WWW comes of age in Wikileaks
11th December 2010
If anybody still doubted the influence of the World Wide Web in our lives, two recent events illustrate how deeply it penetrates the machinery of society and how poorly we respond to its challenge.
A report earlier this week that the government plans to beef up security legislation, giving the SIS and other agencies greater powers to intercept and monitor emails, radiates a Big Brother chill. Mr Key argues the changes are necessary ahead of the Rugby World Cup because that event makes us a more likely target of terrorism. Critics respond that the World Cup is simply an excuse for the State to restrict our freedom.
This story is played out within the shadow of WikiLeaks. The uproar from that organisation’s release of 250,000 leaked US government emails continues to roll around the globe, gathering steam with each passing day. The furore appears to stem less from the content of the emails (which, if we assume the media has focussed on the most provocative, are hardly earth-shattering) than from how it up-ends traditional frameworks of power and privacy.
Wikileaks, like most offspring of the Web, seems a loose gathering of geeky minds. Whether they are subversives intent on bringing down the world order or champions of freedom depends on your point of view. The fact is, this small band of hackers and provocateurs wields more global power at this moment than many nuclear-armed nations. And, unlike nuclear arms or even the now-familiar terrorist threat, the most powerful nations of the world have no effective response.
The arrest in London this week of Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, on charges of sexual assault is risible. Here’s an average guy whose desktop organisation has just embarrassed the world’s greatest power and most of its allies and friends, who is living openly in the middle of London with neither bodyguard nor bullet proof vest, and the worst they can do is throw him in the slammer on accusations of rape.
In Wikileaks the World Wide Web has come of age. For 15 years we’ve been told the Web has the power to radically change the world in the same way that, say, the industrial revolution did, except the Web will do it faster. Most of us have gone along thinking the Web is just another tool, like TV or air conditioning, that we can bolt onto our existing structures but essentially continue to operate as we’ve always done.
Governments have clearly thought the same. They have embraced the Web because of its enormous appetite for information while failing to appreciate that it works as a two-way mirror. Just as governments can use the Web to peer deeply into the lives of their citizenry, so can those same citizens peer right back into the heart of government. And what a black heart it is.
Assange has thrown a challenge to the establishment as fundamental as the storming of the bastille or the Declaration of Independence. Like any revolution it is defined by its ingenuity in out-flanking the mighty. The US government will strive to keep Assange in prison for the rest of his life but that will count for nothing – around the world fifty other Assanges are already sucking classified information out of government files.
When the world’s most powerful nations have had their cyber-weapons turned against them our own government may reflect on the risks of its intention to muscle-up surveillance of email traffic. Invading our privacy may backfire.
But the lessons of Wikileaks are not just for governments. Few individuals appreciate the breadth and depth of their footprint in cyberspace, or its potential consequences. And just as governments may realise the only way to keep information secure is to revert to diplomatic bags, so we each must accept that when we embrace the Web we abandon privacy.
The Web revolution will be complete when everybody knows everything, and nobody cares.
