Cracks in the wilderness of mirrors

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The temptation to see WikiLeaks as a neo-Baudelairean artificial paradise - the marriage of libertarian anarchism and cyber-knowledge - could not be more seductive. Now no more than 40 people are helping founder Julian Assange, plus 800 from the outside.

All this with a 200,000 euro (US$264,000) annual budget - and a nomad home base. WikiLeaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson maintains that this is still a "gateway for whistleblowers", where sources are unidentified and even unknown. You can get a whistleblower to show the emperor has no clothes with just 200,000 euros - just as someone, be him Osama bin Laden or not, could usher the real "new world order" in on 9/11 with $500,000.

Daniel Ellsberg, who broke the Pentagon Papers in 1971, sees Assange as a hero. For vast swathes of the United States establishment, he is now public enemy number one - an unlikely echo of bin Laden. He may be now in southeast England, contactable by Scotland Yard, and about to be arrested at any minute courtesy of an Interpol mandate based on his being wanted in Sweden. Canadian scholar Marshall McLuhan may be doing the twist in his media tomb; if the media are the message, when you can't eliminate the message why not eliminate the media?

The book of sand

Let's examine Assange's crime. Here he is, in his own words, in "State and Terrorist Conspiracies":

To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us, and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not. Firstly we must understand what aspect of government or neo-corporatist behavior we wish to change or remove. Secondly we must develop a way of thinking about this behavior that is strong enough to carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity. Finally we must use these insights to inspire within us and others a course of ennobling, and effective action.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LL04Ak02.html

It seems particularly worth noticeing here that Wikileaks is done cheap. The technical and financial bars to this sort of activity are low.