
Excellent analysis of Assange's Wikileaks motivations (from the horse's mouth) - RickHull
http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/julian-assange-and-the-computer-conspiracy-“to-destroy-this-invisible-government”
======
lmkg
It's a pretty good analysis, and Assange seems to have put a lot of thought
into it. However, he's making an assumption that I think is unfounded, which
is treating the concentration of political power as monolithic. If you assume
that an organization is concerned about the power of the organization, then I
think he's correct in his logic that authoritarianism leads to conspiracy and
communication is important to having power. However, if you assume that most
members of an organization are concerned with personal power rather than the
power of the organization, then the importance of communication goes down
sharply, as the only coordination is opportunistic. A bureaucracy, as opposed
to a dictatorship, is quite content without having goals, coordination, or
communication[1], and can expand its authority based entirely on the mission
creep of lower-level individuals within it.

How valuable the disruption of communication is in fighting a "regime" depends
on how you model that regime. And, of course, in practice you will find that
reality is some bizarre chimera of any group of models. My intuition is that
Congress (plus lobbyists) act more like a decentralized bureaucracy, executive
administrations act more like dictatorships that fight against each other for
territory, and that the closest things we find to Assange's "banal
conspiracies" are small, ad-hoc, opportunistic alignment of objectives, much
smaller, less powerful, and less stable than the government as a whole.

[1] In fact, lack of coordination could help a bureaucracy grow by fostering
redundancy.

~~~
CWuestefeld
That's a really interesting question. Can it be that the perceived "neo-con"
or "Liberal" machines are really emergent behavior based solely (or
predominantly) on independent, opportunistic agents?

I don't know the answer to that, but it's interesting to ponder.

~~~
_delirium
That's one thing I think is worth rescuing from classical Marxism (ignoring
the political prescriptions that the Marxists added on top). The "historical
materialist" view that history is largely emergent behavior of structural
elements like economic relations, not the result of either "great men" or
conscious conspiracies, or some preordained macro-scale order, is still pretty
relevant imo.

(It's actually out of favor in contemporary Marxist thought, oddly enough,
which has gone more in the direction of analyzing the role of culture,
hegemony, etc., following Gramsci. Perhaps some non-Marxists will have to
revive the historical-materialist approach. Jared Diamond's work is sort of in
that direction.)

------
CWuestefeld
tl;dr version (and it is quite long). I've copied out what I think are the key
bits, the following is all quoted:

He begins by positing that conspiracy and authoritarianism go hand in hand,
arguing that since authoritarianism produces resistance to itself -- to the
extent that its authoritarianism becomes generally known -- it can only
continue to exist and function by preventing its intentions (the authorship of
its authority?) from being generally known. It inevitably becomes, he argues,
a conspiracy ...

the most effective way to attack this kind of organization would be to make
"leaks" a fundamental part of the conspiracy’s information environment. Which
is why the point is not that particular leaks are specifically effective.
Wikileaks does not leak something like the _Collateral Murder_ video as a way
of putting an end to that particular military tactic; that would be to target
a specific leg of the hydra even as it grows two more. Instead, the idea is
that increasing the porousness of the conspiracy’s information system will
impede its functioning, that the conspiracy will turn against itself in self-
defense, clamping down on its own information flows in ways that will then
impede its own cognitive function. You destroy the conspiracy, in other words,
by making it so paranoid of itself that it can no longer conspire ...

The leak, in other words, is only the catalyst for the desired counter-
overreaction; Wikileaks wants to provoke the conspiracy into turning off its
own brain in response to the threat. As it tries to plug its own holes and
find the leakers, he reasons, its component elements will de-synchronize from
and turn against each other, de-link from the central processing network, and
come undone.

... he quotes Theodore Roosevelt’s words from his 1912 Progressive party
presidential platform as the epigraph to the first essay; Roosevelt realized a
hundred years ago that "Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an
invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility
to the people," and it was true, then too, that "To destroy this invisible
government, to befoul this unholy alliance between corrupt business and
corrupt politics is the first task of statesmanship."

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I don't want to get into a detailed analysis of the piece -- I only had time
to skim it.

But am I to understand that I (and the rest of the American people) have paid
tens of billions of dollars, had multiple elections, politically demonstrated
and pleaded to Congressmen, to have a State Department that Assange doesn't
feel should keep secrets, so he dumps the embassy cables?

If a single actor can take it on himself to do all of that, then why am I
wasting my time choosing who to vote for, paying taxes, and debating with my
fellow citizens what the correct policy on "X" might be? Seems like I should
just take it on myself -- after careful analysis of course -- that Assange is
a danger to my representative form of government and I should go shoot him (I
mean this completely rhetorically, by the way. I in no way support violence
against anybody)

The problem here is believing your own bullshit, as they say on the streets.
Or put nicer, coming up with a line of reasoning that you (and perhaps others)
deem to be the "correct" one, and then imposing it on the rest of us against
our will.

Democracies don't work by doing the right or correct thing. They work by the
consent of the governed. If Assange takes away my illusion of having some say
in the governing of my state, then he's effectively attacking the social
contract.

I just can't see how this plays out very well.

~~~
chaostheory
"Democracies don't work by doing the right or correct thing. They work by the
consent of the governed."

The question is "does our government listen to its people anymore, regardless
of elections"?

The bank bailouts were opposed by the majority of the population crossing
party lines. I wouldn't be surprised if the new TSA procedures are equally as
hated. I can go on about other subjects such as FISA, ACTA, torture, Iraq &
Afghanistan occupation.

Are we now living in a more subtle version of Singapore or China?

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Why the generalizing?

The question you pose is not something that you can prove one way or another.
It's up to each citizen to make that decision for themselves. As broken as it
all is, a minority of people can't rise up and take away the consent of the
governed by the majority, no matter how good their logic or noble their cause.
It doesn't work like that. It's not a mathematical proof. Systems of people
are not like system of network nodes. Yes, there are similarities, but there
are very important differences too.

Europe already went down this road in the prelude to WWI. It didn't work out
so well. I'm not opposed to going over all of this again, but these things
have already been discussed and argued by people far wiser than us. If I
understand what folks are saying, it's not like Assange has come up with some
unique insight that somehow is going to make things better. This is just
anarchism by another name.

~~~
chaostheory
I wasn't that general. I did cite at least two cases where the majority of the
governed wanted something other than what our government has provided us.
Besides I don't see this toppling our representative democracy. If anything
it'll just help keep our representatives a bit more honest and a bit more
cautious.

My point is that many people already see the social contract as broken.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I screwed that up, so let me restate: why are you making a general assessment
of the state of the social contract and then taking action which effects me
because of your analysis?

I happen to agree with you that things suck. But I disagree with leaks of
State Dept and tactical military intelligence. Others think things are great
but don't mind the leaks. Still others are apathetic and encourage the leaks.
Out of a dozen people, you'll find a dozen different opinions.

We all -- each citizen -- have a unique relationship with our government. Who
are you or anybody else to make a decision like that that effects billions of
dollars spent and tens of thousands of lives? I didn't elect Assange. He
doesn't represent me. And I have no recourse to remove him from his post if I
feel he is acting maliciously or incompetently.

You see, it's not enough to make the argument that things suck so much that
_anything_ would be better. It doesn't work that way. That's just waving your
arms around in anger and exasperation. I also believe we need to get rid of
99.99% of the secrecy we have. But there is still a role for government and
secrecy. Some random person doesn't have the right to "fix" what he thinks is
broken -- because if he can do that, then we all can. And at that point we
might as well just go out in the streets with guns to get our way.

This is insanity. Well thought-out, for a good cause, well-intentioned, but
fundamentally broken. This is like the dozenth time groups of people have been
down this road. It doesn't end well -- even if the state is "fixed".

It's critically important to separate your opinion of the state of things from
the reasons and rules that each individual can take to make a difference.

Take the Declaration of Independence. In it, Jefferson doesn't make the case
that monarchical rule is broken and therefore we must act militarily -- far
from it. He respects the previous state of things but then makes a detailed
argument as to how the king broke the social contract with the colonies,
thereby releasing governance of the states back to the "natural legislature"
of the people. It's a very long list of things we did to try to make things
work and how they didn't work out. If you want a revolution, that's the place
to go to start understanding what arguments work and what arguments don't
work. Move from there to "Letters from a Birmingham Jail". But don't go down
the Marx route where you do this huge amount of clever reasoning and then
wreak havoc on the rest of us because of what you've proven. That's not so
good.

~~~
chaostheory
"Who are you or anybody else to make a decision like that that effects
billions of dollars spent and tens of thousands of lives? I didn't elect
Assange. He doesn't represent me. And I have no recourse to remove him from
his post if I feel he is acting maliciously or incompetently."

This has already been happening for years with our 4th branch of government,
our very own government agencies. They aren't elected. How do we know that
they are complying with the branches that we elected?

"Some random person doesn't have the right to "fix" what he thinks is broken
-- because if he can do that, then we all can. And at that point we might as
well just go out in the streets with guns to get our way."

I don't understand why you are comparing Wikileaks to an armed insurgency.
Wikileaks is only doing what the mainstream media either won't or can no
longer perform because of their new owners. Wikileaks is not an armed and
violent insurgency. It isn't usurping anyone's power if they are acting within
the law or within what they were elected to do. It is only releasing
information that should be known to the public.

Our government is already supposed to make freely available a lot of
information that it is still withholding:

<http://www.aclu.org/accountability/released.html>

What is an alternative to Wikileaks? We've already tried voting, and I'm not
keen on supporting revolution. I'm just advocating transparency to help
preserve our current government, albeit just making it a little more honest
and a little less crazy.

Just saw this the other day on The Onion's competitor:
<http://toofar.tv/blog/?p=7>

------
gasull
Any political system with secrecy evolves into authoritarianism. Why shouldn't
it? Secrecy ensures politicians/bureaucrats won't be accountable.

When did we start thinking that we can have democracy and freedom without
accountability?

It isn't about conspiracy theories. It's just common sense that some people
will abuse their power if they can't be held accountable.

~~~
billybob
Agreed, mostly. But without SOME secrecy, a government can't function.

Imagine if the US became 100% transparent. You could listen to the president's
phone calls, watch military strategy in real time, etc. Unless the
government's enemies (its proper ones - criminals, opposing armies, etc) were
likewise transparent, which they wouldn't be, Uncle Sam would basically be
doomed to be beaten by them. Like if only one poker player had to show his
cards in a game - he'd lose.

Just saying there are limits to the good that transparency can do.

------
yoyar
Assange is poking at the illusion of democracy and it makes people damn
uncomfortable as far as I can see. I think most people know that they are
ruled by rulers and that the idea of the state as benefactor is dead, but to
admit it is another thing for most. They will fight very hard to retain the
comfort of the illusion. And the state will act to retain it also, by any
means necessary.

------
joshes
> _These leaks are not specifically about the war(s) at all, and most seem to
> simply be a broad swath of the everyday normal secrets that a security state
> keeps from all but its most trusted hundreds of thousands of people who have
> the right clearance. Which is the point: Assange is completely right that
> our government has conspiratorial functions. What else would you call the
> fact that a small percentage of our governing class governs and acts in our
> name according to information which is freely shared amongst them but which
> cannot be shared amongst their constituency? And we all probably knew that
> this was more or less the case; anyone who was surprised that our embassies
> are doing dirty, secretive, and disingenuous political work as a matter of
> course is naïve. But Assange is not trying to produce a journalistic scandal
> which will then provoke red-faced government reforms or something, precisely
> because no one is all that scandalized by such things any more. Instead, he
> is trying to strangle the links that make the conspiracy possible, to expose
> the necessary porousness of the American state’s conspiratorial network in
> hopes that the security state will then try to shrink its computational
> network in response, thereby making itself dumber and slower and smaller._

A long quote, yes, but I could not think of a way to shorten it without
severely hindering its meaning.

This is a perfectly articulated description of how I initially felt about
cable release. Wikileaks (and necessarily, at this point, Assange) is not
trying to reveal a huge scandal, to embarrass or to destroy connections. If
one or more of those things happen then so be it. The goal is to reveal, to
expose the standard type and content of information that is traded like
currency amongst the few who govern the very many.

The leak is an attempt at provoking forced honesty; if Wikileaks exposes a
vast amount of cables enough times, the veil and shroud of secrecy that
governments use as a personal cloak will continue to shrink and shrivel until
it is non-functional. And voila! Now governments can no longer act in complete
isolation from its people and governments such as that of the United States,
which promise to be of and for the people, are forced to live up to that
promise, out in the open. If you force the government into that situation
harshly and fully enough, eventually it has no choice but to act that way. And
finally it can be held _accountable_ for its actions, positive or negative.

In short, the goal with all of these leaks is first and foremost to poke and
prod through the secrecy and conspiracy until there is a large enough hole for
the public to be able to view what its own government is doing on its behalf.
Whether or not you feel that this is morally or ethically correct is up to
you; this is just my take on the rationale.

------
paulgerhardt
As a side note, can we go easy on the appeals to emotion in headlines on
Hacker News?

Yes, this article is good; yes, some robots are incredible; as far as titles
go though, it's a distasteful use of rhetoric.

~~~
RickHull
For what it's worth, I completely agree with your sentiment, and I felt a pang
of regret when I reviewed my submission later. If I could rewrite the title
now, I would call it "In-depth, insightful" rather than "Excellent".

~~~
TGJ
Even those are just opinionated adjectives designed to get noticed and voted.

~~~
RickHull
They are designed to be descriptive and informative (hrmph!). I applaud the
article I submitted. Let there be no doubt.

~~~
alexqgb
It's a great article. And your use of 'excellent' was warranted, because the
article is, well, excellent.

Even folks who don't agree with it have to admit that it frames the issue (as
Assange sees it) with genuine clarity. In all the hype surrounding Wikileaks,
this was the first mention I'd seen of what Assange actually said about his
intentions.

------
dkarl
With respect to the potential for popular opposition to government policy, I
think he drastically overestimates the impact of exposure and drastically
underestimates a "conspiracy"'s need for secrecy. Perhaps if he paid more
attention to domestic U.S. politics, he would see that the standard response
to revelations like this is boredom and disinterest. Did Abu Ghraib morally
discredit the Iraq war with U.S. voters? No, the ones who still supported the
war found it easy to shrug off an isolated incident caused by bad apples. Did
it shock any Iraq War supporters to discover that the guys who pushed the Iraq
War in 2002 and 2003 had already been looking for ways to sell another war
against Saddam Hussein for almost a decade before to 9/11, and that their
motivations had nothing to do with terrorism? No, people who had listened to
the arguments and made up their minds to support the war did not care about
the motivations of the obscure policy wonks advising politicians in
Washington.

Anyone expecting the public to be shocked and outraged by a revelation ought
to temper their hopes by reminding themselves how much publicly available
information they find extremely shocking, and how different the typical
voter's response to that information is.

~~~
v21
He's not aiming to change the behaviour of the people, he's aiming to change
the behaviour of the policy wonks. He's aiming to make them either more open,
and therefore far less exclusive. Or he's aiming to have their communications
be much more difficult to achieve.

Either way, the power of the state over the people is lessened. It doesn't
matter that no-one cares about the contents, it only matters that the state
cares that people don't see the contents.

This is a very different motivation than journalists have.

~~~
CamperBob
_Either way, the power of the state over the people is lessened. It doesn't
matter that no-one cares about the contents, it only matters that the state
cares that people don't see the contents._

I'm not sure that even matters. If you look back at the great conspiracies of
history, they haven't been "hidden" by the conspirators at all. Could
Wikileaks have stopped Hitler, who actually _published a book_ explaining his
views and telegraphing his intentions? So did Lenin and Mao, and the future
slaves of their totalitarian states did nothing but nod their assent. The
signatories to the PNAC all but told us to expect a "new Pearl Harbor," but,
heck, that's just tinfoil-hat territory, there.

I'm pessimistic about the benefits of Wikileaks' activities simply because
history has shown, again and again, that nobody cares about conspiracies
except the conspirators. The free flow of information might effect positive
change eventually, but it'll have to wait until next Tuesday night, after
_American Idol_.

~~~
thwarted
_I'm pessimistic about the benefits of Wikileaks' activities simply because
history has shown, again and again, that nobody cares about conspiracies
except the conspirators._

Then the true audience for leaks is the conspirators, they'll feed off their
own paranoia. Apparently, the watchers watch themselves, but even they have
doubts about the trustworthiness of the watchers.

------
smokeyj
As a citizen I like to remain ignorant to the dealings done on my behalf. I
think it's sinful for Julian, or anyone else to seek information that isn't
blessed by the State - and anyone seeking knowledge that is not sanctified by
my Representatives is unacceptable. Now I'm going to stick my head in the sand
because I hate learning about facts.

~~~
dkarl
Replace "citizen" with "president" and you've stated actual U.S. policy (as
represented in movies and novels, anyway.) The Iranian nuclear scientists who
were assassinated on their way to work recently -- if we (the U.S.) killed
them, Obama will never know about it. If, on the other hand, some other
country did it without our help, the CIA might share that information with
him.

------
cavilling_elite
The question I have (and I will start the linked pdf tonight) is if unjust
systems are nonlinearly hit vs. just systems in the event of a leak. What
happens if the new communication or propaganda tools start a copy cat
organization to "leak" their own agenda.

It might work both ways: complete openness and complete falseness.

~~~
jdp23
it's a great question. my intuition is yes at the first level: control of
information is a key technique for many powerful unjust systems. it's a good
point though that the same kind of power could also make unjust systems better
at "false flag" attacks. certainly food for thought.

~~~
lhnz
That would take a lot of organization. Also, what if their operations were
leaked invalidating their previous lies?

~~~
jdp23
agreed it would take a lot of organization. this is the conspiracy we're
talking about though, they're good at stuff like that!

> what if their operations were leaked invalidating their previous lies?

their goal with this strategy is to devalue leaked information, so this would
potentially work to their advantage moving forward. "you can't trust any of
this leaked data. don't you know there's a secret bipartisan private/public
conspiracy spending $5B a year to corrupt the data?"

at some point it gets complex enough that everybody's head explodes

------
danielschonfeld
If anyone is interested here is the full PDF that is quoted throughout this
article dubbed "State and Terrorist Conspiracies":

<http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf>

------
ENOTTY
I'm interpreting this article to say Assange's goal is to decrease the
effectiveness of the conspiracy (eg, US government function) by killing off
information flows within the conspiracy.

If that is so, then I really fear a world with Assange as the head of
Wikileaks.

One of the major reasons why the government failed to prevent the 9/11 plot
was because nobody had all the information in one place so that they could
connect the dots. The 9/11 Commission recommended that different parts of the
government increase the amount of information they share with each other.
(Indeed, the State Department posting certain cables onto SIPRNET that was the
source of this leak was part of the response to that recommendation.)

If Assange's actions induce a return to the world of stovepiping, then the
future might not be so rosy.

Then I guess my only question is why does he want a world like this? Will
society be better off in this kind of world?

------
Maro
I have not followed all the previous Wikileaks, but I definitely disagree with
this latest one.

I don't see what purpose is served by releasing internals memos about what
some diplomat located in Germany thinks about certain German politicians.

There's nothing evil in having a negative opinion about German politicians and
communicating it to your boss. The People certainly don't need to know such
micro level details. OTOH it does harm your diplomatic relations.

-

This is kinda like somebody hacking your Gmail account and releasing all your
work emails to your startup's investors, because, after all, they're your
investors, they deserve to know what's going on?

------
gfodor
Someone in another thread put it best: when did I vote for Julian Assange? Who
is he accountable to? Where are _his_ secrets?

------
joe_the_user
I'd say it's a mistake to either reduce Wikileaks to Assange or reduce the
leak-dynamic to Wikileaks. Technology has made leaking very easy. Someone is
going to do it.

There are many justifications you could come up with, someone will use one of
them.

Leaking, for example, seems inherently easier than file sharing and that
hasn't stopped for a while now.

------
known
As Michael Caine said in
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Knight_%28film%29>

"Some people would enjoy seeing the world burn"

------
gcb
funny how for years all that [USA being an authoritarian conspiracy] was even
promoted as the "correct" action in sci action movies.

how many times the hero agrees not to disclose some alien invasion or
something as to not create mass panic and help the government act in the dark
and so saves the day?

