For my sake, please!

Open Letter to Reporters without Borders

The reputable press organization Reporters without Borders (reporters sans frontières) have issued an open letter to wikileaks citing them for what the see as reckless behaviour in releasing 77,000 confidential documents. You can read it here: http://en.rsf.org/united-states-open-letter-to-wikileaks-founder-12-08-2010,38130.html. Naturally, I disagree with them, and I sent them an e-mail about it, as should you rsf@rsf.org. I decided to also publish my views here, as I believe it is an important issue. So here goes:

I have just finished reading your "attack" on wikileaks, and I must say I am a bit disappointed.
While I realize that a great deal of the difference between your organization and wikileaks is a result of differing values, with regards to the legitimacy of the state itself and its methodology, I do find your approach a bit lacking in focus.
I am of course fundamentally respectful of your work to further press freedom and end censorship and alike, but when you claim that wikileaks' release of documents gives the various authorities around the world legitimate reasons to monitor the internet and keep internet activists under surveillance it smacks quite a bit of backwards logic. That would be like saying that the government can legitimately keep journalists under surveillance because some of them publish confidential materials. There is no legitimacy in such a policy and there never will be. It seems to me that you as an organization should rather focus on that instead of running errands for the Obama administration in taking down Wikileaks.
Also, this issue touches on fundamental issues in state theory, and the philosophical reasoning for a democratic system. The question remains whether a state should be allowed to keep secrets from their own people, while resting on the "legitimacy" the same people provides? Or rather, should a government answer to its people, and be ready to defend its policies without secrecy and threats of legal action? Democracy is founded on the right to overthrow the government should it lose legitimacy, by peaceful means or otherwise. With the excesses we see today, with more than a million dead in two wars, mostly civilians, we as citizens are in our rights to expose and criticize government policies. We have a fundamental right, and even obligation to protest against heavy handed and illegitimate state behaviour, by any means we have at our disposal.

Additionally your arguments seem a bit willy nilly considering that you untill recently praised wikileaks for leaking documents pertaining to Guantanamo and the incident known as "collateral muder". There is no fundamental difference between this most recent release of documents, and these earlier instances. The only difference is in the respose from Obama and his cronies.

Organizations such as your own will continue to reap the benefits of wikileaks' work in the future, as well as suffer the collective punishment of the authorities. The question you should ask yourself is simply, whose side are you on? I'm not implying that you should stand by wikileaks regardless, or that this issue only has two sides, but if you are in favor of press freedom, you cannot turn your back on wikileaks in this matter, and claim that they are the reason why the government is cracking down on freedoms. The government is cracking down on freedoms, because they are protecting their own power, despite lacking legitimacy and a system of principles to back them. All they have is force, and the people's fear of force - in whatever form it takes. Place the blame where the blame is due.

Privatized Propaganda

My political view are well known to anyone who's frequented this blog, or otherwise been subjected to my opinions. They're not really the subject of this blog however, I just wanted to tone an ever so little black flag before I get started on my subject: privatized propaganda warfare.

Over the last year or so wikileaks has become the most publicized actor in an ongoing information war between peace activists and various governments of the world. Wikileaks ofcourse has been responsible for leaking a great deal of classified material pertaining to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and this upsets the people responsible for sending troops to this wars.
Wikileaks however is not the only opposing actor in this war against government information monopolization and spin doctoring, and the war is not new.

I have previously posted the cultural terrorist manifesto, as well as a video by Emergency Broadcast Network - and both of these posts concern the same ongoing information war. What EBN, the Grey Wolves and Wikileaks have in common is that they represent a phenomema or ideology often dubbed infoanarchism. An ideology they also share with the swedish Pirate Party and several other groups and individuals - including yours truly. The main motto for this loose movement of people is "information wants to be free". If you're into revolutionary romanticism we can call this an "information guerilla". It's a quite accurate description.

In other words it as an ongoing insurrectionist campaign being waged between state forces and comercial media with huge budgets and established channels of communication and technology on one hand, and volunteers with highl improvised means of communication and distribution on the other. In many ways this is an example of assymetric warfare, or fourth generation warfare, but on the information front rather than on the classic battlefield.

Assymetric warfare is seen by many as the most important tendency in modern conflict and it is usually typified by regular military units with training and technology going against a guerilla with little or no training and little common ground with their enemy. Usually wars are fought over territory or ideology, or both, whereas an information war is waged in the field of public image and credibility and over a strictly ideological goal.

The interesting thing is however what history teaches us about what happens when a large military system takes on a guerilla. Quite often the "weaker" party succedes, and the government must accede to loss. Whether we are talking about conflict of force, in the cases of the american revolution, the vietnam war or Gandhi's campaing to oust the brits from India - or we are talking about popular protest movements such as the civil rights movement in the sixties. To retain some shred of legitimacy a government cannot trample the rights of its citizens lest it become a dictatorship. So this wikileaks bout is something of a pickle for the authorities. They must attack the activists while trying to come out as the party that takes care of the public interest. Wikileaks must be made out to look like they are thugs, criminals, sociopaths and evildoers, rather than concerned citizens. Once people start questioning why the government so often feels the need to take on their own citizens, whose will they supposedly draw their legitimacy from, the authorities are quite simply fucked...

I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions, maybe while you check out this wonderful little rap about wikileaks.