wouldn’t get even a 5% of reads compared to this if you do it that way.
I don’t thing that Wikileaks has anything to do with hackers.
Bruce Sterling has not convinced this reader of anything with the above ramble, except that he (1) has a way with cutting adjectives, and (2) feels immense condescension for those who choose to live non-fictional lives worth writing about.
In this particular case, martyrdom was not a means, but the end. He prepared for it, planned it. Martyrdom is the goal.
Seeing all of these comments from people who clearly didn’t grok Sterling’s essay (not that there aren’t some valid critiques here), and am reminded of @furrygirl’s tweet from earlier this evening:
“HITLER GRILLED CHEESE! HITLER GRILLED CHEESE!”
“Bradley’s gonna become a “spy” whose “espionage” consisted of making the activities of a democratic government visible to its voting population.”
You write that without noting all that is wrong with it, and you casually toss off all the powerful hell that he and others are going to catch as inevitable and even righteous. Damn, Bruce, you’re too old to be in this business.
I thought this was a remarkable piece of writing, and it’s interesting that many commenters are perceiving it as a smear job against Assange or Manning. I support both of those guys and what they did, but I don’t necessarily accept at face value that their motivations can be purely described by a desire to “do the right thing”.
Of the 3-or-so million people who had access to the cables, it’s not like Manning was the only one with a conscience. If indeed the allegations are true, why was he the one to leak? There are clearly other psychological factors that played a part in his decision – even if he wasn’t conscious of them. And while Sterling isn’t privy to most of Manning’s private feelings, I think he takes a pretty enlightened guess.
Likewise on Assange – who I admire enormously. But Sterling is right that his strategy of redacted publishing through the screen of mainstream media is more of a clever ploy. It’s a modus operandi for WL that’s evolved over the past couple of years as a compromise to his stated goals of bypassing the establishment (media & governments) entirely.
Assange is artfully careful to stay within the letter of the law, but he does not particularly respect those laws. He knows laws are arbitrary rules made by powerful people – particularly the type he is likely to rub against. Like everyone else involved he is playing a sort of game of selective disclosure of his philosophies and intent.
This essay is not news, it doesn’t claim to be. It’s an expression of tender honesty, informed by the experience of a long life.
Wikileaks commenters please read http://scotsmaninoz.blogspot.com/
From a Forbes interview –
“You were a traditional computer hacker. How did you find this new model of getting information out of companies?”
Julian – “It’s a bit annoying, actually. Because I cowrote a book about [being a hacker], there are documentaries about that, people talk about that a lot. They can cut and paste. But that was 20 years ago. It’s very annoying to see modern day articles calling me a computer hacker.
I’m not ashamed of it, I’m quite proud of it. But I understand the reason they suggest I’m a computer hacker now. There’s a very specific reason.
I started one of the first ISPs in Australia, known as Suburbia, in 1993. Since that time, I’ve been a publisher, and at various moments a journalist. There’s a deliberate attempt to redefine what we’re doing not as publishing, which is protected in many countries, or the journalist activities, which is protected in other ways, as something which doesn’t have a protection, like computer hacking, and to therefore split us off from the rest of the press and from these legal protections. It’s done quite deliberately by some of our opponents. It’s also done because of fear, from publishers like The New York Times that they’ll be regulated and investigated if they include our activities in publishing and journalism.”
Calling him a black-hat hacker is just another example of the use of langauge to oppress dissidents. Terrorist is the only name the state has for Revolutionaries. States have power and want to maintain that power, so they’re not going to call you nice names.
Which is why you don’t listen to morons like Bruce.
Also, number 218 – from the same interview –
“Back to Mudge and Cinder: Do you think, knowing his intelligence personally, that he can solve the problem of leaks?”
Julian – “No, but that doesn’t mean that the difficulty can’t be increased. But I think it’s a very difficult case, and the reason I suggest it’s an impossible case to solve completely is that most people do not leak. And the various threats and penalties already mean they have to be highly motivated to deal with those threats and penalties. These are highly motivated people. Censoring might work for the average person, but not for highly motivated people. And our people are highly motivated.
Mudge is a clever guy, and he’s also highly ethical. I suspect he would have concerns about creating a system to conceal genuine abuses.”
Yeah, most people have access to such information, no.218.
The ones who act, are moral. The ones who don’t act are not.
They turn a blind eye, as most of the human herd does.
As someone who has endured psychological and physical abuse for standing up for what was right (and seeing how nobody else did) I know this all too well.
This is why the Assange case is causing controversy. It exposes all you folks in the ivory towers who don’t have to live with injustice, who have the luxury of not bothering to side with victims – for the guilty cowards you are.
Which is why Bruce’s article depoliticizes the issue and harps on about egos and hacker culture instead of talking about the real issue – WAR CRIMES BEING EXPOSED.
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.” – Desmond Tutu
Certainly speaks to Assange’s (potential) personality cult, however, I’m of the mind that whomever Assange happens to be should take a back seat to WikiLeaks…
Nothing against the man, but WikiLeaks itself promises to restore lost ground to government transparency – surely that’s an important thing, given how poorly media has kept citizens informed (id est “with information which can be used to make decisions” versus celebrity gossip, “reality TV”, et cetera) over the years?
A modern day Socratic figure? His trial a comic irony? The jury is still out.
Bruce,
I have to say that your analysis right on target and probably the most literate description of the whole Wikileaks debacle. Congratulations, this is probably the best thing you’ve written lately.
What a waiste ot time to read. Readsliene bad fiction, you sound like a jealous wanker. Why don’t you go do something for humanity.
The comments on here are amazing… Particularly the ones re Manning. I wasn’t previously aware that he was motivated to protest against the phony puppet democratic state that he saw with his own eyes.
The funniest thing is that so many have cited this essay’s length. Printed out, it’s only 10 pages long. Just goes to show that attention span is truly waning…
Meanwhile, unmanned drones continue to bomb ‘tribal areas’.
The 21st century is currently defined by technological changes to the human brain and a permanent, relatively static global war. It remains to be seen whether information can change thinking when the collective brain appears overwhelmed by day-to-day minutae.
The actual content of Sterling’s ramblings here could have been condensed into a couple of paragraphs; and most of that is mere assertion.
Bruce Sterling used to be kind of cool but he’s clearly lost it and makes me wonder if he ever really had it in the first place. At the very least he needs to apologise for his character assassination of Manning, that really sucks.
Henry L. Stimson: “A gentlemen never reads other people’s mail”. The last holder of the eminently honest post, Secretary of War (194-45), Stimson was talking about such an organization as the NSA. When you spy on people, eventually people find-out and will seek to thwart you with disinformation. I think the leaks are a miasma of information that not only may be false, but largely refer to cover-story events.
Why are we in a situation of total blackness when it comes to CIA budgets? That is strictly prohibited in the US constitution. I think that creating a paralyzing force called the DoD led to fanatical ‘information’ ‘gathering’ (or CIA daily briefs, whatever came first) and secrecy.
Diplomats are indeed a pleasant face of the raw animal desires which really run a country. But they also oversee something else: military presence in other countries during times of peace. Diplomats, specifically ambassadors, either knowingly or unknowingly also put a nice face to US global hegemony.
‘We pretend Sweden isn’t in NATO, but they really are’, does that not shock you? It seemed like a dream to me, but how many Swedish sit together discussing this issue without knowing the true facts? It’s getting to be like you can’t go to the store to get some bread, because the bread’s all bad.
We reckless young people lack the humanity of age, especially when we’ve grown-up being told how we’re destroying the environment, we’re over-populated, have no driving purposes as nations other than to have a new house and a new car every year. It could be that Julian’s crowd was just ahead of their time. The constitution has been violated 10 ways to sunday, with wiretapping, torture, and in the last 7 years. What would make an American particularly fond of their current government?
Unfortunately, I am of the opinion that things will get a whole lot worse politically (legally?), and should if high-profile wikileaks can continue. I want other countries to know how badly they are being screwed our of everything their ancestors minded for thousands of years (yes folks, even culture is a horrible casualty of this war).
American is not great. Modernism is not the answer, and the sooner everyone understands that the US has been making a huge mess of things for 64 years, the better-off our planet will be. Think of all the jealousy poorer people have for Americans. I would love to crush that. Because things do not add-up to people.
<SIDE NOTE: There is, physically, something called too much information; this is the Gorgon Stare,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/01/AR2011010102690.html?hpid=topnews
but I don't think Wikileaks could ever be such a source.
On the first reading, I thought this was just pretentious, over-wraught, self-important dreck.
Now I see that it’s actually also pretty disgusting, morally.
It’s interesting how Bruce uses permutations of the phrase, “I know lots of people like X” a million times, like a teenager namedropping people he’s Googling up on his iPhone in a desperate attempt to seem “cool” and “better” than the crowd. While at the same time he is constantly declaritively generalizing hackers as “sociopaths”, and explaining the psychology of Assange and Manning as if he is their therapist or they are characters in his third-person omniscient narrator fiction, when he obviously hasn’t met them and it appears his knowledge of them is limited to a few articles with the #wikileaks hash tag. Frankly I take offense to that.
Among other inaccuracies, Assange didn’t hack anything here; he simply organized a website that publishes leaks revealed by anonymous parties, and does what journalists (Bruce has a degree in this) are supposed to do: reveal the truth. To frame him as a “hacker” is to fit him into the character mold of a pre-determined science fiction story or recycled cyberpunk manifesto.
If Assange’s Wikileaks activities constitutes “hacking”, then every journalist and organization at all involved in publishing leaked facts is a hacker. The New York Times are a bunch of hackers. The Guardian is run by hackers.
Bruce continually makes Assange out to be some kind of cyberpunk anti-hero Neo figure taking it to “The System” with his amazing computer hacker skillz, comparing him to science fictional tropes like the Black Net, etc. And then calls Manning one of “them ‘cracker’, ‘darkside hacker’, computer underground’ types” because he burnt a CD.
Apparently every nine year old who has ever made a mix CD or transferred a file to their iPod is suddenly a ‘dyed in the wool 1337 badass anarcho-darkside computer hacker’. Uh huh.
This article is a thoughtless, selfish, discharacterization of Manning as a childish computer geek sociopath with no knowledge of the world when it’s clear from all evidence that Manning understood the consequences and was clearly standing up for what he knew was right, an act of immense courage.
If anyone is a childish sociopath here, it’s the author of the article.
Verbal diarrhoea.
So long and so little said.
Interesting.I think time will show what a chance we´ve lost here. A chance to really question and demand a more truthful communication, which could empower people in the whole world.
It´s all lost, due to it´s key being in the hands of a person, who doesn´t understand the importance of that.
There it was, the 15 minutes of fame, and conspiracy, truth seekers, dreamers, hacktivists and other people with a heart…can all go back to sleep, the guru was no guru, he was himself lost in all his truths and lies.
ad hominems! (“sociopath” lacking people skills)
trivialisation! (“lewinsky”)
imputed criminality! (“kerviel”)
how low can you go, bruce? jealous, much?
this is one of the most spectacular pieces of jujitsu the world has ever seen. the guy with the plastic bag standing in front of the tank in tiananmen square has nothing on this. he’s hacked the fricking planet, for god’s sake, as you concede, and you’re like, meh?
pathetic!
the guy is risking his life if you hadn’t noticed
he brings to mind tom paine, that disaffected minor customs official who, disgusted at the corruption he saw around him, helped set off not one, but two, political revolutions (the us, then france)
paine nearly came a cropper in france during the terror, because no one said significant political change is ever smooth nor easy, but he fought and fought and fought and fought, and it’s plain whose side he’d be on in this particular scrap
assange also has a poetical turn of mind
he’s managed to turn james jesus angleton’s “wilderness of mirrors” into a hundred mirrors, a thousand
Mr. Sterling is, at the same time, both a good and a terrible author. His writing style involves an ongoing parody of Victorian novelists including the complete inability, or, apparently desire, to indulge in any common sense editing of his material.
In commenting on the Wikileaks situation, Mr. Sterling apparently continues in this vein, offering his range of the moment associations, opinions, random thoughts and rather curious evaluations, if they may be dignified as such, of persons involved.
While I did find his novel “Cryptonomicon” to be quite enjoyable, I find his opinion on any contemporary political or contemporary subject to be of no particular value.
Likewise, on hackers and computing, despite his non fiction book quite some time ago on the topic, it would seem that being close to hackers, associating with them or even randomly knowing some them confers any particular insights of value on Mr. Sterling as is evidenced from his ramblings, which should be confined to his novels where they belong. Such self delusions are commonplace among novelists. Some think they are philosophers, others political revolutionaries or sociologists or world saviours.
Sterling is just a novelist – he is at times brilliant, at other times pedantic, or dull boring and wordy, a pseudo-grandiose throwback to an era probably farther from us now than the ancient Greeks. But he is often entertaining, which is part of what a novelist should be, so while I may not give much credence to his world view opinions, I will continue to read his books. Keep at it Bruce old dude!
Bruce, that was a *damn* good article my brother. We (subversive wikipedians) need to friend up and support one another. Sometimes things like this *need* to happen, somewhat akin to an enema 😉
High on emotion and low on references. Back it up or take it to the tabloids.
“If the Internet was walking around in public, it would look and act a lot like Julian Assange.”
Mmm, that is a good line Sterling. But. If a novel or if a blog was walking around in public, it might not look anything like Bruce Sterling. Bruce Sterling is more likely to be riding in the back of a car, looking out the window, with sunglasses on. If he had a camera in his hands, Bruce Sterling’s choice of angles and lighting would be technically gorgeous. And when he edited everything, the vision he captured of the world going by him, would magically, somehow, be stark and sparkly. But in the end it would be essentially neutral, and it would not really mean enough, in times such as these.
Come out of the backseat, the cramped melancholy. Get some air. Perhaps you too have been grasping for the third rail? Sitting, alone, reconstructing phrases, in front of a computer screen, judging others, who are taking action, not because they are superior, but because they are human.
Thanks for making me think,
Pam
I stopped reading when I got to your juvenile rant about the NSA, which demonstrates that you know almost nothing about the actual agency or the people who work there. You have very strong opinions for someone whose knowledge apparently comes from comic books.
Congrats on having a childish take on a complex government agency.
I have been following this Wiki leaks event for many many months even before it made global headlines..
As a systems analyst and Independent I have been monitoring traffic spikes on among the array of global wires and signals,
evidence clearly suggest more times than not this event has been nothing less than a combined effort by many people around the world, including all major players of the famed G8,
data also suggest that the intent of this effort has been nothing more than another botched attempt to increase the political base required effect via a systemic process any and all steps to curb and eventually control the flow of real facts and and the same time capitalize upon the media blitz at the expense of expendable assets of nations in crisis.
My prayers are with the families of the serviceman caught up in this mess…
Please consider writing about the idea that it might be real that NO MAN wearing a US uniform would ever ever even think of doing what what they are claiming in a time of war unless he was ordered.
It seems that Wikileaks and Assange are victims of a political wich to control og information. This can lead to no good. It just makes people do extreme things to get their message heard.
data also suggest that the intent of this effort has been nothing more than another botched attempt to increase the political base required effect via a systemic process any and all steps to curb and eventually control the flow of real facts and and the same time capitalize upon the media blitz at the expense of expendable assets of nations in crisis.
In terms of press freedom, this is possibly the best example of digital technology having a huge impact on broadcasting and press freedom. It is the epitome of free speech – and these documents probably would not have been published if it were not for the internet and Wikileaks’ technology.
mistery of Wikileaks ..