Assange bail a victory, but ‘cyberwar’ rages on

Julian Assange, founder of the Wikileaks whistleblowing site and newly crowned hero of the movement to keep the Internet free from government control, was today granted bail by a British court on a personal guarantee of GBP240,000.

Judging by the reaction in and out of the courtroom, this was the equivalent of a minor victory in the ongoing ‘information wars’. But the battlefield has expanded far beyond efforts to keep the controversial website open for business. Soon after Assange himself was arrested on charges unrelated to the leak of the US embassy cables (he stands accused of two counts of sexual molestation and one of rape), major online companies deemed to have ‘betrayed’ Wikileaks found themselves besieged by a series of revenge attacks aimed at crippling their online activities.

As in all wars, the first casualty has been truth. Initial reports suggested that Mastercard - the credit website which dropped Wikileaks as a client, allegedly under political pressure by the US government -  had gone offline after being ‘attacked’ by an army of amateur hackers known collectively as ‘Anonymous’.

Mastercard admitted that Anonymous had temporary brought its servers down, but played down media speculations of the reach and capability of this new form of cyber warfare.

Within days, Amazon – a much larger and more complex online presence than Mastercard – similarly found itself under attack. However, the web retail giant dismissed allegations that Anonymous had overloaded its servers, even if just for a few hours. Instead Amazon pointed towards a hardware failure to account for its online absence for several hours.

Whatever the case, it remains a fact that loosely affiliated groups of computer hackers – or ‘hacktivists’, to use the appropriate neologism -  have declared war on all who would dare intrude on the one domain that has to date successfully eluded complete State control: the Internet.

Their efforts have not gone unnoticed in Malta, where a tribute page on the social networking site Facebook (entitled ‘Anonymous Malta’) has vowed to take up the cudgels on behalf of Assange, and his declared mission to lift the lid on a perceived international conspiracy of silence.

‘Hatred for democracy’

So what, exactly, is at stake here? And what is it about Assange’s activities that has attracted so much sympathy and devotion from an ‘army’ whose footsoldiers include teenagers as young as 15 or 16?

And more to the point: why have individual governments – foremost the USA’s, for the fairly obvious reason that it has been the hardest hit by Wikileaks – gone to such lengths to thwart Assange and his website… with some exponents even suggesting that he ought to be executed for his ‘crimes’?

Tolga Temuge, Birdlife executive director and a former activist with Greenpeace, points towards the words of internationally renowned linguist and libertarian philosopher, Prof. Noam Chomsly of MIT University.

“Prof Noam Chomsky of MIT University has answered this question very well,” he begins. “He said that the cables reveal 'a profound hatred for democracy on the part of our political leadership'".

According to Temuge - who is in the process of organising some form of local protest in line with similar international events witnessed in major capital cities over the past week – the reaction to WEikleaks is symptomatic of the gulf that separates elected representatives from the people they are supposed to represent.

”Some of the information in these classified documents, and the vicious campaign of intimidation launched by the US government on WikiLeaks, has shown us how disconnected the western political elite are from the principles of democracy and the interests of the people who have elected them. This is probably the most 'embarrassing' revelation of these cables as these same Western leaders have long been preaching the tyrants of the Middle East and other countries about the principles of neo-liberal 'democracy'.

The great firewall of China

Indeed, the efforts to crush Wikileaks cannot but call to mind the pressure brought to bear on search engine Google by the government of China: a pressure that had been fiercely criticised by the USA – the same USA that is currently virtually the exact same tactics as Jintao’s regime to stifle Wikileaks.

Nor is the USA the only country to haveoverlooked the main issue at stake.

”It is ironic that Julian Assange spent the ‘Human Rights Day’ (10th December) in jail in a country like the UK,” Temuge continues. “This despite the fact that there had been absolutely no charges against him at the time, and he had cooperated with the Swedish and UK officials since August. He had also made himself voluntarily available to the police. Yet his bail was denied on the claim that he might not show up at the court again.”

Temuge argues that the reaction by Western governments is indicative of their attitude to freedom of expression as a whole.

”It was revealed in the late 70s (by the Pike Committee) that the US government has been spending hundreds of millions of US dollars on propaganda, misinformation and disinformation through out the world. The campaign of misinformation continues to date as they know the importance of control of information. The US government is openly pressuring the companies like PayPal, Amazon, Master, Visa etc to stop their services to WikiLeaks. They have also gone as far as intimidating University students posting updates about WikiLeaks on Facebook. The reason for this gross intolerance to freedom of information and disrespect to democracy is, they have now lost the control of information thanks to the web technologies and it is evident that they will do everything in their power to control the internet and limit our civil rights even more in the future.”

Fundamental principles

For all this, reactions on the ground in Malta have been few and far between. No public protests have yet been staged, and the media has by and large adopted a cautious approach to the issue as a whole.

Nonetheless, theInstitute of Maltese Journalists (IĠM) last week associated itself with the statement published by the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) condemning the political backlash being mounted against WikiLeaks, accusing the United States of “attacking free speech after it put pressure on the website’s host server to shut down the site on 1 December, 2010”.

“There is a fundamental principle here to which the IĠM strongly adheres to,” chairman Malcolm Naudi adds, quoting the statement as follows: “It is unacceptable to try to deny people the right to know.”

Naudi adds that “The revelations on WikiLeaks may be embarrassing in their detail, but they also expose corruption and double dealing in public life that is worthy of public scrutiny. The US response is desperate and dangerous because it goes against fundamental principles of free speech and democracy.”

The IGM’s concerns go beyond the actual Wikileaks issue. Naudi argues that vigilance is needed in all cases where information is suppressed.

“These principles transcend the medium that is used to communicate, and any such attempt in Malta would be as strongly condemned by the IĠM, which has campaigned for the confidentiality of the source and also contributed constructively to the White Paper on Freedom of Information.

“What makes the current action against WikiLeaks even more condemnable is that this has been done even though WikiLeaks decided to use respected channels of journalism, including Der Spiegel, The Guardian, the New York Times and El Pais, to filter the information.

Rights and responsibilities

However, he concedes that there is a grey area separating orthodox journalism methods, and the medium of the Internet which is unanswerable to anyone.

“Serious, professional journalists are well aware of their responsibilities both to the public and to people implicated in these revelations and work within the laws of their respective countries, unlike certain parts of the Internet that may not be so well regulated,” he points out.

Nonetheless, the IĠM condemns a;; actions aimed solely at propagating a culture of secrecy. In Naudi’s words, this culture “has for too long drawn a curtain around the unsavoury side of public life. Even people in the diplomatic community, who may not necessarily be trained diplomats, have to be held to account, and this is one way of doing that.

Naudi adds that the IĠM also associated itself with the IFJ’s support for the rights of whistleblowers and the responsible reporting of information in the public interest.

“The people’s right to know is not something that can be wilfully ignored any longer. They have to adjust to the fact that journalists have a duty to report, fairly and accurately, and with due respect for the rights of all parties in the public interest.”