RosieBell

Bunkering up with Julian Assange

Andrew O'Hagan tells a fascinating story of what it was like to ghost write Julian Assange's autobiography.  He did this under contract with Canongate Books, a hip publisher based in Edinburgh.

O'Hagan has got hold of a character who could be one of fiction's great monsters with a toddler's grasp of other people's motives and rights.  Assange holed up talking without interruption for 3 hours at a time is strongly reminiscent of Hitler in his table talk and his lashings out at everyone as he sits in one of his bunkers (Ellingham Hall, the Ecuadorian Embassy) has been portrayed in Downfall.  He has real enemies and he has imaginary ones as well.  The many people who fall out with him do so because of envy or malice.

His paranoia has its comic side:-

He appeared to like the notion that he was being pursued and the tendency was only complicated by the fact that there were real pursuers. But the pursuit was never as grave as he wanted it to be. He stuck to his Cold War tropes, where one didn’t deliver a package, but made a ‘drop off’. One day, we were due to meet some of the WikiLeaks staff at a farmhouse out towards Lowestoft. We went in my car. Julian was especially edgy that afternoon, feeling perhaps that the walls were closing in, as we bumped down one of those flat roads covered in muck left by tractors’ tyres. ‘Quick, quick,’ he said, ‘go left. We’re being followed!’ I looked in the rear-view mirror and could see a white Mondeo with a wire sticking out the back.

‘Don’t be daft, Julian,’ I said. ‘That’s a taxi.’

‘No. Listen to me. It’s surveillance. We’re being followed. Quickly go left.’ Just by comical chance, as I was rocking a Sweeney-style handbrake turn, the car behind us suddenly stopped at a farmhouse gate and a little boy jumped out and ran up the path. I looked at the clock as we rolled off in a cloud of dust. It said 3.48.

‘That was a kid being delivered home from school,’ I said. ‘You’re mental.’

There are some good moments with Assange, the expert hacker and courageous activist:-

At the time of the Egyptian uprising, Mubarak tried to close down the country’s mobile phone network, a service that came through Canada. Julian and his gang hacked into Nortel and fought against Mubarak’s official hackers to reverse the process. The revolution continued and Julian was satisfied, sitting back in our remote kitchen eating chocolates.

That is why I didn’t walk out. The story was just too large. What Julian lacked in efficiency or professionalism he made up for in courage. What he lacked in carefulness he made up for in impact.

But on the whole the Wikileaks endeavour suffered from that symptom of the internet age, the short attention span, the hook, the click-bait and the Twitter storm of petty feuds:-

He’s not a details guy. None of them is. What they love is the big picture and the general fight. They love the noise and the glamour, the history, the spectacle, but not the fine print. That is why they released so many cables so quickly: for impact. And there’s a good argument to support that. But, even today, three years later, the cables have never had the dedicated attention they deserve. They made a splash and then were left languishing. I always hoped someone would do a serious editing job, ordering them country by country, contextualising each one, providing a proper introduction, detailing each injustice and each breach, but Julian wanted the next splash and, even more, he wanted to scrap with each critic he found on the internet. As for the book, he kept putting it off.

Assange makes a virtue of scientific journalism, where readers take the raw data and process it for themselves.  But of course we can't do that any more than we can make our laptops from oil, metals and silicon.  We need context and background information to gauge whether a piece of information is significant or trivial.

I thought, if Julian was serious and strategic, that 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. Perry Anderson of Verso Books had the same thought, and I put it to Julian that the WikiLeaks Map of the World should be a series which provided for a proper academic study of what the biggest security leaks in history had revealed, with expert commentary, notes, essays and introductions. It would provide the organisation with a lasting, grown-up legacy, a powerful, orderly continuation of its initial work.

Julian came to lunch at my flat in Belsize Park. Tariq Ali came and so did Mary-Kay Wilmers, the editor of the London Review, as well as an American editor for Verso called Tom Mertes. Anderson’s idea was that Verso would publish a series of books, or one book in which each chapter showed how the US cables released by WikiLeaks had changed the political position of a particular country. A writer who knew, say, Italy, would introduce the chapter and the same would be done for every country and it would be very meticulous and well-made. Julian gave a big speech at the beginning, the middle and the end. He clearly liked Tariq but had no sense of him as someone who knew a lot more about the world than he did. Although the idea for the book had come from Verso, Julian preferred to give a lecture about how most academics were corrupted by their institutions.

.... . Anyone else would have jumped at the chance of the Verso project but as Julian drove off in a taxi I knew he would never call Tariq about this or lay any of the groundwork they’d agreed. Julian was already more concerned about claiming the idea for himself, an idea that he would never see to fruition. The meeting had called for responsible action, when what Julian loved was irresponsible reaction.

Everyone has one rule for themselves and another for  the rest of the world but Assange takes this to the nth degree:-

Julian was getting a lot of flak in the press for making Wiki-employees sign contracts threatening them with a £12 million lawsuit if they disclosed anything about the organisation. It was clear he didn’t see the problem. He has a notion that WikiLeaks floats above other organisations and their rules. He can’t understand why any public body should keep a secret but insists that his own organisation enforce its secrecy with lawsuits. Every time he mentioned legal action against the Guardian or the New York Times, and he did this a lot, I would roll my eyes, but he didn’t see the contradiction. He was increasingly lodged in a jungle of his own making and I told Jamie it was like trying to write a book with Mr Kurtz.

He was in a state of panic at all times that things might get out. But he manages people so poorly, and is such a slave to what he’s not good at, that he forgets he might be making bombs set to explode in his own face. I am sure this is what happens in many of his scrapes: he runs on a high-octane belief in his own rectitude and wisdom, only to find later that other people had their own views – of what is sound journalism or agreeable sex – and the idea that he might be complicit in his own mess baffles him.

He has the common tendency to fight far more bitterly with those who share his world view than those who outright reject it:-

the Guardian was an enemy because he’d ‘given’ them something and they hadn’t toed the line, whereas the Daily Mail was almost respected for finding him entirely abominable. The Guardian tried to soothe him – its editor, Alan Rusbridger, showed concern for his position, as did the then deputy, Ian Katz, and others – but he talked about its journalists in savage terms. The Guardian felt strongly that the secret material ought to be redacted to protect informants or bystanders named in it, and Julian was inconsistent about that. I never believed he wanted to endanger such people, but he chose to interpret the Guardian’s concern as ‘cowardice’.

He's full of repugnant sexism and anti-Semitsm:-

They certainly had transcripts of our interviews, sittings in which he’d uttered, late at night, many casual libels, many sexist or anti-Semitic remarks, and where he spoke freely about every aspect of his life.

As well as wasting time to a heart-breaking degree, those who engage with Assange find themselves out of goodwill and out of pocket. Canongate tried to salvage the autobiography and published what they could.

Canongate Books, the Edinburgh-based publisher, has blamed Wikileaks founder Julian Assange's "failure to deliver" the book he was contracted to produce for plunging into operating loss.

Accounts, which have just become available from Companies House, reveal Canongate tumbled to an operating loss of £368,467 in 2011, from a profit of £1.08 million at this level in 2010. Canongate acknowledged this was its worst performance "in many years".

For Andrew O'Hagan it hasn't all been a minus.  He came out with a great story to tell, and that's enough pay off for any writer.

(H/T - HJ) 

Gun-slingers, bounty-hunters, sheriffs on the internet frontier

In Alex Gibney's film Wikileaks: We Steal Secrets there were scenes of a modest house in Reykjavjik where Julian Assange and some selfless Icelandic volunteers were working on making a video of Americans killing Reuters journalists and other civilians in Iraq.

It turns out one of the selfless volunteers was an Icelandic snitch,  Sigdur Thordarson, who had got bored with being a hacktivist and wanted to move on to something else.

"Unlike many drawn to WikiLeaks, Thordarson does not seem to have been principally motivated by a passion for the cause of transparency or by the desire to expose government wrongdoing. Instead, he was on the hunt for excitement and got a thrill out of being close to people publishing secret government documents."

Adolescent capacity for mischief to alleviate boredom can end up destroying whole infrastructures for kicks, while taking a few drugs.

Thordarson & Assange - the hackers get younger every day

Thordarson got into contact with another hacking organisation called LulzSec which among other achievements had brought down the CIA website and asked them to investigate the Icelandic government's attitude towards Wikileaks. He then became an FBI informant himself, and as one of the main men in LulzSec had also been recruited by the FBI, the Feds could then verify his credentials and use him as a Wikileaks insider.

Read the whole article and this one too to get an idea of the mind-spinning world of hacking (dis)organisations and how the American government spy on and recruit their would-be spies and saboteurs.

Wikileaks and the Anonymous style hacking groups seem to be like far left political groups in that they are always being infiltrated by forces of the state, there's a blurred line between what you could call productive engagement and sheer vandalism in their activities and they are full of in-fighting.

There does however seem to be very little ideological glue holding the hacktivists together. It's a kind of Against the Man, Fuck the Headmaster attitude. Quite a few of the hackers graduate to becoming security experts for large companies and governments.  On their CVs they list under Achievements:- 

• Broke into Bank of England website and covered it with insulting pictures of Mark Carney

• Released rogue algorithm onto Amazon database, so those ordering Harry Potter books received 50 Shades of Sado-masochism and vice-versa

• Hacked Richard Dawkins's twitter account so he sent out tweets of the Thought for the Day kind, like "At the end of Ramadan, we feel a spiritual closeness to.. " or "the time of Easter is a reminder of"

and those credentials get you a solid job as a gatekeeper for Big Company Inc or Big State Surveilliana.

In our new digital world the state can often find and even turn the hacking known knowns but there are a mass of known unknowns and unknown unknowns in cyberspace. For an upbeat look at how the rogue Digimeisters like Assange and Snowden are the challenging usurpers of the digital world, have a look at this brilliant essay by Bruce Sterling:-

If you’re NSA, as so many thousands are, you’ve known from the get-go that the planet’s wires and cables are a weapon of mass surveillance. Because that is their inherent purpose! You can’t get all conflicted, and start whining that Internet users are citizens of some place or other! That is not the point at all!

Citizens and rights have nothing to do with elite, covert technologies! The targets of surveillance are oblivious dorks, they’re not even newbies! Even US Senators are decorative objects for the NSA. An American Senator knows as much about PRISM and XKeyScore as a troll-doll on the dashboard knows about internal combustion.

.....

Julian Assange. Yeah, him, the silver-haired devil, the Mycroft Holmes of the Ecuadorian Embassy. Bradley Manning’s not at all NSA material, he’s just a leaky clerk with a thumb-drive. But Julian’s quite a lot closer to the NSA — because he’s a career cypherpunk.

If you’re a typical NSA geek, and you stare in all due horror at Julian, it’s impossible not to recognize him as one of your own breed. He’s got the math fixation, the stilted speech, the thousand-yard-stare, and even the private idiolect that somehow allows NSA guys to make up their own vocabulary whenever addressing Congress (who don’t matter) and haranguing black-hat hacker security conventions (who obviously do).

Sterling makes the point that Assange and Wikileaks had more clout than all the human rights groups put together when it came to rescuing Edmund Snowden:-

 the solemn signatories of the recent “International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance.”

… Obviously, a planetary host of actively concerned and politically connected people. Among this buzzing horde of eager online activists from a swarm of nations, what did any of them actually do for Snowden? Nothing.

Before Snowden showed up from a red-eye flight from Hawaii, did they have the least idea what was actually going on with the hardware of their beloved Internet? Not a clue. They’ve been living in a pitiful dream world where their imaginary rule of law applies to an electronic frontier — a frontier being, by definition, a place that never had any laws.

He sums up:-

Digital, globalized societies — where capital and information moves, and where labor and human flesh doesn’t move — they behave like this. That is what we are witnessing and experiencing.

Sterling may overstate the uncontrollability of the net.  But most of us with a job know these days if the network goes down, we stop producing. That the security of our bank accounts may be jeopardised. That computers trading derivatives on miniscule profits can go awry and destroy the economy.  It's a sense of vulnerability. We've most of us wandered into our shanty towns at the edge of Digital City, but we have no idea who the mayor is, who the Council is and who runs the police.

H/t John Carter Wood

Warlords in the internet new world

Having read all about Alex Gibney's film Wikileaks: We steal secrets I went to see it, and recommend that everyone does. It was also great seeing a documentary in the cinema where you can't be distracted, as when you watch something on the telly or the I-player at home.

The film shapes itself round the story of two men, Julian Assange and Bradley Manning.  At the beginning Assange appears admirable.  He's a dedicated anti-establishment hacker and also a charmer, full of humour. You see him rising from smart-arse hacking in Australia - breaking into government systems because he can - to uncovering corrupt banking in Iceland. He and a couple of co-activists seem like heroes when they work together in a tiny house in Reykjavik to make a video of American soldiers killing Reuters journalists.  (The event had already been documented but it was the video that made the public impact).

Meanwhile Bradley Manning, an American soldier roasting in Iraq, is a figure of pathos.  In a civilian niche working with his considerable computing skills and hanging out with sympathetic friends he would have been fine. But he is a fish out of water, or as he says, "The CPU is not made for this motherboard".  He finds himself, an effeminate guy with a conscience, in a highly macho environment holding a job which gives him to access to the reality of the war that the USA is carrying out in Afghanistan and Iraq. His sense of isolation, working on his computer in the desert and being horrified at the revelations of civilian casualties, is painful to watch. He starts leaking the material and that increases his loneliness. So he confides in a soul mate he met on-line, Adrian Lamo, who shopped him.
 
Everyone knows how these stories have panned out, with Assange stuck in the Ecuadorian embassy dodging rape charges and Manning on trial in a military court for aiding the enemy. As for Adrian Lamo, type his name on Google and you'll get "snitch".

Assange's story is a comedy of ironies. He, a hacker with monikers, became a media celebrity with his face on Time magazine.  A transparency absolutist, he pressured his assistants to sign non-disclosure agreements. A pure anti-power activist began misusing his own power. He became an activist rock star who attracted groupies - and, it's alleged, treated them as rock stars have often treated groupies.

Gibney got an interview with one of the women who made the rape allegations and of course like any woman who annoys males throughout the digital world, she was hideously targetted with rape threats and the usual vile stuff by some sites that would see themselves as progressive revolutionaries.

The most likable character to appear is James Ball, who volunteered to work for Wikileaks, got to know Assange's modus operandi, and observes that Assange had the delusions of those working for a greater cause - that if they do wrong, it's all right.  If he tells a lie, something he's prone to do,  it's a noble lie.  One of his on-line names was "Mendax".

Wikileaks: We Steal Secrets is a fascinating story that suggests various themes. It sets up a dozen signposts that could be followed, as distinct from the Adam Curtis style, which acts like a SatNav bossing you along the journey of the theory with your only view being billboards of footage selected to illustrate the point. When Gibney's witnesses talk about their experiences of transparency, of the power of the state and the organisations that challenge the state, or the flow of information that can empower the small as well as the large, they point to ideas that all could be profitably explored and which are as complex and as in the shades of grey as Wikileaks itself - though some of the USA's activities are as black as can be.

Gibney touches briefly on Anonymous, the vigilante/resistance (depending on what they have done to you) loose group of hackers who did a DDoS sabotage of PayPal, Visa and MasterCard when the USa governemnt was leaning on them to block donations to WikiLeaks. Anonymous form a power base of their own, and though they were right enough to sabotage illegitimate force by the USA government, they can start chucking their digital grenades at any net organisation who has displeased them politically - and your only redress is in fact via the government.  (They have now dumped Wikileaks since it became the Julian Assange show). 

So this is the new world of the internet, where Assange was a warlord (or bandit, or outlaw) carrying out skirmishes against the empire. It's only been in common use for about twenty years. The industrial revolution must have been like that. Suddenly there are new cities, and fast transport, whole different ways of working and whereas the average person once only knew their immediate neighbours, they could now seek out the like-minded. We have only just started to guess how the digital revolution is affecting political as well as cultural and personal life.  For Manning of course it was a disaster.  He made a friend online, and was betrayed online, and to those who don't spend half their life online "friend" and "betrayal" where you have never met in the flesh may make no sense - but in fact they are emotional tangibilities in the digital world.

Assange knows the internet like a spy knows safe houses and the weak points of the fortress, and how a mechanic knows a car, and this specialized knowledge is one reason for his egomania. His life swimming in the digital world did give him a slightly fantastical way of engaging with the real world, and his superior knowledge of one system gave him an over-estimation of his political judgement, with a callousness about collateral damage as bad as a government's.  He had his own political view of the war in Afghanistan, and those Afghans who collaborated with the Coalition forms were traitors (to the Taliban?) so never mind if they were killed by careless retracting of the leaked cables.

In fact, a cruel and unusual punishment for Assange would not to be cooped up in a flat in Knightsbridge with wi-fi, but to be given freedom to roam the United Kingdom - with no internet access. That would be virtual, and real, banishment.