Futility of war against WikiLeaks Javed Anwer

Futility of war against WikiLeaks
Javed Anwer

13 December 2010, 05:10 PM IST




Almost 15 years after John Berry Barlow, a founding member of Electronic Frontier Foundation, declared the internet independent, “governments of the industrial world” still don’t get it. The latest WikiLeaks saga is unravelling more than just secret messages that US missions sent home from across the world. And not all of it has to do with 2,50,000 cables. As the US pursues WikiLeaks across the World Wide Web, the virtual community is driving home the message of the web, the realm where nothing is real and yet which has already changed the world forever.



To speak plainly, the message from WikiLeaks saga is clear and blunt. You can’t kill information, good or bad, on the web without nuking the whole internet. Whoever you are or whatever resources you have at your disposal, it’s impossible to hunt down nuggets of information in virtual world. Once the cat is out of the bag, it is out. Internet has an informal, yet very effective, way to respond to any censorship. Since the day Amazon kicked out WikiLeaks from its cloud and then EveryDNS stopped resolving www.WikiLeaks.org, the whistleblower website has spawned across 12 locations using country-level domains like .ch (Switzerland) and .to (Tonga). Unlike .com, .org or .net, none of these domains are under direct control of any US company.



Additionally, WikiLeaks has received support from the web community. The content of the website has found a ready home on over 500 servers called mirrors. It’s not possible, even for the US, the only country in world with a Cyber Command, to go after each of these websites. And even if somehow all WikiLeaks websites and its mirrors are shut down, the leaked cables will continue to flow in P2P channels, which lack any centralized servers and hence can’t be brought down without shutting down whole network.



The hydra-like longevity of WikiLeaks is just one part of the tussle, belligerently termed by some as the world’s First Information War. As several organizations like Paypal, MasterCard and Visa move to choke flow of money to Julian Assange & Company and the WikiLeaks websites find themselves under distributed denial of service DDoS — massive traffic targeted at a particular website to bring it down —the web sympathetic to the whistle-blower website is hitting back. At the forefront is Anonymous, a motley crew of hackers who often assemble at 4Chan, an infamous bulletin board. Anonymous, which has a long history of targeting against any website which it believes infringes on the rights of the web users, has declared a “war” against anyone who censors WikiLeaks. Using an army of faceless volunteers numbering in thousands, the group has paralyzed websites and payment gateways of Swiss bank, which suspended Assange’s bank account a few days ago, MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, and possibly Amazon. Anonymous call its attacks a form of virtual protest.



But Anonymous is not the only one taking up the cudgels on behalf of Wikipedia. No less important are digital natives who gather at forums, Facebook, Twitter, bulletin boards and Internet Relay Chat networks. The web provides each of them with a voice and a platform where they can have their say, however muted their voice is. The individual opinion amounts to nothing, it never did. But when millions of tweets, forum posts and comments at news sites combine, they produce a collective noise that is loud enough to be heard in real world. Web users may not agree about the WikiLeaks methods or madness but their message is clear: lay off the web.



“Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live,” wrote Barlow in his declaration in 1996. “You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.”



Unfortunately, governments still can’t comprehend it. They continue to live in a world draped in 20-century ethos. It’s the world of big corporations, hush-hush diplomats and deft politicians, ruled astutely by a few bright, but not necessarily the best, men and women. It’s a world where things can be broken or built and where everything has a price. But internet is abstract. It’s intangible. Its foundation is based on the premise of non-monetary egalitarianism — Tim Berners Lee finished WWW and simply gave it away for free. You can’t break or build anything here. It’s nothing more than an idea. WikiLeaks is just part of that idea. And however hard governments try, the idea is past the age where it can be killed.