WINTER 20116

EVGENY MOROZOV n ERIC SCHMIDT AND JARED COHEN

HILLARY CLINTON n BERNARD KOUCHNER

JULIAN ASSANGE n ABDULLAH GUL

WikiLeaks and theNew Language ofDiplomacy

Is Internet freedom an absolute, universal value like freedom of speech? If there

are limits, how and by whom can they be established? Is crying fire or scaling

firewalls anymore acceptable in cyberspace than in physical space? What is the

impact on the discourse between nations, cultures and individuals?

In this section, we gather a collage of comments from various key players from

Google to Wikileaks to the US State Department along with comments by one of

the most cogent analysts of the Net and the president of Turkey.

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WikiLeaks and the Perils of Extreme Glasnost

EVGENY MOROZOV, a visiting scholar at Stanford University, is the author of Net

Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World. He spoke with NPQ editor Nathan Gardels in

December about the implications of WikiLeaks.

NPQ | The most recent WikiLeaks cache is not your father’s Pentagon

Papers. Like a neutron bomb of the information age, it has indiscriminately

destroyed good diplomacy and duplicity alike across a broad spectrum of polit-

ical cultures.

Should there be limits to the kind of extreme glasnost represented by

WikiLeaks? If so, by what criteria do we responsibly draw them?

EVGENY MOROZOV | The more I learn about Julian Assange’s philosophy,

the more I come to believe that he is not really rooting to destroy secrecy or make

transparency the primary good in social relations. His is a fairly conventional—even

if a bit odd—political quest for “justice.”

As far as I can understand Assange’s theory—and I don’t think that it’s terribly

coherent or well thought out—he believes that one way to achieve justice is to min-

imize the power of governments to do things that their citizens do not know of and

may not approve of if they do. There is nothing in this theory that heralds the end of

secrecy across the entire social spectrum: Citizens, at least nominally, are entitled to

go about their own business; it’s the government that is the main target.

Here we mustn’t forget that Assange made a name for himself in computer cir-

cles by being one of the key developers of a software application that helped

users—and particularly human rights activists in authoritarian regimes—to

encrypt and protect their data from the eyes of the authorities. So I don’t think that

Assange opposes “secrecy” altogether; for him, it’s really all about keeping the gov-

ernment in check.

Frankly, I don’t know to what extent he had a chance to really come up with a

theory about the role that secrecy plays in international relations and diplomacy. Even

if he had read all the cables, he would need to know the world much more intimately

than the CIA to really assess the impact of the planned release. For example, it’s very

tough to predict whether such files would trigger a war in the Caucasus without

knowing the politics of Armenia and Azerbaijan....

So while we can continue trying to understand the limits of “publicness” in diplo-

macy, I am not sure that Assange would disagree with us on any of this. It just so hap-

pens that he has a vision for changing the world and he believes that, if implemented,

this vision might dwarf all these current harms to diplomacy.

I don’t think that Assange

opposes “secrecy” altogether;

for him, it’s really all about

keeping the government

in check.

Only if we, or he himself, knew his theoretical template of a totally free infor-

mation society could we then draw limits on what is acceptable or not.

NPQ | What is the likely geopolitical outcome down the road from this lat-

est WikiLeaks episode?

Will it pit not only more closed societies against open societies, but also open

societies with secrets against the extreme glasnostics—a kind of three-tiered

clash of information cultures?

In the end, will it make closed societies more open and open societies more

closed? Or, will it make everyone more closed?

MOROZOV | I think it will be intelligence gathering—and especially intelli-

gence sharing—rather than diplomacy per se that would suffer the most. The reason

why the current batch of cables got released in the first place was lax security; with a

few million people having access to these files, it’s really surprising that it took so

many years for someone like Bradley Manning to actually release them to Assange.

But this could have happened even before WikiLeaks took off the ground a few years

ago; these cables may have just been sent to the Guardian or El Pais directly. So in all

likelihood we’ll see a more granular approach to setting permissions as to who gets

access to what kind of data. Ambassadors will keep talking.

This, however, is not the most interesting geopolitical aspect to the WikiLeaks

story. What I found most interesting in the days after the files were released was the

pressure that various American and some European politicians tried to exert on vari-

ous Internet intermediaries that were offering their services to WikiLeaks. Some of

those efforts paid off—with Amazon and PayPal dropping WikiLeaks as a client. This,

of course, looks very suspicious to many computer geeks, who are already often very

suspicious of governments.

What I think might happen is that WikiLeaks and Assange in particular will

emerge as leaders of a new political “geek” movement that would be built on the prin-

ciples of absolute “Internet freedom,” transparency, very permissive copyright law,

and so on. This movement has already been brewing globally—especially in Europe,

where various local cells of the Pirate Party have proved remarkably strong. It’s quite

possible that the “hunt for WikiLeaks” would further radicalize young people and

make them join the fight for the “Free Internet,” however they choose to interpret it.

This may be wonderful news—especially if they renounce violence and start

participating in mainstream politics instead, thus becoming something of a digital

equivalent to the Green Movement in Europe. The other option, alas, is far less

amenable: It’s possible that if Assange is really treated badly and unjustly by the

authorities—and possibly even tried like a “terrorist” as some prominent US politicians

What I think might hap-

pen is that WikiLeaks

and Assange in particular

will emerge as leaders of

a new political “geek”

movement that would be

built on the principles of

absolute “Internet free-

dom” and transparency.

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have suggested—this would nudge the movement toward violent forms of resist-

ance. Given that many of these people are tech-literate and that more and more of

our public infrastructure is digital, this could be a significant impediment to the

growth of the global economy: Just think of the potential losses if Visa and

MasterCard cannot process online payments because of some mysterious cyber-

attacks on their servers.

Whichever way things go, I think it’s pretty obvious that the US government’s

ability to use the Internet to accomplish anything on its foreign policy agenda has been

severely damaged.

The rather aggressive manner in which pundits and politicians in Washington have

reacted to the release of the cables would make many otherwise staunch supporters

of the “Internet freedom” policy reconsider their attitudes towards the US.

I don’t know about the likely impact on Russia, China and some other states that

some like to call “closed.” The reason why the cables made so much noise in America

is because everyone expects America to behave—and it has the nominally free press

and the vibrant civil society that allow Assange’s accusations to stay in the game for at

least a week. I don’t think that this would necessarily be the case in Russia, where both

the media and the civil society are tightly controlled by the Kremlin (and the Internet

might soon be, too), while everyone’s expectations of government corruption are

already so high that few cables could worsen it.

Also, as we have seen in the Middle East, many governments have no qualms

about blocking access to WikiLeaks and preventing their media from covering the

story; it’s hard to say whether it’s as much of a salient issue with the elites in China

as it is with the elites in the US. In short, it’s the democratic states that are going to

suffer the most from WikiLeaks-style forced transparency.

NPQ | How does the US pursuit of Assange stack up with the view Hillary

Clinton espoused a year ago at the Newseum in Washington that Internet free-

dom is our “national brand”?

MOROZOV | It’s inconceivable that on the one-year anniversary of her talk

that Hillary Clinton would be able to deliver a speech on Internet freedom as

pompous and starry-eyed as she did in January 2010. I never believed that Clinton

actually very much pondered the implications and the assumptions implicit in her

stance on “Internet freedom.”

The reality is that even before WikiLeaks, the focus of the domestic Internet

debate was all about demanding more control of it—whether it’s to track Internet

pirates or cyber-terrorists or cyber-bullies. However, in the context of foreign pol-

icy, the debate is somehow always about “Internet freedom” and opposing the

Just think of the potential

losses if Visa and MasterCard

cannot process online pay-

ments because of some

mysterious cyber-attacks

on their servers.

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greater Internet control by the likes of China and Iran—all of it as if these other

governments are somehow doing something that America itself is not doing in the

domestic context.

Some of this may simply have to do with the widespread Western tendency to

glamorize the Internet in authoritarian countries—and especially Internet users—

many of whom are often imagined as some kind of digital equivalents of Andrei

Sakharov, when they are just regular blokes streaming kinky videos from YouTube.

The WikiLeaks saga has brought many of these contradictions into sharper con-

text, but they were already clearly visible before. Before he achieved fame, Assange

was already surrounded by some very, very smart technologists—and now he has

many more admirers in the tech world. To the extent to which Clinton’s Internet-

freedom agenda relies on their coding skills and brains to produce effective anti-

censorship tools that can work in Iran and China, I think it’s in the State Department’s

best interest not to make the kind of irresponsible and aggressive statements it has

been making about Assange so far.

Personally, I don’t think that the Internet should be treated like some sacred cow

that should defy all regulation. All of this will become clear to politicians (and hope-

fully even to some geek activists) once the next genocide in some remote Third World

country is perpetrated by folks armed with GPS-equipped smartphones that also

enable them to listen to incendiary messages on the local radio. I’m sure that this

would be the moment when many decision-makers would regret not having some

kind of a “kill switch” over the Internet. Maybe this won’t happen—and maybe a “kill

switch” is impossible; or maybe it would undermine human progress so much that the

genocide is a risk we would be forced to accept. But I do think that it’s an important

debate that needs to be had rather than be settled in some talk of the absolute univer-

sal principle of “Internet freedom,” as for example Bernard Kouchner did when he

was French foreign minister.

NPQ | Finally, when speaking of limits on information, do you see a concep-

tual link with the controversy swirling around Facebook for, as some charge, ped-

dling private information under the mantle of social networking?

MOROZOV | Well, there is a great irony in the fact that the very same people

who so loudly demand open governments are often also the ones who value their pri-

vacy and hate to be tracked, even if tracking is relatively innocuous. It is really no con-

solation to anyone that the power of groups like WikiLeaks to challenge the state is

increasingly matched by the power of the state to keep track of what its citizens are

doing, either by gathering all of this data on their own or by simply contracting out

to a myriad of small and nimble data-mining agencies.

The Internet should not be

treated like some sacred cow

that should defy all regulation.

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The latter option bothers me especially because it’s far less monitored or

understood by the public: We all get scared when we find out that the government

knows what we browse online—but we are far less concerned about some private

company knowing this. The question we rarely ask is: Why assume that the govern-

ment won’t simply purchase this data from the private sector rather than compile it

on its own?

This only proves that the Internet can have both an empowering and a disempow-

ering effect on democratization—often even simultaneously. I am not sure if Assange

and his associates actually grasp the fact that the only effective way to rein in the

excesses of Facebook and Google when it comes to data protection is to have a strong

government that can act decisively and autonomously. It’s also possible, of course, to

simply find enough leaks about both companies and ruin them by disclosing their

financial statements a quarter too early—but this won’t be a very responsible move.

What is still not clear to me is how exactly WikiLeaks would be able to reconcile the

need for a strong state to defend citizens’ privacy with its desire to minimize the

power of the state by weakening its ability to profit from secrecy.

s

There is a great irony in

the fact that the very same

people who so loudly

demand open governments

are often also the ones

who value their privacy

and hate to be tracked.

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