Is Wikileaks Killing Espionage?
Wikileaks may be to espionage as the internet is to newspapers.
Why should governments pay good money and risk agents’ lives when they can get dirt on their enemies with the click of a finger?
But just the other day, Wikileaks posted a comprehensive list of all the global list of infrastructure sites which the US considers critical for its national security interest – ABSOLUTELY FREE!
If there is one thing wikileaks is actually guilty of is threatening all those intelligence jobs the world over – which is a pretty mean thing to do in a recession.
Yet that is a small price to pay for its potential to finally bury the cold war.
A spectre is haunting Europe— the spectre of Wikileaks. All the powers of the old world have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope Obama and Tsar Putin, China and South Korea, liberals and police-spies.
Wikileaks has indeed become the new Communism – the first truly international phenomenon since Marx and Engels that has been able to successfully unite the world; not East vs West, North vs South, Left vs Right – but States vs People. In doing so, it has starkly revealed the previous divisions to be mere red herrings, not worth wasting one’s time with. All states, Wikileaks reveals, are as bad as each other, and all are more interested in preserving the status quo than serving their people (indeed, are willing to sacrifice their own people to preserve the status quo). Assange can make us all into anarchists.
And just as during the first Red Scare, one’s support of wikileaks has become a litmus test of responsible debate, separating the respectable liberals (the former ‘anti-communist left’) from the ‘lunatic fringe’.
In the old days of Blunt and Burgess, well-placed people who had serious qualms against their countries, societies or ‘the system’ at large had only one sure-fire recourse: provide their secrets to the ‘other side’ – the USSR.
Sure, some people who did this were committed Communists who supported the Soviet Union, but in general it was a very diverse bunch: persecuted gays, stifled bureaucrats, people with petty office grievances, people who were blackmailed and most importantly, people who through their positions had found out so much about the crimes and abuses committed by their government in their name, and usually with some degree of personal involvement (through their work in intelligence or defence) that their conscience compelled them to speak out, and often the only voice that was listening were the Russians.
The downside to this was that when they were unmasked, the dirty secrets these people had revealed about their own governments were overshadowed and invalidated by the fact that they had been ‘enemy spies’, even though few of them particularly cared for Russia, and were just driven into Soviet arms by their anger, powerlessness and sometimes, a misguided sense of civic duty.
Enter wikileaks. Now, those same people – the misfits, the disappointed zealots, the bitter and the dissidents – no longer have to compromise themselves through being used in the interests of a foreign country. They can upload the dirt onto a value -neutral platform. Those who yesterday would have been driven to espionage have instead become whistleblowers. And whistleblowers are always good guys. Why? Because no matter what their intentions or motivations, it’s what they blow the whistle on that counts.
That’s why most governments are now so busy trying to tarnish the messengers – to distract attention from the message itself – spelled out in black and white on screens worldwide.