Andrew McLaughlin, then a Google lobbyist and later a White House science official, with Yochai Benkler in Switzerland in 2007. Photo by "venture communist" Joi Ito.
Yochai Benkler provocatively poses the challenge to the Obama Administration about what he believes is the Dangerous Logic of the Bradley Manning case by claiming that this interaction changes everything:
The judge, Col. Denise Lind, asked the prosecutors a brief but revealing question: Would you have pressed the same charges if Manning had given the documents not to WikiLeaks but directly to the New York Times?
The prosecutor’s answer was simple: “Yes Ma'am.”
My answer to Benkler's conclusion -- based on this prosecutor's answer -- that therefore the prosecution of Manning "places a chill on speech" or on "journalism" is: "No, Sir".
Either the Times would have worked extremely hard to protect sources -- including Manning -- and doled out the documents or used them as deep background for a long time and there would never have been a WikiLeaks case because Julian Assange's ego and anarchic group would never have been in the equation.
Or even the Times would have been forced to concede that this random hack of millions of files "because I can, because I want to stick it to the Man" was in fact treason and would have conceded this to the authorities even in the course of ultimately checking the story with them. We'll never know. It's one of those hysterical hypotheticals that hackers always advance to make their argument because real reason and logic won't do.
But one thing that these prancing Fiskers dancing around the line between criminality and conscience can't have both ways is to claim that Manning's hack with Assange's incitement was an important and revelatory act of conscience and a Big Story -- and also claim that it never harmed anyone, either individual sources or governments.
Much of their argumentation for releasing Manning has hinged on the idea that he didn't do any harm and that the materials didn't do any damage and that they weren't that big a deal. Yet if we are to believe them that "war crimes" were revealed that supposedly the US had been hiding and that even existing human rights groups didn't know about, then they can't explain how it was "no big deal" and "even Obama" or "even Hillary Clinton" claimed it harmed no one. After all, the paganist credo of many of the hackers is "an it harm none, do what ye will" (a diabolically and diametrically opposed notion to the religious Golden Rule, I might add, which creates a context of responsible community with "Do unto others as ye would have them do undo you.")
In any event, I resolutely reject that WikiLeaks never harmed anyone. I myself have tracked some of the people who it has harmed. I know personally of a number of cases harmed by WikiLeaks seriously, yet they are not going to stand up and paint broader targets on their backs for further retribution by oppressive governments merely to prove somebody like Benkler wrong.
But I also don't see that any "war crimes" have been revealed. The Apache helicopter attack is a tragic case of mistaken identity, not a war crime. Other abuses that might be discussed, even things I might pick out like complicity with UNICEF's silence on forced child labour in Uzbekistan, were not revelations -- human rights groups and even other departments of the US government worked on these issues. The world is a nasty and messy place, and WikiLeaks cables and documents reveal, if anything, that the US does its best, and certainly more than the despicable governments they have to deal with.
I probed further yesterday on Twitter and asked whether the New York Times would have performed the ultimately patriotic act that the hacker Adrian Lamo performed when confronted with Manning's trove of stolen documents -- and called the FBI. I'm not sure that it would have. Actually, that's a good reason to work with the hated mainstream media, kids -- they are less likely to blow you in than your fellow snivelling hacker snitches.
But ultimately, it doesn't change the dynamics, because WikiLeaks is not the Pentagon Papers.
Context, intent, motivation -- these all matter.
A leak involving a government official who himself had been entrusted papers about a war, distributed in a limited circle of people, given to a newspaper to publish as a matter of conscience and public interest is very, very different than a defiant hack of millions of documents to destroy a system, handed to fellow hackers intersted in bringing down the state.
These terms of mine aren't just judgemental or pejorative, they are the self-description of these actors when you read their manifestos, as their fellow revolutionary Aaron was and comrade-at-arms and WikiLeaks supporter Aaron Swartz also wrote in his guerilla manifesto.
The difference between these two sets of people -- one involving an educated and credentialed US government officials and trained establishment journalists and their First Amendment lawyers -- and a bunch of hacker kids who hadn't finished their degrees, one of whom went in the army for lack of career options -- is the Internet.
The Internet makes it all better, according to Yochai Benkler; the Internet makes it possible and therefore blesses what might have come to nothing and been limited to a paper fire in the trashcan by pranksters. But the Internet makes it worse, in my view, and gives new scope and drama to the "propaganda of the deed" that the original French anarchists who conceived of this idea could never have imagined.
Manning may have claimed to have "wanted to start a national conversation" which is what leftists always claim their plans for radical revolution are only about, but he didn't say that before or during his deeds, only after.
I have always maintained that Bradley Manning isn't an Internet freedom fighter nor a committed anti-war activist and WikiLeaks isn't media or even an advocacy nonprofit organization.
And for me, what might have changed this is if Manning joined an antiwar organization and worked with them as some former GIs do after their service, or if he had even seen to the publication of the file that supposedly caused his conversion -- the Iraqi printing press raid -- a file that he said in the trial yesterday, as Charlie Savage tweeted, he was upset that Assange didn't publish. Why? This is the crucial litmus test for conscience in my book, not the "Yes m'am."
Julian Assange and the other secret or public members of WikiLeaks are anarchists, members of a hackers' collective, a clandestine cadre group driven by radical ideological precepts. So individual human rights cases don't interest them -- Kenya didn't interest them any longer than it took to dispose of one dump and move on to the nexst.
Here's a good summary of Assange by Steve Coll at The New Yorker
In a part of his manifesto titled “State and Terrorist Conspiracies,” he wrote, “To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly, for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed.” If dissenters hacked and published enough secret information harbored by governments, he went on, this might disrupt what he imagined to be the absolute dependency of governments on flows of hidden data. “An authoritarian conspiracy that cannot think efficiently cannot act to preserve itself against the opponents it induces,” Assange concluded. That is, he believed that he could break governments by siphoning the secrets that nourish them.
* because he could -- most of the acts of Bradley Manning seem to be about opportunism, not planning and stealth -- he was delighted to get the nerdy job of an intelligence analyst and applied himself with zeal to all the technical aspects of making the "work product" of analysis
* because he wanted to "stick it to the Man" -- he was generally unhappy with himself, life in the army, and didn't see any future
*because he hooked up with a thrilling anarchist movement that made him feel wanted He asks his hacker acquaintances idly what they would do if they had access to tons of military cables, and while talking to Lamo, he focuses on a cable about the Vatican and its offenses of corruption or pedophilia because, as for a lot of gays, the presence of this seemingly hypocritical power in the world seeking to moralize against him really angered him and he wanted to "get them".
Remember, it was only a year ago that the defense his lawyer was planning for him was essentially "my transgender status made me do it" -- fortunately for LGBT rights, that approach was dropped as it would set back progress not only in the armed forces for gay rights -- anyone would seem a suspect of treason if this defense could be used -- it would set back progress in society. It was craven and opportunistic and many are glad it got dropped.
Manning's statement of motivations of conscience was one he had nearly three years of prison, a lot of it in solitary confinement, to hone and perpare. So it's better than his actual motivation, context, and state of mind at the time he performed his insolent, infantile and belligerent at of hacking the military servers in a unit where he'd been placed on administrative leave over a physical fight with his fellow servicemen.
Floyd Abrams, the First Amendment lawyer, put it very clearly: WikiLeaks is a source, not a colleague. It's a hackers' collective bent on a political aim of undermining a state they've grown in particular to loathe and hate for its power and influence in the world. Manning, all the more so, is a source. Sources can be of all kinds for the media, honest or dishonest, sane or crazy, but they are sources, not fellow media organizations. WikiLeaks tried to force the hand of the mainstream media by insisting on partnerships that put him on equal footing with the Times or the Guardian and other papers. This failed miserably precisely because he was not interested in news, or disclosing revelations or framing the story in a context, or protecting vulnerable sources, but merely bringing down a government. As leftist as the Guardian is, as liberal as the New York Times is, they are not interesting in bringing down the state. And that matters. A liberal state under the rule of law that secures freedom of private property and freedom of the media actually is something that even these leftists or liberals appreciate.
Yochai Benkler is neither a journalist or a nonprofit activist, although he ought to be, because the Google-funded Berkman Center at Harvard is really a center of radical thought and activism. Of course, like much of the open-source cult, it essentially benefits Google's business interests in liberating the Internet to be used by as many people as possible to click on their ads and make them ad revenue from search, the heart of their business.
Yet layered over this stark oligarchic profit aim are various old socialist ideas in new cyber clothing -- Benkler is famous for his concept of "Wealth of Networks" in opposition to "Wealth of Nations," in which he believes that people will liberate knowledge "trapped" in copyright and patents and share on the Internet and somehow...automagically ensure everyone livelihoods beyond the narrow group of elites who have Harvard positions like Benkler and Lessig.
Benkler's enthusiastic collectivist thinking is the sort of ideology that an old bastion of capitalism like Harvard can sponsor in the seeming secure belief that it is edgy and critical and brings animation and life to stodgy establishmentarianism but doesn't actually threaten the pillars of their establishment. The reality is something else, however: the first institutions and people to go, come the next even more radical stage of the info revolution, would be these expensive universities and these highly-paid professors -- the MOOC (Massively Online Open Course), especially as conceived of by the collectivist connectivists, would make short work of all that and turn them into lowly-paid or volunteer clerks at best.
In the old days, Benkler would never have gotten as much airtime and attention-economy space at The New Republic as he has now, under the new and regrettable ownership Silicon Valley tycoon Chris Hughes. To elevate his shop-worn collectivism to some sort of "business model" for Google and a New Age for the rest of us, to elevate the ethics-free hackers who help deliver this Party-State-Corporation utopia, he has to bless Manning as a kind of political prisoner and WikiLeaks as media.
They are neither. First of all, human rights groups have a term that is more specific than "political prisoner" -- "prisoner of conscience". That is a person imprisoned solely for the free expression of his beliefs who did not use or advocate violence. Yes, the old Amnesty International (not the new, which has eroded its principles) and Human Rights Watch (which does not deploy this term) might consider someone arrested on false criminal charges to be a true "prisoner of conscience".
But they wouldn't say that the charges against Manning of unauthorized disclosure of the hacked files wasn't a crime -- yes, they were illegally hacked, just like JSTOR or PACER were illegally hacked, because even if there was technically authorized access, such large numbers of files were not intended to be removed from the system to use for private use or public propaganda of the deed, and threaten the system itself. All the more so for a military person, who is bound by further restrictions than an ordinary civilian.
There they might say, then, that he was a "political prisoner", i.e. the motivations of the state for imprisoning him were "political" -- thus Mikhail Khodorkovsky is sometimes dubbed a "political prisoner" by some -- although more careful analysts prefer to talk about "excessive punishment" or "lack of due process" in his case. Yet just as no one in the mainstream human rights movement tries to convert Khodorkovsky into some kind of freedom-fighter or democrat of conscience, knowing that he was forced to cut corners and break the law as a businessman in Russia, so they cannot dub Manning as a "political prisoner". I do not think we will see this, although because Index on Censorship gave WikiLeaks a "new media freedom" award (a very bad idea in my view) and because these groups will be under relentless pressure from groups more far to the left than they are, who knows, they may cave.
But the fact is, they didn't make Manning a political prisoner before his trial, because he had broken the law that even these groups, critical of secrecy or wars, would concede.
Of course, while Benkler doesn't admit it, the fact that Manning was in the military, and under oath, and under a more strict regimen than even a State Department official, much less a nonprofit worker, that does create a very different context. The armed forces have to insist on strict discipline for the sake of their mission; the due process of a court martial is different and less than a civilian court because the stakes of obligation are higher.
Long before WikiLeaks and the arrogant and erratic Assange exploited the incident for his propagandistic goals, the human rights groups with which I've been associated over the years took up the case of the killing of the Reuters journalists, demanding accountability, publication of the file, disclosure of the video when it was known it existed. Of course Reuters itself did -- and Reuters has never, ever claimed that the shooting of their journalist was a "war crime," even if they might believe it was preventable. But these human rights groups and Reuters itself didn't take up this case propagandistically -- and falsely -- claiming that the soldiers were deliberate murderers, or that they deliberately targeted a van with children in it -- a despicable place that yes, Yoch Benkler does go to himself in his New Republic piece by refusing to explain the context of the shooting of the van -- he cunningly, just like Assange or Jacob Appelbaum, and misleading portrays it as merely a shooting of children.
But the soldiers thought the people below were toting RPGs, not cameras, and when they saw a van hurriedly pull up to the scene of a shooting, they quite properly and logically thought it was combatants helping other combatants -- not someone with children in the car fool-hardy and reckless enough to charge into a scene of battle and remain to pick up wounded. There was no way to know there were children in the van. They were not visible. So invocation of the harm of children -- an accidental action, just like the initial shooting of the journalists, not with malice and deliberation -- is disgusting. That propagandistic implication is one we got over and over from Assange, although Ryan Lizza at the New Yorker helped to blow the lid off that by quoting Assange's own words about the manipulative "editing" of the video.
Yesterday, Firedoglake's Kevin Gosztoza and legions of tweeters on new or newish accounts with few followers deployed to heckle critics (I see this phenomenon over and over again which lets me know how the cadres function) took up the lament that the mainstream media had "let Bradley Manning down".
Charlie Savage of the New York Times, also Ivy-League educated and a tremendously credentialed and accomplished person, corrected the legions by pointing out that Manning had called the public editor or ombudsman. That's the office you call if a story is biased. Now, Manning may have thought in fact in some larger, idealistic way that he needed to convince this official that all of the Times reporting was wrong and he would set it right.
But it's much more likely that as a naive and unschooled kid who in fact had never worked in a nonprofit activist organization or done much more than type on his Facebook page with his boyfriend and argue with his father, thought that "public editor" is what "the public" should contact. There's another name for that, however, which is "news room". With as serious a story as he got, he could have contacted an actual reporter -- in fact Charlie Savage, who had done exposes of the Bush Administration, might have been such a reporter.
But instead, he gave up -- kids want instant gratification, and it was snowing out, and he didn't feel like waiting to get to Politico, even -- and went to WikiLeaks, because
Oh, I know what that is like. I once sent a story to the much-vaunted secret site of the Wall Street Journal online, and never heard back, never even got an automatic email, much less a phone call -- nothing. So I might put it on my blog some day.
In the old days when there were pink While You Were Out pads with carbon-copy capacity, people would save records of calls, or operators would have log books, even. Now, the message that Bradley Manning might have left on the New York Times' voice mail system has long since been deleted, possibly even automatically by the system itself when it reached a certain load or time stamp. Because now we have electronic systems, and now we have the Internet.
Recent Comments