Wikileaks and the Cyberwars to Come

The childish panic that has swept the policy establishment over the past few weeks over the Wikileaks revelations themselves will soon subside. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s sensible remark that “[g]overnments deal with the United States because it's in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets,” is worth a boatload of apocalyptic prognostications on the order of Michael Cohen from Democracy Arsenal insisting that Wikileaks has “fundamentally undermined US national security and effective US diplomacy,” or Joe Klein in Time claiming, “This entire, anarchic exercise in ‘freedom’ stands as a human disaster.” (Click here to read all of TNR's obsessive coverage of the juicy State Department cables.)

The frenzy was unwarranted from the start. Secretary Gates could express his confidence that the long-term effects would actually be “fairly modest,” at least in part because the ‘revelations’ contained in the Wikileaks document dumps mostly confirmed things that were at least long suspected. For example, many supporters of the Israeli government’s alarmed (or alarmist, depending on your point of view) position on stopping the Iranian nuclear program, if necessary by force, have been saying for some time that it was a view shared by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council. They were right. And, while it may be satisfying to have the details of Washington’s anxieties over the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons arsenal, China’s inability to bring North Korea to heel, or the Yemeni president’s willingness to collaborate with U.S. anti-terrorist operations in his country, the broad outlines of all three of these stories were already largely public knowledge—at least among specialists.

Does anyone seriously think the Iranians don’t know about the Saudi king lobbying Washington to bomb Natanz and the other nuclear facilities, or that the Pakistani Taliban don’t know about American moves with regard to Islamabad’s nuclear program? It would be idiotic to imagine our enemies are so badly informed that the Wikileaks information is news to them.

In reality, there was only one group that was not privy to this information released by Wikileaks: the general public. And we can’t have them properly informed, now can we? Father (or, in the case of Secretary Clinton, “mother,” I suppose) knows best. I do not often agree with Noam Chomsky, but it seems to me that he was exactly right when he said that “one of the main reasons for state secrets is so that the state can defend itself from its citizens.” But, regardless of Washington’s motives, stopping Julian Assange (which, in any case, is not the same thing as stopping Wikileaks, as we are all starting to discover) will not be a victory over terrorism, as Senator Mitch McConnell has suggested so preposterously, for the simple reason that the one group we can be sure had the information in the cables before the Wikileaks are the terrorists.

In contrast, powerful people hate being shown up as much if not more than they hate failure, and people with insider information that gives them special status hate losing their intellectual monopoly, since they know that, if they do, loss of status will not be far behind. In this sense, the back-story of Wikileaks is not that American diplomacy is threatened or that Al Qaeda has been strengthened but that American diplomats have lost face, and American policy intellectuals have been confronted by an existential threat to their priestly monopoly on inside information. Oh, the pity of it!

In fact, though, the policy establishment is absolutely correct in worrying about Wikileaks—just not for the reasons that have usually been stated. For where Wikileaks poses a serious challenge is in its application of a technological mindset that up to now had seemed both the product of and inextricably linked to the clean, enlightened liberal capitalism of the Microsofts, Googles, Apples, and Intels of this world.

Throughout the 1990s, technophiles wrote rapturously of the Internet inaugurating a new age of high-tech Jeffersonian democracy (the phrase is from Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s 1995 critical essay, “The California Ideology”). As a leading Silicon Valley software entrepreneur, Mitch Kapor, put it in 1993, “Life in cyberspace seems to be shaping up exactly as Thomas Jefferson would have wanted: founded on the primacy of individual liberty and a commitment to pluralism, diversity, and community.”

In many ways, this thinking was extremely radical. In the future, people like Kapor, Apple’s Steve Jobs, and of course Bill Gates argued, we would have a completely new relationship to information. “Universal connectivity,” Gates wrote in Forbes in 1999, “will bring together all the information and services you need and make them available to you regardless of where you are, what you are doing, or the kind of device you are using. Call it ‘virtual’ convergence with everything you want in one place, but that place is wherever you want it to be, not just at home or in the office.”