By Katie Kieffer
Image credit: “Julian Assange (WikiLeaks)” by biatch0r on Flickr via Creative Commons.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is a professional mover. “Home” is a work in progress for Assange. The notorious hacker and “freedom-of-information activist” has been on the move from childhood. TIME Magazine reports that Assange’s family “…ran a theater company and moved more than 30 times before he turned 14. At one point, reportedly, he, his baby half brother and his divorced mother fled her boyfriend for years across Australia.”
Since launching the WikiLeaks website, Assange has continually been on the move. He has hopped from one country to the next, avoiding the U.S. Today, he is being hounded by world governments, particularly the U.S. government, for leaking at least 1,325 diplomatic cables on WikiLeaks.
In order to “shut up” WikiLeaks, the U.S. needs to identify the fuel that keeps this website running and extinguish it. Below are key sources that Assange relies on in order to succeed. Extinguish this fuel, and you will extinguish WikiLeaks.
Ego
I think calls for extreme legal action against Assange (the publisher not the leaker, namely Pfc. Bradley Manning) are missing the point. Assange possesses a level of self-esteem that has a striking resemblance to narcissism. Giving Assange attention is like giving him air to breathe. Assange appears to be the type of individual who lives for attention and who relishes his role as a global celebrity. His ego has even pushed some of his closest allies away.
Currently, U.S. officials are fanning WikiLeaks’ fire by publicly expressing distress and disapproval of the site. U.S. officials and media organizations that publish or quote WikiLeaks’ material are merely drawing more attention to the leaks and validating the severity of the information by publicly stating which leaks give terrorists the most ammunition.
Weak threats
Assange’s leaks amount to only 1 percent of what he has access to. Public outcry from embarrassed politicians and diplomats has led Assage to issue his own threat in return: Send your legal hounds after me and I will air more of your dirty laundry on the world stage.
Threats against Assange, including questionable charges of rape, seem to bolster those who support his “crusade” to make almost all government information free and transparent on the internet. This week, The Associated Press reported, “To protect WikiLeaks, scores of individuals and organizations … have created websites that either partially or fully duplicated WikiLeaks’ main site. WikiLeaks said more than 1,000 such “mirror” sites had gone up by evening.”
‘Secrecy inflation’
Time Magazine points out that “secrecy inflation” is a widespread problem in the U.S. that has been growing for years right beneath our nose. Hackers like Assange were able to exploit this weakness and use it to their advantage.
The U.S. government is at fault for dubbing down the definition of “secret” or “classified” information to the point where nearly everything is a secret. Categorizing non-vital items as secret wastes time and money. It also withholds information from the public unnecessarily and gives government officials and diplomats a dangerous layer of bubble wrap whereby they can hide unethical behavior.
Time Magazine reports,
“The number of new secrets designated as such by the U.S. government has risen 75%, from 105,163 in 1996 to 183,224 in 2009, according to the U.S. Information Security Oversight Office. At the same time, the number of documents and other communications created using those secrets has skyrocketed nearly 10 times, from 5,685,462 in 1996 to 54,651,765 in 2009. Not surprisingly, the number of people with access to that Everest of information has grown too. In 2008, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found, the Pentagon alone gave clearances to some 630,000 people.”
“In 1995, Bill Clinton issued Executive Order 12958, which gave just 20 officials, including the President, the power to classify documents as top secret, meaning their disclosure would likely “cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security” of the U.S. But sneakily, the order also allowed those 20 selected officials to delegate their authority to 1,336 others. Nor was that all: according to a 1997 bipartisan congressional report of a committee chaired by the scourge of government secrecy, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, such “derivative” classification authority was eventually handed to some 2 million government officials and a million industry contractors.”
Former President Bill Clinton. Image credit: “Bill Clinton – yes, I took this photo” by Creativity+ Timothy K Hamilton on Flickr via Creative Commons.
Broken clearance system
It is mind-boggling that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security spent $53 billion, the Justice Department spent $30 billion and the U.S. government spent $80.1 billion on intelligence gathering in the most recent fiscal year, yet we have WikiLeaks to show for it. Clearly, the system is broken. Reform, not more money, is needed to fix it.
Time Magazine reveals that,
“…earlier this year, the Washington Post found that some 854,000 people inside and out of government had top-secret clearance, the highest classification. Ensuring all those people can be trusted isn’t easy, especially since the issuance of clearances has been flawed and lacked rigor. The GAO [Government Accountability Office] sampled 3,500 of the investigative reports that officials use to determine whether to give clearances for Pentagon personnel and found that 87% “were missing at least one type of documentation required by the federal investigative standards.” The missing documents included information on previous employment and complete security forms. Some 12% of the reports didn’t include a subject interview. Since 2005, the GAO has put the flawed clearance process on its list of the government problems that pose the highest risk to U.S. security — where it remains.”
Internal corruption
WikiLeaks has brought to light some very disparaging tales of the U.S. on the world stage, including accounts of U.S. diplomats violating diplomatic trust through espionage and U.S. government representatives who bullying or bribing other countries into supporting its climate change agenda. In the words of Assange himself, the best way for the U.S. or any nation to protect itself from finding its dirty laundry online is to act in an upright and ethical manner. He told Time Magazine that the U.S. government can decide to “…reform in such a way that they can be proud of their endeavors and proud to display them to the public.”
The U.S. needs to take the high road in managing its tarnished reputation. Even WikiLeaks’ most recent and brazen leak – a list of places that the U.S. government considers crucial to American security – were already “well-known,” admits USA Today. Thus far, Wikileaks is primarily dangerous because it reveals unethical behavior on behalf of the U.S., not because it reveals edited military secrets. This will potentially make it difficult for the U.S. to work with other countries and make our neighbors second-guess confiding in us.
Rather than calling for Assange’s head, the U.S. government can put a stop to unsavory and over-revealing posts on WikiLeaks by ceasing to fuel Assange’s fire. The U.S. government needs to stop feeding Assange’s inflated ego, offering weak threats on the world stage, inflating secrecy, ignoring a broken clearance system and persisting in internal corruption.
Image credit: “Julian Assange (WikiLeaks)@HITBSecConf2009 KL” by biatch0r on Flickr via Creative Commons.
Another terrific post, Katie! You are so right, “REFORM”…not more $$$ is needed to clean up this mess. Thanks.