If you want simple answers, you shouldn’t be reading my blog. While I do try my best to make certain aspects of Linux simpler and less mysterious, I can’t do that with reality in general.
However, I can save you a lot of time in one respect. Start with the blanket assumption anyone with power and money is scum. In this world, you don’t get power and money without major moral compromise. For purposes of this discussion, “power” is roughly equivalent to “influence” of any sort. A very popular mainstream journalist has power, in that sense. The same journalist most certainly has wealth you can’t match. Once we establish that distrust, then we are in a position to note when someone with power and wealth isn’t quite such a complete psychopath. It’s bound to happen, since most psychopaths have no talent, and building empires requires a certain amount of talent. A few of the harmless, and even the rare good guy, is going to get hired by the psychopaths because they actually need to get some work done once in a while.
If you observe closely how Julian Assange acts as a player on the stage, he is exactly the same sort of psychopath-in-effect as the government and corporate psychopaths he claims to confront. He keeps secrets, manipulates public opinion with carefully staged press releases, and is simply one more actor on the stage using exactly the same theatrics, with exactly the same motives, as everyone else. Real revolutionary leakers simply expose the information when they get their hands on it. They understand, on some level, the most fundamental moral code of all Creation: Truth wants to be free. That’s similar to the hacker’s assertion, “Information wants to be free.” The point here is, information is not necessarily truth. It’s not always accurate and not always pertinent. Truth is always truth regardless of niggling measures of accuracy, and thus is always pertinent. Assange is not about truth, but about making Assange more wealthy and powerful.
It requires a mystical bent to grasp the difference. Truth is God, a Person who is determined to break through all human boundaries and bondages. If you manage to participate in His process of revelation, you’ll be rewarded — that part is plain and simple. If you are mercenary about it, you won’t get much, but you’ll be rewarded. If you are committed to it, you will already have the most valuable rewards.
At any rate, this is what percolates in the back of my mind as I observe the wacky theatrics of the Wikileaks saga. The latest act stars Glen Greenwald and some truly disgusting thuggery by a handful of corporate PR companies. I suppose we can believe the idea several of the company honchos who disavowed the operation really did not know what their subordinates were up to, but I really doubt they were surprised by the skulduggery. They were surprised by the exposure of said skulduggery. If it can be plotted this once, it was always a part of their repertoire, and surely a part of their normal business operations. In other words: Don’t trust them to be totally honest. On the other hand, I tend to believe so far Greenwald is mostly a good guy, somewhat misled about the nature of Wikileaks and Assange’s dreams.
Assange is part of the Hacker Culture. I could care less about distinctions of black hat versus white hat, simply because the standards are not a matter of morality, but of competing ethics. Ethics may reflect a moral commitment, but a moral commitment isn’t necessary. It’s just a commitment to playing by certain rules which are commonly accepted within a given context. Morality is far more fundamental. So the hackers of the world are simply a competing force with their own skewed ethics. Individual hackers can surely be as morally pure as the driven snow which recently covered the ground outside my window, but as a whole, the Hacker Community is much more diverse. That community includes all sorts of criminal elements, simply because the Hacker Ethic ignores the standard definitions of “criminal” in favor of a competing standard. Whether it is more moral is a matter of debate, though it does draw some admiration as the underdog in this fight.
I think Greenwald does understand this part:
After Anonymous imposed some very minimal cyber disruptions on Paypal, Master Card and Amazon, the DOJ flamboyantly vowed to arrest the culprits, and several individuals were just arrested as part of those attacks. But weeks earlier, a far more damaging and serious cyber-attack was launched at WikiLeaks, knocking them offline. Those attacks were sophisticated and dangerous. Whoever did that was quite likely part of either a government agency or a large private entity acting at its behest. Yet the DOJ has never announced any investigation into those attacks or vowed to apprehend the culprits, and it’s impossible to imagine that ever happening.
Thus, while Wikileaks gains some cachet as the underdog, we should not be fooled over the questions of morality. Assange is a wretch, but comes off as the lovable rascal in this play. HBGary and friends are permitted not a stitch of redeeming virtue, and rightly so. The US government as a whole is the biggest and baddest of all wretches, and rightly so, completely unable to even fathom ethics, much less morals. Poor Manning is a pawn in the game; not particularly moral himself, he did what he thought might serve to help in some small way to level the playing field. He gains credit for being brave, if devious, and for understanding clearly no one in actual authority would dream of doing the right thing on any level. He is already paying a very high price for this, and deserves a bit of applause.
That the handiwork of bad people can still bring salutary results is manifestly obvious. Don’t confuse the general moral goodness of bringing truth to light, and a relief from human suffering, versus the fundamental commitment to truth and justice. Simplistic evaluations and labeling don’t serve any good moral purpose, and certainly can’t help us in our search for sanity in this world.
