Yap, dunia kudu biasa dengan budaya Wikileaks..
Negara tidak boleh punya rahasia, karena yang diurus negara itu adalah urusan
bersama, kepentingan bersama.
Mengakui ada hak negara untuk punya rahasia berar memberi kesempatan kepada
orang gajian penduduk negeri itu, yaitu presiden atau perdana menteri,
menteri, anggota berbagai dewan dan pegawai negeri berbagai lembaga negara,
untuk menyalah gunakan kepercayaan yang diberikan kepad amereka..
Dan di zaman "global village tidak ada satu negarapun boleh punya rahasia.
---
guardian.co.uk home
Live with the WikiLeakable world or shut down the net. It's your choice
Western political elites obfuscate, lie and bluster and when the veil of
secrecy is lifted, they try to kill the messenger
* John Naughton
*
o John Naughton
o guardian.co.uk, Monday 6 December 2010 20.59 GMT
Browser showing WikiLeaks home page after move to Switzerland Screen shot of a
browser showing WikiLeaks' home page and Julian Assange after the move to a
Swiss host. REUTERS/Valentin Flauraud
'Never waste a good crisis" used to be the catchphrase of the Obama team in the
runup to the presidential election. In that spirit, let us see what we can
learn from official reactions to the WikiLeaks revelations.
The most obvious lesson is that it represents the first really sustained
confrontation between the established order and the culture of the internet.
There have been skirmishes before, but this is the real thing.
And as the backlash unfolds first with deniable attacks on internet service
providers hosting WikiLeaks, later with companies like Amazon and eBay and
PayPal suddenly "discovering" that their terms and conditions preclude them
from offering services to WikiLeaks, and then with the US government attempting
to intimidate Columbia students posting updates about WikiLeaks on Facebook
the intolerance of the old order is emerging from the rosy mist in which it has
hitherto been obscured. The response has been vicious, co-ordinated and
potentially comprehensive, and it contains hard lessons for everyone who cares
about democracy and about the future of the net.
There is a delicious irony in the fact that it is now the so-called liberal
democracies that are clamouring to shut WikiLeaks down.
Consider, for instance, how the views of the US administration have changed in
just a year. On 21 January, secretary of state Hillary Clinton made a landmark
speech about internet freedom, in Washington DC, which many people welcomed and
most interpreted as a rebuke to China for its alleged cyberattack on Google.
"Information has never been so free," declared Clinton. "Even in authoritarian
countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and
making governments more accountable."
She went on to relate how, during his visit to China in November 2009, Barack
Obama had "defended the right of people to freely access information, and said
that the more freely information flows the stronger societies become. He spoke
about how access to information helps citizens to hold their governments
accountable, generates new ideas, and encourages creativity." Given what we now
know, that Clinton speech reads like a satirical masterpiece.
One thing that might explain the official hysteria about the revelations is the
way they expose how political elites in western democracies have been deceiving
their electorates.
The leaks make it abundantly clear not just that the US-Anglo-European
adventure in Afghanistan is doomed but, more important, that the American,
British and other Nato governments privately admit that too.
The problem is that they cannot face their electorates who also happen to be
the taxpayers funding this folly and tell them this. The leaked dispatches
from the US ambassador to Afghanistan provide vivid confirmation that the
Karzai regime is as corrupt and incompetent as the South Vietnamese regime in
Saigon was when the US was propping it up in the 1970s. And they also make it
clear that the US is as much a captive of that regime as it was in Vietnam.
The WikiLeaks revelations expose the extent to which the US and its allies see
no real prospect of turning Afghanistan into a viable state, let alone a
functioning democracy. They show that there is no light at the end of this
tunnel. But the political establishments in Washington, London and Brussels
cannot bring themselves to admit this.
Afghanistan is, in that sense, a quagmire in the same way that Vietnam was. The
only differences are that the war is now being fought by non-conscripted troops
and we are not carpet-bombing civilians.
The attack of WikiLeaks also ought to be a wake-up call for anyone who has rosy
fantasies about whose side cloud computing providers are on. These are firms
like Google, Flickr, Facebook, Myspace and Amazon which host your blog or store
your data on their servers somewhere on the internet, or which enable you to
rent "virtual" computers again located somewhere on the net. The terms and
conditions under which they provide both "free" and paid-for services will
always give them grounds for dropping your content if they deem it in their
interests to do so. The moral is that you should not put your faith in cloud
computing one day it will rain on your parade.
Look at the case of Amazon, which dropped WikiLeaks from its Elastic Compute
Cloud the moment the going got rough. It seems that Joe Lieberman, a US senator
who suffers from a terminal case of hubris, harassed the company over the
matter. Later Lieberman declared grandly that he would be "asking Amazon about
the extent of its relationship with WikiLeaks and what it and other web service
providers will do in the future to ensure that their services are not used to
distribute stolen, classified information". This led the New Yorker's Amy
Davidson to ask whether "Lieberman feels that he, or any senator, can call in
the company running the New Yorker's printing presses when we are preparing a
story that includes leaked classified material, and tell it to stop us".
What WikiLeaks is really exposing is the extent to which the western democratic
system has been hollowed out. In the last decade its political elites have been
shown to be incompetent (Ireland, the US and UK in not regulating banks);
corrupt (all governments in relation to the arms trade); or recklessly
militaristic (the US and UK in Iraq). And yet nowhere have they been called to
account in any effective way. Instead they have obfuscated, lied or blustered
their way through. And when, finally, the veil of secrecy is lifted, their
reflex reaction is to kill the messenger.
As Simon Jenkins put it recently in the Guardian, "Disclosure is messy and
tests moral and legal boundaries. It is often irresponsible and usually
embarrassing. But it is all that is left when regulation does nothing,
politicians are cowed, lawyers fall silent and audit is polluted.
Accountability can only default to disclosure." What we are hearing from the
enraged officialdom of our democracies is mostly the petulant screaming of
emperors whose clothes have been shredded by the net.
Which brings us back to the larger significance of this controversy. The
political elites of western democracies have discovered that the internet can
be a thorn not just in the side of authoritarian regimes, but in their sides
too. It has been comical watching them and their agencies stomp about the net
like maddened, half-blind giants trying to whack a mole. It has been deeply
worrying to watch terrified internet companies with the exception of Twitter,
so far bending to their will.
But politicians now face an agonising dilemma. The old, mole-whacking approach
won't work. WikiLeaks does not depend only on web technology. Thousands of
copies of those secret cables and probably of much else besides are out
there, distributed by peer-to-peer technologies like BitTorrent. Our rulers
have a choice to make: either they learn to live in a WikiLeakable world, with
all that implies in terms of their future behaviour; or they shut down the
internet. Over to them.
------------------------------------
Post message: [email protected]
Subscribe : [email protected]
Unsubscribe : [email protected]
List owner : [email protected]
Homepage : http://proletar.8m.com/Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/proletar/
<*> Your email settings:
Individual Email | Traditional
<*> To change settings online go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/proletar/join
(Yahoo! ID required)
<*> To change settings via email:
[email protected]
[email protected]
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[email protected]
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
