Dump

The inability of much of the media to engage with anything not involving personalities can be crippling. None of the essays on "Who is Obama?" have helped us understand the man's actions in office. His personal story as a "transformational" figure is largely - figurative. He plays basketball. He bombs Afghanistan. Yes He Can. And by asking the same question of the man most associated with Wikileaks, "Who is Julian Assange?" again the media stares at the epicenter and ignores the blast.

Wikileaks, the controversial "document dump", has angered a number of governments. In response to the recent release of diplomatic cables, the US government has tried to wrench the site off the web. In their turn, sections of the internet community have tried to circumvent this. As it happens, rerouting information is something that the internet was built for, and it is slightly depressing that these basic tenets have not been understood by the nation that largely created the system in the first place. As a secondary effect, the private enabling companies that seem to have acted as government proxies may also be widely criticized.

That the community has not sought to ask questions about the politics of Wikileaks itself or the nature of the current leaks isn't some type of mass naivety. The first responsibility is to reverse the vandalism (The #imwikileaks tag shows this effect). The veracity of the information - not that that has been doubted - is a lower order problem, and a lower priority. If a film has unappealing scenes in it, you don't destroy the cinemas showing it. And you certainly don't threaten to kill the distributors.

There are serious discussions to be had on whether public information can be stolen by the public. But too much is made of the quality of this type of secrecy. While adult society requires secrecy to function, government secrecy is purely tactical and not sacrosanct. We are not talking about your father not being your father. This is about the analysis of partial information in the absence of trust. You keep your cards close to your chest, you make your play and move on. It is quite clear that diplomatic opinion was "secret" to hundreds of people; at some point the wild eyed might refer to that as a conspiracy. In playing the spying game, lives are routinely put at risk. Wikileaks can take on the responsibility for considering the consequences - but they are the whistle, not the blower. They can never get this entirely right.

This "internet community" I mention are simply those likely to value the internet as a structure over the concerns about what it is carrying. Similarly, I don't believe that traffic accidents invalidate the need for roads and transportation. To prevent the internet from becoming subject to the whims of national government, people need to state openly whether they will protect the messenger from the reactions to an unpleasant message.