[p2p-research] <nettime> Six Anti-Theses on WikiLeaks

Sun Dec 12 01:36:41 CET 2010

On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 7:02 PM, Dante-Gabryell Monson <
dante.monson at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
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> From: Faculty of the College of Ontopoetic Machines <
> faculty at ontopoeticmachines.org>
> Date: Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 5:41 AM
> Subject: <nettime> Six Anti-Theses on WikiLeaks
> To: nettime-l at kein.org
>
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> Six Anti-Theses on WikiLeaks
>
> Following "Twelve theses on WikiLeaks" by Geert Lovink & Patrice Riemens
>
>
> 1. Wikileaks exposes the slippery moralism of global capital.
>
> The corporate abdication of non-discrimination prefigures more
> scrutiny of online activity. Visa, Amazon, Mastercard, Tableau,
> PayPal, PostFinance, and EveryDNS: each severed their relationship
> with one or more aspects of the WikiLeaks organization due to
> technicalities. None were served with legal documents requiring
> that they stop supporting "illegal" activity; rather, some caved
> due to vague public and private requests by functionaries within
> US government offices. Yet, these business have no moral qualms as
> to provide similar services to the Ku Klux clan, homophobic sites
> and just about anything else. As to the decision to cut Wikileaks
> off they justified their actions via the legalese of their Terms of
> Service (ToS) or Acceptable Use Policy (AUP), contracts that we all
> accept as the necessary evil of using free services online. AUPs,
> once the interest of legal scholars or small actors who fell afoul
> of them, now become the prime means for ending of services to the
> undesirable. (Recall, for example, Facebooks' threat of legal action
> against the seppukoo project. This is a refrain that continues to
> haunt the online space; however it was never seen with such vehemence
> as with WikiLeaks.) Yet in a truism, this does not only eliminate the
> possibility of online activity, for the actions of Visa, Mastercard,
> and PayPal prevent the flow of electronic currency to WikiLeaks,
> requiring the organization to ask for either bank transfers (that
> are prohibitively expensive for people in the US) or paper money
> orders sent to a physical address. These actions by financial
> institutions foreground the linkage between online activities and
> their real reliance on forms of money that are still tied to large
> corporations. As well, the use of contractual language to engage in
> corporate censorship enables what is prohibited by US Constitutional
> guarantees, among other legal safeguards elsewhere in the world.
> Given the tiered nature of the internet---in that a hosting provider
> purchases bandwidth from a separate company, that probably purchases
> DNS service from a separate company---means that any activity can be
> forced offline by any intermediary if found to be in violation of
> the ToS. While you may have legal recourse via a civil suit, such an
> undertaking is oftentimes impossible due to the legal costs involved
> and the vastly unequal power differential.
>
> 2. Wikileaks draws on the tense affair between the antiauthoritarian
> ethos of hacker culture and the authoritarian logic of capital, also
> known as neoliberalism.
>
> WikiLeaks found a characteristically computational way around their
> hosting problems, drawing on an unorganized group of volunteers to
> provide mirrors of the site (http://wikileaks.ch/mirrors.html). This
> strategy of providing mirrors for content hearkens back to 1990s
> internet culture, where the practice of setting up FTP mirrors was
> commonplace (hacker culture itself is situated in the 1940s, see
> Steven Levy). Mirroring mitigates the impact of corporate censorship
> somewhat, but is likely to be impractical on a large scale in the
> long-term, especially for all of the worthwhile projects that can be
> removed by intermediaries. Nevertheless, this example of mirroring is
> an interesting case of hackers relaxing their security mindset for
> what they perceive as a greater good. Setting up a WikiLeaks mirror
> requires the administrator to allow a member of WikiLeaks remote
> access to their server in order to upload new files as needed; this
> is made possible using public-key encryption techniques, the focus
> of much hacker attention in the 1990s. Usually system administrators
> would never open their servers for unknown people to upload files.
> But there seems to be a belief here that the sysadmins of WikiLeaks,
> whomever they are, will not abuse their power and will only upload
> what they say they will upload. There is something here that deserves
> greater scrutiny, especially in light of what Mathieu O'Neil calls
> "hacker charismatic authority". Most studies consider this as a form
> of authority _over_ people; in this case, however, the authority is
> exercised _amongst_ sysadmins, enabling them to open their machines to
> the unknown WikiLeaks administrators.
>
> 3. Wikileaks shows that any system is vulnerable to infiltration.
>
> WikiLeaks is highly collaborative, and not only as a result of the
> recent mirroring activity. Indeed, the project is only possible due
> to their collaboration with the individuals and groups providing
> the content to be leaked. Throughout the recent consternation over
> "Cablegate", the hundreds, if not thousands, of other people who
> have put their lives on the line to pass documents to WikiLeaks have
> unfortunately been forgotten, Bradley Manning excluded. To ignore
> these people is to make a grave analytical error. Be thankful that we
> do not know their names, for if we did, they would be in immediate
> danger.
>
> 4. Wikileaks demonstrates that the human 'factor' is the weak spot of
> networks.
>
> The "Cablegate" release also shows the importance of having
> collaborators within governmental and military institutions. If we
> assume that Manning is the source of the diplomatic and military
> cables---and this has not been proven yet---then we can see how
> individuals within these organizations are disgusted with the conduct
> of the war. This is of a piece with other projects such as Iraq
> Veterans Against the War and the War Veteran's Book Project that aim
> to present the personal side of the present conflicts in Iraq and
> Afghanistan as a way of organizing public outrage. Do not discount the
> power of solidarity with disgruntled soldiers. We only have to recall
> the Abril Revolution in 1974 in Portugal, where the military supported
> the peaceful transition from the Salazar dictatorship, to understand
> how important it is to have military forces on one's side. Recall as
> well that the main technical tool used to anonymize submissions to
> WikiLeaks, Tor (The Onion Router), came out of a US Naval Research
> Laboratory project to protect clandestine activities overseas. In
> fact, members of the military are some of the most vocal opponents of
> current attempts in the US to require person-level attribution of data
> packets online.
>
> 5. WikiLeaks is a classic example of using media as a tool for
> de-dehumanizing.
>
> The actions of Anonymous on the websites of Visa, Mastercard, PayPal,
> PostFinance, and others are in a lineage with the FloodNet by the
> Electronic Disturbance Theater. While many mainstream media sources
> see these as "attacks", others, such as the editors of The Guardian,
> realize them to be "non-violent action or civil disobedience". We do
> not want to discount how easy it is for the media and authorities to
> misconstrue these actions as illegal denial of service attacks, as a
> 16-year old Dutch teenager is finding out right now, or as the EDT and
> b.a.n.g. lab found out earlier this year. Nevertheless, we are seeing
> a certain maturation of this technique as acceptable to others outside
> of the net.art community.
>
> Furthermore, the deliberation process of Anonymous prefigures future
> forms of activist collaboration online, subject to the caveats
> mentioned above. Discussions happened across a diversity of networked
> media, both old and new (IRC, Twitter, Blogspot, PiratePad, etc.).
> Orderly discussion under the control of a leader was not the norm, as
> individuals simultaneously put forth their own suggestions to have
> them edited into or out of existence. As Gabriella Coleman wrote
> in her analysis of their planning, they appeared to be "seasoned
> political activists", not simply "script-kiddies" as they are
> described by both the mainstream media and other hacker organizations
> such as 2600. Maybe there is something those of us interested in new
> forms of organization can learn from these predominantly 16-24-year
> olds.
>
> 6. Wikileaks suggests an understanding of a notion of networks as
> media assemblages.
>
> Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the recent Wikileaks phenomenon
> has to do with what it portends for future networked tendencies. Given
> what we stated in anti-thesis 1, we ought to pay more attention to
> the movement of information outside of Internet-based networks. There
> is a tendency to conflate network sharing of data with the Internet
> proper, but this is not a necessary condition. Indeed, there are
> multitudinous methods of arranging networks of humans and things that
> do not rely on corporate or government controlled conduits for the
> passage of bits. Consider, for example, the host of artistic projects
> in this space just from the past couple of years: netless, Feral
> Trade, deadswap, Dead Drops, Fluid Nexus, Autonet, etc. These projects
> rely on assemblages of humans and infrastructure in motion. And, they
> rely in part on a prior agreement among participants with respect to
> protocols to follow. This is already at work in the Wikileaks project
> with respect to their main members. Only they know who they are; we
> are in the dark, and rightly so. This is an application of Hakim Bey's
> concept of Immediatism, updated to take into account a certain mongrel
> of immediate contact and networked activities.
>
> Additionally, the projects just mentioned foreground a certain notion
> of slowness that works to counteract the notions of "information
> overload". If data transport relies on the motion of humans from
> one location to another, this will require a particular patience,
> producing a form of slowness. Nevertheless, this should not be
> understood as a pastoral call as voiced by certain proponents of, for
> example, the Slow Food Movement. Rather it is a way to reinvigorate
> thought and practice regarding human-scale machinic assemblages. What
> remains is the difficult and challenging work of producing long-term,
> permanent ad-hoc networks.
>
> Members of the Faculty of the College of Ontopoetic Machines
>
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