Battle lines are drawn

The battle lines in the bid to contain the organic anarchy of the Internet have been drawn. The battle field is Wikileaks. Ever since Sir Tim Berners-Lee declined to tow the conventional and prevailing capitalist thread of making serious money out of his invention, there has been the potential for such a battle.

Sooner or later it was inevitable that a state, or a corporate entity, or the combination of both would conjure concerns of ‘national security’ in a bid to contain the web. It looked very much as if the first war would be that between China and Google. That was eventually fudged into the current no-score draw. There have been many other instances involving countries as disparate as Saudi Arabia and Russia, Iran and more. Indeed, there are plenty of states who restrict their own peoples’ access to the web and would like to restrict the content of the web worldwide. But in the latter regard so far they have failed.

But in the war over Wikileaks, matters have taken a dramatic turn for the worse. Not only is a state, the US, out on the battlefield clear for all to see, but that state has been attempting to marshal other states to join them in affecting what goes onto the web.

Washington appears to have prevailed upon a number of US web entities – Amazon and eBay, in particular, to withdraw their hosting of Wikileaks. Having hosted the site for so long, there is at the very least the strong impression that this time round there is a coincidence of timing between US anger and corporate co-operation.

But worse are the calls by US and Canadian figures for the Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to be killed. Erstwhile US Presidential candidate, the evangelical Mike Huckabee, has called for the death penalty for Bradley Manning, the US Private who fed the material to Wikileaks. He also wants Assange charged under US terrorism legislation which also carries the death penalty. Last Tuesday evening, on CBC, Professor Tom Flanagan, former adviser to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, suggested Assange should be assassinated.

Will the battle lines over Wikileaks begin to reveal a division between states pitting those who slavishly follow the United States in this matter, and those who refuse? Is the Wikileaks battle already perhaps identifying the ‘establishment’ internet players who bow to state pressure and those who do not?

Amid the fog of war, one thing seems to be being ignored: who carries the can for devising a filing system so lax that at least 1.5 million people in the US had access to it, and a 22-year-old could download it and send it to Wikileaks? Any calls there for the assassination, or even the death penalty, for these who designed, operated, and perpetuated such a monumental threat to the national security for the US?

Oh, and by the way, is there anything anyone has learned from all these leaks that represents anything beyond what many speculated was going on anyway?