The Empire strikes back against WikiLeaks
Good article by Alexander Cockburn on The First Post:
First Amendment rights trampled - and WikiLeaks is not the only site to be shut down
The WikiLeaks sites have vanished — though more than 1,400 mirror sites still carry the disclosures. Amazon, Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and the organisation’s Swiss bank have shut them down, either on their own initiative or after a threat from the US government or its poodles in London and Geneva. Julian Assange is in a British jail cell, facing a hearing on trumped-up Swedish allegations zealously posted by Interpol.
The US government is warning potential employees not to read the WikiLeaks materials anywhere on the web, and US Attorney General Eric Holder is cooking up a stew of new gag stipulations and fierce statutory penalties against any site carrying material the government deems compromising to state security. Commercial outfits like Amazon are falling over themselves to connive at the shutdowns, actual or threatened.
One of the biggest lessons for us all comes in the form of a wake-up call on the enormous vulnerability of our prime means of communication to swift government-instigated, summary shutdown.
Forty-three years ago, Ramparts magazine published its disclosures of the CIA’s capture of the National Student Association as a front organisation. The magazine became the target of furious denunciation by the Liebermans and McConnells of the day. Even before publication, the CIA’s Desmond FitzGerald authorised a dirty-tricks operation against Ramparts.
But at no time did the government muster the nerve to flout the First Amendment and try to shut the magazine down on grounds that it was compromising “national security” or was guilty of espionage. A courtroom challenge by Ramparts’ lawyers would have been inevitable.
While visiting Britain in the early 1970s, former CIA case officer Philip Agee had a brief meeting with Tony Godwin, editor-in-chief of Penguin Books, a friend of mine. Godwin agreed to publish Agee’s exposé, including the names of active CIA officers and details of their operations.
Agee managed to write the book in Paris, though I warned him that the CIA certainly knew of his plans and would probably try to kill him. They bugged his typewriter and later floated disobliging rumours about his sex life and drinking habits. But no one tried to shove him into the Seine or even put him in a French prison.
Today? At the least, all of Ramparts’ electronic business operations would be closed down. Pressured by the US government, Amazon would deny Penguin all access or ability to sell books. Just look at what has happened to WikiLeaks.
Britain has had its left leaker heroes. In 1963, ‘Spies for Peace’ – a group of direct-action British anarchists and kindred radicals associated with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Bertrand Russell’s Committee of 100 - broke into a secret government bunker, Regional Seat of Government Number 6 (RSG-6), at Warren Row, near Reading, where they photographed and copied documents, showing secret government preparations for rule after a nuclear war.
They distributed a pamphlet along with copies of relevant documents to the press, stigmatising the “small group of people who have accepted thermo-nuclear war as a probability, and are consciously and carefully planning for it ... They are quietly waiting for the day the bomb drops, for that will be the day they take over.”
There was uproar before the Conservative government of the day issued a D-notice forbidding any further coverage in the press. The cops and intelligence services hunted long and hard for the ‘spies for peace’, and caught nary a one. These days, would the press have been so initially swift to reprint the pamphlet? Would any website reprinting its contents have survived for 24 hours?
So far as the internet is concerned, First Amendment protections here in the US – certainly better than protections in the UK - appear to have no purchase or even acknowledged standing. Even before the WikiLeaks hysteria took hold, the situation was very serious.
As Davey D recently reported on his Hip Hop Corner website, over the Thanksgiving holiday Homeland Security, along with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Justice Department and the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordinating Center, closed more than 80 websites, including popular hip-hop sites RapGodfathers.com, dajaz1.com and Onsmash.com. These sites were accused of copyright violations. No hearing. Alive one minute, dead the next.
So here we have a public “commons” — the internet — subject to arbitrary onslaught by the state and powerful commercial interests, and not even the shadow of constitutional protection.
The situation is getting worse. The net itself is going private. As I write, Google and Facebook are locked in a struggle over which company will control the bulk of the world’s internet traffic. Millions could find that the e-mail addresses they try to communicate with, the sites they want to visit, the ads they may want to run, are all under Google’s or Facebook’s supervision and can be closed off without explanation or redress at any time.
Here in the US certainly, we need a big push on First Amendment protections for the internet: one more battlefield where the left and the libertarians can join forces. But we must do more than buttress the First Amendment. We must also challenge the corporations’ power to determine the structure of the internet and decide who is permitted to use it.