The big news of the week is “cablegate” aka the thousands of confidential US diplomatic documents that are being made public by WikiLeaks.
While the contents of the leaked cables range from the bizarre (Gaddafi’s blonde companion) to evidence of illegal behavior (spying on UN officials), the outcome of all this is that diplomacy will go on as before. There is no alternative to diplomacy. Even war, after all, is diplomacy by other means…
The impact of the leak on the culture and values of Western democratic societies will be more serious.
Western politicians of all stripes have called various actions on Julian Assange (WikiLeaks’ founder), ranging from hunting him down like Osama Bin Laden to assassination by drone.
What ever happened to Western concepts of judicial due process and the assumption of innocence?
While politicians can be forgiven for acting like politicians, after all, they have their constituents to answer to (in theory at least; in practice, US politicians answer to their campaign donors), the actions of companies like Amazon and EveryDNS are more worrisome.
When WikiLeaks came under intense denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, the website was moved to Amazon’s EC2 hosting service. On Wednesday, Amazon cut off WikiLeaks, citing pressure from US Senator Joe Lieberman.
On Friday, EveryDNS.net took down the wikileaks.org domain name, citing WikiLeaks’ violation of EveryDNS’s acceptable use policy.
Another company, Tableau Software, bowing to pressure from Senator Lieberman, “removed from the Internet visualisations of the US Embassy cables”.
This is all very worrisome because it shows how it easy it is shut down a website. All you need is a little bit of political pressure. And all this is achieved without judicial review and due process.
Is that what Western freedoms and liberties have come to? What happened to freedom of speech?
The problem is not whether what WikiLeaks did was legal or acceptable. There are processes in the system for dealing with cases like these, including a potential grand jury indictment against Julian Assange.
Resorting to what is essentially censorship is absolutely not the way to deal with WikiLeaks.
Believe me when I say I know what censorship is. The general perception is that China started the art of Internet censorship with its “great firewall”.
The reality is that in 1996, as the Internet became popular in Singapore (a country that has NOTHING to do with China), the government there started considering ways to control what its citizens had access to on the Internet. The primary target was online pornography but free and unfettered political expression was also a concern. As a start, all private Internet traffic had to pass through government-controlled proxy servers. Unapproved websites were blocked. At some point, the government considered requiring local website owners to register with the government, in the same way that printed media publishers had to obtain government licenses. I don’t know if this was ever put into practice because I had left Singapore by then.
I know this because I organized a petition drive to oppose the Singapore government’s move to censor and control the Internet. There have even been articles written about that petition.
What I see happening to WikiLeaks is more of the same: attempts at control and censorship. And it is scary. When politicians call the shots, who is next? After all, as the maxim goes: one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter (members of the Irgun/Haganah who later became Israeli leaders and Nelson Mandela/ANC come to mind). If your website upsets a politician or political party, will it be shutdown through direct and indirect political pressure? If that happens and you lack the technical skills of the WikiLeaks crew, what is your recourse?
The fact is that Western countries don’t need this. The system in place is robust enough to handle WikiLeaks, Al Qaeda terrorism and more. After all, this same system survived a 44-year cold war with the Soviet Union with most of our freedoms intact.
