WikiLeaks has been all over the world news headlines this past week after the Daily Beast reported that Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning released 260,000 classified documents to the controversial journalism network. Wired.com has followed up on story with reports about Manning’s conscience and WikiLeaks’ intention to provide him with legal help.

In related news, the Guardian reported on Friday that the FBI is looking for WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange, in hopes of preventing him from publishing those documents. But WikiLeaks has not yet confirmed that they actually received 260,000 internal Army documents — maybe because the U.S. government seems so concerned about the situation. Manning also claimed to have leaked the 2007 Apache helicopter video that I discussed here in April.

Apparentely The New Yorker chose a really good time to publish a 10,000-word feature about Julian Assange. The story “No Secrets” by Raffi Khatchadourian was published on 6/7/10, the day before the news broke about Manning. I’m extremely interested in Assange and the WikiLeaks organization, but I was still surprised when I got sucked into this article. Assange is a fascinating character — the type of person who you don’t usually hear about because governments hate him so much. But he’ll likely be an important figure in the time ahead, so I wanted to present excerpts from the story in a convenient run-down.

On the hope for a new “scientific journalism” and their approach to the Apache helicopter footage:

If you publish a paper on DNA, you are required, by all the good biological journals, to submit the data that has informed your research—the idea being that people will replicate it, check it, verify it. So this is something that needs to be done for journalism as well. There is an immediate power imbalance, in that readers are unable to verify what they are being told, and that leads to abuse.’ Because Assange publishes his source material, he believes that WikiLeaks is free to offer its analysis, no matter how speculative. In the case of Project B, Assange wanted to edit the raw footage into a short film as a vehicle for commentary. For a while, he thought about calling the film ‘Permission to Engage,’ but ultimately decided on something more forceful: ‘Collateral Murder.’ He told Gonggrijp, ‘We want to knock out this “collateral damage” euphemism, and so when anyone uses it they will think “collateral murder.”’

On Assange’s upbringing and self-directed education:

Assange’s mother believed that formal education would inculcate an unhealthy respect for authority in her children and dampen their will to learn. ‘I didn’t want their spirits broken,’ she told me. …[Assange] took correspondence classes and studied informally with university professors. But mostly he read on his own, voraciously. He was drawn to science. ‘I spent a lot of time in libraries going from one thing to another, looking closely at the books I found in citations, and followed that trail,’ he recalled.

This bit shows a prominent aspect of WikiLeaks in its formative stage. Assange was arrested in 1991 for hacking with a group that went by the name “The International Subversives”:

‘Julian was the most knowledgeable and the most secretive of the lot,’ Ken Day, the lead investigator, told me. ‘He had some altruistic motive. I think he acted on the belief that everyone should have access to everything.’

On Assanges’ budding life philosophy and the need for an organization that would foster information leaks:

He had come to understand the defining human struggle not as left versus right, or faith versus reason, but as individual versus institution. As a student of Kafka, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, he believed that truth, creativity, love, and compassion are corrupted by institutional hierarchies, and by ‘patronage networks’—one of his favorite expressions—that contort the human spirit. He sketched out a manifesto of sorts, titled ‘Conspiracy as Governance,’ which sought to apply graph theory to politics. Assange wrote that illegitimate governance was by definition conspiratorial—the product of functionaries in ‘collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population.’ He argued that, when a regime’s lines of internal communication are disrupted, the information flow among conspirators must dwindle, and that, as the flow approaches zero, the conspiracy dissolves. Leaks were an instrument of information warfare.

On realizing the shortcomings of traditional journalism and mass media:

In some respects, Assange appeared to be most annoyed by the journalistic process itself—’a craven sucking up to official sources to imbue the eventual story with some kind of official basis,’ as he once put it. …in the Bunker one evening, Gonggrijp told me, ‘We are not the press.’ He considers WikiLeaks an advocacy group for sources; within the framework of the Web site, he said, ‘the source is no longer dependent on finding a journalist who may or may not do something good with his document.’

On WikiLeaks’ main objectives:

Assange, despite his claims to scientific journalism, emphasized to me that his mission is to expose injustice, not to provide an even-handed record of events. In an invitation to potential collaborators in 2006, he wrote, ‘Our primary targets are those highly oppressive regimes in China, Russia and Central Eurasia, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the West who wish to reveal illegal or immoral behavior in their own governments and corporations.’ He has argued that a ‘social movement’ to expose secrets could ‘bring down many administrations that rely on concealing reality—including the US administration.’

On justifying the potential for damage:

At the same time, Aftergood told me, the overclassification of information is a problem of increasing scale—one that harms not only citizens, who should be able to have access to government records, but the system of classification itself. When too many secrets are kept, it becomes difficult to know which ones are important.

Khatchadourian’s skeptical remarks about the long-term tenacity of WikiLeaks:

But experimenting with the site’s presentation and its technical operations will not answer a deeper question that WikiLeaks must address: What is it about? The Web site’s strengths—its near-total imperviousness to lawsuits and government harassment—make it an instrument for good in societies where the laws are unjust. But, unlike authoritarian regimes, democratic governments hold secrets largely because citizens agree that they should, in order to protect legitimate policy. In liberal societies, the site’s strengths are its weaknesses. Lawsuits, if they are fair, are a form of deterrence against abuse. Soon enough, Assange must confront the paradox of his creation: the thing that he seems to detest most—power without accountability—is encoded in the site’s DNA, and will only become more pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution.

On objective and subjective approaches to journalism:

‘It was surprising to me that we were seen as such an impartial arbiter of the truth, which may speak well to what we have done,’ [Assange] told me. But he also said, ‘To be completely impartial is to be an idiot. This would mean that we would have to treat the dust in the street the same as the lives of people who have been killed.’

You can read the entire feature here.

Now that I’ve emerged from my symbolic journey through the desert that took place over the last few months, I need to start cracking away at a variety of topics that have sparked my interest lately. The timeliest of those topics is WikiLeaks, a site that I heard about a few weeks ago via an NPR column. Now that I Google search for it, I see it was actually a partner article (from a group called Foreign Policy), and they made it sound like it was already old news on April 8.

In other words, a video of an American helicopter shooting down a group of non-militant people in a suburb of Baghdad accrued more than two million views on YouTube within five days of being posted online (that happened on 4/3/10). It now has more than six million views. This is the way that information will be distributed in the future, and the distribution itself is almost more interesting than what we see in the video. After all, put in a different context, this could be a scene from a popular Hollywood war movie.

But this is “real life.” This is a group of American marines murdering innocent Iraqis who were “suspected” to be looking for trouble in the streets. Two of them were professional journalists (Reuters photographers) carrying large cameras under their arms, which by a far stretch could be made out to be automatic weapons. If there had actually be a battle going on (and if more than two were carrying large black objects), one might be able to argue that it was an honest mistake — collateral damage in the “fight for justice” while we “bring freedom to the world.”

However, these people were walking casually down the street. There was no warfare in sight. The helicopter simply requested permission to shoot down these “targets,” quite simply because they were out looking for targets. As many have likely already commented, the scariest thing is how absolutely ordinary these events seem to the marines in the helicopter.

The ghost of Bill Hicks is chuckling on my shoulder right now. “I told you fuckers! What do you expect when you give a bunch of emotionally stunted and overly aggressive Americans access to the most expensive toys in the world?! They’re gonna do exactly what those war video games and movies brainwashed them to do: kill everything in site with a grin on their face.”

Yes, Bill. Thanks, and we miss you… very dearly.

It turns out that WikiLeaks is actually based in Sweden and run by a group called the Sunshine Press — a “non-profit organization funded by human rights campaigners, investigative journalists, technologists and the general public” (Wikipedia has much more information about them). And they have a separate site for this specific video: collateralmurder.com. Essentially they published this video after Reuters used Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to obtain it.

Personally I think this will be one of the most important stories of the year. This is the inevitable path of technological advance. Truth will demand to be acknowledged. I think that’s why Obama is pressing for universal access to high-speed Internet, even though he bowed to the bail-out demands from banks and auto companies. He knows there’s a hypocrisy to his actions, but he also knows that the intelligence capabilities of the general public are reaching a point where they will become superior to any one secret agency.

Of course, information will never come without a price — even if it’s free of cost to the public. From journalists on the war front (139 were killed in Iraq from 2003 to 2009, according to the Collateral Murder page), to a group like the Sunshine Press (who, according to information on their Wikipedia page, have already been the target of censorship, surveillance and/or attacks in various countries worldwide), this type of service is going to take a lot of courage, cooperation and hard work.

Currently their biggest problem might be fundraising. As it says on their site:

We have received hundreds of thousands of pages from corrupt banks, the US detainee system, the Iraq war, China, the UN and many others that we do not currently have the resources to release to a world audience. You can change that and by doing so, change the world. Even $10 will pay to put one of these reports into another ten thousand hands and $1000, a million.

So if you’re a fan of truth — not just “fact-based journalism” coming from mainstream media (which, because of near-universal corporate affiliation, is weakened by conflicts of interest), but the kind of truth that is going to reverse the downward spiral of civilization — and you have some money to spare, consider sending it their way.

Of course, many would argue that Wikipedia or some other resource really marked the beginning of what I’ve deemed the “first-ever golden age of journalism.” But I’m not so sure. Wikipedia is great for that purpose, but you really have to know what you’re looking for. I think we’re going to see a very rapid growth of specialized reporting sites like WikiLeaks that have a specific focus or unique way of gathering and distributing content — content that is vital to the interests of the American public, rather than to the interests of the American oligarchy. Either way, we have a lot to look forward to in this area.

In case you haven’t yet seen “Collateral Murder,” here’s the clip from YouTube.

Reading the book, I had the sense that Brown was speaking directly to me. It seemed to connect many different ideas, concepts, and experiences in my mind in ways I was unprepared or incapable of doing myself. It was a breath of fresh intellectual air, but it hit me like a tornado–and right from the start, too. The book is the result of Brown’s exhaustive studies of Freud’s psychoanalysis. However, it’s not a biography; it’s a highly interpretive work that connects psychology, philosophy (especially Hegel and Spinoza), history, and literature. Brown hopes to explain and eventually absolve mankind’s “restlessness and discontent.” One of my favorite paragraphs came on page 16:

“Mankind today is still making history without having any conscious idea of what it really wants or under what conditions it would stop being unhappy; in fact what it seems to be doing is making itself more unhappy and calling that unhappiness progress.”

“Freud’s real critique of religion…is the contention…that true humility lies in science. True humility, he says, requires that we learn from Copernicus that the human world is not the purpose or center of the universe; that we learn from Darwin that man is a member of the animal kingdom; and that we learn from Freud that the human ego is not even master in its own house.”

“History is shaped, beyond our conscious wills, not by the cunning of Reason but by the cunning of Desire.”

This page alone lessened the awkwardness I have felt for being a science nerd first and a reader/writer second. It suddenly made sense: why I was obsessed with astronomy in high school; why I took a history of Darwin class in college; why (also in college) I took a Freud/psychoanalysis class; why I couldn’t shake the knowledge I had accumulated through all three endeavors.

As with most theoretical nonfiction studies, things get extremely messy and somewhat less interesting towards the end. It’s a lot easier to construct the big ideas on page 16 than it is to divide them up into dozens of sub-ideas. Anyways, I highly recommend the book. (Does it seem weird to anyone else that most of the stuff I’ve been writing about is from the late 1950s?)

Naturally, his claims are a bit scary to those who think that it’s okay for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to sue someone who downloads MP3s from a peer-to-peer network. Lessig suggests that copyright law was established to protect the creative process, and has always included the right of “Fair Use.” This means you should be allowed to use copyrighted material in a transformative way that furthers creativity and cultural growth. Lessig claims that our society favors corporate interests over individual rights. This doesn’t mean that we should steal any digital property we come across. But we have to fight to protect our freedom to interact with the culture around us.

Many of Lessig’s books are even available for free PDF download under a Creative Commons license. (What a way to convince people that you follow your own advice!) In other words, I can share, modify, or remix those books and not only avoid legal prosecution, but, as long as I credit Lessig, perhaps even get praised by the author himself. I think I’ll let Lessig explain:

“For the first time in our tradition, the ordinary ways in which individuals create and share culture fall within the reach of the regulation of the law, which has expanded to draw within its control a vast amount of culture and creativity that it never reached before. The technology that preserved the balance of our history—between uses of our culture that were free and uses of our culture that were only upon permission—has been undone. The consequence is that we are less and less a free culture, more and more a permission culture” (p. 8).

“Digital technologies, tied to the Internet, could produce a vastly more competitive and vibrant market for building and cultivating culture; that market could include a much wider and more diverse range of creators; those creators could produce and distribute a much more vibrant range of creativity; and depending on a few important factors, those creators could earn more on average from this system than creators do today” (p. 9).

“We are allowing those most threatened by the changes to use their power to change the law—and more importantly, to use their power to change something fundamental about who we have always been. [...] We allow it because the interests most threatened are among the most powerful players in our depressingly compromised process of making law” (p. 13).

Another presence on the rebel side of the fight is the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF), who works to protect individual rights in the digital world. Of course, all of these sites (and more) are on our Links page. Is this all starting to make sense?