Wikileaks: the Big Picture

There are a lot of issues implicated in Wikileaks' recent publications and the world's responses to them, and I'm not at all sure what the exact resolutions of those issues should be. But I think it's important to keep the big picture in view.

We are living in times of extraordinary incursions against the rightful liberties and powers of ordinary citizens.

A big part of the problem is that knowledge is power, and a balance of power requires a balance of knowledge. But the way things are now, corporations and the government know everything about us and we know almost nothing important about them.

There have been periods in the past when the mainstream media did a better job of fulfilling its proper function as the "watchdog of democracy." It hasn't been doing that for some while. Part of that problem is that, leaving the internet aside for the moment, the vast majority of media worldwide are directly or indirectly controlled by oligarchs (see Wikipedia and the sources cited there).

As for the internet, the oligarchs are already well on their way to controlling most of it; witness the latest proposed FCC regulations.

Wikileaks almost certainly has not broken any laws. The U.S. government and others have been struggling mightily to conjure something to charge someone with for some time now, without success; clearly, they're going to have to get a lot more, shall we say, creative.

W.r.t. the U.S. Embassy cables, WikiLeaks has posted online only a small portion of the material leaked to it, and most of what it's posted was published first by one of its newspaper partners (The New York Times, The Guardian, El Pais, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, et al.). Moreover, the material posted by WikiLeaks contains the redactions applied by those papers to protect innocent people and otherwise minimize harm. (See Salon and sources cited therein for details.)

Wikileaks is not a spy operation any more than The NYT is. Rather, it's a journalistic organization whose mission is to publish what other people want to leak to them, if the information is credible and significant (see here).

Basically, I believe that t.m.i. is better than too little. I have more faith in our ability as a species to collectively sort through the info and interpret it helpfully, than I have in the likelihood that any smaller group of individuals entrusted with the power to pick and choose what we should know, without meaningful oversight, will fail to abuse that power.

Do I think no one should be able to have secrets? No. I certainly don't want all my personal info to be known, let alone published.

But there's an important distinction to be made between information held by governments or public corporations vs. individuals' personal info. I am not entrusted with the welfare of large numbers of consumers or citizens; and if I were, again, to the extent any info in my possession related to matters that could affect them, I don't think I should be allowed unilaterally to decide what they get to know about it.

Perhaps, ideally, it would be better to only expose the "sausage-making" processes behind our leaders' decisions (diplomatic or otherwise) to the extent we've actually been misled about the facts justifying those decisions. E.g., maybe it doesn't matter so much who wanted what out of the Iraq war, as that we were lied to about the reasons for starting it.

But it's hard to expose those lies without also exposing the back-room realities of who wanted what, esp. when you're a relatively small, underfunded operation.

And one thing we should all thank Assange for is irrefutable proof that one person can still make a difference.

Finally, I can't resist noting that, w.r.t. timing, it appears to have been Wikileaks' promised release of information on a major bank, believed to be Bank of America, after the end of this year that triggered the recent, dramatic step-up in pressure on Assange.

Let me also just mention, (1) the UK Guardian has published some truly great pieces on the whole affair, w.r.t. both reporting and analysis, including this one and this one (I strongly encourage you to read both); (2) you can download an archive of Wikileaks' releases that's complete as least as of the date of this post here (it's only a few MB's; you'll need StuffIt or something to unzip it); and (3) as of this writing, you can still reach Wikileaks' site here. (You can also find previous c-Blog posts on Wikileaks here.)

UPDATE: "A Twitter posting by American poet and essayist John Perry Barlow[:] . . . . 'The first serious infowar is now engaged' . . . . 'The field of battle is Wikileaks. You are the troops . . . '" "Using the moniker 'I Am Wikileaks,' supporters . . . [have] created more than 570 mirror versions of the Wikileaks website and have called for a boycott of Paypal, Amazon and EveryDNS, three US-based websites that recently severed ties to Wikileaks. . . . More here.

FURTHER UPDATE: Hot off the "press," Assange's Op-Ed for The Australian here (also well worth the read).

Everything is NOT Ok

Photo doc here.

EVERYTHING IS OK

(Thanks, Ben!) More here.

What Body Scanners Really Show

. . . is that (1) our leaders are in corporate pockets, and/or (2) our leaders are more afraid of US than they are of terrorists.

Body scanner makers doubled lobbying cash over 5 years
". . . Rapiscan Systems, meanwhile, has spent $271,500 on lobbying so far this year, compared with $80,000 five years earlier. It has faced criticism for hiring Michael Chertoff, the former Homeland Security secretary, last year. Chertoff has been a prominent proponent of using scanners to foil terrorism. The government has spent $41.2 million with Rapiscan. . . ."

Body scanner CEO accompanied Obama to India
". . . The CEO of one of the two companies licensed to sell full body scanners to the TSA accompanied President Barack Obama to India earlier this month, a clear sign of the deep ties between Washington politicians and the companies pushing to have body scanners installed at all US airports. . . ."

Body scanner caught masturbating
". . . as a team of High School netball players went through the scanner. 'The young ladies were going through the scanner one by one, and . . . .'"

And see this translation of what John Pistole means when he talks about providing the "high level of confidence" we weren't clamoring for:

But it's not the waste of money I mainly object to, and it's certainly not the invasion of my bodily privacy, or even the damage to my DNA; it's the rape of my Fourth Amendment rights.

What's next, scanning before travel by train? bus? toll roads? TSA is performing a police function with respect to a public, common carrier. The government cannot be allowed to unilaterally repeal the Constitution merely by subcontracting its obligations to private corporations.

UPDATE: If you had any remaining doubt about the real purposes of this "security theater," see this documentary: "Some facts from Please Remove Your Shoes . . . : 'During the first 3 months of 2007, the TSA Logistics Center received 8 explosive detection systems units at a cost of about $7 million. As of January 2009, all 8 explosive detection systems units remained in storage at the Logistics Center. TSA paid out $98 million in bonuses and pay raises in 2008. According to GAO, TSA inspectors spend 33% of their time inspecting, 8% on incidents, 5% investigating, 5% on 'outreach' 49% of their time on 'other.' Other?'" (Link inserted; from BoingBoing via Ben – thanks!)

FURTHER UPDATE: I thought I was kidding about scanning before boarding a bus!

FURTHER FURTHER UPDATE: Mark Denninger makes a great point: none of the 9/11 hijackers or the underwear bomber had the documentation to remain in or enter the U.S. legally, and the technology to turn up that fact in time to have prevented them from flying here has been commercially available for 20 years, but only now has the Obama admin finally announced we'll start using it. (Meanwhile, we've spent billions on "worthless virtual strip-search machines" from Chertoff & Co.)

HiChristina!

. . . , that is, Fritz Donnelly and Christina Ewald, have organized 5 wacky, participatory happenings per week since March, 2009, in their Brooklyn, NY space. Looks like their movie will incorporate some of the hi-lites; should be fun and interesting, at least for people like me who participated in one of their events.

Brent Green's Gravity

Within the last month, I've seen two Brent Green pieces that were new to me, both brilliant. First, Paulina Hollers at Site Santa Fe (mentioned in this previous post). More recently, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then at Diverseworks in Houston. The latter piece was shown as part of The Second Program in Dallas and I unfortunately couldn't make it; but Diverseworks had a wonderful installation including the main video plus three related videos plus a sort of 3-D, room-sized panoply comprising a sprawling banner, giant corrugated cardboard cutouts, painting, and texts. Here are some installation pics; below is a video of Green with some background on the videos and a related sculpture that was not included at Diverseworks. (The show runs through Dec. 19.)

The other night

. . . I had a dream inside a dream (meaning "dream" literally.)

First I had a dream. Then I dreamed I was telling my dream to a shrink.

In the middle of it, he got up and left. I turned to the other people in the room – oddly, there were some – and said, "It wasn't that boring, was it?"

I'm not telling any more about the dream-within-the-dream, except it wasn't boring.

Pogomix's "Snow White"

Built from audio and video from the 1937 Disney classic; cf. the ultra-lame, official Disney trailer. As I understand, some of Pogo's best work remains unseen due to legal obstacles.

UPDATE: This post led to a pretty interesting discussion in a private forum, which I'm taking the liberty of copying here:

R----: Fagottron does some great remix compositions!

K----: creepy happy

S----: This remix is much better than the original.

c.: This was my intro to this guy; I think he's really inspired. Whether consciously intended or not, the thing reads eerily well as social commentary--mocking both the 50's & the hopey-changey thing, yet pointing out that (as stated in "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,") "Nothing is inevitable, except defeat for those who give up . . . ." The transformation he wrought on the original music seems impt., too: from a somewhat more mournful, passive song wishing for someone to rescue her, to a more rockin'-yet-Zen-yet-proactive inspiration.

I----: I agree with the proactive presentation, however, its too slick and tinny....it seems to extol or satirize mechanization, industrialization....Huxley's hypnotic repetitious conditioning that turns human beings into automated robots...

I like real sound, real music and what is so wrong with 'hopey-changey'? It doesn't have to mean a denial of what is real, but to deny hope can lead to change is to me, the hallmark of oppression and the game of the oppressors. Thanks for the quotation and the video, food for thought.....

c.: I----, thanks. I think we agree more than not.

I.m.o., the only thing wrong with the recent hopey-changey was that it was NOT entirely based in reality, & did involve wishing for a hero who'd fix things for us, instead of us doing the work to understand & reform the system.

For me, the video does not at all deny hope; among other things, the whole chord structure strikes me as more "major" (as opposed to minor) or cheerful than the orig'l song, as well has having a much perkier beat. But at this point, we have our work cut out for us--among other things, to try to see through the "capitalism" and "socialism" brands & sort thru what actually does & does not work re- both, to understand the substance well enough that we don't throw out the good parts while the bad parts are simply re-labelled & re-sold to us (we know the t-party won't be the last experiment in conservative re-branding).

I totally agree re- the creepiness of the video, too--like the way Snow White claps her hands like an infant, with eyes swooning like Marilyn Monroe who, as Cynthia Heimel observed so acutely, became the ultimate sex object by acting like she was too dumb to realize she had a p*ssy. I'm thinking at least some of these aspects are revealing about expectations in the '50's, & feel the artist used them deliberately--that's part of what I find so fascinating about the piece--while leaving it up to us to decide what elements just seem weird now & what elements seem to have turned out to be enduring (e.g., Snow White's ability to love & enjoy a bunch of dwarves with major idiosyncracies that may limit them individually yet turn out to be complementary in a group).

Sorry to go on so long; guess this piece just really tapped into a bunch of stuff I've been thinking & feeling . . .

I----: Agreed...many of us have forgotten the spirit of self-reliance and individualism combined with respect for others that we grew up believing in...And, yeah, I remember the Class of 70's 'Fun Girls' rant...."Someday my prince will come, someday, I'll find the bum...." So, maybe there was less naivete then.....Thanks for engaging in this discussion. Enjoy your posts and your website!

I----: For some reason, not all of your post first appeared. My comment above only addressed the first paragraph.

I also agree with you, particularly your comments about re-brainding. The caricature represented by the exaggerated innocence of Snow White, for adults, is creepy, even in the original. However, it was meant for children, not for adults. The sad thing about child development is that around the ages of 3 and 4 we all learn about lies and deceptions....the Tooth Fairy....but to believe, to question whether what is wished can be real has motivated scientists, intellectuals and geniuses throughout human history. I love that serious physicists are developing theories of multi-universes; that social psychologists regularly refer to mind-reading as an activity of the brain which enhances brain function ie understand the perspective of the other person and your brain functions better, if you are competing, it gives you an advantage....these people, not too long ago, would have been 'branded', now it is state-of-the art...

I enjoyed the beat too, but synthesized, metallic beats remind me of a Wrinkle in Time and the fight with the 'Brain' that could only be won by calculating mathematical formulas....

Marilyn...oh, poor Marilyn...what women convince themselves, or rather allow others to convince themselves of, is tragically packaged in her story....

Have been thinking too much, perhaps about the women in Iran and Saudi Arabia, among other places, who are condemned to death by stoning and trying to understand how really intelligent people, people who seem concerned about others, can allow this....So, I guess your post hit on some things I have been coping with too....

Again, thanks for the post and your viewpoints!