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| Sunil Sethi: Life under the Net | | WikiLeaks has survived and thrived only because the Internet is an uncontrollable space, beyond the purview of any govt or corporation |
| Sunil Sethi / New Delhi Aug 07, 2010, 00:10 IST |
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The world of techie communication gets weirder by the minute — only this morning, I had an SMS from Sai Baba (or someone purportedly acting on his behalf) offering “daily alerts in quotes, trivia and prayers” from the holy man himself at Rs 30 a month. Tarts, real estate tycoons and many others are also in daily touch with me despite my best efforts to block their unsolicited calls, messages and emails. From the US, there is a stream of horror stories of the offensive and bizarre behaviour of techie support staff at Indian call centres. Unethical, nutcase employees of reputable computer corporations have conned American callers, in search of simple technical assistance, to hack into their laptops and misuse private information — from credit card numbers and personal pictures — and go on spending sprees or set up porn sites.
That’s the dark side of the remorselessly intrusive and persistent assault of instant communication. But is it all bad news? Not if you consider the pale-faced, silvery-haired visage of Julian Paul Assange, the Australian founder of WikiLeaks.org, universal whistleblower and cyberspace czar, whose online site recently posted thousands of secret reports of the US Army’s actions in Afghanistan between 2004 and 2009 and had governments quaking round the world.
WikiLeaks has been around for just three-and-a-half years but its relentless crusade to make government and corporate secrets public has made it one of the most powerful and feared communication agencies in the world — not a news organisation so much as a “media insurgency”. It is the 21st century embodiment of the press baron Lord Thomson’s famous aphorism that “news is what someone, somewhere is hiding; the rest is advertising”.
WikiLeaks has survived and thrived only because the Internet is an uncontrollable space, beyond the purview of any government or corporation. In Assange’s words, it is “an uncensorable system for mass document leaking and public analysis”. An 11-page profile of Assange, his secretive organisation and its modus operandi published in The New Yorker in March remains one of the most-read features of the year in the prestigious weekly.
The truly extraordinary aspect of WikiLeaks is that it has no permanent physical address and Assange is a man of no fixed abode. Together with a small band of activists and computer hackers (reminiscent of Lisbeth Salander, the beguiling dragon-tattooed heroine of Steig Larsson’s Millennium trilogy), it is on the move and will set up shop anywhere, in locations as diverse as Iceland or Canada. It is manned by unpaid volunteers and funded by donations. Anyone can leak classified materials, including videos, anytime to WikiLeaks and from anywhere in the world, which are only made public after rigorous authentication. It has published highly incriminating documents and videos from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay and from Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo account to corruption in corporations, banks and governments.
Assange’s setup is impervious to threats, legal action and closure because it exists out there — in cyberspace. Cornering it would be like trying to capture a cloud. Those who have tried have failed. “A government or company that wanted to remove content from WikiLeaks would have to practically dismantle the Internet itself,” reports The New Yorker.
In the end, Assange’s achievement, endorsed by Amnesty International awards and invitations to speak by the most influential networks in the world, is both a tribute to and miraculous manifestation of communication technology. It is also a reflection of how rapidly the old media is becoming unsustainable. The latest casualty this week was the sale of the 77-year-old magazine, Newsweek, for a token one dollar (excluding millions of dollars of accumulated debt).
For all the intrusions of junk mails and messages, and unethical practices unleashed by remote-control computer hacking, WikiLeaks is also a product of the same technology. Intrusiveness is crucial to information that someone, somewhere is trying to suppress.
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