The Blog of War: WikiLeaks Exposes Business-as-Usual, and a New Battle Ensues

[unhappycamper]

The Blog of War: WikiLeaks Exposes Business-as-Usual, and a New Battle Ensues
Randall Amster
Peace educator, author, and activist
Posted: December 11, 2010 03:52 PM

In an ideal world, the WikiLeaks revelations would have ended two wars. Documenting patterns of cavalier abuse and untold brutality in Iraq and Afghanistan might have sparked public outrage sufficient to undermine the capacity to continue these campaigns. Instead we've seen the war machine dig in even deeper, extending drawdown deadlines and expanding fronts to adjacent locales. Rather than being in retreat over the WikiLeaks data dump, the Pentagon seems to have become emboldened by the simple fact that a significant portion of its dirty laundry has been aired publicly, and the neighbors have barely uttered a murmur of discontent at the sight.

Even more perversely, WikiLeaks seems to have exacerbated two additional wars rather than ending the ones most clearly in its sights. The first is simply the "war at home," in which the technologies of scanning and surveilling utilized in combat theaters are emplaced domestically under the guise of fighting terrorists. Under the same paltry logic that keeps us indefinitely embroiled in Afghanistan, periodic attempts at impracticable mayhem by disaffected pawns become the basis for a quantum leap in backscatter hardware, security screeds in public places, and the state's increasing interpenetration of our privacy and dignity. By chronicling the perverse lengths to which the U.S. will go in the "war on terror," WikiLeaks has ironically helped to legitimize those actions by adding to their endorsement the imprimatur of public acceptance.

Not only has this led to the tacit approval and domestic deployment of the war machine, but in a feat of suspicious synergy the WikiLeaks controversy has actually spawned a third war. Media outlets everywhere have caught the wave of "cyberterrorists" and a burgeoning "cyberwar" as part of an "Operation Payback" that is ostensibly designed to avenge the mistreatment of Julian Assange and militantly defend the murky concept of "internet freedom." Business Week, for instance, characterized this as an effort "to wage a cyberwar in WikiLeaks' defense," launched by a terrorist-sounding "shadowy group" with "axis of evil" overtones that is "starting to look like the onset of a global struggle by Web anarchists against the mighty Empire." The socio-cultural import and dramatic nature of such war imagery was not lost on Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow, who unabashedly tweeted in support: "The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops."

Interestingly, this purported cyberwar comes at a time when the debate over internet access and regulation is reaching a tipping point. Some politicians and pundits have openly called for listing WikiLeaks as a "terrorist organization," invoking the standard Trojan Horse phrase that is repeatedly used to curtail liberty, justify incursions, and foster interminable conflicts. For their part, the self-described "Anonymous" hacktivists and avengers of Assange have in many ways fed into this narrative, simultaneously exalting the power of the technological web and throwing down the gauntlet over its privatization and/or regulation:

"The internet is the last bastion of freedom in this evolving technical world. The internet is capable of connecting us all. When we are connected we are strong. When we are strong we have power.... This is why the government is moving on WikiLeaks. This is what they fear. They fear our power when we unite."

[mmonk]

1. It all seems to be an orchestrated play for internet media control.