WikiLeaks is a legal innovation, not a tech one

By B.G. | WASHINGTON

HI ALL, it's a technology correspondent, sneaking over to the American politics blog. I couldn't help but overhear your conversation about WikiLeaks, and I feel like I have to jump in and say something.

The internet is not magic.

Many of the posts I've read about WikiLeaks, here and elsewhere, have expressed a certain technological fatalism. For example, Andrew Sullivan writes that the "culprit" is the internet; downloads can be shifted among servers, distributing responsibility. David Frum believes that WikiLeaks is a kind of digital IED, requiring nothing more than "servers and a thumb drive". My colleague W.W. points out that technology compresses data, making it easier to make off with. While I agree that technology and the internet make information sharing easier, I think we are placing too much emphasis on this aspect of WikiLeaks's operation.

There is an assumption that you can put data on the internet and whoosh, it's everywhere. Just plug the thumb drive into the computer, evidently, and the rest happens by itself. It all has to do with servers or something. But thumb drives have been around for a long time, as has the internet, so why didn't WikiLeaks happen ten years ago? Just because WikiLeaks uses servers and encrypts its internal communications doesn't mean that it's a "cyber" organisation, or that it's particularly innovative in its use of technology. Many organisations, including this paper, use servers and have virtual private networks. Julian Assange, though he is technically brilliant, is not a technological innovator. He is a legal innovator.

We are not quite sure where WikiLeaks has its servers. We can deduce, from what Mr Assange has said, that they are in Sweden, Iceland, Belgium and New York state. Mr Assange, in his obsession with revealing secrets, has compiled a list of countries with generous whistleblower-protection laws. WikiLeaks' multiple servers aren't there to back each other up; they're there to gather legal protections. Every server is subject to the laws of the state where it's plugged in, so WikiLeaks routes every submission in a clever pattern to move it through each of these locations. You can, if you don't have access to a computer, arrange with WikiLeaks a physical drop of your leaked material; they will digitise it and send it on the same multinational path. (For a fuller explanation, see what we wrote about Iceland's proposed media law on this blog earlier this year.)

It's telling that Mr Assange hasn't placed his servers in some technically capable autocracy with a desire to thumb its nose at the world, say Iran or Venezuela. He needs liberal democracies. Their laws guarantee the safety of his information. And when trying to solve what looks like a digital problem, the best path is to consider where the problem is physically vulnerable. Anti-spammers, for example, have finally notched up some successes in the last two years by going after server locations; spammers need servers in places like America, which has reliable networks and vast fields of vulnerable personal computers. But America also has laws, and ways to enforce them.

My gripe against Mr Assange is that he takes advantage of the protections of liberal democracies, but refuses to submit himself to them. If he wants to use the libel protections guaranteed by New York State, then he should live in New York, and commit himself to all of the safety and consequences of America's constitution. If he wants to use Sweden's whistleblower laws, then he should return to Sweden and let its justice system take its course. This, as we've written in the paper, is what distinguishes Mr Assange from Daniel Ellsberg. Mr Ellsberg did not flee America after releasing the Pentagon Papers; he stayed here and stood trial. Regardless of what you think about Mr Ellsberg's motives, he followed the basic tenets of civil disobedience: break a law, then publicly accept the consequences. Mr Assange just protects himself.

Julian Assange has created a legal structure that allows him to answer only to his own conscience. This is an extraordinarily clever hack of the world's legal systems. But it makes his pretense at moral authority a little hard to take seriously. And it also points toward a solution. If America feels threatened by WikiLeaks, then it should lean on its allies—Sweden, Iceland and Belgium—to strip the organisation of the protections it so carefully gathers as it shifts its information around the world. Mr Assange has suggested that he might be hounded all the way to Russia or Cuba. If he has to take all of his servers with him, it wil be harder for him to act so boldly.

(Photo credit: AFP)