War on WikiLeaks is a losing battle

WikiLeaks’ true legacy might not be more transparency but the destruction of internet freedoms, says Dan Buckley

IN God we trust. All others we monitor. That’s not just a memorable catchphrase. It is also the philosophy behind Xceedium, an American company that seeks to protect companies and major internet users from the kind of breaches that WikiLeaks has laid bare.

As Ken Ammon, the company’s chief strategy officer puts it: “What do Metallica and the US government have in common? They are both fighting to control information once it has been placed on the internet. Like Napster, which rocked the musicindustry by enabling piracy and was eventually sued by the band Metallica, the current WikiLeaks crisis is simply another example of a controversial yet highly efficient and hard to stop internet distribution engine for the global sharing of data.”

In other words, gossip will find a way.

Both Metallica and the United States government have pursued these internet distribution systems in an attempt to regain control of content they own. But, according to Ammon, it’s a losing battle.

“For Metallica, not much has been done to stop the millions of people who illegally access and share music files. Internet users know several Napster replacements exist that still amass files and enable the sharing of them. When something people want — music or data — becomes public, you can be sure that people will find a way to share it.”

So how is it possible that a simple website can so infuriate governments the world over, but still remain active? And how can it be stopped?

The fact is that it may prove impossible to stop it. Hamfisted attempts by governments to silence WikiLeaks appear to be doing more harm than good.

Attempts so far to bring it to heel include:

- WikiLeaks lost its domain name system provider, so it had to change its domain name from wikileaks.org to wikileaks.ch.

- WikiLeaks lost access to income sources when PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, and others stopped accepting payments on its behalf.

- WikiLeaks lost hosting services from the online retailer Amazon for violating its terms of service by not owning its own content.

- WikiLeaks’ ringmaster Julian Assange was tracked down and arrested — not for trafficking in stolen government documents, but on a conveniently strange sexual deviance charge.

But even with all this, WikiLeaks is still with us. Like any other website, it is essentially nothing more than a folder of files sitting on a hard drive, but it has now become a great cause, a rallying cry for both anti-war protesters and those who want to sow unrest among Western governments.

WikiLeaks has become a martyr to the cause of freedom and there is mounting evidence that the backlash against the arrest of Assange is rapidly growing into a mass movement that aims to cause widespread disruption on the internet.

In Britain, extra security measures have been added to a host of government web services, in particular those used to claim benefits or provide tax information.

While the WikiLeaks phenomenon is centred on the US, its effects are global. Among the embarrassing leaks to emerge on this side of the Atlantic was the revelation that the US was concerned as long as ago as October 2008 that Ireland did not have a grip on its crippled banks.

WikiLeaks has released cables which name two Irish locations on a list of worldwide sites the US deems vital to its national security. The locations in question are the Hibernia Atlantic transatlantic communications cable linking the US to Ireland, which comes ashore in Dublin, and the Genzyme bio-tech plant, located in Waterford.

The list was put together after the US State Department recently asked US missions based abroad to compile a list of installations whose loss could impact upon US national security. With that in mind, this could prove one of the most damaging cables yet, as all of the sites are by definition seen as at risk from terrorist attack.

Where will it all end? As the internet exists today, it will be virtually impossible for any government — let alone any company like Xceedium — to stop the information flow.

While a website, domain name, or even hosting provider can be shut down, it’s impossible to block every single computer in homes, offices, and schools that might host and replicate files.

But that is not to say that governments will not try. It is quite conceivable that we could see attempts to exert greater controls over the website, even among western democracies.

If that happens, they will be following countries like China, which has erected the Golden Shield Project, otherwise known as The Great Firewall of China. The purpose of this is to monitor and control everything that travels in, through, or out of China’s internet. Sites are blocked, content is filtered, and censorship is total.

If authorities in the West decide they have finally had enough of trafficking in stolen classified information, we may start to see more draconian controls placed on our use of the internet.

Ironically, that would mean that the true legacy of WikiLeaks might not be increased transparency but the destruction of internet freedoms.