Book Review: WikiLeaks, Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy, Part I

After reading WikiLeaks, Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy, I posted this blog.  Now I'm posting a book review.

It's going to be difficult to say everything I want to say about this 300+ page book.  It's packed full of detail on one of the most controversial media stories in the last century.  The story is thought-provoking, philosophically rich in the sense that ethical dilemmas present themselves throughout, and it's exciting reading - like reading about James Bond as an internet hacker.  The book starts out describing a very awkward looking old woman, surrounded by "nerdy youngsters" stepping out of a car and hurriedly into a village home in the English village of Ellingham.  

Looking closer, it became apparent that this was a strange looking woman.  The authors write, "She had a kind of hump!"  They continue, "Close up... it was obvious that this strange figure was Julian Assange, his platinum hair concealed by a wig.  At more than 6ft tall, he was never going to be a very convincing female.  'You can't imagine how ridiculous it was,' WikiLeaks' James Ball later said.  'He'd stayed dressed up as an old woman for more than two hours.'  Assange was swapping genders in a pantomime attempt to evade possible pursuers... In a breathtakingly short time, WikiLeaks had soared out of its previous niche as an obscure radical website to become a widely known online news platform.  Assange had published leaked footage showing airborne US Helicopter pilots executing two Reuters employees in Baghdad, seemingly as if they were playing a video-game.  He had followed up this coup with another, even bigger sensation: an unprecedented newspaper deal, brokered with the Guardian newspaper in London, to reveal hundreds of thousands of classified US military field reports from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, many of them damning" (14).  

The book tells the story of Julian Assange - a computer genius who, with less counter-cultural tendencies, could have been a Mark Zuckerburg.  He was born in Australia and lived an outrageous childhood.  The son of a hippy mother and a father who abandoned them.  His mother became involved with a young man named Keith Hamilton who was an amateur musician and a member of a New Age group, the Santiniketan Park Association.  He was a psychopath who allegedly had five identities.  

"The Santiniketan Park Association was a notorious cult presided over by Anne Hamilton-Byrne, a yoga teacher who convinced her middle-class followers she was a reincarnation of Jesus.  Keith Hamilton was not only associated with the cult.  He may even have been Hamilton-Byrne's son.  Hamilton-Byrne and her helpers collected children, often persuading teenage mothers to hand over their babies.  She and her disciples - "the aunties" - lived together in an isolated rural property surrounded by a barbed wired fence and overlooking a lake near the town of Eildon, Victoria.  Here, they administered a bizarre regime over their charges, who at one point numbered 28 children.  There were regular beatings.  Children had their heads held down in buckets of water" (38).  

When Julian's mother tried to leave the group in 1982, Hamilton violently pursued her, trying to gain custody over Julian's half-brother.  "For the next five or six years, the three lived as fugitives" (38).  

Julian began hacking computers when he was 16 years old.  By the time he was 19 he was Australia's most accomplished hacker, and quite possibly involved in launching a computer worm against Nasa's website at the age of 17.  As fits his childhood, he was always paranoid about being followed and tracked.  Part of the success of WikiLeaks was probably the result of this paranoia.  Assange went to great trouble to make sure any leaks provided him were untraceable to their source.  Still, the man responsible for the greatest leak in the last 50 years, Bradley Manning, was caught, though not through Assange or WikiLeaks.  Manning passed along the Apache helicopter video, classified field reports from Afghanistan and Iraq, and hundreds of thousands of embassy memos revealing classified opinions of world leaders.

The book tells the story of Bradley Manning, a Specialist with the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, stationed in Iraq.  He spent his work days in a "secured" computer room of the base poring over top-secret information.  The authors report, "For such a young and relatively inexperienced soldier, it was extremely sensitive work.  Yet from his first day at Hammer, he was puzzled by the lax security.  The door was bolted with a five-digit cipher lock, but all you had to do was knock on it and you'd be let in.  His fellow intelligence workers seemed to have grown bored and disenchanted from the relentless grind of 14-hour days, seven days a week.  They just sat at their workstations, watching music videos or footage of car chases.  'People stopped caring after three weeks,' Manning observed" (20-21).

Manning was always a free-thinker - a renegade agnostic in his super-religious small town in Oklahoma.  He had strong liberal political opinions unpopular in his town.  He was also homosexual and therefore an outcast.  A bit direction-less, he followed his father's footsteps and joined the army.  He had a real talent for computer programming, and graduated into the military with security clearance and a job working in intelligence.  

His free-thinking, philosophical mind did not adapt to military culture.  Manning felt like he was not treated with respect and was particularly bitter about the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy.  He frequently voiced his outrage in chat rooms and his Facebook profile said, "Take me for who I am, or face the consequences."  The US government would face the consequences.  

Given the lax security in the base in Iraq, Manning very simply burned classified information onto CDR's labeled "Lady Gaga" and made contact with Assange.  The only reason he was caught was because he confessed what he did to a hacker friend who turned him in.  

He now sits in solitary confinement in Quantico Marine Corps Base in Virginia.  At the time this book was published (2011) it's reported: "Although he has not been tried or convicted, he is being made to suffer under harsh conditions.  He spends 23 hours a day alone in a 6ft by 12 ft cell, with one hour's exercise in which he walks figures-of-eight in an empty room.  According to his lawyer, Manning is not allowed to sleep after being wakened at 5am.  If he ever tries to do so, he is immediately made to sit or stand up by the guards, who are not allowed to converse with him.  Any attempt to do press-ups or other exercise in his cell is forcibly prevented" (88).

I will follow up this blog with Part II.

Leigh, David and Luke Harding.  WikiLeaks, Inside Julian Assange's War On Secrecy.  New York: Public Affairs, 2011.

Foucault and WikiLeaks - What If Our Leaders Were Transparent?

A dear friend of mine, Michael Tyler, is an outstanding photographer and an all around creative and free-thinking man.  He's been writing stories for as long as I've known him (a long time), and he's made a lot of them into full-length indie films that he directed.  About a  year ago, he sent me a story called Post Everest.

The basis of the plot is a world in which governments, agencies, businesses, and citizens were made completely transparent.  They were recorded, videotaped, and broadcasted.  People were even recorded in the bathroom.  No place was private.  It's not that someone was watching them at all times, but rather that someone could be watching them at all times.  The result was nuclear disarmament and peace.

Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, argues that this type of "disciplinary mechanism" is not so far fetched.  In fact, it's already instituted in post 1800 society, just not for governments.  The goal of the transparency of individuals is already functioning to a large extent in the modern/post-modern world.

Ok, don't write me off as a conspiracy theorist and check out another website just yet.  I am not saying that we are being videotaped and recorded right now.  Just take Jeremy Bentham's idea for a Panopticon - a circular building with a tower in the center.  The building is divided into cells in which one isolated person would dwell (this person could be a prisoner in the case of a prison, a student in the case of a school, a worked in the case of a factory, etc.).  The isolated subject could not see their neighbor.  They could only see the tower in the center.  The tower would be the place where the guards/teachers/supervisors/etc. would sit.  Through the use of backlighting, they could see into each cell perfectly well while the inhabitant of each cell could not see inside the tower - they could not see if anyone was really in it or not.

Foucault writes, "By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery.  They are like so many cages, so many small theaters, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible" (200).

Bentham never built the thing, but he wanted to, and he came close.  Despite the fact that it was never constructed, it still represents real power relations and existing theories of social manipulation.  Foucault writes, "the Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use" (205).

Foucault's work illuminates a mechanism of power unique to the 1800s and beyond (still in effect today).  This is a power that maintains control through the excessive individuation of subjects.  Mechanisms of power today test us, rank us, seek to cure us, aim to normalize us, try to discipline us each, individually.  Michael's book is inspired by WikiLeaks, which adds an interesting twist to the modern world.  WikiLeaks founder, and Michael in his book, ask, what if this "technology of control" and this "apparatus of knowledge" that individualizes each subject and makes him/her transparent was placed in the hands of "the people" themselves?  What if the soldier looking at us from the tower in the world Panopticon was exposed and people, living in cells in the periphery, watched him on the internet?  Would the world finally stop blowing itself up?  Would justice ensue - the same justice that already binds the individual subjects in the modern world?

This is the vision of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.  Leaders must be as transparent as their citizens.  So long as they are not, a citizen's votes are not made with full knowledge and democracy does not work.  WikiLeaks, of course, flooded the media with the greatest leak of confidential information ever, exposing the internal memos of ambassadors and military leaders.  The US panicked - the veil they looked out from was lifted.  Citizens briefly saw them.

Taking from Foucault, it seems Assange wants to take modern means and methods for creating a disciplined and obedient population to its logical conclusion: applying those same means and methods to create a disciplined and obedient group of world leaders.  Michael's book explored the possibility that, if there were no closed door meetings, no classified memos, no anonymous super pacs, no top secret missions, etc. that the result would be a peaceful world.

The idea is totally intriguing.  This type of transparency already exists for the masses, just not the leaders.  Note Foucault's study:  As power became less centralized in monarchies, reforms to the law ensued.  From punishment as excessive example (the scaffold, the public torture, the public confessions) came punishment as regulated, involving time limits, and as increasingly private (punishment happens now behind walls).  At the same time, punishment became increasingly common.  Crimes and their corresponding punishments proliferated and came to increasingly involve violations or private property (as opposed to pre-modern crimes which were most commonly violations of rights).  At the same time, punishments were focused less and less on the crime and more and more on the subject.  Punishments were less about adequately responding to the injustice done and more about healing an evil tendency in the criminal.  Pleads of insanity ensued.  Criminals started serving time in mental hospitals instead of prisons.  Timeframes for sentences were justified by scientific research - how long until the criminal is ready to return to society healed, ready to remain peaceful?

As you would expect, studies on individuals become more and more detailed.  Research identifies "normal" behavior - goals for normalcy are identified, school children are monitored and ranked.  They are individualized and scrutinized.

In the end, we have a radically individualized way of perceiving society that thrives as a result of each individual's discipline and obedience.  A high level of transparency, as a mechanism for ascribing power relationships, can be attributed to such disciplined, obedient masses.  Even Occupy Wall Street is obedient - protestors seek city permits and permissions, facilitate (usually) efficient vacancies, refuse to react violently even as they're systematically and methodically pepper-sprayed or imprisoned.  These docile, obedient bodies are perceived as heroes (and I won't say they aren't brave - they are far more brave then me!).  The perceived heroism of remaining docile even in the face of violence is part of a whole apparatus of power that pervades modern society.

So, what of Michael's idea?  What if the degree of individualization and transparency no longer eluded the highest echelons of power?  So the person providing the order to pepper spray the masses was watched and recorded and understood by the masses...  Would that person, like the occupiers, become more manageable?  Would the same levels of obedience and discipline apply to exposed leaders no longer able to close a door or stamp a document 'classified'?



I will follow up on this with a book review of "WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy" by David Leigh and Luke Harding of The Guardian.  After reading Michael's book, I realized I knew very little about WikiLeaks and the greatest leak of classified information in history.  So, when I saw the book on sale at Powell's, I grabbed it.  I'm so glad I did (just as I'm glad I was able to read Michael's awesome work!).

Foucault, Michel.  Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.  Trans. Alan Sheridan.  New York: Random House, 1995.