I don’t really fear that the apparent abandonment of Wikileaks by U.S.-based host Amazon.com — presumably under government pressure — really means the end of the excellent anti-state, whistle-blower organization. Truthfully, the sudden denial of hosting services seems like a petulant playground kick in a world of potential alternatives, many of them far beyond the reach of embarrassed American politicians (apparently, the group moved back to Sweden, according to NPR).
Isn’t that telling, though? Governments are reduced to symbolically shuttering Websites for a few days, leaving the actual whistle-blowers and their desire to expose information otherwise untouched. Supposedly, Julian Assange and company have a stash of bank-related documents slated for their next expose. In the unlikely event that they can’t get the Website up and running again, what’s to stop them from zipping and emailing the data to media organizations and bloggers, just as they did the U.S. diplomatic cables? Or I suppose they could go so far as to print the juicy data or save it to thumb drives and physically hand it to people likely to spread the information further.
Ultimately, Wikileaks is about the desire to expose compromising secrets, not about maintaining Websites. And Wikileaks is just one incarnation of that push for transparency — taking the Website, the organization or its leader out of the picture only shifts the action elsewhere.
TJP
December 1, 2010 at 6:03 pmAn interesting facet of this whole affair is that governments over-classify so much information that it is impossible shield all of it from prying eyes. Am I the only one who has examined it from this angle? It’s a sickness of the political ruling class, and ultimately the root cause of their problems. Such mountains of information require herds of custodians, and it is not possible to determine in advance what agenda each one may have. Wikileaks is simply taking advantage of a preexisting problem.
I’ve directly witnessed the spy agency mentality at local government levels, where it is entirely unjustified. The problem is so widespread that residents have to FOI budget information and local government policy. That’s ridiculous.