Julian Assange Takes Space

Julian Assange dancing in Reykavik in 2011.

"It was Evelyn Waugh who said that when a writer is born into a family the family is over. And why would it be any different when a second family comes to call? Julian wanted a brother, a friend, a PR guru, a chief of staff, a speechwriter, and he wanted that person to be a writer with a reputation. When he was working with those fellows from the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel, he allowed himself to forget that they were journalists with decades of experience and their own fund of beliefs. To him they were just conduits and possible disciples: he is still reeling, even today, from the shock that they were their own men and women. My discussions with him would go on, in private, long after the idea of ‘collaboration’ was over. But he consistently forgot that I am foremost a writer and an independent person. Julian is an actor who believes all the lines in the play are there to feed his lines; that none of the other lives is substantial in itself. People have inferred from this kind of thing that he has Asperger’s syndrome and they could be right. He sees every idea as a mere spark from a fire in his own mind. That way madness lies, of course, and the extent of Julian’s lying convinced me that he is probably a little mad, sad and bad, for all the glory of WikiLeaks as a project. For me, the clarifying moment in our relationship came when he so desperately wanted me to join him on the helicopter flight to Hay. He wanted me to see him on the helicopter and he wanted me to assist him in living out that version of himself. The fact he was going to a book festival to talk about a book we both knew he would never produce was immaterial: he was flying in from Neverland with his own personal J.M. Barrie. What could be nicer for the lost boy of Queensland with his silver hair and his sense that the world of adults is no real place for him? By refusing the helicopter I was not refusing that side of him, only allowing myself the distance to see it clearly for what it was. And to see myself clearly, too: I have had to fight to grow away from my own lost boy, and it seemed right that day to fly a kite with my daughter and retain my independence from this man’s confused dream of himself." - Ghosting by Andrew O'Hagan

The great tragedy of Julian Assange and Wikileaks is that they have become one in the same thing. The role of Wikileaks is now the life of Assange. In 2010 when the heat was closing in, Assange should have set up an administrative panel to manage the organization and then continued to fight his own battles independent of the function of Wikileaks. By reading Ghosting by Andrew O'Hagan we gain insight into why this would never have happened. Assange is brilliant, but his poor skills with people and how his own fears and obsessions dominate the decision making processes of the organization result in a spectacle driven series of explosive revelations. 

"One of the issues that bugged me was how far all this had taken us from the work WikiLeaks had started out doing. I believed at this stage that the organisation could regroup after the legal appeals and the autobiography battle, returning to the core work that had made Julian’s name. But there was strong evidence now that he was devoted to his legal problems as well as to skirmishes with former collaborators over his reputation" - Ghosting by Andrew O'Hagan.

The entrance of personality into journalism is journalism at its lowest level. The most obvious similar example, and one from a very different sphere than Wikileaks is News of the World. Reputation and publishing are tied together, but like The Economist, there is no reason for this to be centered on individuals. Even mainstream traditional publishing can be done anonymously right through to the point of readership. The name of the publication is enough to ensure reputation.

By breaking his confidentiality, O'Hagan delivers a fascinating portrait of Assange. No matter what happens in the future, Julian's role in the history of digital media is assured. However, by making himself the public face of Wikileaks, Assange opened himself up to exactly the sort of scrutiny and critique that O'Hagan delivers. Thus the tragedy of Assange is the tragedy of Narcissus:

Narcissus is the most beautiful boy whom many have ever seen, but he does not return anyone’s affections. One of the disappointed nymphs prays to the god of anger, Nemesis, that "he who loves not others love himself." Nemesis answers this prayer. Narcissus looks at his own reflection in a river and suddenly falls in love with himself. He can think of nothing and no one else. He pines away, leaning perpetually over the pool, until finally he perishes.

Information waits for no man and unless Assange can redefine himself in the contexts of more recent and less personality driven acts related to information, power and access (i.e. Manning, Snowden), he is in danger of becoming a figure in a digital mythology that warns against rather than inspires. O'Hagan comes to a similar conclusion when he writes, "WikiLeaks should not only bale stuff out onto the web, but should then facilitate the editing and presenting of that work in a way that was of permanent historical value". I believe it is too late for this now, and unless Assange can extricate himself from his present situation and rebuild trust with his key allies and the broader community of digital information activists, then his enemies (and he has so many of them) have won. The defeat of this Narcissus would be no victory for the people trying to make sense of the global digital pool we all now live in. Freedom is under threat, as Chelsea Manning writes in her Sam Adams Award Acceptance Speech, Feb 2014;

"When the public lacks the ability to access what its government is doing, it ceases to be involved in the governing process. There is a distinct difference between citizens, in which people are entitled to rights and privileges protected by and from the state, and subjects, in which people are placed under the absolute authority and control of the state. In essence, this is the difference between tyranny and freedom. To echo a maxim from Milton and Foes Friedman: a society that puts secrecy - in the sense of state secrecy - ahead of transparency and accountability will end up neither secure nor free."

The stakes are that high. Assange has to understand that what he has voluntarily taken on in his 'job' is so important that he no longer matters as an individual, no matter how painful and difficult that realization is. It seems Chelsea Manning is aware of that as her present defiance indicates while still languishing in prison.

Cut Up of Julian Assange's Speech After One Year in Ecuadorian Embassy

Julian Assange Needs Laundry (Send Clothes to Flat 3, 3 Hans Crescent, Knightsbridge, London SW1X 0LS, United Kingdom)

Monday and every one of us.

After a litany of wrongs done to an expanding terrific of fatal consequences for justice.

Edward Snowden is the eighth espionage indictment from the US department for tipping us off.

It is getting to the world.

As if by clockwork, he has been longer than the Nobel Peace Prize, but with a beginning.

Two dangerous runaway processes spying on each other, but it as this trial enters its fourth week on the intelligence community and the internet distinction and service to humanity there is no point where the mark of an international embassy has sought refuge from charges with espionage by the Obama services giants - to spy on everyone is the root of the last decade with scale.

Simultaneously, human privacy today is just Edward Snowden's ordeal of persecution.

As a result of that decision, it has now been a year since I entered this work in relative safety as a leaker to be charged with espionage under the program - involving the Obama administration. The US government is trying to convict Edward Snowden who is charged with espionage. Edward Snowden blew the whistle on an ongoing administration.

The US government is being secretly eradicated.

A few weeks ago, President Bradley Manning showed democracy.

Government secrecy has been for us an espionage of investigation.

(Original Speech is Here)

The Surveilled Imagination – A World Watched to Make Information

NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden speaks about his leaking of information about PRISM
This is a short essay on surveillance as commodity acquisition and the social contract. I have been following the story of PRISM, which according to the United States Army Field Manual, as quoted by Mother Jones, is

“A subsystem of collection management mission application, is a Web-based management and synchronization tool used to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of theater operations. PRISM creates a collaborative environment for resource managers, collection managers, exploitation managers and customers”.

Based on information leaked by Edward Snowden, a former contracted manager for the National Security Association, PRISM is used to collect and monitor information from millions of people inside and outside of the United States of America. Unless you have been offline over the past week, you have probably heard about this, as it is just beginning to have consequences, due largely to the extent of the allegations and the time it took for most governments and public figures to understand precisely what the PRISM Leak means. It means so much and could be of such far-reaching consequences that many of the departments and institutions responsible for this sort of knowledge were initially silent, presumably trying to fathom it. One of the more intelligent speculations I saw about PRISM was from Guy Verhofstadt, President of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) Group in the European Parliament. Guy tweeted;

“#prism How has data been used and is it in conflict with EU data protection? The Commission, best @BarrosoEU must answer this at next #EP”

I am sure Mr Barrosso is looking into it right now. This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to PRISM. But I want to back off slightly from the revelations of PRISM to what it means in broader terms. I want to ask here, what is the reality of surveillance? I mean mass surveillance; "the pervasive surveillance of an entire population, or a substantial fraction thereof" (Wikileaks).

I started following the developments around the PRISM leak on Twitter as they were published on The Guardian website. I noticed this tweet from Mark Vanderbeeken (Senior partner at Experientia and editor of Putting People First, Turin, Italy);

“But is it actually possible to return to a non-surveillance world? The genie is now out of the bottle”

I replied to Mark that it is not possible to 'go back' to an imagined "non-surveillance world" (if that ever existed); but what we are actually witnessing today is the process of shifting power and control under the auspices of digital technology and the mass surveillance it makes possible. In writing this I thought particularly of the life of Christopher Marlowe, the famous playwright and contemporary of Shakespeare. Marlowe was at the center of a surveilled society, a society which was undergoing dramatic changes. Marlowe worked as a spy, and was also the subject for surveillance, dying at the age of 29 in 1593 as a result of an altercation in an inn under suspicious circumstances.

Up to his eyeball in surveillance; Christopher Marlowe 1564-1593 (spy poet trouble maker)

Surveillance today is beyond anything Marlowe could have imagined even in his most extravagant stage drama. With a massive digital network of communication, mediation and simulation now well established around the planet, it is possible to gather information about people at a level of detail unparalleled in human history. Many nation states are now spying on their general populations. Information is collected en masse and stored not for individual identification, but to construct patterning in the population. Mass information is about demographics, trends, movements on a large scale towards ideas, issues or cultural trends. At the same time individual privacy is no longer possible for anyone that uses digital media, although encryption such as Tor does hide connections between people and sites online.

"The expansion in the use of surveillance represents one of the most significant changes in the life of the nation since the end of the Second World War. Mass surveillance has the potential to erode privacy. As privacy is an essential prerequisite to the exercise of individual freedom, its erosion weakens the constitutional foundations on which democracy and good governance have traditionally been based in this country." -  United Kingdom House of Lords Constitution Committee, "Surveillance: Citizens and the State" (2009)

I returned to Twitter, filled with ideas about what mass surveillance was doing to our societies. If the constant unmonitored gathering of information by the public and private security industry ("70% of the intelligent budget of the USA today goes to private contractors like Booz Allen" -whistleblower Chris Pyle) is damaging democracy and individual freedom, what else it is doing? I dug up my favorite theorists when it comes to information and the body politico in a globalized interconnected 24-hour digital society. I see the perceived need for surveillance as part of the "deterritorialization of production" (Negri & Hardt) and this can be transparent or opaque. All are networks monitored and this includes production. Surveillance creates what is one of the most valuable resources of the 21st Century, information. Mark Getty, chairman of Getty Images, once said, "Intellectual Property is the oil of the 21st century". I believe surveillance is the State using the tools at its disposal to create a vast resource. So the problem with surveillance is structural. Information is resource. Value is added by scarcity, effect and processing. In this sense surveillance is monopolistic as it can only be created on a mass scale by a level of infrastructure that has a budget of governmental proportions. I could spy on my neighbors, or even a town, but it could not be used in any meaningful way and besides it is illegal. The government on the other hand is already doing this and a lot more.

Many citizens believe it is necessary to be surveilled. Paul Sheehan, a columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia wrote that the problem for those seeing Edward Snowden’s leaking of information about PRISM as a heroic act based their assessment on  “The final inconvenient fact is a practical one: all government agencies except the tax department do not have the time, the resources, or the interest to examine the activities of private citizens without good reason. Most of us are of no interest to the government unless we are doing something dangerous to others. Paranoia is invariably self-absorption” – (Tuesday 11 June 2013). With his use of Newspeak ('Paranoia is invariably self-absorption'), Sheehan totally misses the concept of information as a resource. What if information is not gathered to catch the feared ‘bad guys’ but in order to create something of value? If this is so we have to ask how the subjects that are surveilled contribute to the creation of this value. The government does not have the ability or interest in monitoring the daily activities of the majority of the population. But it does have an interesting in monitoring mass opinion, demographic behaviors and cultural shifts that occur in the governed population. This is largely done without the consent of the people. While laws are introduced to contain and combat security threats, the same legislation used to create these laws can be used to create the ‘oil of the 21st Century’.

The most worrying possibility is that the leaks we are seeing now are not particularly relevant to the security apparatus, that these low-level figures in the system releasing information are actually playing into the argument for a greater degree of security and monitoring and as a result there will be tighter controls and less transparency in the future. The news of PRISM was first broken in May 2006 by Walter Pincus writing for USA Today

"Disclosed that the NSA "has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth," attributing that information to "people with direct knowledge of the arrangement." The newspaper continued: "The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans - most of whom aren't suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews."

Today Pincus is writing about a history of surveillance in the USA, but few people seem to be paying attention to him then or now. Pincus states "It is worth noting that two days after the USA Today disclosure, a Washington Post poll showed that 63 percent of those polled said it was acceptable for the government to collect tens of millions of phone records, while 35 percent considered that unacceptable."

Mass surveillance contravenes the social contract, as an infringement upon the right of the sovereignty (the people) to full disclosure of the body politic;

"Rousseau emphasizes that the general will exists to protect individuals against the mass, not to require them to be sacrificed to it. He is, of course, sharply aware that men have selfish and sectional interests which will lead them to try to oppress others. It is for this reason that loyalty to the good of all alike must be a supreme (although not exclusive) commitment by everyone, not only if a truly general will is to be heeded but also if it is to be formulated successfully in the first place" - Entry, "Rousseau" in the Routelege Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward Craig, editor, Volume Eight, p. 371

For this reason there must be disclosure in order for democracy to be restored to those countries currently operating secret mass intelligence networks against their own citizens. The PRISM affair can be argued to be an attempt by one man to manifest disclosure. This is an idea shared by others. Dean and Professor of Law at the National University of Singapore Simon Chesterman writes in One Nation Under Surveillance – A New Social Contract to Defend Freedom Without Sacrificing Liberty (Oxford 2011) of a need for a “new social contract” that should be characterized by three principles:

(1) The intelligence powers exercised must be public,
(2) The entities carrying out these functions must be legal, and
(3) Accountability for activities of intelligence services must be consequence-sensitive (as opposed to having the aim of deterring or responding to abuse) (See Dreier).

These three additions to the Social Contract will change the nature and affect of mass surveillance on society. However, if the reason behind the mass surveillance that has developed in many nations is because of the value of information then there is unlikely to be a change in relation to the social contact. It is at this point we must consider the role of capitalist ideology in mass surveillance. If "Intellectual Property is the oil of the 21st century" then the masses of information gathered on the public is valuable. If surveillance is made public, legal (i.e. a result of due process), and driven by consequences then it will cease to have the same value according to commodity relations (i.e. scarcity, processing into tangible goods etc.). It is at this point I consider we are now at a crossroads for the continuation of the human project. How we move forward on this question will alter the community of the species.

One Nation Under Surveillance: A New Social Contract with Simon Chesterman (click on image)

There will always be surveillance and in an age where information is as valuable as oil there will only ever be more. But can information produced by surveillance be used for bettering society rather than controlling the more radical/progressive (depending on your perspectives) elements? Instead of using surveillance to create ‘security’ alone we could be using this information to organize community action, make free media for people to use, creating databases for culture, art, and knowledge. If we can collect the data from the phone calls people make, why can’t we make a system where information is shared for knowledge, art, science and research, social development and solidarity? This is a surveillance system that would take the forms of open information, universal access, networked and self-organizing systems run by users.